“We have to be bold enough to say the free-market model doesn’t produce, doesn’t work … the trickle-down effect didn’t happen,” Starmer told a meeting at the Mechanics’ Institute where the TUC was formed in 1868.
“We have to rebuild an economic model that reduces inequality and protects working people.”
Whether the trickle down effect works or not doesn’t mean that free markets work or not. Further, whether free markets reduce inequality or not isn’t the decisive test of whether they work or not either.
Where is this free market of which he speaks?
Yesterday we were talking of professions and their codes of conduct. When I started in my profession, the code of conduct was about 20 pages long. 15 or so years later, it’s now about 300.
Whether that is either or both of a conspiracy against the laity or a duffing up of the profession, I struggle to see how either side is the freer for it.
The McDonald’s franchise at Tehran airport is currently up for grabs at a knock-down price – bloody free markets, eh!
“We have to rebuild an economic model that reduces inequality,” said the rat-faced man in a country where 90% of income tax is collected from the top 50% of earners.
No-one seems to be asking who their chancellor’s going to be. From this language John McDonnell would seem to be Keir’s preferred candidate?
Build as many economic models as you like, Sir Keir. Just test them against reality before you impose any of them on the whole of the UK public.
If he were here, he’d probably have some smart alec answer about free markets not being tested before being imposed, which isn’t really how they came about. And if the evil capitalists are skimming 6-7% off the top of their businesses in unjustified profits, then there is room for a coop, collective, not-for-profit, or other business model to come in and undercut them by offering lower prices and a little more wages to their workers. Heck, just come up with a model that makes it easier for that sort of thing to happen.
He does look a bit like Roland Rat, doesn’t he?!
Sir Keir, ex DPP etc, is trying his best Tony Blair triangulation. Say what he thinks whoever he is talking to wants to hear. Sadly for him he’s not the salesman Blair was, nor does he have a tame media cheerleading for him. And the looney lefties who now make up a number of the PLP and even more of the wider party will be looking for the slightest deviation from the true path of Corbynism. It’s great to watch him twist and turn as he lies and lies again.
@Mr Lud
In certain lights he looks a lot like Max Headroom.
Maybe he is taking advice from Captain Potato, talking one moment about how there can’t be a free market and, next moment, saying that free markets don’t work.
Of course, tightly regulated markets can work but they tend to work for huge companies who can lobby for regulations to help them. As a case study, see how Philips lobbied the EU over UV lightbulbs
That would be the deep fake Starmer, Mr Womby.
Bongo,
“If he were here, he’d probably have some smart alec answer about free markets not being tested before being imposed, which isn’t really how they came about. And if the evil capitalists are skimming 6-7% off the top of their businesses in unjustified profits, then there is room for a coop, collective, not-for-profit, or other business model to come in and undercut them by offering lower prices and a little more wages to their workers. Heck, just come up with a model that makes it easier for that sort of thing to happen.”
The thing that really struck me when I moved from working in a company to working freelance for the government is that you might lose 6-7% in profit in the private sector, but inefficiency in government is so much higher than that. The private sector reacts to new technology or new information very quickly. Compare Dyson’s electric car project with HS2. He put in some money and work and one day realised it’s a bad idea and killed it. The information about HS2 is getting worse all the time. It simply doesn’t add up. But it won’t get killed quickly.
the trickle-down effect didn’t happen,” Starmer
If there is anyone, even an unskilled illegal immigrant, earning as little as the Tolpuddle martyrs then Starmer could argue thuswise.
OK, Keir baby: show us.
Sir Kier Starmer reminds me strongly of a double-glazing salesman worked for Everest in the eighties. Had the sort of damp handshake gives you an immediate urge to find somewhere to wash your hands
“The information about HS2 is getting worse all the time. It simply doesn’t add up. But it won’t get killed quickly.”
I was listening to Chris Grayling on Chopper’s Brexit podcast and he was saying that the EU has a standard platform height and they tried to impose it on HS2. This would have meant that some rains wouldn’t have had level access. He didn’t say it but presumably we’d have then been n contravention of some disabilities legislation.
I liked this response from the Young People’s Party on twitter:
“The “free market” isn’t the problem, or even “a” problem.
The problem is government protected monopolies, corporatism and implicit and explicit subsidies for landowners and bankers.
Which is not that different to socialism.”
Isn’t the effect of free market capitalism, trickle-up: mighty economic oaks out of little risky acorns grow?
Somebody has an idea for something he/she thinks people will want, risks capital, invests his/her labour and turns it into a business which makes others better off and provides jobs – or of course gets it wrong and loses everything.
“We have to rebuild an economic model that reduces inequality and protects working people.”
Uhhh . . . sir, that is NOT an economic model. To the extent that it is ‘economic’ at all is that it will DESTROY the economy.
‘“We have to be bold enough to say the free-market model doesn’t produce, doesn’t work … the trickle-down effect didn’t happen”
Uhh, okay, so what? But first, ‘free-market model’ is the absence of a ‘model.’ Free means free. People trade with each other. Freely. The way they want to.
The ‘free-market’ has no duty to produce anything. But the idea that people trading with each other without interference ‘doesn’t produce, doesn’t work’ is simply bizarre. Surreal.
Starmer makes Fauxcahontas and Obama look intelligent.
An observation: if you take a tour through Starmer’s constituency, I doubt two people in ten are what my Malaysian pals would call ‘proper English’.
He’s a bwana, in St Pancras.
Two voters in ten.
m’Lud, near enough. I lived in St Pancras for over 30 years, my parents married in St Pancras church, in 1985 it was still ‘proper English, by 2016 it certainly wasn’t. I got out before I became the only native left.
I was trying to think who Keir Starmer reminded me off …
Bridget Jones’ mum’s fancy man!
http://movie-dude.co.uk/Patrick%20Barlow%20%20Bridget%20Jones's%20Diary%20(2001).jpg
Starmer: “the trickle-down effect didn’t happen”
Try telling that to the 3,200 Princess and 2,600 Sunseeker employees… and their suppliers’ employees
UK’s yacht builders ride growing wave of super-rich customers
@Bloke on M4 January 12, 2020 at 11:51 am
+1 Quick reaction in public sector is 2-3 years
Good to see Sir Keir carrying on with the playbook that drew scorn and laughs in Torie strongholds like Manchester.
Shouldn’t Newmania be popping up just about now to (a) curse all Brexiteers and (b) remind us that Labour actually picked a seat somewhere in the Midlands, so everything is fine and the Tories are going to get crushed real soon?
Dennis, bless you. As I always say, thank you for caring.
But on the simple arithmetic, everyone’s favourite ageing hippy family man has a point: if St Albans fell in 2019, just as Kingston upon Thames did in ’97, it’s because there are tectonic shifts.
Basically, London exports its pathologies.
London must be dealt with.
I live in the blasted place, so I know.
London is like a contaminated petri dish, sneezing on the rest of the country.
I’m being poetical. I shall go and lie down.
@Mr Lud
I hope that you enjoyed your lie-down.
The Holborn and St Pancras constituency is most of the borough of Camden (11 wards out of 18).
Camden is undoubtedly cosmopolitan and has become more so in recent decades.
That said, the best estimate is that 47% of the inhabitants are ‘White British’, which I think is more or less the demographic that you have in mind.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/datasets/populationcharacteristicsresearch
Anyone who denies the existence of the trickle-down effect not only has to believe in the stupidity of the rich but also the altruism of the working class in choosing not to apply for the post of “Jeeves” to all the Bertie Woosters. As to the former, Charles Darwin never had to work for his living after the voyage of “The Beagle” spending all his time in scientific research funder by his father and father-in-law (and two of his sons became Cambridge professors); as to the latter, I am currently working my way through a biography of William Pitt the younger and it is quite obvious that certain of his servants were pocketing substantial sums at his expense. The author mentions the extraordinary size of the meat bill at Holwood House and the fact that it was even higher when he was not in residence.