Best Of

News from my parish...the government's published amendments to the Employment Rights Bill and there's a proper seismic shift buried in there. They're scrapping the cap on unfair dismissal compensation awards. Completely. Just a simple "omit s124" - that's ERA 1996 the section that limits the payout. Gone. Will need primary legislation from a future govt to bring back as will changing the qualifying period that's going from 2 years down to 6 months.

So if this gets through the Lords, we're looking at uncapped awards for unfair dismissal claims. Sky's the limit. For context, the current cap is around £120k (or a year's salary if lower). That's already a chunky sum, but now? Could be multiples of that depending on actual losses. Admittedly the median award's only £15k so not much will actually change at the sharp end but, nevertheless, employers are going to be bricking it.

One angle that occurs, it will actually reduce the amount of legal gymnastics where claimants try to wedge whistleblowing or discrimination angles into unfair dismissal cases just to dodge the compensation cap. If there's no cap to dodge, there's less incentive for creative pleading.

Whether there should be one or not, £120k was the wrong cap, too low. Was it the same amount introduced in 1996 perchance?

No. That was about £10k. Blair increased it to £50k in 1998 and it has been increasing every April broadly in line with inflation every year. Cameron introduced a further cap so that it was the lower of 52-weeks basic and the overall cap. I think I recall it went down one year...

The BBC. The finest news organisation in the world

‘ Why I'm terrified of motorways even though I've been driving for 20 years’

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5ylnw9g994o

My wife won't drive on the motorway. I keep telling her that if she can drive in SE London she can drive on the motorway, to no avail.

That’s a news article on the BBC then !

Motorway driving is a doddle.

I think the big issue is anticipation, if you haven't been taught to think ahead for example notice there's a slow vehicle ahead, check you mirrors and pull out while you're travelling at a similar speed to the other traffic but instead realize too late and slow right down so you're stuck with other traffic whizzing past you, then it's probably terrifying.
TBH doesn't sound like the people the BBC interviewed should have passed in the first place.

@viewcode

I got your message on the previous thread and will respond as requested.

I note this comment from you, which is a view share by some other posters -

"I hold the Widdecombe position on trans: namely, those who have gone all the way surgically/hormonally and can reasonably function as the opposite sex should be allowed to be legally considered as the opposite sex."

I realise that people cannot be expected to follow the ins and outs of complicated areas of law. But the ECHR ruled in 2017 in the case of Garçon & Nicot v France (followed in a case against Italy in 2018 and Romania in 2021 saying the same) that countries could NOT insist on surgery (with a high risk of sterility) as a condition for recognising a change in gender in law. The ECHR has ruled that a change gender identity must in certain circumstances be recognised in law, regardless of a persons physical body. This therefore means means that you cannot link gender recognition to surgery/hormone treatment and must give it to, for instance, a man who has made no changes to his body whatsoever or to a woman trying to get pregnant, if they claim to have changed their gender (re this last, see the recent ruling by Mr Justice Hayden in the "W" case - in October 2025).

Ms Widdecombe, as a former MP and Minister in the Home Office, should have done her research before opining on this or putting this forward as some sort of solution or compromise. It isn't. It is unlawful. This debate is persistently hampered by politicians and commentators putting forward "solutions" which are unlawful. It is unfair and unkind to all concerned to offer false solutions and to mislead about what the law says and has said for some time, whatever side of the debate anyone is on.

Joke mode on.

Only consider anyone a woman if they can multi-task - as no man can.

Only consider anyone a man if they can parallel park - an no woman can.

Joke mode off, and dives behind the sofa.

I'm so bad at parallel parking - I'm clearly a women...

Get a BMW with Parking Assistant Plus. Our iX has it and it's brilliant. If it is physically possible to get the vehicle into the parking space within the holomonic constraints of the steering geometry, PAP will do it first time, every time.

WRT the header and John Curtice, I think if you examine his words carefully he was not making a prediction about Tory/LD seats, he was doing the maths of how current polling works out with the Tories only a bit in front of the LDs. This is a thing known to all PBers whp pay attention to Gareth of the Vale, namely that the LD vote is concentrated so gets seats on a low national poll, the Tory vote is spread, so get few seats on a low national poll.

Curtice never, SFAICS, says what future outcomes will actually be until 10 pm on a Thursday in 2029. When he gets it right.

The Independent has not been entirely fair to him.

It's bizarre that we've gone from the Tory vote being concentrated, heavily correlated with middle class populations, with the LibDems being the party with wide but shallow appeal, picking up people who reject both major parties spread evenly across the country, to what (based on the last election) looks almost the reverse.

Most seats and wards now seem to fall into either being strong LD prospects, or they pull in a derisory vote worthy of a Tory in Liverpool. All the seats where they could rely on 15% (+/-5%) regardless seem to have disappeared.

I think that's a combination of lukewarm appeal and efficient targeting. People have got used to voting for the least objectionable party with a good chance of beating the party they most dislike. It's a problem for democracy that nobody except arguably Reform gets people voting positively, regardless of the tactical position. Superfically that's just a problem of FPTP, but fundamentally it's a problem that everyone has found that it's easier to get votes to stop someone else than to get them on a positive agenda.

Lol. Reform only exists because it's the ultimate, negative, "f*** the lot of you" vote.

In an alternative universe, your party delivered the Jenkins Report recommendations back when you were an MP in the early 2000s and we've enjoyed a couple of decades of stable centre-left coalitions.