George Osbourne

[kenada_blue]

no mate you dont, were facing dark times in the uk, no leadership shown from are leaders in fact i dont think for one minute they know a thing about normal life all three leaders only jobs have been in politics, kids in debt for there education, old people using there lifes savings to even have a little bit of dignity in there later days, and this showers only answer is to cut with one hand and borrow with the other, its all leading to a breakdown in uk life that will make the summer riots looking like a walk in the park.oh for a leader that looked up to the stars for this country and not a down to the gutter, what have the younger generation got in front of them, poverty gap growing, low home ownership, no job security, and mass unemployment, sounds rather familiar to europe in the 1930,s as lingong has said in his post , and look what happened then only a fool dosnt learn from history sadly europe and the uk is run by fools.

Have the same mentality.

Get a chance to bugger off...take it. Oz, US, Canada, Japan would be my places of choice.

 

[edge]

Put simply, he's a [Poor language removed].

sadly he is one among many,on both sides of the house

 

[Bruce Wayne]

I called them the family jewels because we, thats 100% of the British people owned them not the few who could afford shares them and as such we could all have shared in the Hugh profits made at are expense,
The energy companies alone boasted profits into the billions, and ironically EDF the biggest in the UK is 83% French state owned, yes the French are getting the money we should be getting if as a Brit that doesn't get under your skin nothing will.
Coal was making a loss, but a lot of that was down to the dash for north sea gas a commodity that has been in decline since 2002, leaving us now to import coal from south America ,Poland and Russia in bigger numbers or rely more on nuclear energy something that deffo isn't green, thats even before we calculate the cost in jobs from over 90,000 to 6000 who work in mines now mostly at a profit by the way, how much has it cost the country in welfare not only to those men and there families but the people who relied on them as well .
In short i would hazard a guess the combined profits of these companies in energy, water rail, etc since getting sold off could have made modern day UK a far more wealthy and less debt burdened country rather than it is today, and would make it far more easy for any government to control the economy as it could control the price of such things to its people and businesses rather than at the whim of some overseas shareholder.this in a a record time for stagnation of standards of living the worst since the war and in real terms a drop in family disposable income of 5% ove the last three years
I'm Sounding like a bleeding commie now, makes note to have a word with myself

The thing is you can't really say how things are now and transpose them on how things were then. I mean if you cast your mind back to when the web was first taking off, BT were dragging their heels in a big way over the local loop because they had the old public sector mentality still. They enjoyed their monopoly and were loathe to let anyone else have access to it. It was a similar picture with mobile telephony, with the likes of Vodafone and Orange giving BT (Cellnet as it was) a good kicking in mobile. Cellnet and Vodafone were formed around the same time, but where Vodafone had a market cap of over £100bn, O2 was eventually sold to Telefonica for just £18bn, and it was only really after that move that they picked up again.

I don't have efficiency data for the utilities but it wouldn't surprise me to hear the same sort of thing, as there are similar stories from around the world. Venuzuela for instance nationalised (or stole depending how you want to view things) their state controlled industries from the private sector, and the efficiency of those industries is not good. The high energy prices mean they still make reasonable money, but most of that is hived off for other pet projects, meaning those companies are starved of investment.

You could say much the same about the car industry, and both my dad and grandad worked in it so I'm not blind to patriotic allegiances, but the Leyland/MG/Rover factories really weren't up to much, especially compared to the Japanese competitors of the day. It was like a mini (no pun intended) version of what has happened in Detroit. That's not to say the industry is a write off. I mean Toyota has recently expanded its plant, and both theirs and Nissan's UK plants are amongst the best in Europe. We also have a fantastic high performance cottage industry around Weybridge/Woking, with McClaren are the centre. I mean we lead the world in F1 design and manufacture.

Re the job thing, there's an old Chinese saying that I'm going to butcher a bit. It talks about someone trying to build a dam, and due to political inteference they want to employ as many people on the project as possible. So rather than using diggers they employ 100 people with tooth picks instead.

One final thing, you say 'modern day UK' a wealthier place. Lets not confuse the UK government with the UK population. The UK population is considerably better off now than it's ever been. Look on the url below. It shows GDP per capita (in real terms)

http://www.google.co.uk/publicdata/...m=country:GBR&dl=en&hl=en&q=uk+gdp+per+capita

It's almost 4 times what it was in the 70's and 80's!! So we're 4 times richer than we were then. Think about that.

 

[Blue 1]

sadly he is one among many,on both sides of the house

Is right.

 

[edge]

the nationalized sectors had faults as you say didnt move with the times,maybe there is a middle ground somewere that should have been tried , best of outside brains with goverment backing moving them along, back to what we were going on about at the beginning it shows we havnt got any leaders with any vision to even try something like that.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

The country is roughly 4 times more wealthy per person than it was in 1980. I'd say that's pretty strong evidence that what we did do has worked wouldn't you? On pretty much any economic or social indicator you care to mention, British society is in another world to back then.

Whilst I won't say that that is down to our government it would be crazy to think our lives are **** now compared to then because they're simply not.

 

[davek]

The thing is you can't really say how things are now and transpose them on how things were then. I mean if you cast your mind back to when the web was first taking off, BT were dragging their heels in a big way over the local loop because they had the old public sector mentality still. They enjoyed their monopoly and were loathe to let anyone else have access to it. It was a similar picture with mobile telephony, with the likes of Vodafone and Orange giving BT (Cellnet as it was) a good kicking in mobile. Cellnet and Vodafone were formed around the same time, but where Vodafone had a market cap of over £100bn, O2 was eventually sold to Telefonica for just £18bn, and it was only really after that move that they picked up again.

I don't have efficiency data for the utilities but it wouldn't surprise me to hear the same sort of thing, as there are similar stories from around the world. Venuzuela for instance nationalised (or stole depending how you want to view things) their state controlled industries from the private sector, and the efficiency of those industries is not good. The high energy prices mean they still make reasonable money, but most of that is hived off for other pet projects, meaning those companies are starved of investment.

You could say much the same about the car industry, and both my dad and grandad worked in it so I'm not blind to patriotic allegiances, but the Leyland/MG/Rover factories really weren't up to much, especially compared to the Japanese competitors of the day. It was like a mini (no pun intended) version of what has happened in Detroit. That's not to say the industry is a write off. I mean Toyota has recently expanded its plant, and both theirs and Nissan's UK plants are amongst the best in Europe. We also have a fantastic high performance cottage industry around Weybridge/Woking, with McClaren are the centre. I mean we lead the world in F1 design and manufacture.

Re the job thing, there's an old Chinese saying that I'm going to butcher a bit. It talks about someone trying to build a dam, and due to political inteference they want to employ as many people on the project as possible. So rather than using diggers they employ 100 people with tooth picks instead.

One final thing, you say 'modern day UK' a wealthier place. Lets not confuse the UK government with the UK population. The UK population is considerably better off now than it's ever been. Look on the url below. It shows GDP per capita (in real terms)

http://www.google.co.uk/publicdata/...m=country:GBR&dl=en&hl=en&q=uk+gdp+per+capita

It's almost 4 times what it was in the 70's and 80's!! So we're 4 times richer than we were then. Think about that.

But that's not really wealth if it's the house you were forced to buy and live in (because that'll be the bulk of that "wealth increase".). All that's good for is using as a ticket to pay off the next house.

Wages as a proportion of GDP has fallen dramatically in the same period (roughly the same shape as your graph but going in the opposite direction. That's why the credit take up was so high in the "boom".

 

[chicoazul]

Bruce you post these studies and data often, but the vast majority of it doesn't correlate with the real world feel, and ultimately suits your agenda. Pretty much all my mates and family are suffering? Do you think they feel four times better off?

All while were meant to be eternally grateful that "the city" choose London, that's right London, not the UK. They're making absolute tits of us, if they want to jib it then fine. If were left with no natural industries or commodities then it's down to one person mostly. Your idol, the iron lady.

 

[kenada_blue]

The thing is you can't really say how things are now and transpose them on how things were then. I mean if you cast your mind back to when the web was first taking off, BT were dragging their heels in a big way over the local loop because they had the old public sector mentality still. They enjoyed their monopoly and were loathe to let anyone else have access to it. It was a similar picture with mobile telephony, with the likes of Vodafone and Orange giving BT (Cellnet as it was) a good kicking in mobile. Cellnet and Vodafone were formed around the same time, but where Vodafone had a market cap of over £100bn, O2 was eventually sold to Telefonica for just £18bn, and it was only really after that move that they picked up again.

I don't have efficiency data for the utilities but it wouldn't surprise me to hear the same sort of thing, as there are similar stories from around the world. Venuzuela for instance nationalised (or stole depending how you want to view things) their state controlled industries from the private sector, and the efficiency of those industries is not good. The high energy prices mean they still make reasonable money, but most of that is hived off for other pet projects, meaning those companies are starved of investment.

You could say much the same about the car industry, and both my dad and grandad worked in it so I'm not blind to patriotic allegiances, but the Leyland/MG/Rover factories really weren't up to much, especially compared to the Japanese competitors of the day. It was like a mini (no pun intended) version of what has happened in Detroit. That's not to say the industry is a write off. I mean Toyota has recently expanded its plant, and both theirs and Nissan's UK plants are amongst the best in Europe. We also have a fantastic high performance cottage industry around Weybridge/Woking, with McClaren are the centre. I mean we lead the world in F1 design and manufacture.

Re the job thing, there's an old Chinese saying that I'm going to butcher a bit. It talks about someone trying to build a dam, and due to political inteference they want to employ as many people on the project as possible. So rather than using diggers they employ 100 people with tooth picks instead.

One final thing, you say 'modern day UK' a wealthier place. Lets not confuse the UK government with the UK population. The UK population is considerably better off now than it's ever been. Look on the url below. It shows GDP per capita (in real terms)

http://www.google.co.uk/publicdata/...m=country:GBR&dl=en&hl=en&q=uk+gdp+per+capita

It's almost 4 times what it was in the 70's and 80's!! So we're 4 times richer than we were then. Think about that.

But bread cost 9p in the 70's. Its £1+ or 50p if you buy that cheap **** now.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

But bread cost 9p in the 70's. Its £1+ or 50p if you buy that cheap **** now.

Yes, and the computer you're writing that message on would have cost you a few million back then

Bruce you post these studies and data often, but the vast majority of it doesn't correlate with the real world feel, and ultimately suits your agenda. Pretty much all my mates and family are suffering? Do you think they feel four times better off?

All while were meant to be eternally grateful that "the city" choose London, that's right London, not the UK. They're making absolute tits of us, if they want to jib it then fine. If were left with no natural industries or commodities then it's down to one person mostly. Your idol, the iron lady.

Yes, that's because people like to look at things relatively rather than absolutely. In absolute terms our society is better off now than we've ever been. Nutrition, life expectancy, wealth, education and things like that are all vastly better than they were back then. The thing is, in terms of psychology we don't look at things like that, we tend to look at things relatively. There's a famous Harvard study where they gave someone a million bucks (or something like that), but because everyone else in their peer group was given two million that person was unhappy because relative to his mates he was poor.

So relative to our 1980's selves we're a whole lot better off, but perhaps relative to other people in the UK today (probably the 'rich' that are typecast in the press?) we feel like we're not. And lets face it, the press don't ever print good news stories, they don't ever want to make us feel like life is actually pretty good. They peddle bad news and hysteria. Your job as free thinking human beings is to not fall for their BS.

 

[Jib in lad]

We have really seen how low this Tory scum will go over the last two days lies lies and more lies .

How do they sleep at night . Attacking the poor and vulnerable is what they do though so we shouldnt be surprised .

 

[Bruce Wayne]

But that's not really wealth if it's the house you were forced to buy and live in (because that'll be the bulk of that "wealth increase".). All that's good for is using as a ticket to pay off the next house.

Wages as a proportion of GDP has fallen dramatically in the same period (roughly the same shape as your graph but going in the opposite direction. That's why the credit take up was so high in the "boom".

Don't mean to burst that bubble Dave, but that aint true either. See below, it shows real disposable income per head of the population. See how nicely it's gone up?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8443114/UK-economy-in-graphs.html?image=5

I make it roughly doubled since 1980.

 

[chicoazul]

In your opinion yes, obviously consumerism has really took off.

It would be good to compare those figures against other countries, as a point of reference.

 

[Jib in lad]

Don't mean to burst that bubble Dave, but that aint true either. See below, it shows real disposable income per head of the population. See how nicely it's gone up?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8443114/UK-economy-in-graphs.html?image=5

I make it roughly doubled since 1980.

Bruce try to catch C4news tonight on line , your wrong mate .

 

[Bruce Wayne]

But bread cost 9p in the 70's. Its £1+ or 50p if you buy that cheap **** now.

BTW, if we take the 33p for a loaf in 1980 and plug that into the inflation calculator over at the B of E, it returns a price now of £1.32. According to Tesco I can get a nice loaf of seeded batch for 88p. Not a bad saving there is it? Obviously a loaf of white is cheaper still.