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And where do I find work with a comparable salary and benefit scheme? Or indeed career options?

When it comes to retirement, I fancy Nottingham. But for now, I'm very much stuck where I am.

Sure, I could take my skills somewhere else in the future, but I've got a couple of career goals to achieve first (such as Ombudsman), after which I can more or less name my price in the financial and insurance sector. However, the deal has to be right, as I'd lose my pretty damned sweet FCA pension.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
And where do I find work with a comparable salary and benefit scheme? Or indeed career options?

When it comes to retirement, I fancy Nottingham. But for now, I'm very much stuck where I am.

Sure, I could take my skills somewhere else in the future, but I've got a couple of career goals to achieve first (such as Ombudsman), after which I can more or less name my price in the financial and insurance sector. However, the deal has to be right, as I'd lose my pretty damned sweet FCA pension.

This is the thing though. You want to be able to afford a cheap house, but you also want to have all the benefits of living in the most attractive parts of the country (I love Kent me) in terms of infrastructure, career opportunity, and so forth.

Is it really the Government's job to ensure that everyone gets to own a home in the most expensive part of the nation? Sounds to me as if their time would be better spent trying to make the other parts of the country more attractive in other prospects than focusing on one tiny overcrowded corner. It's the most realistic way of doing things.

No, it's the Government's job not to concentrate the country's wealth and industry into a single city.

Or to get housing built in high demand areas to prevent ridiculous house prices.

Or to introduce taxes on buy-to-let parasites helping to push those house prices up.

Houses are cheap where people don't want to buy, which is usually (educated guessing time) because there are a lack desirable features e.g. Jobs. When you've spent the better part of the last 20 years in educating being told (or *promised*) that if you work hard you'll get somewhere, you go where you get the most return for your work. And that ain't Durham.

And when the wealth and opportunities are so well concentrated, you get a bigger imbalance.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
No, it's the Government's job not to concentrate the country's wealth and industry into a single city.

That isn't within the control of the government necessarily though. Or rather, it's not something that occurs as a result of the government's actions, but natural forces.

Look back historically, people congregate. Where people congregate, the land becomes more valuable because there's less space to live in. Jobs proliferate as there's a workforce. More people living tighter together require greater infrastructural support and supply chains. That enables more people to come in, which increases land values and employment opportunities again, round and round in an endless chain.

Meanwhile, stuff left in between of these hubs suffers those things in reverse.

The government can act to try and mitigate those effects, but all they can ever do is firefight against the market and societal forces. If they build more housing in the most desirable areas? It doesn't necessarily enable more people to buy, as the cheaper housing available in greater quantities can simply end up luring in even more people, and pushing demand right back up again. They tax buy to let landlords? Those landlords just include the price of the tax in their rent, and as there's such demand, the only people who get shafted are the tenants (because the houses will get rented regardless).

London and the South East are lost causes. I have no expectation I will ever be able to afford to buy here purely off my own wage, and accept that if I wish to live here, renting will be the order of the day. That's just life. If owning becomes of more importance to me, I must move elsewhere, in the same way I might chase a career, a woman, or any other thing of importance to me. It's all about counterbalancing those priorities within my life.Few people get to have their cake, eat it, and have ten more on order.

Whilst I'd love it if the Government just magically conjured up a £50,000 house for me in Twickenham, the sad reality is that there's no way to make that happen outside of breaking the economy and shattering the country. That's just the way things are.

Government shut down the Coal mines, leaving no provision for those out of work.

Government watched our industry decline, made no provosion for those out of work.

Government actively sought to shift us to a service industry, focussed on London.

London gets all the attention, all the spending, everywhere else is seemingly left to rot.

Net effect? People with skills find the most jobs in London/Home Counties. Businesses then see that as the main area to invest in.

Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

Until an effort is made to get businesses investing elsewhere, it'll just continue.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Government shut down the Coal mines, leaving no provision for those out of work.

Government watched our industry decline, made no provosion for those out of work.

Government actively sought to shift us to a service industry, focussed on London.

London gets all the attention, all the spending, everywhere else is seemingly left to rot.

Net effect? People with skills find the most jobs in London/Home Counties. Businesses then see that as the main area to invest in.

Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

Until an effort is made to get businesses investing elsewhere, it'll just continue.

And why did they shut them down? Because after many many years of subsidy, they weren't going anywhere. They were bankrupt, uncompetitive, losing money left right and centre. Along with the steel industry and several others.

The government is not responsible for the forces of globalisation, or the industrialisation of other countries. They did everything they could to subsidise them over an extended period. But nothing grew up to replace them. No organic new industries came about, the old ones just staggered on, draining taxpayer money like a sieve. It reached the point where it probably would have been more economic to literally just write every worker a cheque north of Birmingham and tell them to stay home.

So the government cast around to try and find some sort of industry we could still compete in, and they ended up promoting the stuff that was still going strong. Like the banking sector. You can sit there and criticise it till the cows come home, but that doesn't mean there was a viable alternative. You think when Harold Wilson went cap in hand to the IMF in '76, it was because there were loads of other industries we could just set up in Northern England, but he chose not to?

I repeat, the Government firefights. It can intervene and mitigate to an extent, like when it subsidised Northern industry. But it can't do it forever, and it isn't responsible for the forces that drove it into the ground to begin with.

I get why they shut them down. No point running anything at a loss.

But to abandon those communities? To leave behind two or three generations of workers with no work, and screw over kids who had previously gone through school knowing they'd likely end up in that industry? Unforgivable. Unjustifiable.

I've driven through parts of South Wales. Much of the scenery is truly breath taking. But before long, you're going through a former mining town. People exist there - you can't call it living. There's little to no public transport, and without jobs, they can't exactly afford to run a car, limiting their ability to seek work elsewhere.

It's a vicious cycle of poverty singularly not of their own making. And then they get lambasted in the press for being reliant on government handouts, demonised through no fault of their own.

The Government simply doesn't firefight. At all. Instead, they light the blue touch paper, collect their kickbacks, then retire to a safe distance, safe in the knowledge their friends in the gutter press will ensure the fault for their actions is palmed off on some other poor sod that had nothing to do with it.

Arguably though, the government hasn't really tried to plug the gap - emerging tech such as renewables have had investment cut, whilst a similar thing is happening with education.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:I get why they shut them down. No point running anything at a loss.

But to abandon those communities? To leave behind two or three generations of workers with no work, and screw over kids who had previously gone through work knowing they'd likely end up in that industry? Unforgivable. Unjustifiable.

I repeat, what should they have done? What amazing new industries should they have propagated there, that would have required only a handful of years worth of subsidy to kick off? What infrastructure could they have built that would have somehow kickstarted the local economy?

It is all well and good to say that they should have done /something, but that's very easy to say. People see governments as these huge powerful entities capable of anything, but they're as much victim to market and societal forces as anything else.

I've driven through parts of South Wales. Much of the scenery is truly breath taking. But before long, you're going through a former mining town. People exist there - you can't call it living. There's little to no public transport, and without jobs, they can't exactly afford to run a car, limiting their ability to seek work elsewhere.

It's a vicious cycle of poverty singularly not of their own making. And then they get lambasted in the press for being reliant on government handouts, demonised through no fault of their own.

You'll see the same signs in Eastern Europe driving through towns of workers made entirely for a single government purpose, or parts of what were ancient Middle-Eastern trade hubs. It's nobody's fault. But that doesn't mean that anyone can do much about it. Silicon Valley sprang to life out of nowhere, but the flip side is that another community somewhere else has likely breathed its last collective strangled breath as the industry it relied upon became outdated or unnecessary.

The Government does its best at times, and others, its worst. Often it does both depending on where you live. But the sad truth is that it cannot conjure up wealth and prosperity for all those abandoned dead towns now; any more than it could for Jarrow after that all too poignant march in the thirties. You can throw money at a problem, but that doesn't make it self-sustaining or generating.

This isn't saying 'what they did didn't work'. This isn't Captain Hindsight.

This is THEY DID FETH ALL. Shut it down, left it to rot. No money for retraining. No attempts at all to help communities regenerate. None.

Here, the Government did nothing. At all. That's not incompetence. That's outright malice.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
This isn't saying 'what they did didn't work'. This isn't Captain Hindsight.

This is THEY DID FETH ALL. Shut it down, left it to rot. No money for retraining. No attempts at all to help communities regenerate. None.

Here, the Government did nothing. At all. That's not incompetence. That's outright malice.

They did do something. Like you said, they swapped across to being a service based industry. They threw the doors open to foreign investment. And many other things.

What you dislike, is that they did nothing to try and regenerate the North. But have you considered that it could be that there was nothing that could have been done at the time? That it would have just been throwing more money at it for no end goal? Just continuing to stave off the inevitable, swapping one kind of taxpayer subsidy for another?

I repeat. You're castigating at them for doing nothing. But you're assuming there was something that they could do. So I'm asking you; if there was, what was it?

The North. The South West. Wales. Even parts of Kent (Chatham, coastal areas)

All left to rot because 'London Is Alright'.

Encourage businesses to set up in those areas. Share the cost of getting the local workforce trained for those jobs.

But they'd didn't even try. Did they?

And Hastings! 7th most deprived area in the UK

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
The North. The South West. Wales. Even parts of Kent (Chatham, coastal areas)

All left to rot because 'London Is Alright'.

Encourage businesses to set up in those areas. Share the cost of getting the local workforce trained for those jobs.

But they'd didn't even try. Did they?

Trained for what jobs? The other sectors of the economy didn't have hundreds of thousands of vacancies lying around for suitably retrained people to fill, even if you could have inclined them to move south.

What businesses? What sectors were so ripe for expansion that they could even have begun to fill the gaps left behind? And wouldn't most 'encouragement' have just been more subsidies under a different name? If so, then why bother closing the plants?

I'm not trying to rag on you here, or even necessarily to defend the government (of several days). I'm just pointing out that saying the government should have done something is very easy to do, but to put your finger on what it was they didn't do is a lot more difficult. I would give much that economics was so simple we could establish industries capable of employing millions of men meaningfully with ease.

 Ketara wrote:

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:I get why they shut them down. No point running anything at a loss.

But to abandon those communities? To leave behind two or three generations of workers with no work, and screw over kids who had previously gone through work knowing they'd likely end up in that industry? Unforgivable. Unjustifiable.

I repeat, what should they have done? What amazing new industries should they have propagated there, that would have required only a handful of years worth of subsidy to kick off? What infrastructure could they have built that would have somehow kickstarted the local economy?

It is all well and good to say that they should have done /something, but that's very easy to say. People see governments as these huge powerful entities capable of anything, but they're as much victim to market and societal forces as anything else.

I've driven through parts of South Wales. Much of the scenery is truly breath taking. But before long, you're going through a former mining town. People exist there - you can't call it living. There's little to no public transport, and without jobs, they can't exactly afford to run a car, limiting their ability to seek work elsewhere.

It's a vicious cycle of poverty singularly not of their own making. And then they get lambasted in the press for being reliant on government handouts, demonised through no fault of their own.

You'll see the same signs in Eastern Europe driving through towns of workers made entirely for a single government purpose, or parts of what were ancient Middle-Eastern trade hubs. It's nobody's fault. But that doesn't mean that anyone can do much about it. Silicon Valley sprang to life out of nowhere, but the flip side is that another community somewhere else has likely breathed its last collective strangled breath as the industry it relied upon became outdated or unnecessary.

The Government does its best at times, and others, its worst. Often it does both depending on where you live. But the sad truth is that it cannot conjure up wealth and prosperity for all those abandoned dead towns now; any more than it could for Jarrow after that all too poignant march in the thirties. You can throw money at a problem, but that doesn't make it self-sustaining or generating.

Government isn't above subsidising industry, if it suits them. Banking bailouts, oil, gas and train companies get subsidies.
The fact of the matter is Thatcher deliberately destroyed those industries, not just because they were no longer profitable, but because they were the seat of Union power.

As to what can be done, well some investment in any infrastructure would be a start. Road and rail links through the UK are appalling. I've mentioned it many times, I've lived in all corners of the country, and most parts that are doing poorly is because you can't get there easily. Many parts of the UK have to rely on single carriageway roads, being battered by excessive lorry use, and diesel rail. Lincolnshire, for example has about 22 miles of dual carriageway and no motorway whatsoever.

Meanwhile, 60 billion is being wasted to make journey times between London and Birmingham 30 minutes shorter so that the London elite can have all their nannies, shop assistants, nurses and binmen live in Brum, and commute in to service their needs.
Money spent on infrastructure means growth for the area it is spent on, that is proven;

London School of Economics Infrastructure and growth

 Ketara wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
The North. The South West. Wales. Even parts of Kent (Chatham, coastal areas)

All left to rot because 'London Is Alright'.

Encourage businesses to set up in those areas. Share the cost of getting the local workforce trained for those jobs.

But they'd didn't even try. Did they?

Trained for what jobs? The other sectors of the economy didn't have hundreds of thousands of vacancies lying around for suitably retrained people to fill, even if you could have inclined them to move south.

What businesses? What sectors were so ripe for expansion that they could even have begun to fill the gaps left behind? And wouldn't most 'encouragement' have just been more subsidies under a different name? If so, then why bother closing the plants?

I'm not trying to rag on you here, or even necessarily to defend the government (of several days). I'm just pointing out that saying the government should have done something is very easy to do, but to put your finger on what it was they didn't do is a lot more difficult. I would give much that economics was so simple we could establish industries capable of employing millions of men meaningfully with ease.

See all the industry based in London?

That industry. The stuff that was deliberately concentrated in the Home Counties.

Call Centres. Don't need much of an education to wok in those.

What you're doing is 'shrug, whatevs.' That's what the government has been doing, and it is categorically not good enough.

And you mentioned earlier 'good money after bad'. You mean, a bit like swathes of the country almost entirely reliant on state handouts, yes? With little sign of it ending because their areas get little to no investment? Yeah? That sort of good money after bad?

Or is it 'shrug, that'd cost money, feth 'em' good money after bad?

It may actually be cheaper to run industries at a loss than it is to pay full support to thousands of unemployed and cripple the local economy of entire areas of the country. You then have supplies for your own infrastructure instead of buying everything from abroad. Further, you don't become deskilled so that buying from abroad is the only option.

Anyway, I don't fully buy the argument that they are as uncompetitive as some claim. They weren't great, but our government finished off our steel industry when they did nothing to prevent cheap steel flooding into Europe. It's clear China wants a monopoly by flooding world markets with cheap steel and we let them and then fold our industries accordingly. What happens to the demand when they hold all the supply?

Now we face not being able to manufacture steel for our own defence projects. Typical Tories, only doing what suits wealthy corporations and their profit by importing cheap from abroad.

Hell, helping businesses is ultimately what working tax credits are for. Topping up low wages with public money as a subsidy to corporations, instead of raising the minimum wage and putting the full wage burden onto employers.

Yup. Though WTC are a Labour invention, it's pathetic that we even need that.

r_squared wrote:
Government isn't above subsidising industry, if it suits them. Banking bailouts, oil, gas and train companies get subsidies.
The fact of the matter is Thatcher deliberately destroyed those industries, not just because they were no longer profitable, but because they were the seat of Union power.

Half a dozen of one and six of the other, I suspect. Certainly, something needed to be done about the Unions at the time.

Meanwhile, 60 billion is being wasted to make journey times between London and Birmingham 30 minutes shorter so that the London elite can have all their nannies, shop assistants, nurses and binmen live in Brum, and commute in to service their needs.
Money spent on infrastructure means growth for the area it is spent on, that is proven;

You may well be right about HS2, I do not know enough, and have no opinion.

With regards to infrastructure, the report you just cited mentions them as 'essential ingredients', and with good reason. It's not just a case of New Tramline=Amazing new local economy. Spain is living proof that blowing vast sums on amazing infrastructure can just leave you with empty buildings, airports, etc. Infrastructure investment needs to be targeted towards an end goal. Otherwise you can plonk down lots of shiny new infrastructure, and nobody uses it.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
See all the industry based in London?

Not really. London is big, but it's mainly the city and a crapton of head offices allied with the Universities and a small pile of creative stuff. Not really transplantable. All the pharmaceuticals and aerospace stuff is elsewhere in the country.

Call Centres. Don't need much of an education to wok in those.

....and that's why all the employment for them has gone to India.

What you're doing is 'shrug, whatevs.

No. I'm very much not doing that. I'm just asking you (for the fourth time now), what all this business and industry that the government is supposed to encouraged is in, what the training they're supposed to have sponsored was.

The answer, judging from your responses thus far, is that you don't know. You feel that something should have been done. You just don't know what. Which is not a bad thing or a slight against you. You're one bloke. You don't even work for the government. No reason you should.

All I'm trying to highlight here, is that whilst it is exceptionally easy to identify the problem, the solution is far more elusive.

And you mentioned earlier 'good money after bad'. You mean, a bit like swathes of the country almost entirely reliant on state handouts, yes? With little sign of it ending because their areas get little to no investment? Yeah? That sort of good money after bad?

Or is it 'shrug, that'd cost money, feth 'em' good money after bad?

By good money after bad, I mean you're just pouring money into a hole after it's been established it does nothing. There's nothing wrong with propping up an industry in the short term until it can get back on its feet. You save a lot of jobs and misery that way. When you hit over a decade though, that's the point you recognise the industry is likely a zombie, and not going anywhere. That's the stage it becomes throwing good money after bad. You'll note the banks didn't require even half a decade of support, for all your vitriol. The coal industry spent a good fifty years collapsing, on the hand.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
It may actually be cheaper to run industries at a loss than it is to pay full support to thousands of unemployed and cripple the local economy of entire areas of the country. You then have supplies for your own infrastructure instead of buying everything from abroad. Further, you don't become deskilled so that buying from abroad is the only option.

And in many circumstances, you would be correct. In others, you would not. There is no magic bullet, catch all solution, sadly.

Anyway, I don't fully buy the argument that they are as uncompetitive as some claim. They weren't great, but our government finished off our steel industry when they did nothing to prevent cheap steel flooding into Europe. It's clear China wants a monopoly by flooding world markets with cheap steel and we let them and then fold our industries accordingly. What happens to the demand when they hold all the supply?

Now we face not being able to manufacture steel for our own defence projects. Typical Tories, only doing what suits wealthy corporations and their profit by importing cheap from abroad.

Hell, helping businesses is ultimately what working tax credits are for. Topping up low wages with public money as a subsidy to corporations, instead of raising the minimum wage and putting the full wage burden onto employers.

I suspect the steel industry will be retained one way or another. The government might let it get whittled down to bare-bones, but they do have defence priorities that will overrule their free market instincts I would suspect.

So one minute people are ranting its racist to oppose mass immigration, and then the very same people are arguing for bans on Chinese exports?

I thought free trade and globalisation was one of the arguments in favour of EU membership. Well, Chinese Steel and foreign investors buying all our houses is part of that free trade globalisation. You can't have your cake and eat it.

(I actually agree with blocking cheap Chinese steel BTW. Only I get mocked and derided as a racist nationalist when I advocate things like that).

I cant keep up with this thread.

I've friends who are engineers, and apparently quality wise, Chinese Steel isn't a patch on British Steel.

But that's no reason to ban its import.

Instead, those building with it or otherwise using it need to stop being cheapskates trying to squeeze every penny of profit they can.

Also, there's a world of difference between migrant workers, and imported goods.

One is a group of human beings. The other is just stuff.

You're saying builders should stop being greedy cheapskates out of the goodness of their heart? Yeah, like that'll happen.

Import tariffs, quality standards and bans on steel that fails to meet those standards are the only solution. Not wishful thinking.

No, I'm saying people need a greater respect for value over price.

And again, completely different to immigration - particularly as we need migration to fill jobs Brits can't or won't do, because skills gap and aging populace.

 Ketara wrote:
There's always the alternative solution, which is to move out of London. Outside of the M25, and a few overheated areas (Kent, Birmingham, Bristol, etc) property prices go through the floor. You can pick up a two bedroom around Durham for £50,000, no problem. And that's not even the cheapest.

Which is fine if you can get a job in Durham.

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
Too many new labour still in the party. Under New Labour my family, and many others, became worse off. Public sector pay stalled, taxes went up, student loans grew considerably, national industries continued to dry up. Loans and housing costs spiralled out of control and they did nothing. Now children have to leave their home towns because they can't afford a house. Social mobility is in reverse, Millenials are worse off with poorer and less stable futures than their parents had at the same age.. Really, New Labour have done little for their core voters who are now struggling, and Corbyn just doesn't have the clout or the support to make a difference, to turn back decades of dissatisfaction.

This is all true, but those of us with greyer heads indicating longer experience and memories know it happened under Thatcher and Major too, and continued under the Coalition and current Tory governments.

 Kilkrazy wrote:

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
Too many new labour still in the party. Under New Labour my family, and many others, became worse off. Public sector pay stalled, taxes went up, student loans grew considerably, national industries continued to dry up. Loans and housing costs spiralled out of control and they did nothing. Now children have to leave their home towns because they can't afford a house. Social mobility is in reverse, Millenials are worse off with poorer and less stable futures than their parents had at the same age.. Really, New Labour have done little for their core voters who are now struggling, and Corbyn just doesn't have the clout or the support to make a difference, to turn back decades of dissatisfaction.

This is all true, but those of us with greyer heads indicating longer experience and memories know it happened under Thatcher and Major too, and continued under the Coalition and current Tory governments.

Yep, centre right governments, of both colour hues, have a lot to answer for in this country.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
So one minute people are ranting its racist to oppose mass immigration, and then the very same people are arguing for bans on Chinese exports?

I think the semantics are getting jumbled. If you want to ban something simply because it comes from a specified country then yes that is racist, because it is opposed based on race. This is the same as opposing immigration simply because they aren't from this country (although strictly this is more bigotry than racism). What happened is following the boom years the steel industry was massively over producing steel so the price collapsed. In a true free trade system this will naturally balance out by a reduction in production. However the Chinese government instead massively subsidised their steel industry to the point that the rest couldn't compete. This is definitely not free trade. Really when people talk about banning Chinese steel they are really saying heavily subsidised steel should be taxed to prevent government interference (it became about China because it was the only one really doing it with steel). However the UK/EU/US all heavily subsidise food production so that African countries for example really struggle to sell their goods on the open market - so it's not like we are angels in all this either!

The same really goes for buying houses in the SE, it's not particularly foreigners but more the very wealthy that are causing a lot of the problems as they invest in property as part of their portfolio.

As for trying to drive some of the wealth away from London/Cambridge/Oxford. There are ways but it will be a slow process now. Funds like the new robotic innovation fund for universities could be ear marked for universities that are Midlands and northwards and SW only so that the elite London, Oxbridge universities can't apply. You can also have tax breaks for tech companies in the same regions (so let's say businesses rates for certain industries would be 50% if you solely invested in the Yorkshire. Basically you want to give enough of an incentive for people to move out but not enough to cripple those that stay.

 Ketara wrote:
...With regards to infrastructure, the report you just cited mentions them as 'essential ingredients', and with good reason. It's not just a case of New Tramline=Amazing new local economy. Spain is living proof that blowing vast sums on amazing infrastructure can just leave you with empty buildings, airports, etc. Infrastructure investment needs to be targeted towards an end goal. Otherwise you can plonk down lots of shiny new infrastructure, and nobody uses it...

Except for the fact that zero to bare minimum investment in infrastructure actively throttles local economies. This is a fact for every region outside of the south east and London, and the same old platitudes are rolled out, meanwhile Londoners can cross the Thames in novelty transport like fething gondolas, whilst Lincoln, Boston and Grantham wait decades for a fething bypass.

It's not good enough to not even try, and if Brexit showed anything, it's that the region's outside London are fething pissed off.