Retired Professor of Political Economy
(Lancaster University, UK - retired 2021)
(also #ProfDJ across the Lune Valley)
Contributor: North West Bylines #NoBridge
The move back to the office is certainly underway, with working from home being de-normalised & back to an exception (if now more frequent).
But what is the impact on those who for health or mobility reasons are only able to work from home.
In many ways WFH was (accidentally?) a boon for 'disabled' employment, allowing many to access jobs that would have been difficult if attendance at office was required.
How will their opportunities fare in the move away from WFH?
New research/polling from The Sutton Trust outlines the impact of the cost of living crisis on students & their experience of university.
Around two-thirds of students have needed to take on part-time work while studying, with an impact on their studies including missed classes as well as missed assignment deadlines.
While more evident for students from the most deprived areas, many rich(er) students also need to work to survive university.
'It’s not a story of one bad apple, or one bad chief executive, or one bad institutional culture, or one underprivileged area. In 2022, 80 of the country’s 193 maternity units were deemed unsafe by the Care Quality Commission. That definitely wasn’t the austerity promise, not even in the small print: creating a country not safe to give birth in'!
One more dimensions of the Tories wrecking of the NHS
Its crunch time for the current university business model as (in a representative sample of 24 unis), deposits from international students ahead of studying in 2024/25 have dropped by over 50%.
Having been thrust into a cross-subsidy model where non-UK students have been keeping many universities afloat, this drastic reduction (if widespread) will either force universities into yet another business model (who knows what?) or will see some/many bankrupted!
When Rishi Sunak's strategy for trying to retain votes is explicitly to confirm its 'better the devil you know', you can but wonder who advised him that self-identifying as a devil was good optics.
(Yes, I know it a common enough saying but....)
I'm sure at the very least the political cartoonists will have a field day with this...
so I think we can now truthfully state:
Rishi Sunak = the Devil
Can't wait to see the Tory election leaflets with that as their strap line!
Northern Ireland is now a sanctuary for migrants in fear of the Tories' Rwanda deportation policy.
The High Court of Northern Ireland has struck down key elements of UK Illegal Migration Act, as incompatible with the Windsor Agreement between the EU & UK.
It also ruled that other aspects remain incompatible with the ECHR.
So, those migrants who might have skipped over the border to the RoI, now can remain in NI from where it would seem they now cannot be deported.
Yup, sounds like a good idea... even better curfew & controlled visiting (to vet lobbyists).... might quickly dissuade the grifters & opportunists - link that with a lottery for a two year term in the upper house, and we're looking at some great reforms....
(oh hold on, I've just come to... was I hallucinating there?)
Yes, and all good... but the one fly in the ointment (as it were), is that in such citizen assemblies, the permanent bureaucracy gains power through continuity - now that's not fatal as there are all sorts of ways of dealing with that, but nonetheless its not an insgnifcnat problem - but overall I've always favoured a lottery-filled limited term citizens' second house
Surely its time for Reform UK to be forced to rename itself 'The Party of Richard Tice' given his role in bank-rolling it.... and of course as you would expect Nigel Farage is not using his won money to pay the party's expenses.
[Oddly (?) I'm reminded of Richard Branson's business model across his Virgin conglomerate.]
If, as many suggest, rich people's contributions to political parties should be tightly constrained by law, that would be then of Reform!
As Martin Wolf argues in the FT today, the good news is that life expectancy continues to climb (albeit with occasional blips, like the one the UK is currently working through), but the bad news is we haven't reconfigured our social mores & practices to recognise this demographic change.
Improvements in longevity are unevenly distributed but the key to making this work for everyone is better public health provision & clearer notions of lifetime learning & supporting career change(s).
Yesterday I posted on the inhumanity of denial of PIP payments - which I'll repost shortly.
In response I received many testaments to individual experiences of this cruel & unjust system.
If you are in any doubt that the PIP system is being used to punish the disabled & is not fit for the purpose it is claimed to serve, then expand the next post to read these stories.
Your will be shocked, saddened, but also impressed by claimants resilience in the face of adversity such as this! #disability
This week the Migration Advisory Committee reports back to James Cleverly on his latest 'tightening up' on international student visas, explicitly intended to stop 'abuses' of the system.
But the real impact will to further disrupt an already problematic business model for universities into which they have been forced by successive government (the dependence of international student fees to balance the books) & disrupting the UK's global reputation.
I realise Rishi Sunak, with his financial services background is used to adding to any claim that 'past performance is no guarantee of future results' (usually deployed about investments), but he now seems to be turning this into the Tories key electoral message as he promises 'bold idea' to change British society for the better....
Does he really think we can just forget a decade & half of Tory chaos, mismanagement, mendacity & corruption?
Why not start the day with a little political economy
For those of you new to the idea that money is primarily the result of private credit creation in the banking sector, here's a nice (concise) summary of the position, linking the history of money, the role of the state & the importance of banks credit creation activity.
The key point, is there is no 'natural' economy, only one made from rule/laws of exchange & state interventions.
Hmmm... so the Q. is how long will Keir Starmer continue to hold Natalie Elphicke close?
She's been accused of excusing her husband who was found guilty of rape, of joining three others is attempting to influence his trial & now also (more recently) of trying to blame deaths on striking firemen.... and that's before we get on to her voting record...
Many are wondering how she could have a home in the Labour Party.... so we have to ask: what does Labour get our of her continued proximity?
Well, of course, in the BBC's coverage of Nadhim Zahawi confirming the cost of the settlement he reached with the HMRC over his tax affairs, no mention is made of the use of a SLAPP to stifle comment on these affairs (a SLAPP that has resulted in the lawyer concerned being referred to the Lawyers Disciplinary Tribunal).... are we surprised by this omission? Certainly not.
If you're not sure about the cruelty, inhumanity & injustice in the PIP system of benefits for those impacted by various health & ability issues, then you need to work through my timeline this morning, with posts responding to a post I made about PIP refusals & appeals - my heart goes out to those who have posted, and further emphasises that there are parts of our state apparatus that are cruel, callous & inhumane, just because they can be...
Although this figures are from 2018, there's little reason to expect that things have got better for women in the subsequent 7 years.
Around a third of women have been subjected to physical and/or sexual violence from a current or former partner, from a non-partner, or both of these forms of violence combined at least once in their lifetime (since the age of 15).
We still have a lot of work to do to stop men abusing women
The ever readable Kenan Malik joins the dots between exploitation of seafarers by P&O, globalisation & the success of Dubai (built on more exploitation of workers), to (rightly, to my mind) to re-emphasise that this all looks pretty much like the economics of class.
Call it what you will; global capitalism, corporate capitalism, neoliberalism, etc.
in the end the political economy of class relations never went away, it was just obscured.
Across the political Right, the narrative is that disability benefits (primarily Personal Independence Payments; PIPs) are too easy to get & are often paid to the 'undeserving'... however, in reality nearly half of applicants are rejected, rising to over two thirds for endometriosis (a gendered dimension I'll leave you to ponder), but with high rates of rejections over-turned on appeal (often with the same evidence).
I'm sorry to her about this; we have institutionalised inhumanity & callousness & you're paying the price of these choices.... hope the next review goes better
yes classic easily systemic distancing that's a much wider 'benefit' of outsourcing.... we see this in supply chains all the time - 'oh we didn't realise the price reduction this supplier offered would involve exploration of workers.... how were we to know, we're so far away'... labour rights workers have been battling this sort of distancing for years (incidentally all predicted by John Ruskin in C19th)
'sources' are now saying that Natalie Elphicke did not so much experience a political conversion as storm out of the Tory party having twice been refused Ministerial posts.
And, more explicitly Tories seem to be happy to say that it was her conduct in trying to excuse her husband's conviction for sexual assault (for which she has belatedly apologised).
No surprise the Tories want to depict her as tainted... & perhaps no surprise Streeting is defending her!
Good luck with the sales... we're big on terrace & container gardening here... having forsaken a 'real' garden when we moved 16 years ago... and have never looked back - containers are so much easier than beds etc. - and you can move them round when you want to rejig the courtyard.
enjoy your Sunday.... we're hoping the rain holds off until this evening, but we're (I think) a but further east than you.
thanks... at our last house I laid a terrace too flat, so it ends up quite dangerous with standing water (and ice in the winter), so don't forget to lay the slabs at incline.... and if you were going to do that, I apologise for the mansplaining-ness of that remark
