That Corbyn fella...

There are also plenty of people who ideologically view the State as an inefficient means of distributing wealth and services. They might take the view that actually lots of services are sufficiently funded but it's mismanagement / Whitehall pensions eating the fat.

Neither ignore other people's welfare, they just come from a different view point.

I'd say that's the entrenched view of a lot of people who lived through the 70s, where powerful unions helped to stagnate industry and services at a time of low investment and recession - and who also genuinely believe that Thatcher's way of dealing with them was the best for the country.

If someone's making a profit out of public services, we're paying them too much.

Sorry that was meant to follow on from my earlier post.

But you're totally correct. I know for a lot of younger people it's hard for us not to look at the babyboomers as having all the breaks. But when you chat to them many remember interest rates of 20%, shit services, endemic corruption throughout public institutions or total incompetence.

Even in very recent history you have plenty of egs of the public sector being totally dicked over by private contractors. Of course you can lay the blame at the door of unscrupulous contractors,but that gives weight to that POV.

I think that's always going to be a massive hurdle for a left-wing labour party. I am not sure what the counter to that is.

There's not a lot in recent history to point towards the public sector doing better than the private - East Coast main line is one, the BBC is another - though obviously that's massively under attack, since value for money high quality public media kind of fucks with the private media barons. There's just not that much in the public sector any more; it's all been rapaciously sold off and monetised.

Bit of a shambles this. Horrible watching your team score an own goal.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/oct/12/shadow-chancellor-u-turn-on-fiscal-responsibility-vote-john-mcdonnell-labour-budget-surplus

The charter itself is symbolic, only specifying a surplus should be run during "normal times" , the definiton of which is unclear. And so, Mcdonnel's position on the charter is also symbolic. This u-turn makes his message look really muddled.

Anyone got some really positive coverage of the Corbyn leadership they'd like to share? i need cheering up

It's almost as if they never expected to win the leadership and are hurriedly trying to work out how exactly they're going to be able to make their policies work!
God, if only people got time and space they needed to actually make coherent sense, rather than being rushed into half-baked ideas being presented as policy. The same should probably be said for the Tories' increasingly unworkable tax credits nonsense.

It's almost as if they never expected to win the leadership and are hurriedly trying to work out how exactly they're going to be able to make their policies work!

Looks a bit like that, doesn't it...

I really, really hope they can make some headway. British politics needs a strong force that both says and does something positive for the electorate; at the very least a strong Corbyn Labour should reign in the worst of the Conservative ideals.

Don't know if you ever listen to the Guardian Politics podcast?
The one just after Corbyn's election, has one talking head/voice
proclaim that 'the left' never expected to win, or necessarily gain enough MP's votes to be nominated, and that after successive drubbings for other Party elections,
it was Corbyn's 'turn' to stand, on the basis that the electorate deserved to hear that there was an alternative viewpoint to varying grades of austerity.
I'm glad he did stand, and win,
as it should be easy to explain that you cannot 'cut your way out of recession',
which was precisely the 'U'-turn Osborne took to resuscitate the economy in 2012 after he had strangled the growth inherited from Darling in the first half of 2010.

The economic problems of the 1970s were most definitely not caused by strong Trades Unions!

That was oil and was the reason diesels became popular in Europe. (Thanks Peugeot)

Apologies, I'd phrased it very badly - comes of hopping between doing work and procrastinating on forums.
Unions did cause a lot of problems in terms of rigid working conditions and archaic practises though. UK car industry died by not innovating, UK film industry was a joke when unions wouldn't let crew work a second longer than agreed hours, etc etc. The solution brought upon them by the Thatcher era was decimating and horrific of course; an utter demolition of their powers and hence their basic goal of protecting workers.

Unions. A mixed blessing. Our union at the theatre stops us working on Sundays or before 8am, meaning we have to work harder and faster to get jobs finished. I've gone freelance to get away from the union, I can make more money as a carpenter that way. They can definitely restrict progress. On the other hand, the lack of union support has often meant my Girlfreind, an actress, gets fucked over by directors.

Overall unions are a good thing, and countries where they are stronger have less inequality (according to the IMF). It's a neoliberal myth that the economic problems of the 1970 were caused by unions. In the 70s the economic problems started with the oil shock, but the deregulation of the financial sector and the growth of credit led to more money on the economy than there was capacity to use, and further inflation. Government response to this was to try to reduce money in the economy through wage caps, which Trades Unions tried to protect their members from.

@winnifred1849 interesting that your income has increased - better rate, freelance tax efficiency, or longer hours?

Our union at the theatre stops us working on Sundays or before 8am, meaning we have to work harder and faster to get jobs finished.

Surely if everyone knows these restrictions are in place it's not the unions fault if time is allocated unrealistically for the amount of work needed?
It happens without unions too, just means that people end up working 18 hour days, 7 days a week.

^ yeah this

18 * 7 = 3 * 42 = 4 * 31.5

Stop hogging all the work.

Many apols.

Your account is also very one-sided. Unions in Germany, for example, have engaged with management about how to reposition industry in the face of a more globalised market. In the UK the relationship between unions and management was mostly confrontational and antagonistic, reducing the bigger problem (that the world was changing rapidly and that industry needed to adapt) to a highly polarised war over wages. Management (and government) clearly bear blame for this, but so do the unions.

@winnifred1849 interesting that your income has increased - better rate, freelance tax efficiency, or longer hours?

Better rate- I charge depending on what I think the client will pay, or work as efficiently as I can within a budget. The union obviously gave me no control over this. Also longer hours; I'll happily work 12 hrs a day, three weeks straight if needed, for the same hourly rate, whereas in the union overtime was avoided at all costs as the rate went up. I can commit to the job fully, and take a more personal pride in getting it done. The union doesn't make it worth your while to do this. I actually pay more tax now I'm freelance, as I'm earning more. I also lost holiday pay, and sick pay, but these amounts are insignificant in comparison.

Surely if everyone knows these restrictions are in place it's not the unions fault if time is allocated unrealistically for the amount of work needed?
It happens without unions too, just means that people end up working 18 hour days, 7 days a week.

you can place 'fault' with the union or the employer, but the fact is employers will try to save money however they can within the rules. I can make myself more valuable in a freer jobs market. As I said above, I'm happy to work those kinds of hours by choice if it's worth my while.

I would say however that my experience is not typical, you can't really be a freelance railway worker or steelworks worker, so the same choices don't apply. In these cases the jobs market can drive wages down, as we know.

Don't worry. Problem is if you don't get consensus on not doing crazy working patterns, anyone who doesn't gets labelled a slacker.

In most industries there is an inverse relationship between hours worked and productivity, and in programming, I've read about studies that identify 42 hrs a week as the threshold beyond which total weekly output went down instead of up.

Which Labour sort of tried to do with "In place of strife" at the end of the 60s and less obviously in the late 70s.

The unions and parts of the party blocked it.

The Unions were short sighted but don't exclude the hopeless management of parts of british industry from responsibility for the failures of the 60s,70s and 80s

Listening to some old bloke on the radio this morning, he was saying something along the lines of how we ought to be grateful to the financial sector for being such a large part of our economy.
Now, you'll have to correct me if I'm wring, but doesn't the financial sector pretty much only benefit the very richest? And isn't the financial sector also extremely volatile and most likely to cause a recession every 5 or 10 years because it's run and staffed by criminals and gamblers?

Mind you. If we rebuilt a manufacturing industry, I'm not quite sure how it could compete with those in parts of the world where they're taking home what equates to slave wages in this country. It's all rather complicated.