Economically, officially disregarding the referendum would be a great move. Politically it would be a clusterfuck - it's essentially telling 52% of people who won a public vote to go fuck themselves, and that could open the way to parties like UKIP getting a much stronger foothold than they already have.
By just... not actually triggering article 50, you can keep the 52% relatively happy (hey, we're leaving soon, right?) while hoping that businesses figure out we're not really leaving the EU and thus avoiding much economic damage as well.
We've already felt some results of the Brexit vote (research funding says hi) but the two big moments will be when (or if) article 50 is triggered, and then when the deadline for negotiations expires two years later.
There's a proud history of governments actively ignoring referendum results in order to avoid tanking an entire country. The last example was the Greek austerity one.
I believe in a government able to faff about a bit and then get to a ge without having started it at which point hopefully everybody will have forgotten about it. As you say, it's the just avoiding it for a while option
Mojo_Jojo on
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
So I read a German newspaper article that claimed that May basically killed the future of nuclear power in Britain by stopping two power plant projects. What's up with that?
Delayed, not cancelled. The project had terms that were, to be frank, pretty terrible for the UK, ensuring a fixed minimum price for the electricity for thirty years that was insanely generous. Chinese money was sought to back the project up because the previous Chancellor didn't want to publicly fund it, in spite of the fact that this would have made it cheaper, and the new PM is understandably less keen on the whole thing than the old one.
The timing of the announcement of the delay was stupid, though. Possibly they thought EDF was going to back out and they wouldn't have to delay it, which is why the announcement only came the day after EDF confirmed their commitment.
So I read a German newspaper article that claimed that May basically killed the future of nuclear power in Britain by stopping two power plant projects. What's up with that?
It was a bloody terrible agreement that let the Chinese build a test reactor over here and then we paid massively subsidised French energy for a while. Apparently the deal was also fairly bad for edf despite that.
The uk does need more power and nuclear makes sense but because we've not built a reactor for such a long time we need outside help which means it takes years to plan and then it gets scrapped
Doing it hours before the go ahead was announced though is appalling
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
The switch from grants to maintenance loans was announced in July 2015 by the then Chancellor, George Osborne, in his Budget.
Mr Osborne said at the time that there was a "basic unfairness in asking taxpayers to fund grants for people who are likely to earn a lot more than them".
There's something about the tacit acknowledgement that it's not the top earners funding education that annoys me.
The switch from grants to maintenance loans was announced in July 2015 by the then Chancellor, George Osborne, in his Budget.
Mr Osborne said at the time that there was a "basic unfairness in asking taxpayers to fund grants for people who are likely to earn a lot more than them".
There's something about the tacit acknowledgement that it's not the top earners funding education that annoys me.
Fuck every single little thing about that. Seriously. If they try to bring that in over here I'll go spare.
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
The switch from grants to maintenance loans was announced in July 2015 by the then Chancellor, George Osborne, in his Budget.
Mr Osborne said at the time that there was a "basic unfairness in asking taxpayers to fund grants for people who are likely to earn a lot more than them".
There's something about the tacit acknowledgement that it's not the top earners funding education that annoys me.
Fuck every single little thing about that. Seriously. If they try to bring that in over here I'll go spare.
He's saying that they shouldn't help out poor people because the people they're helping will eventually become rich. Freaking crab bucket.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
Delayed, not cancelled. The project had terms that were, to be frank, pretty terrible for the UK, ensuring a fixed minimum price for the electricity for thirty years that was insanely generous. Chinese money was sought to back the project up because the previous Chancellor didn't want to publicly fund it, in spite of the fact that this would have made it cheaper, and the new PM is understandably less keen on the whole thing than the old one.
The timing of the announcement of the delay was stupid, though. Possibly they thought EDF was going to back out and they wouldn't have to delay it, which is why the announcement only came the day after EDF confirmed their commitment.
There's also a chance the recent escapades with Russia may have taught the government some lessons about gambling our energy security on money from nations we're sort of friends with but not really and there's obvious potential for us to go our separate ways politically in the coming decades.
Crawling into the pocket of the Chinese government is a bad fucking idea and you don't have to be a genius to see it, we really don't need to be giving them a stick to beat us with.
God, Osborne is such a fucking idiot, him not being chancellor anymore is actually one ray of sunshine in this sorry mess.
'Poor people should stay poor' is the message I'm getting from that.
The guiding principle of Conservatism since forever.
A good number of Conservatives want the poor to stay poor not out of hatred but because they think wealth is a zero-sum game and gains by other people will be a loss for themselves.
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Werewolf2000adSuckers, I know exactly what went wrong.Registered Userregular
Mr Osborne said at the time that there was a "basic unfairness in asking taxpayers to fund grants for people who are likely to earn a lot more than them".
'Poor people should stay poor' is the message I'm getting from that.
The guiding principle of Conservatism since forever.
A good number of Conservatives want the poor to stay poor not out of hatred but because they think wealth is a zero-sum game and gains by other people will be a loss for themselves.
Because money is a finite resource, bestowed upon us at the commencement of the Universe?
Have these people no grasp on basic economic principles??
'Poor people should stay poor' is the message I'm getting from that.
The guiding principle of Conservatism since forever.
A good number of Conservatives want the poor to stay poor not out of hatred but because they think wealth is a zero-sum game and gains by other people will be a loss for themselves.
Because money is a finite resource, bestowed upon us at the commencement of the Universe?
Have these people no grasp on basic economic principles??
'Poor people should stay poor' is the message I'm getting from that.
The guiding principle of Conservatism since forever.
A good number of Conservatives want the poor to stay poor not out of hatred but because they think wealth is a zero-sum game and gains by other people will be a loss for themselves.
Because money is a finite resource, bestowed upon us at the commencement of the Universe?
Have these people no grasp on basic economic principles??
Generally, no, is the thing. People have very little idea about big-scale economics. A lot of trouble comes from people applying things that work on small-scale, home-level economics to the large scale problems where they definitely don't. This, incidentally, is the primary reason why people actually support austerity measures. In a household, it makes perfect sense that the response to "we're running out of money" is "well, let's tighten our belts and tough it out to spend less for a year or two, build the savings back up". A country doesn't work like a household or a small business, but those are the terms in which people generally CAN try to understand things.
Also! This makes certain courses less and less accessible to those from lower economic families /statuses. Architecture was an incredibly expensive course and I'd guess 3/4 were from middle class backgrounds with financial help from their parents. Those who weren't struggled to get by and afford the course.
Y'know, it always worries me when I see a politician using the household budget metaphor because I'm never quite certain if they're just appealing to individuals with that level of understanding or if they themselves have it.
Y'know, it always worries me when I see a politician using the household budget metaphor because I'm never quite certain if they're just appealing to individuals with that level of understanding or if they themselves have it.
"We're running out of money, we need to tighten our belts, fire three of the maids and we might have to wait for a full month of income from our rental properties before we buy that jacuzzi. Ah, economics."
Talking of applying household budgets to inappropriate circumstances, no, a student loan will NEVER make a degree unaffordable because a student loan is not like a normal loan. Unlike America, you only ever have to pay back a student loan when you are receiving an income that can afford it, and the minimum repayment amounts are pretty small.
The whole system has been increasingly set up to encourage you to never really pay it off, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It just becomes a graduate tax.
Sure it's a worse situation than the good old days of grants, but it will never make a degree out of reach of anybody and it annoys me to hear people say that.
That's only true if you assume a student loan covers all financial needs during a degree; when I was an undergrad that wasn't the case, and most students I knew either required family assistance or income from another source. For some students the additional low income grant was the difference between being able to make ends meet as a student or having to quit and look for full time employment.
Caveat; I haven't paid too much attention to the changes to loans over the past few years so don't know how forgiving they currently are.
Talking of applying household budgets to inappropriate circumstances, no, a student loan will NEVER make a degree unaffordable because a student loan is not like a normal loan. Unlike America, you only ever have to pay back a student loan when you are receiving an income that can afford it, and the minimum repayment amounts are pretty small.
The whole system has been increasingly set up to encourage you to never really pay it off, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It just becomes a graduate tax.
Sure it's a worse situation than the good old days of grants, but it will never make a degree out of reach of anybody and it annoys me to hear people say that.
I think just the concept of the amount of debt you're putting yourself in is a huge disincentive. The fees are at 9k now right? So that's 36k in tuition fees alone, never mind books and just the simple cost of living for 4 years not earning money. Then there's the news I read today that prominent think tanks are doing the sums and coming up with a degree in certain fields or from certain universities being uneconomic since it'll cost more to get then the likely increase your earning potential it provides.
I can see a lot of people from poor backgrounds looking at those figures and going "fuck that". Student loan arrangements aside being saddled with that much debt is going to sink your capacity to go out and get a mortgage or a bank loan for any other reason.
I just quickly added it up, I probably spent around £2k on my third year which I just graduated from. That's the cost of things essential to the course and outside of the course fee, rent, food and transport etc.
I just quickly added it up, I probably spent around £2k on my third year which I just graduated from. That's the cost of things essential to the course and outside of the course fee, rent, food and transport etc.
That is a lot of money.
And that actually seems like a low figure for a whole years worth of food, rent, transport and extortionately priced uni textbooks.
I just quickly added it up, I probably spent around £2k on my third year which I just graduated from. That's the cost of things essential to the course and outside of the course fee, rent, food and transport etc.
That is a lot of money.
And that actually seems like a low figure for a whole years worth of food, rent, transport and extortionately priced uni textbooks.
Perhaps I phrased that wrong, that's outside of rent, food, transport, the course fee and text books. So the £2k is on top of all those things.
The banks doing the mortgage calculations are not idiots and will only be taking your student debt into account as far its small effect on your income goes. Which is as it should be.
And I'm in no way saying Uni isn't a big expense which the loans cannot probably solely cover. Thank tuition fees for that.
The point was a student loan is never, ever an unaffordable amount of debt. Ever. And it's so often presented as such in bad faith by organisations like the NUS who who should be dispelling this myth, not perpetuating it.
The banks doing the mortgage calculations are not idiots and will only be taking your student debt into account as far its small effect on your income goes. Which is as it should be.
And I'm in no way saying Uni isn't a big expense which the loans cannot probably solely cover. Thank tuition fees for that.
The point was a student loan is never, ever an unaffordable amount of debt. Ever. And it's so often presented as such in bad faith by organisations like the NUS who who should be dispelling this myth, not perpetuating it.
I don't know what that's like in the UK, but student debt is a big issue in the States. It's difficult to pay off a $20,000 loan when no one is hiring.
UK student debt is not commercial debt. Repayments are based on your income and with a minimum income threshold. If you aren't earning enough to make repayments you just don't have to make any. And after 30 years anything you didn't repay is written off. It can never be an unaffordable financial burden.
UK student debt is not commercial debt. Repayments are based on your income and with a minimum income threshold. If you aren't earning enough to make repayments you just don't have to make any. And after 30 years anything you didn't repay is written off. It can never be an unaffordable financial burden.
I wish America had that.
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Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
edited August 2016
It's effectively a tax on people who went to uni students who weren't from rich backgrounds
They would be better off making it a literal tax you pay on your first five to ten years of work if you went to uni regardless of the wealth of your parents
Mojo_Jojo on
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
In the UK you don't have to pay it back at all until you are earning over a certain amount, I want to say... £18,000? And then if you stop earning again you stop having to pay it until you resume.
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There's a proud history of governments actively ignoring referendum results in order to avoid tanking an entire country. The last example was the Greek austerity one.
I believe in a government able to faff about a bit and then get to a ge without having started it at which point hopefully everybody will have forgotten about it. As you say, it's the just avoiding it for a while option
50/50
The key thing is they're not triggering it right now
Depending on what May is thinking maybe the situation in 2017 won't be right to trigger it and then whoops neo-Brownist stall tactics
The timing of the announcement of the delay was stupid, though. Possibly they thought EDF was going to back out and they wouldn't have to delay it, which is why the announcement only came the day after EDF confirmed their commitment.
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It was a bloody terrible agreement that let the Chinese build a test reactor over here and then we paid massively subsidised French energy for a while. Apparently the deal was also fairly bad for edf despite that.
The uk does need more power and nuclear makes sense but because we've not built a reactor for such a long time we need outside help which means it takes years to plan and then it gets scrapped
Doing it hours before the go ahead was announced though is appalling
There's something about the tacit acknowledgement that it's not the top earners funding education that annoys me.
Fuck every single little thing about that. Seriously. If they try to bring that in over here I'll go spare.
He's saying that they shouldn't help out poor people because the people they're helping will eventually become rich. Freaking crab bucket.
There's also a chance the recent escapades with Russia may have taught the government some lessons about gambling our energy security on money from nations we're sort of friends with but not really and there's obvious potential for us to go our separate ways politically in the coming decades.
Crawling into the pocket of the Chinese government is a bad fucking idea and you don't have to be a genius to see it, we really don't need to be giving them a stick to beat us with.
God, Osborne is such a fucking idiot, him not being chancellor anymore is actually one ray of sunshine in this sorry mess.
The guiding principle of Conservatism since forever.
A good number of Conservatives want the poor to stay poor not out of hatred but because they think wealth is a zero-sum game and gains by other people will be a loss for themselves.
Not these days they sodding well aren't.
EVERYBODY WANTS TO SIT IN THE BIG CHAIR, MEG!
Because money is a finite resource, bestowed upon us at the commencement of the Universe?
Have these people no grasp on basic economic principles??
*looks at Brexit*
...yes?
Generally, no, is the thing. People have very little idea about big-scale economics. A lot of trouble comes from people applying things that work on small-scale, home-level economics to the large scale problems where they definitely don't. This, incidentally, is the primary reason why people actually support austerity measures. In a household, it makes perfect sense that the response to "we're running out of money" is "well, let's tighten our belts and tough it out to spend less for a year or two, build the savings back up". A country doesn't work like a household or a small business, but those are the terms in which people generally CAN try to understand things.
"We're running out of money, we need to tighten our belts, fire three of the maids and we might have to wait for a full month of income from our rental properties before we buy that jacuzzi. Ah, economics."
The whole system has been increasingly set up to encourage you to never really pay it off, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It just becomes a graduate tax.
Sure it's a worse situation than the good old days of grants, but it will never make a degree out of reach of anybody and it annoys me to hear people say that.
Caveat; I haven't paid too much attention to the changes to loans over the past few years so don't know how forgiving they currently are.
I think just the concept of the amount of debt you're putting yourself in is a huge disincentive. The fees are at 9k now right? So that's 36k in tuition fees alone, never mind books and just the simple cost of living for 4 years not earning money. Then there's the news I read today that prominent think tanks are doing the sums and coming up with a degree in certain fields or from certain universities being uneconomic since it'll cost more to get then the likely increase your earning potential it provides.
I can see a lot of people from poor backgrounds looking at those figures and going "fuck that". Student loan arrangements aside being saddled with that much debt is going to sink your capacity to go out and get a mortgage or a bank loan for any other reason.
That is a lot of money.
And that actually seems like a low figure for a whole years worth of food, rent, transport and extortionately priced uni textbooks.
Student loans post-1998 aren't included in credit ratings, but they are included in affordability calculations for mortgages
So they're not necessarily going to stop you getting a mortgage, but it will affect how much you can borrow
Which is fine as long as you're earning money - like so much in life
Perhaps I phrased that wrong, that's outside of rent, food, transport, the course fee and text books. So the £2k is on top of all those things.
And I'm in no way saying Uni isn't a big expense which the loans cannot probably solely cover. Thank tuition fees for that.
The point was a student loan is never, ever an unaffordable amount of debt. Ever. And it's so often presented as such in bad faith by organisations like the NUS who who should be dispelling this myth, not perpetuating it.
I don't know what that's like in the UK, but student debt is a big issue in the States. It's difficult to pay off a $20,000 loan when no one is hiring.
I wish America had that.
They would be better off making it a literal tax you pay on your first five to ten years of work if you went to uni regardless of the wealth of your parents
get wrekt young'uns.
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