England: Mr Bates versus the Establishment

I lived in the UK for 7 years, and my impression is that it depends on what you’re buying and where you live. Greater London is hugely expensive. Transport is expensive. Fresh food is expensive.

But outside London is way cheaper.

I’d also say that the people from the UK visiting Australia tends to skew upwards on the earnings curve. Most of the bottom half haven’t done anything outside the UK beyond maybe a buck’s night in Prague or a few days on the Spanish coast. Which were all incredibly cheap when I was there compared to travelling elsewhere (or doing bucks in the UK).

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I have a 45yo cousin in Stockport who has never been to London :rofl:

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Lived in London once and never again. Wish a lot of my best mates didn’t live their so I wouldn’t have any reason to go back. Sure theres heaps to do and the history is endless but as a life style its the quickest money drain you’ll find. You can have the same lifestyle at half the cost in NYC, Berlin or Madrid if you wanted to.

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Singapore says hold my beer.

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Tbf not a ‘city’ i’d ever consider vaguely visiting let alone living in. I spent a week in Kisangani once and i’d probably rather go back there than Singapore.

Oh they’re a mess this UK Government. 100 weak days of Rishi Sunak after the utter chaos of Truss and the disgraced Boris yet no better. Nadhim Zahawi, Tory Chairman, Cabinet Minister without Porfolio and briefly former Chancellor under Boris and sacked (finally) today after emergence of his tax investigation and circa £5m tax penalty. Being investigated whilst in No.11, not letting on whilst effectively running HMRC ffs. He’s the guy who co-founded YouGov and made a killing our of it and property. Self made multi-millionaire but shady as hell imo.

Who else? Well, there’s Rishi’s eejit and useless former Education Sec Gavin Williamson who lasted about a month and resigned. He’d been sacked twice before by Boris and Theresa May mind you.

Nadine Dorries … now there’s a character. In hot water breaking this “ministerial code”. A Boris brown-nosing loose quasi populist cannon in many people’s eyes.

Dominic Raab, MoJ in the Cabinet still under the cosh for a fair amount of previous. Bullying thT is. He was the Deputy PM last I looked.

Raab was the former Foreign Sec under Boris who was on the beach when Kabul fell back in Nov 2022.

At least old Rod Stewart gets it right. An understatement surely though.

It’s way overtime this lot were turfed out and Labour under Keir Starmer and maybe the Lib Dems keeping them focused on public services were in. Tories are a mess whilst Jeremy Hunt seems to relish cutting services more post Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini budget 4 months ago. That disaster cost the UK a cool £74bn … the Great British Public are fast becoming mutinous.

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I’d laugh at this, but lots of good people and struggling ones will be impacted as well. I know they (as a country) keep voting for more pain on themselves, but this will hit lots hard.

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A very brave man to make such a prediction. Can Bob prove Slovenia and Poland will even exist in 10 years time ?

Ha ! Can Bob prove that he himself will even exist in 10 years’ time ? (He’s 75 after all.)

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Penny Wong has given them a lifeline.
She will let them into the Indo Pacific if they behave themselves differently from the way they treated her family in Borneo when they were playing the colonial overlords

OK I admit it.
I don’t get the Britains’s boneheaded policy towards the EU.
Legislation committing Britain to replacing or repealing all retained EU law by the end of 2023 seems ridiculous to me, and will only create more trade friction with the EU, and this unstable policy settings seemed to be making things worse.

For example, the Economist said recently "The government announced in 2021 that a zero-emissions vehicle mandate, laying out what share of manufacturers’ new sales needs to be emissions-free, would begin to apply in 2024. With 11 months to go, the industry is still waiting for details… Investment incentives are up in the air. "

Overlay the US with their huge Inflation Reduction Act incentives, and Britain seems to be so far behind keeping its automotive industry healthy and onside…and thats just one industry.
There are many more examples of unstable industry policy settings.

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Some of the repeal of EU legislation is legal tidying up. There is EU legislation with direct effect on Member States without the requirement for legislation at Member State level.
When the EU legislation gets amended, it can be legally messy .
A FTA with the EU could include some agreement on common standards or mutual recognition of standards.

brexit happened because of this

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Not really.

Far more about protecting the right of the party in a First Past the Post voting structure.

Because for decades UK politicians have blamed things that go wrong on the EU, with the proviso “we can’t do anything about it”. They provided a fantastic scapegoat for everything. Which meant even people who would normally be positive were luke warm on the EU. This (plus EU immigration) caused a chunk of the right to be rabidly against being in the EU. The right was more susceptible as conservatives like harking back to yesteryear, the EU was more progressive so the conservative politicians/press attacked them more, and more of the racists are usually in that crowd (although nowhere near all).

As this group got bigger, the support of minority parties increased. The problem with first-past-the-post elections is that people voting for smaller parties reduces the chances of the major party on their side of politics winning. This is what Cameron faced in 2015, where he needed to shore up his anti-EU credentials ahead of the general election to stop losing votes to brexit based minority parties. Which he did, by promising a referendum on Brexit.

He then assumed the referendum would easily pass, so he didn’t bother setting out clear rules, a clear form of Brexit, or anything else in the referendum. Which meant when it passed, there was no clear way forward. The anti-EU members of the conservatives then got rabid themselves, and pushed for an extreme version. And here we are.

The irony was that only a few years before the 2015 election the UK had a referendum on moving to preferential voting, as part of the deal between the Tories and Lib Dems after the 2010 election. Which the Tories campaigned against. If Cameron had just changed things, he’d have protected his flank and not needed the referendum promise. The Lib Dems were massacred anyway as their supporters hated them joining the Tories in government and supporting austerity.

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He’s highly regarded not just within Labour but amongst the soft Tory hinterland given the general sympathy felt towards nurses, teachers and his own transport workers. Speaks well on radio, well briefed and from a blue collar perspective, he’s their best bet too to reverse this cataclysmic erosion of earnings across the sectors.

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France is also into striking, but for different reasons.
The price of bread attracts the most, followed by protests against raising the retirement age to 64yo and full pension only after 43 years in the workforce

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Not sure they took some of those parts of her speech all that well. “Past colonialism - pfft nothing to see here, because I’m black.”

Who’s this dude. I like him.

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