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That point is addressed in the thread:
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1570832891588018176And just to pre-empt some "yes but Norway has loads of oil wealth!" responses, that’s not the point. The point is Norwegian living standards relative to other countries are the same right across the distribution. As they are in most other countries. But not the US or UK.
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Sounds like 'Police officer Taser' to me. I'm not sure
https://youtu.be/yHBWjVm_5pA?t=525
Hopefully the Police found the baggie he threw.
They did.
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Norway is in a state of bliss which this country couldn't finance right now. But we could at least have that as our objective. We could get there eventually. The Tories have deliberately been widening the rich-poor divide since the policy of austerity in 2008, which was supposed to be temporary. It's become permanent, because the Tories believe the property-owning classes should be enriched at the expense of the poor. Our soldiers in WW1 & 2 fought to reverse that. But now their descendants are licking the arse of royalty.
ISTR Norway boosted their sovereign wealth fund by investing in stocks which crashed in 2008. The Tories prefer to sell our infrastructure to French and German companies, so that our rail and energy customers are now subsiding train tickets and gas bills on the Continent.
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That whole interaction with the Merc passenger is just bizarre
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Use of force by a police officer has to be proportionate to a threat. It isn't obvious to me that someone running away is a threat to anyone.
The law allows the police use of force to carry out certain lawful powers, such as arrest, not just in response to a threat. S117 of PACE.
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Yes, the use of force needs to be reasonable (this is what PACE says) so proportionality and necessity and alternatives obviously play a part in assessing reasonableness. But it is proportional to carrying out a legal power, there does not have to be a perceived threat is my, possibly pedantic, point.
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A warning makes no sense unless there is a reasonable likely hood of following through.
An example case from earlier in the year where a taser was fired at someone running away: https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/local-news/yorkshire-police-officer-fires-taser-24161119
Appears to have led to a complaint and an investigation. I haven't found the outcome of that, it's perhaps still ongoing.
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I'm reminded of this taser story
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/18/stunned-then-shocked-race-adviser-tasered-by-police-is-targeted-againI think the more options the cops have the more they'll use them. If for some reason guns were more common, I think you'd get more cops shooting people.
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'oh well Norway's different
It is. But to drag the sovereign wealth fund into an argument doesn't necessarily prove the point those people are trying to make. The whole point of the fund is to keep the oil money out of the national economy. The legislation around the fund (intends to) make it impossible to elect a populist government that could then spend the money freely and in turn create some kind of Nordic version of Dubai. This means the day to day politics aren't that different from any other of the other traditionally prudent countries in Europe. Public purse strings are kept tight, there are long hospital queues for certain illnesses, teachers are currently on strike etc.
The reason for the wealth distribution has a lot more to do with a tradition of very strong labour unions, and several institutionalised mechanisms between unions and employer organisations that set wages on a national level. When you give labour unions that level of power you can get effects that might be surprising to someone used to a an Anglo-American tradition of hard fronts between employer and employee. In Norway on the other hand, the trade unions have the level of power where they are forced to recognise their own impact. They appreciate that there is a risk that asking for too much would hurt the country's competitive edge internationally and that jobs can always be lost to lower cost countries. Which is essentially the same argument the political right is always us warning about. And with this in mind they typically ask for relatively small pay rises. This track history of modesty ensures that they are are awarded pay rises pretty much every year. Let's say they demand 2.2% one year, then only 1.7% the next, and then maybe 2.8 % in a bumper year. They employ their own army of economists and business types to figure out exactly how much they can ask for. And as with the law of compound interest, small increases eventually add up to a lot. Every year some jobs are in fact lost to lower cost countries, it's unavoidable. But this institutionalised system means it will never be A LOT of jobs lost. They unspoken consensus between unions and the business organisations is that it's OK to risk some such job losses due to wage increases as long as it's no more than a few thousand a year. And as long as the economy is going well on the whole those who become unemployed can usually find something else within an acceptable time frame.
Oh and finally, the oil money doesn't really touch any of this process. That money is squirrelled away abroad for the long term.
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I know a few decent earners with no disposable income.
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No more than the UK surely? We just let successive governments sell it off cheap rather than investing in the population.
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Oh and finally, the oil money doesn't really touch any of this. That money is squirrelled away abroad for the long term.
And a cushion: Norway has been withdrawing from the pension fund to smooth the impact of Covid https://www.ipe.com/news/norway-takes-record-withdrawal-from-swf-in-revised-budget/10052707.article
No more than the UK surely? We just let successive governments sell it off cheap rather than investing in the population
Well yes, exactly. Norway isn't the UK.
Agree, it's possible to live like that, it doesn't make sense to just say 'oh well Norway's different, smaller population it'll never work here etc etc'.
I'm not saying the UK can't be better, but I think pointing at Norway and hand waving the differences away isn't making any case at all for how the UK gets there.
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withdrawing from the pension fund to smooth the impact of Covid
Correct. But this type of luxury is only very indirectly linked to a fairer income distribution. As explained above, the wage levels are set by the private sector negotiations, not by the government shooting the big oil money gun at everything and everyone. As a general rule Norwegian public sector pay lags behind that of the private sector. (That's why the teachers are currently on strike.) So my larger point is that since the system and culture around wage negotiations works fairly separately from how the oil money is handled it shouldn't be impossible to replicate it elsewhere.
rather than investing in the population.
The investing in the population bit hasn't really happened since the early 90s. That being said, direct infusions of oil money did help a lot in the 70s and 80s and much of the living standard you see today is thanks to getting started on a good path back then.
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I'll openly admit this is back of a fag packet and Google, but looks to me like the 2021 injection of money was about 16% of the Uk's welfare budget, for a population 8% of the UK's, so not trivial.
Obviously this isn't apples to apples because as I myself have been pointing out, very different countries, and as you say it's not directly driving wage levels, but IMO it does feed into a sense of security that allows for a more egalitarian outlook.
My personal belief is that people become grabby when they feel unsafe. Expecting people to vote for higher taxes now on the payoff they'll see better services/social care/pensions eventually isn't going to work. The UK needs to put the framework in place first, so people feel safe to contribute. Norway has used their oil revenue to build that sense of safety. God knows how the UK can do it starting from where we are now.
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Feels like it is getting bogged down in Norway, there are other countries doing much better than us without a sovereign wealth fund as an excuse
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I wonder how that figure has changed over the years. That artical is from 2013, likely discussing players who started as pros around the turn of the century at the latest. Footballers are both earning more and seem to be more professional.