Ending where we began with Britain’s incredible shrinking labour force, UK GDP has just about recovered to where it was before the onset of Covid, but the labour force is still nearly half a million smaller.
That means – by definition – that productivity has increased. We’re gaining the same output from less labour – an increase in prodictivity.
So they’re basically kvetching “Who will serve (my customers) their coffee in pret?”.
A comment on TalkTV last week:
“one million visas for foreign workers were issued last year and we have 5.3 million people on out of work benefits”.
Census data released yesterday: 1/6th of the population are foreigners.
It can’t be! The Guardian keeps telling us how utterly horribly racist this country is, there is no way so many foreigners would choose to come here.
jgh: do I understand correctly that the 1/6th applies only to UK residents born abroad? The foreigners born here are separate?
Of course some foreigners born here are presumably adequately British. Many are not. For instance it’s logically possible to be both British and a Moslem but I suspect – open to correction – that many UK-born Moslems aren’t remotely British and are proud of it. It’s not even a race thing: plenty of Irish Roman Catholics born here aren’t British and also are proud of it.
We have a French friend who has lived here so long that she considers herself both French and British. It can be a complicated thing; is it simplified if you get race riots such as those in Leicester recently? I’m not sure.
By the way, the estimable Dr Thompson has a piece up on Unz about who pays the taxes and who draws the benefits.
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/your-household-other-households/
Taken from the ONS Website:-
You asked
Can you please tell me:
1) The total number of insurance numbers on the database.
2) The total number of national insurance numbers issued to foreign nationals.
3) The total number of active insurance numbers (being used for tax purposes).
4) The total number of active insurance numbers issued to forgiven nationals.
We said
Thank you for your request.
Unfortunately we do not hold the information you require.
How queer.
All that productivity will dissipate in a couple of years when the Tories have let in another million serfs to deal with the McJobs shortage.
D’oh. Meant McJobs vacancies glut.
Why would it be strange that ONS doesn’t know the information that HMRC holds?
I’ve come to the conclusion the reason that there aren’t enough people to do all the jobs is that vast swathes of the country do nothing. They are employed, but they achieve nothing. I passed a gang of ‘workers’ the other day, doing something on the roadside, probably utility related. There were at least 4 transit vans parked up, and approximately 7 or 8 people in yellow hi-viz jackets standing around, looking into a hole while 1 or 2 blokes were digging said hole with a shovel. That is this country in a nutshell. Approximately a third actually working productively, the rest doing SFA most of the day. Covid furloughs showed us how many people are superfluous to requirements – despite paying millions to stay at home and do nothing the country still functioned – food was produced, electricity generated, water and gas piped to our homes, goods transported around the country. Nearly 12m people were furloughed – most of them could be sacked and the country would be better off for it.
There’s productivity and productivity, isn’t there? Mechanising a process to double the output is a good thing, cracking the whip on employees to squeeze twice as much work out of them, not so much.
In this case though I would expect an increase the black economy.
Winter Fuel Allowance – not a massive budget item, but a complete black hole for productivity compared to the alternative.
Adding £5/week to the State Retirement Pension and Pension Credit delivers the same amount of money to the recipients in round numbers and admin is cost free.
Instead we dish it out in two lumps with various adjustments for Brits living in countries that are hotter than here. Must be a few hundred civil servants and an IT system supporting them providing no value at all, unless there really are some unsupported pensioners who can’t budget and don’t know it gets a bit colder in winter.
But the wages of these civil servants counts as income in GDP.
Jim,
“I passed a gang of ‘workers’ the other day, doing something on the roadside, probably utility related. There were at least 4 transit vans parked up, and approximately 7 or 8 people in yellow hi-viz jackets standing around, looking into a hole while 1 or 2 blokes were digging said hole with a shovel. “
Explained here, although I think there’s a few “coordinators” missing.
https://twitter.com/tonyadevitti/status/1586687937684684801?s=61&t=jdoFYiDcXeuxRRAXMNpn8g
Doesn’t even have to be £5 a payment could be a seasonal increase that kicks in automatically, little more work but still easier than running 2 systems
is it covid that causes people to shrink? Or is it the vaccine?