#21

Looking forward to the Labour front bench turning up to PMQs in these

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#22

We’re jabbing
To think that jabbing was a thing of the past
We’re jabbing
And I hope this jab is gonna last

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#23

Are we not already in a period of mass unemployment? It’s not like we’re going to get away without paying for the furlough scheme down the road and effectively what we have now is an extraordinarily ‘generous’ (I don’t use that word in the compassionate sense) benefit.

Good job we haven’t fundamentally cocked up our relationship with our largest trading partner or that would really have made things difficult!

#24

Couldn’t think of anything better and had this open

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#25

I strongly recommend not reading the comments.

That said, one is extremely funny

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#26

Or 10 pages, though. I’m not disagreeing that the Labour party is at loggerheads as always, more that this issue should be pretty clear cut. It’s not really ‘oh they can’t do anything without criticism these days’. As they’ve quoted Clive Lewis saying himself, it’s fatherlandism. That’s… not good.

#27

I think we both agree that nationalism is a bad thing

What frustrates me is that like you say the Labour Party is at loggerheads again which is a distraction from pointing out how bad the tories are. It seems that most of the posts here are digs at Labour policy rather than anything else, and to people with only a causal interest in politics it’s painting a distorted picture

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#28

Unemployment is currently 5%. In the financial crisis it peaked at 8.5% versus 10.5% in the 1990s recession and 11.9% back in the dark days of Thatcher.

#29

I think probably the best way to get people like us, or anyone else, to be more vehement in getting behind how bad the tories are, is for the opposition to do that first, hopefully as a priority over union jack top hats.

#30

Can we compare given how a zero-hour contract means you’re not unemployed?

I genuinely don’t know for a number of reasons; not sure how unemployment is recorded now compared with in the past.

If you were on a yts scheme would you be included in unemployment figures? No idea.

Someone do my research for me.

#31

i thought this a lot and someone here pointed out there’s way less people on zero hour than i assumed. like vassssstly less than you’d think.

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#32

What I meant was that we are effectively in a period of mass unemployment because everybody who is furloughed does not currently have viable employment under the circumstances we are in. That doesn’t include the large number of self employed who presumably don’t come under the furlough scheme. It was around 30% in May last year, I don’t know what it is now.

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#33

I do know the answers to this, but am a bit busy right now.

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#34

the concept of unemployment is very misleading in today’s economy - a deliberate and very successful strategy of the coalition government to get as many people earning minimum wage or worse on zero hours contracts, reducing or removing their benefits and bringing the “unemployment” figure down artificially low

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#35

Underemployment is at least as important a metric

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#36

I know all this. I used to head up a team in the ONS Labour Market Division.

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#37

sweet as. seemed like a relevant part of the conversation that no-one had said, but good for you mate

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#38

:smiley: never mind the labour party being dicks to each other internally, DiS is showing us all how it’s done.

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#39

surely depends what those national symbols are though doesn’t it. and yeah as “a leftist”, you can talk about identity and culture up to the very point where you talk about britain being composed of a nation of many identities and cultures. and then comes the wave of disgust from the right. so at that point you either stand your ground get told you’re not “patriotic” enough (i.e., you don’t centre whiteness as the key driver of “the national story”), or you have to capitulate and go along with jingoism and nationalism while discarding the other identities and cultures “in order to win”. which cannot happen, and never does happen, cos the hogs already get their swill from the tories. it’s a bad idea all round to play about with rhetoric and symbols of the right (which whether we like it or not, is undeniably what the flag and the poppy and whatever are now).

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#40

and if they don’t get it from the tories, they won’t be moving to labour to scratch that itch.

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