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I think I had forgotten about the nationalisations because I do not regard them as changing anything substantial for legal reasons: "In light of this, EC law does not prohibit the nationalisation of undertakings. It has to be pointed out, however, that a Member State nationalising a private undertaking has to act like a private market economy operator as regards both the purchase price and the management of the nationalised undertaking. Otherwise, State aid rules (Articles 107 and 108 TFEU) would apply." https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2015-003938-ASW_EN.html

That is part of the problem. too much time in school, not enough outside that narrow environment. That is why my kids did not/do not go to school. So the state now needs to not only raise children (instead of parents) but parents as well. What is the point of having kids if you spend your time working to pay for them while other other people bring them up. We need shorter working hours, less child care, and less time in school. https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/schools-failing-flexible-answer

Nationalised telecoms are not a good idea (it is not a natural monopoly and is complex in tradeoffs providers offers), and free superfast broadband is a complete waste of money - just so people can watch higher quality video. I did forget about utilities - my bad. Its still a pretty partial reversal of privatisations.

Sorry, i should have said utilities and a temporary reversal on trains. it is still only a very partial reversal of all the nationalisation that has happened.

Previous IMF predications were too low. Do people blaming Brexit for this also think the reason Germany is doing worse than the UK is Brexit too? The big story is that Europe (EU and UK alike) are doing massive worse than the US and most of Asia

All of them according to the political consensus. Not even Corbyn wanted to reverse any of them (apart from a temporary one on train operating companies), or even most of the post Maggie ones. I can see the case of state ownership of natural monopolies like water and electricity, but see no reason for state ownership of oil majors, car manufacturers, steel producers, etc.

No, schools should be about learning. The rest of it is parenting. A good ethos in schools help, but it is not schools job. One of our problems as a society is parents are working long hours and not parenting, and schools cannot pick up that slack. Then again, I took my children out of school years ago.

Keeping people away from work does not force them into church - they can just do nothing, or mow the lawn, go to the pub, or whatever. The reason it is popular is that people want to have time off at the same time as everyone else so they can spend time with their friends and families. There is also the difficulty of what people do with kids if they have to go to work when schools and childcare are closed.

This is not a UK problem, it is a Western Europe wide problem. There is little difference between us and France of Germany, for example - the other "big" western European countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita We are significantly worse than Germany (but not France) on PPP median income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income Another illustration - despite the high growth in eastern Europe and the expansion of the EU, the EU was a smaller proportion of the global economy at the time the UK left than the EEC was when we joined.

During the referendum both Boris Johnson and Farage tried to sell exactly that. They won the referendum, but their political careers are not looking great right now.

They are pretty much going down that route. Single parents are under a lot of pressure to work rather than live off benefits. This means they will use childcare, which will be heavily subsidised. So the state pays a lot of money to get someone to make a small economic contribution instead of letting them look after their children. The kids are worse off (in childcare instead of with a parent). It also means poor, especially single parents,people cannot home educate (research shows kids are better off HE, and yes, even if parents are not well educated, they do better than in school - partly because they are the ones who go to crap schools otherwise). All of this makes society a bit worse off in the short term, and a lot worse off in the long term. The point is just to make people work. You see the same thing in the cross party, cross all media, outrage at people retiring early.Work is a moral end in itself. You live to work, rather than working to live. Working is the secular equivalent of keeping the sabbath - except you do it five days a week instead of one.

How is that relevant to what I said? Did you get my point at all? It is that the numbers are far too small to affect the property market. If they are all single men, then it strengthens my point as they can live in more crowded accommodation than families can.

Do you mean the author or the person he is quoting? Do you realise who the latter is? Not at all disjointed,. The west should have done more when it could. If it was not willing to do that it should have accepted the alternative. They have constant conflict and causes of conflict. Becase we have common enemies, and because we are all now stable, affluent, democracies. They have similar rivalries now, and China is by far the greatest potential threat to Russia. That is naive itself, because you see things in black and white terms. It would have been very easy to put Russia in a position where it had more in common with the west. The whole "EU and US" as a bloc is part of the problem. If the EU and NATO had not made Russia feel threatened they would have a different attitude to us. I do not think you understand WHY Russia view Europe that way. You are contradicting what everyone with expertise on Russia says, what past Russian foreign policy says, what the Russians themselves have done. The fact is that the west has clearly signalled to Russia that it can dominate parts of Eastern Europe (e.g. its invasions of Gerogia and Ukraine) and then turned around and said it cannot (the announcement that Ukraine would be joining transatlantic instaitutions a few months before the invasion). Wavering is not good foreign policy.

Do you understand it? Most people here clearly do not. Demand and supply curves are the amount that would be bought and sold respectively at a given price. The price and quantity are where they overlap. It is a bit more complicated for something like housing that is not a commodity. Given people crossing the channel in small boats are not exactly loaded they will have a minimal effect on supply and demand. The foreigners who move the demand curve are: 1. Rich ones who buy big houses in expensive areas. They take up a lot of land. We have tax incentives to encourage them to live here. We also encourage them to buy holiday homes. 2. Investors who buy property, especially those who then leave it empty as they cannot be bothered letting. We encourage these too. The main thing that shifts the demand curve is interest rates. It might do, but there are lots of ways to solve that problem. There is a lot of unused, or underused property around. Slap a 1% of the value annual tax on all commercial and residential property other than main residences and the supply explode. Sadly, no govt would have the guts to do that. The full paragraph reads: "Among those rescued included a small baby, with the Ministry of Defence confirming on Monday afternoon that 442 migrants had made the crossing on Sunday, bringing the total illegal arrivals to the UK this year to 486 people. " So that was in late Jan, so about 500 a month, so about 6,000/year at that rate. The total so far this year is 3,680. So it might be reasonable to project 12 to 16 thousand for the year. This is tiny compared to the number of Ukrainians who have been allowed in. 120k is just a fake number to rile people. WHat did you do - calculate a reasonable estimate and multiply it by 10. It is a very useful distraction from other issues for politicians, but is not of huge importance. It is just a useful way of polarising people (as the comments so far indicate, it works) to make them easy to manipulate.

Only because we have given them mutual interests. read the article, We failed to promote democracy in Russia when we could influence it. China is also a threat to Russia - they are far from natural allies, they have territorial disputes, have and even came into military conflict during the cold war. The Chinese would love to grab some of Siberia and the Russians know it. The fallacy in your argument is that it is inevitable that Russia and China are allies. Their mutual interests are the result of idiotic western foreign policy. Again, read the article I linked to. This is worsened by making Russia feel threatened. This quite, bearing in mind the article was written 25 years ago: "If we are unlucky they will say, as Mr. Kennan predicts, that NATO expansion set up a situation in which NATO now has to either expand all the way to Russia's border, triggering a new cold war, or stop expanding after these three new countries and create a new dividing line through Europe." Exactly what happened.

Asylum claims being far more likely to be granted for people from certain ethnic groups is not new: Iraqi Kurds, Sri Lankan Tamils, etc. The other thing is allowing immigration of people with British ancestry. It is very true a lot of people have exaggerated expectations. They think they can easily get a job. The see pay that is high in their home country terms and fail to realise the cost of living. Even those who know people may not know the truth. There is an old joke about am immigrant who told people in his home country that he had hundreds of people under him at work. He mowed the grass in a cemetery. They may also know people who came here in things like skilled migrant visas who are likely to be doihng well. Not large numbers, but I know quite a few (OK, that is because a lot of the people I know in Asia are rich).

That was because the west has been messing up its Russia policy for decades: https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/02/opinion/foreign-affairs-now-a-word-from-x.html What the Ukraine war does it make those mistakes irretrevable.

Exports are higher than they would have been ceteris paribus with a higher exchange rate. I did not say lower currency will reduce property values, I said higher exchange rates will. I do not think stagflation is likely if the economy is doing so badly the government needs to print money. Also, given inflation, unless there has been an incredibly deep recession, the extra money needed to pay off debt will be less than the increase in the money supply, because the real terms value of the debt as not increased. Index linking does not increase the cost of debt relative to the economy, so unless tax revenues fall relative to the economy, the ability to repay index linked gilts is unimpaired by inflation. You would need a HUGE contraction for this to be a problem.

Anything that strengthens China will be our problem. China is a far greater threat. But will not become drawn into China's sphere of influence. A strong Russia that will be a rival to, rather than a dependent of, China might be the best option (for everyone other than the Ukrainians, that is). We had good choices 20 years ago. We decided not to take them, through complacency and incompetence, so now all we have left are bad choices.

A term which originally meant anti-imperialist.

So all that achieves is push them into dependence on China: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-21/china-s-russian-energy-imports-balloon-to-88-billion-since-war

Inflation will not rise if the economy is slowing down - and it will only need to print money to pay debt if the economy is slowing a lot. The pounds might depreciate, but that will 1) increase exports stimulating the economy and 2) the effect of that can be offset by other things - e.g. a fall in the costs of either residential or commercial property. Furthermore if inflation is caused by printing money to pay off index linked gilts, it will reduce the real value of other gilts. Raising interest rates will reduce inflation and reduce the nominal value of debt.

It is not massively different. It could be as simple as differences in the basket of goods - e.g. if the UK weights tomatoes more heavily (I have no idea if it does) the shortage would have a bigger impact. It depends on which periods you look at, and who you compare with. Why the G7 rather than the EU or the OECD? It was lower last month: https://data.oecd.org/price/inflation-cpi.htm#indicator-chart

As a now single dad I agree. It is probably one reason people are less keen to have kids. What is the point if all you do is pay other people to look after them? The expense without the joy. I work from home and I home educate, and it has been amazing. If my life had gone slightly differently I could have ended up richer, working long hours, and leaving the (now ex) wife to bring up the kids. What would have been the point? We really need more family friendly working practices, instead we just got subsidies to get the wage slaves to hand their kids over and work more.

There is no real mechanism to do that at an international level though. The ICC charter has only been signed by some countries, and even any of those could just withdraw any time they chose to. International law is not really the same kind of thing that national law is.