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I have no sympathy for Ursula von der Leyen, I would not have referred to her as a failed politician otherwise. But she does indeed look like a monumental state

by mmarq 4y ago

I have no sympathy for Ursula von der Leyen, I would not have referred to her as a failed politician otherwise. But she does indeed look like a monumental stateswoman compared to Cameron, Osborne, Johnson, Sunak, Gove, Farage, May, Corbyn, Truss, Sunak, etc… Germany works much better than the UK. Just look at salary growth or at the number of strikes that the past 12 years of idiocy unleashed on the UK. Sunak as a chancellor is responsible for idiocies like Eat Out to Help Out, the stamp duty holiday and losing billions of pound of taxpayers’ money to fraudsters during the pandemic. As a prime minister he can’t manage the strikes and half his cabinet is under investigation (by HMRC or for violations of the ministerial code or bullying). He’s clearly not fit for the role and doesn’t know what he’s doing. And at this point I’m not even expecting a strategic vision, I’d just like somebody that doesn’t increase my tax bill by 10 % every year and loses half of the money like a toddler sent to buy milk and bread. An NHS consultant makes 70K, that in London is not enough to send a child to nursery and pay the rent (that is: they are poor). A junior doctor makes a fraction of that. For those unaware, depending on the specialty, a junior doctor may be even 35-40 year old. A private doctor may make a lot of money, but I wrote specifically that the NHS can’t hire, not that I can’t find a doctor in Harley Street. Finally, taxes have gone up (I would have payed £800 less a month in 2009). Sunak alone increased my tax bill by £2-300 a month, while inflation reduced my real income by more than 10%. I don’t have time to find the data, but last time I checked public capital investment as a share of GDP was lower than in 2007.

skippyboxedhero 4y ago
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makomk 4y ago
"Looks like" is very much the right way of describing it - it's largely a matter of appearances. Especially since Brexit, a lot of the British media pushes only the downsides of any option the government chooses and only the upsides of the alternatives, whilst at the same time spinning everything other countries do as a success. For example, Germany's rail infrastructure has been having real problems actually running trains as a result of massive underinvestment (about a third of what the UK spends if I remember ightly) but our media makes it sounds like they're the ones with a better rail system due to actually investing. Or take Covid - our press pushed this tale about South Korea having such effective contact tracing they could lift restrictions and reopen society, whereas our incompetent government failed to do so, but in reality they were actually less successful at doing so and even had their own equivalent of Eat Out to Help Out planned that they completely failed to launch in 2020 because they couldn't keep restrictions lifted for long enough. It's just that the British press only reported on them attempting to lift restrictions as proof they succeeded and ignored the part where it kept on failingg and they were almost immediately reimposed, whilst their UK coverage only focused on failures and not on the country being largely out of lockdown for most of summer 2020. Also, the only zero-fraud option for something like furlough or business support is to deny everyone - every real-world set of anti-fraud checks inevitably blocks some genuine people and permits some fraudsters, I'm sure HN must be familiar with this concept by now, and of course the media attacked the government as incompetent for both. (For example, complaining that businesses couldn't just add people to payroll and immediately claim furlough for them - which would enable massive, trivial fraud - and also that they had no way of detecting if employers were making people come into work whilst claming they were furloughed.) Most of the publications pushing that story even spin normal benefit fraud as something that's not a big deal and right-wing Tory attempts to crack down on it as damaging and counterproductive using essentially this argument. On the other hand, Germany's financial regulator actually opened a criminal investigation into the journalists who investigated the Wirecard fraud, and Germany's own press and politicians failed so hard at investigating that it fell to journalists from outside the country working for the Financial Times to finally prove it. Those are, qualititively, very different kinds of fraud problems and not in a way that makes Germany look good.
- mmarq 4y ago
  Are you really trying to convince me that 10 years of wage growth in Germany are bad and 10 years of stagnation in the UK are good by listing random factoids on German trains (that work way better than the British) and mentioning the Wirecard fraud? Should we start with the Libor fixing scandal and continue all the way through to the recent PPE scandal? Is this how it works?
  - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
    PPE scandal was covered by the Auditor General. Libor fixing has, subsequently, been discovered not to be a crime (to the great embarrassment of the SFO who seem to have botched everything recently). The significance of Wirecard may be the fact that one of the biggest German frauds of all time was uncovered by a British newspaper. And after it was discovered, top politicians continued to lobby aggressively for the country for over a year. The level of corruption is unimaginable to Brits (imagine if Cameron was working directly for Putin...that is what Schroder is doing, indeed most of the SPD male parliamentarians have, one hears, been compromised in Moscow) precisely because of our open institutions. These do not exist in Germany (as has been widely acknowledged even within Germany after Wirecard). The reason cases do not play out the same way here is because of the Auditor General, because of the FT...this kind of scrutiny is unimaginable to most countries in the EU (why would voters even have such a puerile interest in their representatives? They vote, we lead).

by mmarq 4y ago

skippyboxedhero 4y ago

[dead]

makomk 4y ago

"Looks like" is very much the right way of describing it - it's largely a matter of appearances. Especially since Brexit, a lot of the British media pushes only the downsides of any option the government chooses and only the upsides of the alternatives, whilst at the same time spinning everything other countries do as a success. For example, Germany's rail infrastructure has been having real problems actually running trains as a result of massive underinvestment (about a third of what the UK spends if I remember ightly) but our media makes it sounds like they're the ones with a better rail system due to actually investing. Or take Covid - our press pushed this tale about South Korea having such effective contact tracing they could lift restrictions and reopen society, whereas our incompetent government failed to do so, but in reality they were actually less successful at doing so and even had their own equivalent of Eat Out to Help Out planned that they completely failed to launch in 2020 because they couldn't keep restrictions lifted for long enough. It's just that the British press only reported on them attempting to lift restrictions as proof they succeeded and ignored the part where it kept on failingg and they were almost immediately reimposed, whilst their UK coverage only focused on failures and not on the country being largely out of lockdown for most of summer 2020. Also, the only zero-fraud option for something like furlough or business support is to deny everyone - every real-world set of anti-fraud checks inevitably blocks some genuine people and permits some fraudsters, I'm sure HN must be familiar with this concept by now, and of course the media attacked the government as incompetent for both. (For example, complaining that businesses couldn't just add people to payroll and immediately claim furlough for them - which would enable massive, trivial fraud - and also that they had no way of detecting if employers were making people come into work whilst claming they were furloughed.) Most of the publications pushing that story even spin normal benefit fraud as something that's not a big deal and right-wing Tory attempts to crack down on it as damaging and counterproductive using essentially this argument. On the other hand, Germany's financial regulator actually opened a criminal investigation into the journalists who investigated the Wirecard fraud, and Germany's own press and politicians failed so hard at investigating that it fell to journalists from outside the country working for the Financial Times to finally prove it. Those are, qualititively, very different kinds of fraud problems and not in a way that makes Germany look good.

mmarq 4y ago
Are you really trying to convince me that 10 years of wage growth in Germany are bad and 10 years of stagnation in the UK are good by listing random factoids on German trains (that work way better than the British) and mentioning the Wirecard fraud? Should we start with the Libor fixing scandal and continue all the way through to the recent PPE scandal? Is this how it works?
- skippyboxedhero 4y ago
  PPE scandal was covered by the Auditor General. Libor fixing has, subsequently, been discovered not to be a crime (to the great embarrassment of the SFO who seem to have botched everything recently). The significance of Wirecard may be the fact that one of the biggest German frauds of all time was uncovered by a British newspaper. And after it was discovered, top politicians continued to lobby aggressively for the country for over a year. The level of corruption is unimaginable to Brits (imagine if Cameron was working directly for Putin...that is what Schroder is doing, indeed most of the SPD male parliamentarians have, one hears, been compromised in Moscow) precisely because of our open institutions. These do not exist in Germany (as has been widely acknowledged even within Germany after Wirecard). The reason cases do not play out the same way here is because of the Auditor General, because of the FT...this kind of scrutiny is unimaginable to most countries in the EU (why would voters even have such a puerile interest in their representatives? They vote, we lead).