Best Of

In Kemi's defence, she hasn't gone full "The UK needs a TRUMP", Liz Truss style.

A thoughful column from Sunder Katwala (@Sundersays on both Twitter and Bluesky):

Comment: Britain is not America, so how do we keep it that way?

"..I was reflecting on Britain and America in giving the Migration Museum’s annual lecture last week, exploring how the history of migration might influence the future. America has had a much clearer idea of itself as a “nation of immigrants” – symbolised by the Statue of Liberty. But that did not prevent Trump winning while pledging the biggest deportation effort in American history. Trump’s return strengthens the case for clear blue Transatlantic water – keeping a distance from America’s culture wars as we navigate our own identity challenges in a changing Britain."

https://www.easterneye.biz/britain-and-america-political-polarisation/

Nice ad that nearly saw the light of day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5n0DLYbYqc

As usual the best way to defeat right wing populists is to put them in power and let them destroy themselves - but at what cost to the rest of us???

*cough*BREXIT*cough*

Brexit came about due to centrist Dad Call me Dave.

Yep, never should have called the referendum.

Calling the EU referendum was not the problem. The trouble is Cameron is a lousy campaigner who ran a lousy campaign, but thought he was great at it.

Had Cameron campaigned for Leave in the Referendum do you think Remain would have won?

See my other post. But yes. Partly because Cameron would be leading Leave, and partly because someone else would have fronted Remain.

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).

Can you explain how you pay a mortgage from a poor income. The whole point is they will need to sell at least part of farm to pay it so making it even poorer income etc.
Idiocy thought up by morons. It should be tax applied when any sale is made , inheriting land is worth nothing unless you sell.

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).

No you can't as you don't have the income to repay a mortgage for starters.

We need houses to live in mainly in cities, suburbs and towns, we need the countryside to still provide our food mainly

If the land cannot generate any income, why is its value so high?

It is there to develop food, not to be sold off to the nearest property developer

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.

True.
Everything needing to be passed through 5 layers with noone prepared to make a decision. The larger the organisation the worse they are to deal with as a supplier or customer.

The inefficiencies can exist in large orgs so long as they're making profits though...

I've previously described working as a contractor at Citi, as the financial crash happened. Some vignettes...

- A BA, from the same company as me, did more work than a whole floor of the BAs, pre crash
- People whose job it was to attend meetings, and construct personations from those meetings, that they would give at other meetings. Some people were 2 jobs away from both top management and the people who actually did banking.
- A manager screaming "Does anyone know our exposure to fucking Lehmans?"
- After the crash, they binned whole floors of people in the tower in Canary wharf. It was Kung Fu mixed with Jenga....

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.

I know you, like me, are knee deep in this.

An illustration of the waste:

My father is still at home with regular carer visits. He falls from time to time. Inevitable given his condition. No biggee. Check he's OK, help him up on sofa and make him a cuppa you might think.

But no. The carers will not apply common sense. They immediately call 999. Ambulance is booked but may be 4 - 6 hours. Dad expected to sit on floor for all this time, waiting to be helped up.So I (in another part of the country) get a call from the care agency, looking to be relieved. WTF do they expect me to do? I ring around best I can and - with luck - get a neighbour on phone who goes and helps him up. So I tell carer to cancel the ambulance. 'No' I'm told they can't do that. So now we have an ambulance coming at some point for an emergency which never existed. This has happened six times over last couple of months.

What a waste of time for the ambulance service. How many times is this scenario being played out across the country?

It's about discretion. A relative was working in care facility. She lifted a patient, by herself. Just off the bed, patient still over the bed. 6 inches or so. The patient was a little old lady. My relative likes to bench far more than the patients weight, at the gym. Risk to patient zero. Risk to my relative zero. Patient was in distress.....

Fired of course.

This is a huge issue. I have the same with ambulances being called.

The crew tell me they spend half the day dealing with this kind of stuff. No wonder wait times are 8 hours etc etc.

Agencies refuse to pick people off the floor. I even have equipment which I use myself to get relative off floor (i can provide details if anyone is interested).

They wont use that.

I assume this is all to do with modern insurance and risk and legal liability and all that shite.

But the nhs is picking up the pieces.

https://x.com/ONS/status/1858805323441598762

@ONS
Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.

And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.

And the multi billion pound question is... why?

Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?

My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.

I think from my limited experience that there is a lack of quality management, that WFH has in fact reduced people's output despite all the claims to the contrary, that it has encouraged a mind set that this job is for my benefit rather than the benefit of the people to whom the service that is being provided, that it is my mental health and work life balance that is important, not the quality of life of the service users I am supposedly working for and, perhaps above all, the never ending multiplication of emails to masses of people who don't need to receive them but get interrupted anyway.

None of this will stop me from WFH today, of course.

David, you could have just said the inherently lazy barstewards will take the piss when allowed to work at home. The diligent productive people will do even more work.

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.

Let’s presume for one moment Angela Rayners wheeze of allowing public sector workers to do the same job for four days a week comes to pass. How would this impact productivity ?

The wage bill of the public sector is being cut by 20% ?

All for it.

https://x.com/ONS/status/1858805323441598762

@ONS
Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.

And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.

And the multi billion pound question is... why?

Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?

My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.

I think from my limited experience that there is a lack of quality management, that WFH has in fact reduced people's output despite all the claims to the contrary, that it has encouraged a mind set that this job is for my benefit rather than the benefit of the people to whom the service that is being provided, that it is my mental health and work life balance that is important, not the quality of life of the service users I am supposedly working for and, perhaps above all, the never ending multiplication of emails to masses of people who don't need to receive them but get interrupted anyway.

None of this will stop me from WFH today, of course.

I’ve found it made me more efficient at delivering existing work, and less efficient at winning new work. I’m back in most of the time now.

It’s definitely a challenge for our new joiners and graduate entry too.

My daughter, who qualified as a solicitor last week, had a job whilst at University with the SSSC which is a regulator of the care sector in Scotland. All the time she was working for them (admittedly during Covid) she was WFH and only rarely met her colleagues.

They offered her a traineeship but she, rightly in my view, came to the conclusion that she would not learn from that in the same way as she would in the office and she went for a private firm instead. Her current job has her in court pretty much every day and has given her a vast range of experience she simply would not have got with the SSSC who were offering her more money. The management there were genuinely surprised when she turned them down.

For young people yes being in the office 4/5 days a week or indeed 5 out of 5 may be a benefit as they get to know their team and do work in person.

For parents, especially mothers, wfh however is a godsend as it gives them time to do the school run, do the washing, cooking, cleaning etc in breaks from work at home in the day which they couldn't so easily with the daily commute and also saves on travel costs

The attractions for those mothers are obvious and it no doubt improves their work life balance enormously. The ONS seem to be indicating, however, that it is not doing a lot for their output.

Yes well given our below replacement fertility rate we could do with a few more women having an output of children as mothers with more work life balance making that easier than just being measured on their output of workplace productivity

If you want to improve fertility rates then tax cuts for 30 somethings not Farmers would be a good idea. Yet Kemi thinks statutory maternity pay should go.

"Yet Kemi thinks statutory maternity pay should go".

Not true.