To ask what should be being done about the economy and the country generally

[AlertCat]

I’m fairly Keynesian in my economics (I’m not an economist) but there are so many problems in society at the moment that I’m not sure even a massive programme of work like in the 1950s would really help.
There’s another thread where people are expressing unhappiness at the levels of tax they’re being asked to pay and it’s easy to find lots of threads about benefit claimants and immigration.

If we take as given that (a) our birthrate means we need immigration; (b) we have a benefits system that’s both overly punitive and (apparently) overly lenient if you say the right things (I’m not sure I personally believe the second part, but it’s an opinion I see a lot); (c) climate change means more and more people from the global south moving north; (d) the days of good state services, free at the point of use may be over-

what would you do differently to the government? Could we get back to the kind of services provision we had in the post-war consensus era (up until the Thatcher government)? Is that a pipe dream? Is it even desirable?

I really don't understand the resentment towards the older generation. Like every other sector of society, some did well out of the economy of their time, some didn't.

Current retirees were working in the 60s, 70s, 80s and actively built and contributed to the society we now "enjoy".
They were told to buy property, to invest in pension schemes, basically worked with what they had and were encouraged to do by the successive government's of their times. They were pioneers in tech, they campaigned for equal rights, and were even environmentalists.

Yes, some can't quite grasp that things have changed, but their world was the much vaunted by MN when it suits, one of self-reliance and resilience.

Right now we have an ever increasing pool of suspects for all society's ills -

The old
The sick
The disabled
The unemployed
The poor in general
Immigrants.

Most of us at some point of our lives may fall into several of those categories, sometimes all at once. (Ask me how I know 🙄). Once again we refuse to really scrutinise how economic instability is being engineered by a few for their own gain, versus the overall well-being of the population.

My 85 year old Dad had plenty to say about neoliberalism and Keir Starmer, none of it complimentary and very astute in many ways. Sadly he died in April, and I'm missing his viewpoint very much indeed.

Yes, I do agree about the lack of investment in non university routes. I don't have a degree and neither of my children are going down that route and there isn't the same support.

Absolutely, although I also think the outrageous 9% graduate tax (which is what it is, effectively) is completely wrong.

Education is where public spending needs to go. The budget needs to be doubled. Half the class sizes in primary and secondary. Open many different but smaller secondary schools focusing on specific areas (so core subjects but a main focus on art/ sciences/ languages/ trades plus core subjects) which children can choose between and apply for at 14.

Strong technical apprenticeship routes with businesses and further education linking together to design courses with guaranteed routes into employement at the end and genuine career prospects (as exists in Germany). This depends largely on strong small and medium-sized businesses and therefore also comes back to the favourable trade environment, start-up grants and business support, administrative support with exporting etc that I mentioned upthread).

Meanwhile send 15-20% to University - the most academic who genuinely benefit from it - and fund it entirely for them as it used to be, because this benefits the whole of society.

Reinstate adult education colleges/ evening classes and add funded remote learning to this with meaningful courses, again designed with employers so that they produce the skills that they want and include work experience etc to help people obtain their foot on the ladder of the career for which they are training. If we want people to work into their 60s in a fast-changing economy then retraining opportunities are essential.

If you read my posts you’ll see that actually my plan included support for the disabled, to address unemployment, was supportive of immigrants that benefit the UK and explained why we currently have to seek immigrants who are a net cost due to skills shortages and how to address this.

The old, I’m afraid, as a cohort, largely caused the current mess by complete mismanagement of the economy for decades and decades which they selfishly voted for because they ignored the entirely foreseen problems that these policies would cause, which we are now living through. They neglected our infrastructure, sold off assets to fund tax cuts for themselves, many didn’t make any provision for their own old age and just expected someone else to fund this, knowing they were a large cohort and there would be a shrinking proportion of working people to pay for retirees and that life expectancies and therefore healthcare costs were rising exponentially they made no provision in the social care of healthcare systems to address this and fund it and just pushed that cost onto subsequent generations, they ran up a huge national debt while voting for tax cuts for themselves (the higher rate tax threshold for example would start at around £120k not £50k now if it had been uprated with inflation), they now demand a personal allowance so high their entire state pension (which most of them paid nowhere near enough tax to fund) to be tax free, they sold off social housing and didn’t rebuild it, they didn’t implement planning policies to enable self-building to be common and perpetuated a planning regime meaning that few houses were built and those that have been are some of the smallest in any developed country and badly constructed, yet they think they young people apparently should be able to achieve the same standard of living if they “just worked harder”.

They sucked up the free university, freely available and cheap rental housing and the huge property price rises if they bought somewhere, MIRAS (imagine having your mortgage interest being tax deductible! They always forget to mention that when they go on about how mortgage rates were 19% for a few weeks, on a capital value of 1/8 of the amount in real terms; when they could deduct the mortgage interest from tax anyway!!), they have continuously lowered tax thresholds and uprated their own pensions, reduced benefits, consumed an ever-larger amount of public spending to everyone else’s detriment, and then moan about how lazy everyone else is while they live in a house worth 20 times what they paid for it, earning in real terms 3 times as much for the same level of career success.

I found the original documentation and deeds for my house the other day. It was first sold in 1953. Per the Bank of England calculator it cost me 8 times what the first family who lived here paid for it, in real terms.

The issue people have with that generation is the complete refusal to accept the enormous economic harm they have caused to the living standards of their children and grandchildren, the total lack of remorse and unwillingness to accept any responsibility, or indeed pay any money from their (as a cohort) piles of wealth to actually contribute to fixing the problems, or helping the others in their cohort who aren’t as well off and didn’t take advantage successfully of being born at the most beneficial possible point in human history to date.

@InPraiseOfIdleness

Education is where public spending needs to go. The budget needs to be doubled. Half the class sizes in primary and secondary. Open many different but smaller secondary schools focusing on specific areas (so core subjects but a main focus on art/ sciences/ languages/ trades plus core subjects) which children can choose between and apply for at 14.

Definitely agree with that. We've now got huge secondary schools and no diversification as to subjects etc. The whole idea of merging and having "mega" schools was to broaden subject options, increase class/ability differentiation, etc., but it's not happened.

At our nearest "huge" school, they just do more of the same, i.e. 3 identical woodwork (sorry "Res Mat") labs instead of 1 in each of the 3 smaller schools it replaced. There are 9 forms per year, but instead of say, Maths & English having 9 different ability levels, they are in three groups of 3, so 3 lots of "top, middle, bottom" sets for Maths and English which simply isn't good enough for proper differentiation by ability/aptitude. Likewise with modern foreign languages, with such a large cohort, they should be offering multiple language options, but it's still the tired old French or German being the only options - no opportunities for Spanish, Italian, Mandarin, or anything else.

When we were going around doing the open day tours for our son when he was moving from Primary to Secondary, we really couldn't believe how little had changed over the 40+ years since we were at secondary school. It's all re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titannic. Billions spent on "reform" and change, but ultimately it's all still the same. When we looked at the kind of work our son was doing in classes, his homework, etc., right through his secondary years, it was all basically the same as our own crap comp education of 40+ years ago. So little had actually changed. Just basically photocopied/printed scrappy worksheets instead of purple duplicator scrappy worksheets, and teachers writing on smart boards instead of blackboard/chalk or marker pens on whiteboards.

"The more things change, the more they stay the same" is so true with our education system.

Over the decades, considering how different the World is, and how different the Workplaces are, schools should be radically different. Different subjects, different structures, different content, different skills being taught, different teaching methods, etc. It really is no wonder so many kids are disengaged and disruptive in classes, and even those who get good qualifications are still mostly unfit for the workplace.

@InPraiseOfIdleness

They sucked up the free university, freely available and cheap rental housing and the huge property price rises if they bought somewhere, MIRAS (imagine having your mortgage interest being tax deductible! They always forget to mention that when they go on about how mortgage rates were 19% for a few weeks, on a capital value of 1/8 of the amount in real terms; when they could deduct the mortgage interest from tax anyway!!), they have continuously lowered tax thresholds and uprated their own pensions, reduced benefits, consumed an ever-larger amount of public spending to everyone else’s detriment, and then moan about how lazy everyone else is while they live in a house worth 20 times what they paid for it, earning in real terms 3 times as much for the same level of career success.

They also forget how they benefitted from mortgage endowment policy windfalls, privatisation windfalls etc. Lots of people benefitted enormously from building societies and insurance/pension forms being converted from mutuals to public limited companies - they voted for such conversion on the back of knowing they'd get hundreds or even thousands of pounds upon demutualisation. Likewise with the selling off of utilities - they queued to buy shares cheaply and then sold them for handsome profits, again, to benefit from windfalls. I get irrationally angry when people complain about the privatised utilities, bank and insurance firm profits etc., when the older generation intentionally voted for such policies and actions so that they'd get their windfalls!

I saw some figures the other day about the privatisation of British Gas back in the 1980s. Someone who bought £1000 worth of shares upon privatisation is now sitting on shares worth around £16000 if they've held on to them and would also have benefitted from dividends over those years. That's windfalls that today's younger generation will never get the opportunity to benefit from and are in fact paying through the nose for higher energy costs, with some of the profits made going to the older generation.

It was never the “most efficient healthcare system”. It was cheaper then (hence those claims), but not “efficient” in any real sense of the word because even back then the patient outcomes (which is surely the point of a health service!) were vastly inferior to the systems in other countries which were costing a not too dissimilar percentage of GDP (e.g. France, Germany, Australia). The whole system needs radical overhaul becauase - as with every other completely unsustainable and fiscally irresponsible way of arranging public services in the UK like our state pensions and unfunded public sector pensions - it is not viable in its current form and is impoverishing the country, for worse outcomes than other systems that are structured sensible, and therefore also making it impossible to direct the enormous levels of tax being charged to any of the areas of public spending that will actually generate growth or rising living standards.

Blimey, you have an incredibly cynical view of "the old", and I feel it's rather unfair to blame the whole cohort for something out of most of their control.

This is a generation brought up to respect and emulate their betters, so believed inn what their chosen party was telling them at the time, as most voters do. And like all governments some of them tweaked their pledges after election and didn't do what they promised.

Those who had power and money groomed the electorate to get into power. Case in point, the Labour Party has proved it is not the party of the working man at all, so now Reform, though made up of rich aristocrats and corporate shills is trying to woo the masses with populist propaganda. It's always short term gain leading to long term pain because capitalism as practised is essentially a pyramid scheme transferring wealth from the labour force into shareholders hands, and it's now allowed to escalate unchecked.

Yes. Some of the highest energy costs in the world (with much of the infrastructure being owned or built by nationalised energy providers of other countries, with the profits used to subsidise lower costs for their own citizens…). Same story with transport. Similar with the disgraceful state of the water “industry” who paid themselves dividends when they hadn’t got sufficient profits to do so because they weren’t reinvesting a sufficient amount to maintain or upgrade infrastructure in order to have a viable business plan (and now expect us to pay for the backdated costs of the money they gave to shareholders in dividends they couldn’t afford while loading these “companies” with debts). Then you have wage suppression even in private companies that still have retirees claiming DB pensions that they didn’t pay enough for, so salaries are held down to cover these costs. Public sector pension liabilities that are literally unpayable with the lowering ratio of workers to retirees, running into trillions of pounds and held off the Government’s balance sheet. They simply cannot and will not be paid.

Meanwhile, young, working people are having substandard education, living in cramped and substandard housing, being taxed into oblivion and having basic family support like childcare funding and child benefit withdrawn if they do manage to claw their way up the earnings scales a little.

A total refocus of spending on the young is required: on education and training, on infrastructure, on additional tax free allowances for those with children (like pretty much every other developed country), on taxing on a household unit basis to remove distortions (like in pretty much every other developed country), freeing up Government backed funding to self-build quality housing, advisory and administrative as well as financial support for business start-ups etc, all of this is absolutely essential now.

If something isn’t done about it soon to make a decent future and standard of living viable for working age people so that aspiration returns and the disincentives to study and work hard are removed then the decline will become irreversible.

I’m afraid that those excuses are so poor, they just will not wash. An entire generation stuck its fingers in its ears and ignored the reality that was staring it in the face because it benefitted them, a great deal.

Even those pensioners now claiming to be “poor” should think about what their life would have been like if they were a young person with a similar career today. What kind of housing could they have afforded? At what age would they expect to be retiring?

Who are these ‘older people sitting around ?’…
The problems we have REALLY aren’t between generations as we are all individuals within each generation .I marched against the council houses being sold off , I rattled a tin for ‘lesbians & gays support the miners ‘ . I protested against the end of universal NHS dentistry & the privatisation of British Rail & our utilities. I marched with the Junior doctors and campaigned against the Health & Social Care Act of 2012 etc etc . I have worked really hard to support and serve other people all my life .
I have however never had any real power to influence the political class which has brought in one appalling piece of legislation after another during my lifetime. I’ve just tried to do my best with what I have , from where I am .

Make the state pension dependent on 40 NI contributing years rather than 35.

Stop all building of 5+ bed homes for the next 10 years, and ensure 50% of new builds are 1 and 2 bed homes, because that is what we need - small freehold units with small gardens, which is what most young families and retirees want.

Require all new buildings and car parks to have solar and/or hot water panels. Ban them elsewhere.

Why do you think manufacturing shifted from western countries? Academically it’s called the geographical relocation of the social forces of production. Essentially it meant that lower wages, with less restriction caused by pesky unions and workers rights, were the easiest way to increase profit. This is still the case. Do you really think the devastation to local communities was not understood. I recommend Roger and Me by Michael Moore for an illuminating watch.

Except people like Trump are now unhappy with their economic reliance on nations (China is the second largest owner of US debt) they consider inferior and allegedly thinks tariffs will bring manufacturing back.

It’s lose/lose for multinationals. They either lose profit via tariffs or lose profit due to relocation costs, necessary skills training and higher wages.

There is no real aim to bring back manufacturing at the cost of profit or political aim to enhance workers lives or social or community welfare. It’s just a ruse to get better trade deals.

JFK junior is neither qualified nor cares about the health of the nation. The government is well aware and has been for decades that the most profitable forms of the food industry make people ill - eg the link between refined carbohydrates and T2 diabetes. Do you really think he will identify the concrete of what people actually eat or say it’s all about vaccination. Have you actually read the crap he spouts about autism!

As I said, the figures I quoted and analysis of net contributions/ costs per person are cohort-based, as is all generational analysis by definition. They are averages so of course there will be outliers, as I specifically stated.

I also stated that as a result of having extracted such immense wealth from the nation as a cohort and made no fiscally responsible plans to reform systems to fund their own retirements, healthcare or social care adequately it is this generation that should now be coughing up the money to fund that problem for the members of their generation who are poorer and need additional support, not the current working aged generations who are significantly impoverished already by the behaviour of the current generation of retirees who have caused our current economic problems due to their catastrophic and deliberately self-interested mismanagement of the economy.

As it stands, they are still sucking up the vast majority of public spending from taxes which are at an unprecedented historical high, while also having more wealth as a cohort than any other section of society, or any cohort in history. This is causing the ever-declining living standards of their children and grandchildren who pay these extortionate taxes but receive services in terms of health, education, housing and infrastructure that would be embarrassing to a developing country. The generation now retired/ retiring should take responsibility, as a cohort, to distribute a sufficient amount of the wealth they have extracted to fund the services that they require in retirement for themselves (including for the poorer members of their cohort).

Public spending from current taxes urgently needs directing towards repairing the damage that the generation of retirees caused during their own working lifetimes and redirecting towards infrastructure, education, business, technology and productivity growth so that living standards can begin to rise again and the damage can be repaired.

Agree with this. Or if it's more palatable just get rid of NIC and increase taxes to make up for the difference. There is no way it's fair that only workers pay that extra tax.

Not forgetting of course, that as a parting gift, they were also the generation responsible for giving us Brexit, just to hammer another nail into the coffin of any prospect of economic prosperity. The elderly vote, as is well-documented, is what swung this decision, against the wishes of younger people who’d have to live with the consequences and falling living standards that it would quite obviously exacerbate, as was quite clear at the time. They were quite happy to tell us they were “happy to be poorer”, but it seems they just meant that they were quite happy for the rest of us to be poorer, with wages falling in real terms for many years, jobs and economic opportunities declining, while their pensions continued to be uprated with inflation or even more.

It’s time for them to pay up and put their money where their mouth is, including to support those of their own generation who didn’t support any of this and haven’t benefitted from it.

Do people really pity the poor multinationals who have out sourced the jobs of their consumers to other countries and dodge their fair share of tax through being internationally mobile ?

It's all about globalists getting richer while everyone else ends up on the rubbish tip.

It's probably not surprising we are now having a paradigm change. Because the one thing globalists didn't manage to steal were the votes of the disaffected.

That’s precisely why we need better education and focus on the UK areas of strength. Globalisation obviously means that production of basic and simple products will move to countries where labour is cheaper. Tariffs a la economically illiterate Trump maniacs will not reverse this process and will only make their own population poorer.

The solution is to adapt your economy to focus on high value, high productivity businesses. Focus on the UK sectors where we have strengths like science, technology, pharmaceuticals, defence manufacturing, the arts. Create business clusters. Change legislation to protect small businesses and startups from being bought out by huge foreign corporations. Provide start-up grants, link our extremely strong research function in our higher education sector to technology clusters of start ups and businesses. Remove trade barriers, create unified support for small- and medium-sized companies to help them navigate export procedures, provide grants for R&D and expansion, lower tax rates on strategic growth areas, invest in the infrastructure they need.

Erecting trade barriers is hardly going to incentivise business investment. Neither are high tax rates, poor infrastructure, and an unskilled workforce due to our useless education system.

Only increases in productivity will generate higher living standards without it just being squabbling over crumbs of cake and redistributing them/ causing further inflation that negates any pay rise anyway. Productivity has to rise which means focusing the economy on higher value activities, which require high levels of skill, which require investment in education that is fit for purpose.

Omg. Yes. To all of this.

As for JFK Junior, why is this moron even being given airtime? The idiot is claiming vaccines cause autism, as you noted. Nobody with even one functioning brain cell would give him the time of day (although sadly these days in the Venn diagram presenting “has a functioning brain cell” and “is an American” there is only a small remaining overlap!).

Not only that but it’s a litany of complaint about Thatcherism, which many of us loathed and detested and never voted for. It’s perfectly obvious to many of us that selling off the family silver, flogging off council houses at huge discounts and introducing a market into the NHS has resulted in the current mess. Some of us predicted it at the time.

Trump et al are friends of the multi nationalists and the globalists and anyone who is rich, powerful and profitable no matter how corrupt.

The paradigm shift is not an understanding through lived experience of the impact of such policies but a backward blaming or the poor, powerless and dispossessed. The disaffected can be a weapon used to articulate the unspeakable by a so called populist movement.

The problem with means-testing state pensions is that you yet again create another disincentive for responsible behaviour/ working/ saving: the exact things we need to remove. Whatever threshold (even with tapering) that you introduce will of course encourage anybody around that threshold not to bother to make any private provision. It’s also the case that it will lose all public support if the precise people who are paying the most for it (i.e. paying their own pension several times over AND funding the pensions of numerous others) are then told they cannot have the state pension themselves. It will therefore become next in line to be frozen until its real terms value is reduced to practically nothing (the fastest way to get something abolished entirely or reduced to a meaningless level is to means-test it, hence why most countries make things like childcare funding etc universal - it’s essential for the social contract that those funding the services also get to use them. Without this the social contract collapses and these cease to be public services in any real sense, just another means of covert redistribution).

Instead, we need to tax existing wealthy retirees of the generation who created this mess far more to fund those in their cohort who were allowed to save nothing for their retirements, which shouldn’t have been an option (the need for auto-enrollment with no opt-out was clear several decades before it was introduced).

And we need to make auto-enrollment now compulsory (no opt-out allowed) and gradually raise the rates to a sensible level. State pension can then, over time, be something only necessary for those who are so severely disabled that they’ve never been able to work, which it is perfectly reasonable to expect everyone else to fund from tax. Everyone else should be making their own pension provision, and would be able to do so if we took appropriate measures to repair the economy so that growth returned and salaries could start to rise in real terms for the first time in two decades.

There are A LOT of OAPs from cultures where women don’t work. Have a good look around next time you’re in A&E or your GP surgery. They’re far more of a burden than an OAP professional who has worked and contributed for 35-40 years. All these young new arrivals get old too, you know!

@InPraiseOfIdleness As pensions were not compulsory, it’s difficult to be punitive now. Loads of older people, especially women, didn’t work so of course they had no pension. The effects of ww2 affected a lot of this and pensions for part time workers were not widespread. You cannot equate today’s pension provision with what was available years ago. There’s no comparison. Neither my DM or MIL had a private pension. They didn’t earn much either and DM was a nurse with no pension prior to marriage. DF had no pension either as self employed. Loads of people paid tax but didn’t pay into pensions.

So, don’t assume better off pensioners have not paid shed loads of tax whilst working. I think NI should not stop at 65. Roll it into income tax would be a better idea. It’s should be a tax everyone pays because obviously it’s not insurance.

We must have a state pension and auto enrolment must happen for an additional private pension. Paying for child care keeps better paid women working so they are not lost to the economy.

There won’t be growth if we rely too much on the state. Growth comes from the private sector. We cannot max out borrowing which we pass onto our dc. We need a look at the hugely expensive health system and if we don’t have a higher birth rate, we will struggle to afford any decent service. So getting NI from older people would be a start.