Best Of

My nephew is in hospital at moment with RSV and complications. His care definitely seems substandard.

Terrible time for the junior doctors to strike. Feel very angry they've done this now during winter flu crisis.

If you're going to strike there's no point in doing it when nobody will notice. You strike when it has maximum impact.

They can strike all they want, the problem is there is no magic money pot to pay them anymore and no-one has got pay increases that match the 28% they got.

Heck I know a lot of people on less now then in 2023 rather than 28% more

The reason you get the 28% figure is 1) that's a cumulative figure over three years 2) during a period of massive inflation 3) from a low base.

Frankly, it's extraordinary entitlement from a public that puts massive demand on a service run largely by young people, struggling to get on the housing ladder and with enormous debt. They want to see the state to use it's overwhelming monopsonistic power to drive down wages at the expense of working people.

This graph shows what has happened to pay before Labour got in:

Relative over Christmas told an anecdote about an ex-nurse friend of theirs: intensive care nurse, burnt out during the pandemic, quit and is now a nail technician -- and is making more money than she did as a nurse...

And there’s no fear that as a nail technician you will make a mistake and get struck off, or worse harm someone.

My immediate thought is to ask when being a "nail technician" became a thing and also who is spending money on their services.

People who,get their nails done, like my wife.

The fashion is now for glue on gels not varnish.

My wife got some Xmas ones last week. Not cheap either.

Those who do nails and those who have their nails done.

The two Britains of the 21st century.

(Nothing wrong on a personal level with spending your money how you see fit within the law. But my local.ahopping parade supports a couple of nail bars, which rather points to something being off somewhere in the big picture.)

Nail salons, hair salons, tattoo parlours and the like have become mainstays of our shopping centres because they require customer attendance, so cannot (yet) be successfully replicated online. Taz's wife is supporting the High Street and good for her.

I thought that once you'd got a tattoo you'd got it. Couldn't get rid of it without painful and tedious (and expensive) skin grafts.

These days they use lasers to break up the ink in the skin. It's painful. But so is tattooing.

Everyone: you look fine as you are. Certainly better than if you draw pictures on yourself, attach things to the end of your fingers, paint yourself browny-orange, inflate your lips or other bits of your face, or any one of the peculiar unpleasant and counter-productive things which humans increasingly appear to do to themselves for the misguided sake of their appearance.
I can accept the need for a haircut from time to time though I can't for the life of me understand why we need quite so many people fulfilling that function. (I opted out of that particular market six years ago.)

@alexmassie

There have been England cricket teams with a lot less talent than this one but it is very hard to think of one that has played worse cricket. 3-0 flatters them.

https://x.com/alexmassie/status/2002652982224339290?s=20

Really?

2013-4

Lost by 381, 218, 150, 281 and 8 wickets. Barely won a session.

Perhaps we're seeing a bit of the 'performance = outcome - expectations' thing.

Going in, there was a widespread view (inc in the betting) that this England team had a decent chance of winning or at least would be competitive. It was a much anticipated series.

So now the reality (3/0 down and all over in less than 11 days play) feels particularly gutting.

Just listened to the Athers and Nass podcast, and the gutting thing is that the Aussies were without Cummings for two Tests, Hazelwood for three, Lyon for one and a bit, and Smith for one. Had you told us that a year ago we would have expected to be leading at this point, not out for the count. Throw in the fact that we almost literally handed them the first win from a position of extreme strength, and collapsed to 168-8 on a flat pitch in the first innings here, and it adds up to a justified sense of disappointment

I don't get the obsession form the Head Honcho's with pace; Aussies have beaten us with consistent line and length for decades. Glenn McGrath wasn't that quick, and he must surely be a decent bowler try and emulate. They always have a good spinner, we don't even pick one. Just seems crazy

Also from the Obs, today’s Rawnsley while we wait for the sun to emerge above the horizon…

It is not just the dire approval ratings that make the Starmer government look so bereft of allies; it is the absence of any visible cheerleaders at Westminster or beyond it. For that, Sir Keir is copping much of the blame from his party. It is not the case that the country has “fallen out of love” with Labour. It was never in love in the first place.

This is a broadly centrist government led by a serious and hardworking man who is committed to some worthy goals. Which is a terrible combination in our hyper-polarised media environment. The achievements it can fairly claim get next to no attention while its blunders receive maximum magnification.

He is also grappling with the systemic challenge that has defeated so many governments in the affluent world since the crippling financial crisis of 2007-09. How do you satisfy public demand for decent state services at reasonable levels of taxation when growth is so anaemic? The doom loop of higher taxes for unsatisfactory services feeds the corrosion of trust in the state and its ability to deliver.

There’s a compelling case that the defining political event of the past 12 months came in the summer when No 10 and the Treasury combined in an effort to curb the ballooning cost of disability benefits, only to be forced into an abject and authority-shredding retreat by their own backbenchers. Those who hated the idea of welfare reform liked the government no better for the fact that it was forced to capitulate. Those who think we need welfare reform despaired that the government proved incapable of implementing it. There was another chaotic tale surrounding the budget…. [which] became a spirit-sapping feel-bad affair about leaks and accusations of misrepresentation.

It’s an unmerry Christmas for those in power. As you gather in what I hope is the warm embrace of your loved ones, spare a thought for our sadly cheerless and friendless government.

Nah, fuck them. They made their bed. Weak leadership and a govt without any vision or capability to do what is needed. The people at the top are more concerned at keeping themselves in their positions of power than anything else.

You could argue we've not had a defining idea of Government since Liz Truss (apologies) and before that since the Blessed Margaret. There is no big idea or if there is, no one has presented one with significant clarity and thought.

We've mostly had Governments which have maintained what I call post-Thatcherite social democracy - Johnson's Government (had it not been derailed by a microscopic virus) would likely have bene similar to Blair's and what Cameron's would have been had it not had to deal with the consequences of 2008.

Even in 1979, what Thatcher presented was less radical than Heath's manifesto in 1970 but the events of the 1970s proved to everyone Butskellism had run its course. If the 2020s show post-Thatcherite social democracy to have run its course, there will be an audience receptive to new economic and social ideas but it seems at the moment all about an insular ethno-nationalism where we blame (in no particular order) migrants, welfare claimants, old people, tall people, young people and people whose surname begins with "S". Finding people to blame is easy - coming up with practical cost-effective solutions isn't and as the anecdote from Peter Lilley pointed out, simply hacking away at the incomes of the poorest to make the richest feel better isn't the answer and, to be fair, hacking away at the incomes of the richest to make the poorest feel better isn't the answer either.

The demographic transformation of the country has been the problem or the opportunity - we need to stop thinking in a 20th century industrial mindset and start thinking in a 21st century post-industrial way re-defining the contract between the State and the older citizen. I do think the age of sheer material acquisition is coming to an end but I also think while capitalism in essence works, the current model is corrupt and no longer fit for purpose.

Your last sentence applies to all Governments - it didn't start on July 5th 2024.

My concern with capitalism is if young people cannot get a stake in society, like a home, why should they buy into the system. It needs to be aspirational.

The whole system feeling broken is why people on the right are moving to Reform and the left to the Greens. Neither have the solutions but both are NOTA.

Aspiration comes in many forms, I'd argue, but obviously somewhere nice to live is a good start. Yet we are building properties and selling them at prices (in London) no one can afford until or unless they inherit from parents/grandparents etc.

In my part of town, the answer is rental - young couples have to rent because they earn enough but have no savings so both work to pay the rent. How do they ever get off the rental treadmill?

Conservatives like people to own their homes because they become Conservative voters obsessed with mortgage rates. Yet, rental has always been a big part of the London housing market and still is. Who is going to be able to afford £600k for a one-bed flat at the Twelvetrees developement by West Ham station? Not the people who need housing, those on the council waiting list, families in a single room, others who live in appalling conditions in private rental hellholes.

We build houses for profit, not to solve the housing crisis - that's how aspiration is framed.

I would build social housing and allow renters’ payments to be 90% rent and 10% towards the purchase of the property. Gradually increase the proportion that is used towards the purchase until the renters are in a position to purchase the property outright with a mortgage. They also pay towards the cost of repairs and maintenance at the same percentage they are paying for rent, to get them used to paying for the upkeep of their home.

The rental income received by the property owners is ringfenced for building more properties.

It will need an initial grant or loan to enable the scheme to be started, which will be an investment.

A stat I came across - 40% of council houses sold under RTB are now owned by private landlords. A renewal of that sector (however structured) is key to addressing our housing crisis imo. Re the big picture a mindset change would be healthy. Residential property to be viewed primarily as a utility not an investment.

OT rant

Several days and a few hundred pounds into the process of verifying my identity on Companies House in order to prove that as an owner of one small flat, I am not an international money launderer (and tbh I'm not really sure how it proves this but I'm sure the government knows what it is doing) I have now acquired a passport and verified my identity to gov.uk.

The final step, then, is to associate my Companies House ID with my now-verified gov.uk ID.

But so far as I can see, there is no secure way to do that. Instead of logging in and pressing a couple of buttons, I have to hand my top-secret code to a complete stranger and trust him or her or them and their accountants and lawyers and cleaners to guard this code jealously and securely (not like pornhub or M&S or the Co-op or Jaguar or, erm, the government which keep getting hacked) and not use it to register their own money laundering network.

Seriously, I am torn between FFS and WTF.

Mail on Sunday featuring an end of year survey by Lord Ashcroft poll has the conservatives within 3 of reform and labour 4th

Reform. 25%
Conservatives 22%
Greens. 19%
Labour 18%
Lib dems 10%

Poll of 5,195 voters between 11th and 15th December

That’s way out from other polls. Reform significantly lower, Greens within touching distance of first, Tories higher, Lib Dems much lower. Looks odd to me.

That said, LLG 47 RefCon 47 is not a million miles away from the other pollsters.

We can ignore the Lord Ashcroft poll.

Why?

He’s not a BPC registered pollster.

Doesn’t count for the PB predictions competition for example.

Morning all

More bleating from the hospitality industry and some petty spite planning to "ban Labour MPs" from pubs, restaurants etc.

I've very little sympathy - there are two aspects to the whingeing. First, the NI increases - well, all businesses have had to pay for the elephant trap laid for the incoming Government by Sunak and Hunt.

Second, the ending of business rate relief - this was introduced by the Conservatives in 2020 during COVID (and rightly so given no one could go out initially and the virus spreader Eat Out to Help Out was a politically motivated catastrophe) but instead of a rapid removal after a year or two it was left in place for a five year timeframe and of course Reeves and Starmer have been left holding that grenade when it exploded.

I suppose Reeves could have continued with the business rates relief (not quite sure why she didn't and that's her political error) but rather like Council Tax, the political pain of revaluation isn't worth it so the sleeping dog can remain unmolested in the lounge bar by the fire.

The other side of the argument is the hospitality industry has or should have prospered from reduced business rates in a way other businesses (presumably) haven't and the end of the relief has been akin to Cleese and Palin at the end of the fish slapping dance.

Nonetheless, it's quite clear a lot of this is simply playing politics - I've not for instance heard Badenoch or Stride commit to restoring the Business Rates relief at 2020 levels should they get into power next time (and Reform's position on this is also unknown). Pubs and restaurants can choose who they wish to serve but this is petty and vindictive and one could argue it was well known the relief would last only five years.