"But put aside any emotions — the market does not give a flying fuck what you think about social justice — it just is. If the market price isn’t good enough, the marginal supply of labour will reduce, and you need to be prepared to put up with the consequences of that for your righteous vibes."
This this this. Amazing to see so many supposedly 'pro-free market' newspapers conveniently fail to see that the labour market also applies to the public sector. I do wonder if they've run so many pieces about how public sector workers 'couldn't get a job in the real world' that they've started to believe it.
It's worth noting that the Liberal Democrats, despite being nearly forgotten in the national narrative, have played a huge role in this. Not through their participation in the 2010-15 coalition, where in fact I think they were a largely positive force (though not as strongly as I thought at the time - I was a member from 2010-2019), but through their utter capitulation to the "localist" wing of their own party since their 2015 electoral drubbing.
The party has almost no power left, but uses most of what it has to pound the Conservative party *from the NIMBY direction*, making it clear through the Chesham & Amersham clown show that if the Tories back off their dedication to maximising homeowner wealth even slightly, they'll get electorally hammered. You'd have hoped that a party with as comfortable a majority as the Tories currently enjoy, and certainly with the kind of decent polling position they did have back around the C&A by-election (which was before the recent chaos at the top) would have the breathing space to not have to constantly red-line their appeal to their extreme wing. But this can't happen, because the Liberal Democrats have slipped into the role that used to be played, at least in theory, by UKIP, of keeping the Tories anchored to their base by threatening their core vote if they took a more pragmatic course. But unlike UKIP, the Lib Dems have actually followed through on the threat and shown they can actually dole out the punishment, whereas UKIP was only ever talk.
This is an extremely painful reality for me, as I was a pretty partisan Lib Dem for a long time, but the NIMBY wing that was always poking around doing damage got a huge boost in 2015 and then inexorably tightened its grip over the following years, eventually reaching a point where I couldn't continue.
"But put aside any emotions — the market does not give a flying fuck what you think about social justice — it just is. If the market price isn’t good enough, the marginal supply of labour will reduce, and you need to be prepared to put up with the consequences of that for your righteous vibes."
This this this. Amazing to see so many supposedly 'pro-free market' newspapers conveniently fail to see that the labour market also applies to the public sector. I do wonder if they've run so many pieces about how public sector workers 'couldn't get a job in the real world' that they've started to believe it.
It's worth noting that the Liberal Democrats, despite being nearly forgotten in the national narrative, have played a huge role in this. Not through their participation in the 2010-15 coalition, where in fact I think they were a largely positive force (though not as strongly as I thought at the time - I was a member from 2010-2019), but through their utter capitulation to the "localist" wing of their own party since their 2015 electoral drubbing.
The party has almost no power left, but uses most of what it has to pound the Conservative party *from the NIMBY direction*, making it clear through the Chesham & Amersham clown show that if the Tories back off their dedication to maximising homeowner wealth even slightly, they'll get electorally hammered. You'd have hoped that a party with as comfortable a majority as the Tories currently enjoy, and certainly with the kind of decent polling position they did have back around the C&A by-election (which was before the recent chaos at the top) would have the breathing space to not have to constantly red-line their appeal to their extreme wing. But this can't happen, because the Liberal Democrats have slipped into the role that used to be played, at least in theory, by UKIP, of keeping the Tories anchored to their base by threatening their core vote if they took a more pragmatic course. But unlike UKIP, the Lib Dems have actually followed through on the threat and shown they can actually dole out the punishment, whereas UKIP was only ever talk.
This is an extremely painful reality for me, as I was a pretty partisan Lib Dem for a long time, but the NIMBY wing that was always poking around doing damage got a huge boost in 2015 and then inexorably tightened its grip over the following years, eventually reaching a point where I couldn't continue.