Best Of

Further evidence of the mediocrity of this government.

'Schools should cut down on museums and theatre trips and remove references in lessons to middle class activities like skiing holidays a government curriculum review will be held.'

https://x.com/SophiaSleigh/status/1859215458395656486

The government's education/curriculum reivew is a Woke Disaster in the making. They've got the most insane Woke twats from academe advising them, proper Britain-haters and "post-colonialist gender studies" experts

I actually despise them now, I even think Corbyn and McDonnell would have been better. Yes they might have hit big corporates a bit more and been a bit more anti Israel and still removed the remaining hereditary peers from the Lords but they didn't hate our farmers, small businesses and pensioners as much as this one does and McDonnell at least had some vague intellectual traints unlike the philistine and woke Starmer and Reeves

I mean that bit of newspaper clipping only says "...a government curriculum review will be told". I'm sure they get told all kinds of mad stuff without agreeing it. 'Will be told' seems about as weak as 'Minister mulls' as an indication of what will actually happen.

The person in CHARGE of the curriculum reivew is drenched with Wokeness, a super-Woke academic

We can be fairly certain that the result will be calamitously Woke, and will make English education worse. I think they've looked at the plunging standards in Welsh and Scottish schools under the Woke SNP and Welsh Labour and decided: wow, great, we can do that in England as well

"Drenched in wokeness" makes you sound like an Inquisitor finding heresy everywhere.

The chair of the Curriculum Review is Becky Francis CBE

Here are some of her more famous papers:

"Power plays: primary school children’s constructions of gender, power and adult work (1998)"

"The gendered subject: students’ subject preferences and discussions of gender and subject ability (2000)"

"Understanding minority ethnic achievement: race, gender, class and ‘success’ (2006)"

"Re/theorising gender: Female masculinity and male femininity in the classroom? (2010)"

"Reassessing ‘ability’ grouping: improving practice for equity and attainment (2020)."

Nuff said

One reason cited for high powered e-mopeds (eg Sur-Rons or hacked e-cycles) was that the legal ones just weren't fast enough. Without getting into this vs that, it is an relevant question for all of us, I think.

This is the kind of situation that arises when the relevant government department is fast asleep. Delivery riders use juiced-up Surrons and the like because the legal alternative is awful.

Buy an over powered e-bike and just get going.. or... go the legal route; pay twice as much for a 50cc equivalent electric scooter that is limited to 28mph, apply for your provisional licence, do your CBT day (£150-200, needs repeating every two years), pay possibly thousands for insurance, get an approved helmet, etc, etc.

A 1KW e-bike can be had for about £1200. A road-legal scooter is going have an all-in price of £4000-6000 depending on the insurance costs, for a machine that's slower than the e-bike. No brainer.

https://youtu.be/BMNUsM_nsec?feature=shared

The solution is to make the supply chain responsible for illegally modified e-bikes.

If you sell a bike that *can* be modified to be illegal, you get done.

Or change the law so what is illegal becomes legal, or at least some of them.

My only experience of ebikes is they have completely replaced classic bicycles for Deliveroo. Probably most are legal or legal-ish. Otoh, if I'd had a series of phones nicked by masked men on ebikes, my perspective would be different.

What slightly concerns me is that some of the opposition comes from the pedal cycle purists. If too fast is too fast, it should not matter if the machine is battery-assisted or cost £2,000 (after government subsidy) for legs only.

I'm not sure that pedal-cycle purists actually exist. It is universally recognised now that EAPCs / pedelecs extend the range of people who can get and use personal transport, and is a huge benefit.

You may have single-speed types (ie fixies), but they are more fashion victims than purists. And you get people who ride Ordinary Bicycles in Edwardian Dress, presumably with their berskirted ladies somewhere nearby in calico drawers - they are more like re-enactors with 16ft pikes. But then you also get similar people who do regularity trials in Austin 7s, or who have a 1960s Ferrari because they want to show off their wealth by having a full time mechanic to mend it twice a day.

There are the velominati, but that is backhanded self-satire, and more like the Fight Club crossed with the FSM.
https://www.velominati.com/

Further evidence of the mediocrity of this government.

'Schools should cut down on museums and theatre trips and remove references in lessons to middle class activities like skiing holidays a government curriculum review will be held.'

https://x.com/SophiaSleigh/status/1859215458395656486

The government's education/curriculum reivew is a Woke Disaster in the making. They've got the most insane Woke twats from academe advising them, proper Britain-haters and "post-colonialist gender studies" experts

I actually despise them now, I even think Corbyn and McDonnell would have been better. Yes they might have hit big corporates a bit more and been a bit more anti Israel but they didn't hate our farmers, small businesses and pensioners as much as this one does and McDonnell at least had some vague intellectual traints unlike the philistine and woke Starmer and Reeves

Yep. They are actually STUPID, and malevolently so

And let's look at their record so far

Inflation: rising
Unemployment: rising
Growth: nearly extinguished
Taxes: rising
Debt: rising
Public services: cut
Defence: cut
Pensioners: told to freeze
Farmers: told to fuck off
Retailers: told to jump in a lake
Chagos Islands: given away for nothing, indeed we have to PAY


That's just the first five months. And that's ignoring all the petty grift and corruption

I know. It's appalling isn't it? What sort of idiot would have voted for them? Oh!

We'd just experienced the (then, anyway) alternative, of course.

Further evidence of the mediocrity of this government.

'Schools should cut down on museums and theatre trips and remove references in lessons to middle class activities like skiing holidays a government curriculum review will be held.'

https://x.com/SophiaSleigh/status/1859215458395656486

The government's education/curriculum reivew is a Woke Disaster in the making. They've got the most insane Woke twats from academe advising them, proper Britain-haters and "post-colonialist gender studies" experts

I actually despise them now, I even think Corbyn and McDonnell would have been better. Yes they might have hit big corporates a bit more and been a bit more anti Israel and still removed the remaining hereditary peers from the Lords but they didn't hate our farmers, small businesses and pensioners as much as this one does and McDonnell at least had some vague intellectual traints unlike the philistine and woke Starmer and Reeves

I mean that bit of newspaper clipping only says "...a government curriculum review will be told". I'm sure they get told all kinds of mad stuff without agreeing it. 'Will be told' seems about as weak as 'Minister mulls' as an indication of what will actually happen.

The person in CHARGE of the curriculum reivew is drenched with Wokeness, a super-Woke academic

We can be fairly certain that the result will be calamitously Woke, and will make English education worse. I think they've looked at the plunging standards in Welsh and Scottish schools under the Woke SNP and Welsh Labour and decided: wow, great, we can do that in England as well

"Drenched in wokeness" makes you sound like an Inquisitor finding heresy everywhere.

It is, though.

This Government won't last. The only thing that could keep it in is a perfect split of opposition votes between LD, Tories and Reform (aka what happens in Wales) but is something that genuinely worries me.

I feel like I'm in the minority here, in that I don't see why agricultural land should benefit from any special IHT rules compared to other family owned industries, e.g. engineering. Maybe there is a case that capital invested in productive capacity should be treated differently, but I can see difficulties in defining it and personally don't believe it should be treated any differently to money in the bank, or residential property.

There is a separate issue of land being transferred from being UK-family owned to foreign individuals or investment funds. Again, we haven't worried about it for any other industry and I don't see why agricultural land should be different. Actually I am worried about this, but my concern is across the board, not solely agriculture.

There is another issue that currently food production appears to be uneconomic in the country. Should we be concerned about food security? If we are then we should take steps to ensure that farmers get a fair return. But, again, why should we be more concerned about food than (say) energy, or steel production? There's no reason for farming to be singled out for special protection, in my view. However I would note (as an opponent of Brexit) that we now have an opportunity to do something about all those things except none of the pro-Brexit people appear to be proposing anything, which I find odd.

You are rather missing the point already made by a number if us that no genuine family businesses should be paying IHT. Farmers happen to be the main point of discussion but Cyclefree, JJ and myself have all spoken about other family firms as well.

The whole basis of the IHT tax raid on businesses is flawed and will lead to businesses going bust.

Apologies if I missed it as I dived in mid-thread, and then my lunch hour disappeared immediately after posting so I'm late replying.

Actually I don't entirely disagree with you - farms and other family businesses should be treated the same. I'm open to persuasion on whether there should be IHT breaks on them (I lean against, but on pragmatic grounds as much as principle). I missed that it applied to other businesses too so thanks for flagging that up.

They are getting IHT breaks: paying half the rate everyone else does, getting 10 years to pay it & getting a £2million (for a couple) nil rate band.

From where I’m sitting it just seems that the landed gentry are hiding behind the facade of “poor benighted farmers” in a bid to preserve their entirely unearned wealth. I don’t see why they should not be subject to the same taxes as the rest of us.

Further evidence of the mediocrity of this government.

'Schools should cut down on museums and theatre trips and remove references in lessons to middle class activities like skiing holidays a government curriculum review will be held.'

https://x.com/SophiaSleigh/status/1859215458395656486

The government's education/curriculum reivew is a Woke Disaster in the making. They've got the most insane Woke twats from academe advising them, proper Britain-haters and "post-colonialist gender studies" experts

I actually despise them now, I even think Corbyn and McDonnell would have been better. Yes they might have hit big corporates a bit more and been a bit more anti Israel and still removed the remaining hereditary peers from the Lords but they didn't hate our farmers, small businesses and pensioners as much as this one does and McDonnell at least had some vague intellectual traints unlike the philistine and woke Starmer and Reeves

(narrator: viewcode said before on PB that if John McDonnell had run for the leadership and won, he would have won the GE. The lethal failure of the left was its failure to run Bernie Sanders in 2016 and John McDonnell later)

The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.

Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.

To broaden the point, where's the incentive to sack people who aren't performing - where is the incentive to perform at all? The money comes from Government grant, so the incentive is actually to fail, because failing services get more money thrown at them. The NHS has been very successful at failing for years. An efficient, high performance public service would see its budget reduced the next year.

What we really need is a total reordering of incentives within the public sector, where possible based on the money following the user, and the user having choice. If hospitals and schools had to attract patients and pupils to get funding, all the perverse incentives would be reversed and the services grow better and more efficient.

I'm plowing thru (I know, I know ) Abby Innes's "Late Soviet Britain" and she makes a very convincing case as to why that simply doesn't work. Basically if you run the public sector like the private sector you lose control due to the principle-agent problem, so to regain control you impose authorities, regulators, targets etc, and you end up with a brundlefly hybrid with the disadvantages of both, lying on the lab floor pleading to be killed.

It sounds good in theory. It isn't in practice. And we have about forty years of evidence for that now.

I don't know what 'the principle agent problem' is - if I did I could opine. I'd say 'losing control' is a feature not a bug - Whitehall controlling things appears to be at the root of most of the problems we face, and has been for more than 5 decades.

As for practice, of course we don't have 40 years of experience. Market based reforms haven't taken place in our public services, even at pilot level as far as I'm aware.

Sorry, principal-agent problem. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem )

If you outsource a thing to somebody else, that person has their own goals and will deviate from yours over times. You need to prevent them so you end up imposing controls, making a mockery of the outsourcing in the first place.

I was referring to the Thatcher reforms of outsourcing, followed by the Blair reforms of targets etc. We tried it. It didn't work. We tried to make it better. We made it worse. By the time we got to Covid it got out-and-out corrupt. And we keep saying "more bureaucracy will fix it!" It won't. And we keep saying "make it behave like the private sector!". And it doesn't

That doesn't really address my point though. What you're talking about could be termed 'the privatisation of supply'. What I am talking about is the privatisation of demand. When you outsource supply, there may be some efficiency benefits, but the Government is still the client and the system does not change fundamentally - and it brings its own issues. When you privatise the demand, you're reversing that. It doesn't matter whether the supplier is in public or private hands. It could be entirely public, but as long as the money and therefore the incentive comes from the user, and the user is free to go elsewhere, with the requisite effect on income, it will work.

Without doubt one of the worst thread headers TSE has ever done.

No party wins general elections without shoring up their core vote first and for Tories they include private school parents and farmers. Voters also want a choice not an echo, if you want to hammer farmers with inheritance tax and hit private school parents with VAT you vote Labour anyway and if the Tories don't stand up for farmers and private school parents they will leak voters to Reform and the LDs who will.

Plus 57% of voters oppose the hated tractor tax anyway

https://x.com/LukeTryl/status/1858787981303185664

Not to mention VAT on school fees will just reduce the scholarships they provide and hit smaller schools most making them even more exclusive. While we need family farms to produce our food, you can't make food from houses. Most farms may be asset rich but they are income poor

If you are asset rich but income poor, you can get a mortgage or similar sort of loan. It’s not difficult.

We need houses to live in. You can’t make houses from food (pace Hansel & Gretel).

The housing shortage is primarily driven by your favourite addiction: immigration.