Friday 3 November 2017

Robert Peston - WTF

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Our former friend and plugger, ITV's Robert Peston has a new book out. It is, somewhat predictably for a Remainer, about how terrible  voting for Brexit and Trump could be for the world economies.



What isn't predictable is that Robert now believes that the people were absolubtely right to vote for both Brexit and Trump. 

He states that the political elite, of which he expressly includes himself, had, and have, a huge disconnect between what they think and feel and what millions of ordinary people think and feel.
 He gives plenty of economic arguments for why that is so
.And also has recognised that for very many who were told  'if you vote to leave, things will become really bad for you,'  believed things were already pretty bad. And were unlikely to ever improve unless they voted for change.

Here is the rest of Peston being interviewed by Iain Dale about his new book. 
WTF 



Not a word from the leading Remainer that I disagree with.
Repentant Sinner. Take your place back at our table.

CU might even give him a link him again.

13 comments:

Nick Drew said...

Excellent stuff

There's a good fit with the marxist insight (let's not call it a theory), that a necessary(1) condition for *gasps* The Revolution is when the proletariat intuitively grasps that things cannot get any worse - that any change must result in something better, at least for them

or, more simply put -

F*** 'em all
F*** 'em all
This is our last chance for withdrawal ...


____________
(1) necessary but not sufficient, according to KM

Electro-Kevin said...

The "how do we take back control ?" bit sounds ominous.

I've tried arguing this on other sites but telling people they're thick and telling people they're racialists is bad, is wrong and isn't going to get us anywhere.

andrew said...

EK

of course I have not read it but I suspect the
"how do we take back control ?" bit
refers to how Robert and his mates take back control - not you.

Moving on.

To those who think brexit will make any difference, I can stand here on this electronic soapbox and say very clearly (again)

- leave/remain hard/soft brexit - there will be no real difference.

why
1 - there is no way of measuring any difference
2 - lots of clever people argue that we will be better / worse off, most of the estimates mention about +/-5% of gdp by 2030. i.e. no-one really knows
3 - inflation at 2.5% - £1 now will be £1.35 in 2030 - or it might be in a range 1.25 - 1.42 - my point being that your £1 will change over a long period of time very slowly to be worth something else and how are you really going to notice?

Especially for those in the bottom 20-40%, there is a benefits system that keeps them housed and fed and that wont change at all

What really p***** me off is this collective unwillingness to look at the UK's real problems
- Housing costs
- Productivity
- Domination of London / South east
- over - reliance on financial services
- add your own

and work towards solving them.


Bill Quango MP said...

Andrew- Those issues you raise seem to be just what Peston is saying. And what he thinks is wrong and needs addressing.
I have just taken his book onto my reader and will get to it soon. See if he has any answers.

Where I am in full agreement with him is when he suggest that people wanted something different from the status quo. That if you were very well off before the crash, in whatever sector. Medical.Local council.Banking. Charity. Academic etc. Then you are even better off now.
If you were at the very bottom, then not too much change.
But for the big group of managing. just abouts and failing, its not been that great.

I did argue in 2008 for letting it go. For having the crash, 1929 style. Because by 1934 it was mostly over here.A long tail, but that was because of a lot of missteps on the putting it right.

I'm not sure now that I would have been right. To have had a 1980s style recession that evicts people from homes and adds two million or more to the unemployed figures.

But it would have been over a long while back. And the boom-bust cycle should have been in boom by now.

Instead we have never ending light cuts to everything and mild tax rises and wealth drain for the many, not the few.

Anonymous said...

Hooray.....I always liked him and am glad he's returned from the dark side!

Andrew perhaps we will be slightly worse off in the short run but infinitely better off in the long term. We won't have to pay those pesky eurocrats for a start. Who cares how much is the exact figure for the sum we pay in each week.......not paying for them will be a good start. No-one can know at the moment what it will do to our trade balance and it is a bit of a leap of faith but as you say we probably won't see much difference.

Additionally we can decide for ourselves on our own laws etc. Self determination is infinitely better than the alternative.

Anonymous said...

It's not clear why Peston regards himself as being part of a "political elite". He is a hack with an annoying voice, who has never been elected to anything.

These type of people also refer to themselves as "the metropolitan elite", when in fact they are just middle-class leftists living in places like Camden.

James Higham said...

Careful with Peston.

Electro-Kevin said...

"Where I am in full agreement with him is when he suggest that people wanted something different from the status quo."

Which evades the very clear signal from the referendum result that people are pissed off with uncontrolled immigration.

Peston is a dishonest man if his book seeks to complicate this very simple message.

Andrew's "There is no way of telling between hard/soft Brexit"

Oh yes. It will be very easy to tell.

So prepare for Corbyn.

Throughout has been the underestimation of the intelligence of Leave voters.

Charlie said...

I'm not sure that there's anything left to discuss when it comes to how Brexit and Trump happened - it seems obvious to me.

Telling people that, if they vote for x, things are going to get really bad, only works if things are not already really bad for them. When you're struggling to earn enough to support a family, but competing for wages with immigrants who are happy to live ten to a house, how much worse can it get?

When middle America screams that the American dream is dying and their towns and cities are shells, it's not because they're white supremacists yearning for a return to the days of the slave trade, it's because their way of life has become unsustainable.

Same with Corbyn. We now have an entire generation who have very little wealth to speak of, have given up hope of ever having any, enter a highly-competitive jobs market with a substandard education - and people wonder how the hell they can vote for a bunch of Trots!

It's not rocket surgery. The Tories should have started sorting out housing in 2010. They've left it far too late.

Anonymous said...

Housing problem = immigration problem, Charlie.

This is where Corbyn wins:

A) Snowflakes who think he will penalise Boomers

B) Boomers who are insulted by the May appointment refusing to vote Tory

Charlie said...

It's not just an immigration problem. Prices fell 20% in the aftermath of the crash. Immigration didn't.

It is partly an immigration problem, though It's also a credit problem ("emergency" IRs), a regulation problem (why does the regulator allow mortgage terms longer than 25 years?), a taxation problem (for BTL, mortgage interest was tax deductible, although that is now being remedied) and a policy problem (the various lending schemes, the fallacy that Help To Buy is to help buyers).

For renters, we could also do with better tenancies. ASTs are crap.

Anonymous said...

Just as in the 17th and 18th centuries, London is (for Native Brits) a demographic sink (i.e. the population shrinks absent migration from the provinces).

Two hundred years back, the problem was disease which wiped people out faster than they could be replaced by children growing to adulthood. Today the problem is house prices compared to wages.

A forty year old woman on £40,000 a year in North London will be living in a one bedroom flat, assuming she bought it 15 or 20 years ago. She'll be childless. The same 40 year old in Workington could raise two or three kids. My son knows people who are literally losing money living in London, whose rent and living expenses aren't covered by their wages. Presumably they have savings/parents and are hoping for promotion before the savings/parents vanish.

Peston's doing a major mea culpa. He flattered himself that he wasn't like the other posh Oxbridge media types, as a Jewish boy from East London he knew the poor better than they did. Turns out he didn't have a clue what they were thinking in Stoke, Merthyr or Barrow, and to his credit he's putting his hand up.

Electro-Kevin said...

"Presumably they have savings/parents and are hoping for promotion before the savings/parents vanish."

Or just waiting (hoping) for the parents to vanish.

Went to friends' this weekend at their fabulous self build house which they (well, he, actually) put up over ten years on the site of a run down bungalow.

A fantastically impressive grand design - spoilt only a little bit by the three boomerang children (in their thirties) emerging from various parts of the house to raid the fridge, in onesies and their rooms smelling of sleep.

They must be eyeing that 800k pad greedily.

And then my thoughts went to my own children...

I've already told them it's going to the donkey sanctuary if they don't pass their exams.