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PB is becoming a class ridden shithole.
The very jobs you rich fuckers denigrate, the jobs you think are only fit for the the lazy and feckless, are the jobs you feckers won't do.
You need someone to deliver your Hello Fresh food box because you're too fucking lazy to go to the shop yourself. You need someone to wipe your elderly parents arse because you certainly ain't going to do it.
You're far too busy being important lawyers and bankers and financiers and fancy project managers to realise that having tossers doing the menial stuff means you get to have your new Apple iWank delivered by a minimum wage courier at a time and place of your choosing, so you can carry on doing the important stuff instead of having to meet poor people in shopping centres.
I'd flounce, but I'm too lazy and feckless. And no one would notice anyway 🤡

Please don't flounce. What a fantastic post.

We need common people such as yourself on here to remind us why we decided not to go the manual labour/leave school at 16 route and instead worked hard, achieved good jobs through hard work (albeit not breaking paving stones kind of hard work - yuk) and are now generally happy looking down on the rabble of which you form such an important part.

So please stay.

PB is becoming a class ridden shithole.
The very jobs you rich fuckers denigrate, the jobs you think are only fit for the the lazy and feckless, are the jobs you feckers won't do.
You need someone to deliver your Hello Fresh food box because you're too fucking lazy to go to the shop yourself. You need someone to wipe your elderly parents arse because you certainly ain't going to do it.
You're far too busy being important lawyers and bankers and financiers and fancy project managers to realise that having tossers doing the menial stuff means you get to have your new Apple iWank delivered by a minimum wage courier at a time and place of your choosing, so you can carry on doing the important stuff instead of having to meet poor people in shopping centres.
I'd flounce, but I'm too lazy and feckless. And no one would notice anyway 🤡

Legendary rant. Love it! 👌

I've had a scan through the thread and I'm struggling to see who or what exactly TFS is referring to.

I thought the same.

I wondered whether I'm expected to wipe my father's arse*? Given the distance involved this is not possible. Even if I had Mr Tickle arms.

* for the record I have, many times, but the less said the better. I just think of Starmer.

I suspect those having their habitual rants about the public sector (and suggesting bouncing the shittier x% of the workforce into courier jobs etc). I, for one, welcome a rant from the other side for a bit of balance

Torsten's Bell tweet is idiotic. Agricultural land is a tool of a trade. A house is not.

What has been less noticed is that the tax changes affect all family owned businesses. Not just farms. So the idea that this is just about closing off a loophole is nonsense. It is a tax change which will harm all family owned businesses. What is the justification for doing so?

The answers are all over the place: one minute it's "well very few will be affected" and the next "well the NHS will collapse without the money". These are incoherent and inconsistent. And frankly - though I imagine I will get a lot of grief for saying so - I don't think the purpose of our economy or tax policy should be to keep the NHS afloat. Even if it were other Budget decisions completely undermine that anyway - not least the NIC changes which will harm GP surgeries and care homes. A proper social care policy would do more to help the NHS than anything else - but on that we have once again got tumbleweed and a tax change which will, if anything, make matters worse.

On social care it could be even worse than you describe. The current plan seems to be set a mechanism to allow higher/fairer levels of pay across the whole sector, yet with no indication whatsoever how local councils will fund the whacking increase in fees required.

Laura K claims there is a big meeting scheduled for this coming Monday between chancellor, PM and NHS ministers to finally thrash this out.

I expect more tumbleweed sadly.

Social care is the real destroyer of inheritances, not IHT.

Only if you need residential care for dementia, at home care is still exempt after May scrapped the dementia tax.

Personally I favour an insurance model for social care like the Japanese

I’ve never understood why the idea doesn’t take off. It makes total sense to me. We all face the risk of a long life in a home, but in practice only a minority get there. Classic case for insurance.

"at home care is still exempt"

Not sure what this refers to. Care in your own home is certainly NOT exempt. If you have savings or assets over £23K you pay for the whole shooting match yourself. The exemption, which is what you might mean, is the actual house you live in.

Even those whose savings are not at £23K (obvs a lot of people across the population) may find their family somehow has to find top-up money as the council is struggling to find an agency who will work at their rates and turn up for more than a quick bish-bosh-bash 15min visit.

I really wish this war against employees by other employees would end.

I don’t know what organisations people have worked for but I’d find it hard to believe Vodafone where I was for many years is any less bureaucratic than the public sector. Every decision or change I wanted to make had to go through five layers of management.

Perhaps it’s just that large organisations in general are like tankers? I hear much the same from friends at Apple and Google.

Most public sector organisations have no idea how many employees they have at anytime. This has become much worse since COVID. I know for a fact that the cabinet office found 100s of people who were still salaried in 2021/2 who had been given no work for months and this will have been much worse in other departments.

It's not just the insane Bureaucracy, it's the fact that there is little grip on what the purpose of each department is and what the overall goal is. This lack of direction and grip means the public sector is terrible at driving down costs and removing useless processes.

You could apply all of this to private sector organisations though. I’m not saying that the public sector is a bastion of efficiency, just that I’m not seeing this amazing private sector efficiency people keep talking about.

At start ups, yes. But that’s not really what we are talking about here.

You don't think it's likely, inevitable even, given profit motive, that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector? In any case I don't give a monkey's about a private company being inefficient unless I'm a shareholder, I'm not paying for that out of taxes.

That's exactly right. Being efficient means maximising the output from a given amount of land, labour and capital inputs. It is a constant, tedious, demanding grind and even when you put in the effort you still need judgement to get it right, because it involves making decisions about the future.

It is much easier to demand a subsidy from a spineless government or whack prices up on captive customers. Then inefficiencies get built in and you quickly end up with business that serve their employees and shareholders, not their customers.

The two defences against those practices are competition and the possibility of bankruptcy. Competition without bankruptcy is no use, like for instance a nationalised industry in a competitive industry. Nor is bankruptcy without competition - then you just get fat monopolists. Sometimes effective economic regulation can mimic competitive discipline, but it is very difficult and always a second best option.

The competitive, dynamic economy we desperately need, needs as much competition and as little state support as possible. Unfortunately of course this government is pulling in the opposite direction, and the last one was hardly a vigorous champion of free enterprise. We may get a saner government one day.

The 'saner government' may come out of necessity - when the money runs dry.

I do worry about the Government furlough genie being out of the bottle come the next recession, and everyone expecting their job to be preserved.

PB is becoming a class ridden shithole.
The very jobs you rich fuckers denigrate, the jobs you think are only fit for the the lazy and feckless, are the jobs you feckers won't do.
You need someone to deliver your Hello Fresh food box because you're too fucking lazy to go to the shop yourself. You need someone to wipe your elderly parents arse because you certainly ain't going to do it.
You're far too busy being important lawyers and bankers and financiers and fancy project managers to realise that having tossers doing the menial stuff means you get to have your new Apple iWank delivered by a minimum wage courier at a time and place of your choosing, so you can carry on doing the important stuff instead of having to meet poor people in shopping centres.
I'd flounce, but I'm too lazy and feckless. And no one would notice anyway 🤡

Legendary rant. Love it! 👌

I've had a scan through the thread and I'm struggling to see who or what exactly TFS is referring to.

I really wish this war against employees by other employees would end.

I don’t know what organisations people have worked for but I’d find it hard to believe Vodafone where I was for many years is any less bureaucratic than the public sector. Every decision or change I wanted to make had to go through five layers of management.

Perhaps it’s just that large organisations in general are like tankers? I hear much the same from friends at Apple and Google.

Most public sector organisations have no idea how many employees they have at anytime. This has become much worse since COVID. I know for a fact that the cabinet office found 100s of people who were still salaried in 2021/2 who had been given no work for months and this will have been much worse in other departments.

It's not just the insane Bureaucracy, it's the fact that there is little grip on what the purpose of each department is and what the overall goal is. This lack of direction and grip means the public sector is terrible at driving down costs and removing useless processes.

I worked for a global megacorp for many years and most of its departments seemed to be in perpetual low-level conflict with each other, and deliberately so. It is often hard to recognise the idealised versions of private sector companies that some advance.

It is this failure to recognise how things actually work that leads to the public sector's biggest failing: top-down reorganisations. Labour's John Reid told us the Home Office was not fit for purpose, yet post break-up, crime and immigration are out of control. Likewise decennial NHS reforms from Thatcher to Lansley.

Even if reforms are a good idea on paper, management or ministers must account for the cost of implementation.

I really wish this war against employees by other employees would end.

I don’t know what organisations people have worked for but I’d find it hard to believe Vodafone where I was for many years is any less bureaucratic than the public sector. Every decision or change I wanted to make had to go through five layers of management.

Perhaps it’s just that large organisations in general are like tankers? I hear much the same from friends at Apple and Google.

Most public sector organisations have no idea how many employees they have at anytime. This has become much worse since COVID. I know for a fact that the cabinet office found 100s of people who were still salaried in 2021/2 who had been given no work for months and this will have been much worse in other departments.

It's not just the insane Bureaucracy, it's the fact that there is little grip on what the purpose of each department is and what the overall goal is. This lack of direction and grip means the public sector is terrible at driving down costs and removing useless processes.

You could apply all of this to private sector organisations though. I’m not saying that the public sector is a bastion of efficiency, just that I’m not seeing this amazing private sector efficiency people keep talking about.

At start ups, yes. But that’s not really what we are talking about here.

You don't think it's likely, inevitable even, given profit motive, that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector? In any case I don't give a monkey's about a private company being inefficient unless I'm a shareholder, I'm not paying for that out of taxes.

That's exactly right. Being efficient means maximising the output from a given amount of land, labour and capital inputs. It is a constant, tedious, demanding grind and even when you put in the effort you still need judgement to get it right, because it involves making decisions about the future.

It is much easier to demand a subsidy from a spineless government or whack prices up on captive customers. Then inefficiencies get built in and you quickly end up with business that serve their employees and shareholders, not their customers.

The two defences against those practices are competition and the possibility of bankruptcy. Competition without bankruptcy is no use, like for instance a nationalised industry in a competitive industry. Nor is bankruptcy without competition - then you just get fat monopolists. Sometimes effective economic regulation can mimic competitive discipline, but it is very difficult and always a second best option.

The competitive, dynamic economy we desperately need, needs as much competition and as little state support as possible. Unfortunately of course this government is pulling in the opposite direction, and the last one was hardly a vigorous champion of free enterprise. We may get a saner government one day.

The nasty fringe on here who attack the “lazy” public sector on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, and with no reference to any of the work done on why “public sector productivity” metrics are bollocks, do annoy me. The myth of the “efficient private sector” crumbles instantly if you’ve worked in or with it at senior levels.

Large private firms are at least as inefficient and prone to error, but don’t have to disclose those errors as much, even when publicly traded, so pretend they are not. Small firms are often quite efficient, but also doing something quite simple and niche, where it’s a lot easier to do that.

In fact there are almost no private sector firms attempting to do anything half as complex as a Government Department or the NHS, or managing their way through as much ambiguity and change.

PB is becoming a class ridden shithole.
The very jobs you rich fuckers denigrate, the jobs you think are only fit for the the lazy and feckless, are the jobs you feckers won't do.
You need someone to deliver your Hello Fresh food box because you're too fucking lazy to go to the shop yourself. You need someone to wipe your elderly parents arse because you certainly ain't going to do it.
You're far too busy being important lawyers and bankers and financiers and fancy project managers to realise that having tossers doing the menial stuff means you get to have your new Apple iWank delivered by a minimum wage courier at a time and place of your choosing, so you can carry on doing the important stuff instead of having to meet poor people in shopping centres.
I'd flounce, but I'm too lazy and feckless. And no one would notice anyway 🤡

Legendary rant. Love it! 👌