So, if the Mirror is right the extremely rich Rishi Sunak is in California on business; the state where he met his wife and where he, apparently, owns a home in Santa Monica and has lots of friends there. I'm not sure why this business trip wasn't public knowledge, but it clearly wasn't. Wonder why.
Could be a problem for Sunak. Whatever one's view of Omicron and what should be done, we are in the middle of another Covid crisis and it's clearly going to have major economic implications for lots of businesses. But the man to decide whether to lend support to hospitality businesses (which are going to lose loads of money whether or not more restrictions are put in place) is on a jolly business trip in California. I'll bet Cyclefree is livid.
Sunak has relatives there. Part of his wife's family are Californian.
And Cyclefree is always livid about something, in any case.
I've just got home.
My Daughter's business is taking 40% of the revenue she was taking in November let alone December. She is beyond depressed.
She normally closes for the first 2 weeks of January. Unless support is forthcoming, as other countries faced with this variant have provided, she will not be reopening. There is no point.
A business which survived, was viable, increased its turnover and was profitable will disappear because it simply cannot survive the loss of Xmas business without support. So all the support that was given before will have been for nothing.
Jobs lost. Local suppliers and breweries lose another customer and a village loses a venue. The government loses the tax revenues. What are the chances of the owner finding a buyer or tenant in this sort of environment? And yet the government is proposing to spend £21 million in the area to increase its attractiveness as a tourist destination. Where are people supposed to eat and stay when all the local venues have closed?
She is young. She is entrepreneurial and tough. But she looks utterly beaten and abandoned. It breaks my heart. She will not be the only one who feels like this. She and her generation are this country's future and this government is treating them like shit.
I expect better. At least I used to. Not any more.
More than livid I am utterly contemptuous of people like you who are so dismissive of what is happening to the young. And even more contemptuous of people like Sunak, cosseted by their money, who have no clue at the damage they are doing.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
This country has been shafting the young for years. It was similar under Labour - they pulled up many ladders behind them: free education, good pensions, etc. The Millennials et al have been used as a human bank account by the older generations to feather-bed their existence and protect their inheritances.
It is why I have encouraged my kids to use their dual nationality to seek work overseas. The UK was a great country once and being British was something you could take pride in. Nowadays it is a joke with a comedy govt which is mapping the way to becoming a shabby, insular backwater.
Some excellent points - I think you are right about the young being systematically shxfted - the interest rate on the govt student loan scheme is a scandal is an excellent example, meanwhile the wealthy over 60s remain absolutely steadfast in their grip on political power - one of the great political shifts in the 21C has been the systematic hoovering up of the grey vote by the Conservatives in England - its given us BREXIT, a sex-crazed liar as PM, a series of culture wars and an inflated sense of national importance that will culminate in disaster at some point. I do think the Blues will edge it (but will watch with an enthusiasm for a byelection I've not had in years)
That RPI plus 3% on Student Loans is just cruel.
I was talking to my neighbour. She is in her 20's, a teaching assistant, doing a teaching degree at night school. So, about the most sensible and cost effective way of doing a degree. Will leave with 18k of debt. We worked out that it could well be cheaper for her to get a loan from the bank upon graduation then pay it off over 5 years when she gets a teaching job (should be about 3% interest, if the current bank interest rates are sustained), than stay with the student loans company.
Aside from vocational degrees such as the above; University education is for the wealthy only. An extension of private school; but the student loans system enables the poor and naive to be exploited under the guise of 'access'.
Commercial bank offering unsecured personal loan for 3%?
Colour me sceptical.
I've taken out unsecured loans at this rate. Admittedly not recently though.
Another option is mortgage equity withdrawal, that could bring the rate down to sub 2%, dependent on personal circumstances. Or just borrow the money off a wealthy relative and pay it back at 1-2%; win win as the savings rate is hopeless.
What was the politicos rationale for the interest rate being so high? If you get a high flying job and reach six figures in your 20s, you pay it off early. The bigger chunk will presumably never pay it off. But there will be plenty in the middle who do pay it off but take most of their working life to do so.
Was it purely so they could privatise the loan book with as small a discount as possible? Poor form if so.
Well it was all pursued in the interest of sound public finances. Balancing the books. Paying our way in the world. Cutting the deficit. Strong and stable government in the National Interest.
Well yes, but it was all based on the premise that we needed to send 50% of our youth to university. Take that arbitrary target away and it becomes somewhat easier to suppose that do go through university. We could even decide to pay the tuition fees of those doing courses we were looking to encourage (i.e. STEM courses).
Is Omicron intrinsically less severe than other variants? @BillHanage and I argue that it's still too early to say, despite what appear to be early signs of milder impact in SA than past waves.
People, this is your future thanks to the green lobby.
Gas prices are at a near record level again and we are nowhere near a viable, fully scalable alternative that will keep the lights on and our homes warm in winter.
Still, stop drilling for oil and gas and stop further exploration. All good.
When we have five times the wind capacity then wind would still be generating a respectable 12 GW or so on a day like today, and we'd have the excess from previous days stored. If we would build the tidal lagoons, and the mini-nuke reactors too, then our exposure to fluctuations in global fossil fuel prices would be much reduced, perhaps eliminated.
Which is why, in a litany of silly mistakes, May's abandonment of tidal power was her worst one.
Our local tidal energy scheme just got conditional planning approval from the county council. It looks like the plan is to spend 2022 on the detailed plans and getting the other approvals they need, with construction 2023-4 and go live 2025.
It had been lined up to go five years ago, but the finances collapsed when the Tories withdrew the grants, as you say.
The Yar estuary? ISTR there was a tidal mill there in mediaeval/early modern times a little up from Yarmouth tourist info.
So, if the Mirror is right the extremely rich Rishi Sunak is in California on business; the state where he met his wife and where he, apparently, owns a home in Santa Monica and has lots of friends there. I'm not sure why this business trip wasn't public knowledge, but it clearly wasn't. Wonder why.
Could be a problem for Sunak. Whatever one's view of Omicron and what should be done, we are in the middle of another Covid crisis and it's clearly going to have major economic implications for lots of businesses. But the man to decide whether to lend support to hospitality businesses (which are going to lose loads of money whether or not more restrictions are put in place) is on a jolly business trip in California. I'll bet Cyclefree is livid.
Sunak has relatives there. Part of his wife's family are Californian.
And Cyclefree is always livid about something, in any case.
I've just got home.
My Daughter's business is taking 40% of the revenue she was taking in November let alone December. She is beyond depressed.
She normally closes for the first 2 weeks of January. Unless support is forthcoming, as other countries faced with this variant have provided, she will not be reopening. There is no point.
A business which survived, was viable, increased its turnover and was profitable will disappear because it simply cannot survive the loss of Xmas business without support. So all the support that was given before will have been for nothing.
Jobs lost. Local suppliers and breweries lose another customer and a village loses a venue. The government loses the tax revenues. What are the chances of the owner finding a buyer or tenant in this sort of environment? And yet the government is proposing to spend £21 million in the area to increase its attractiveness as a tourist destination. Where are people supposed to eat and stay when all the local venues have closed?
She is young. She is entrepreneurial and tough. But she looks utterly beaten and abandoned. It breaks my heart. She will not be the only one who feels like this. She and her generation are this country's future and this government is treating them like shit.
I expect better. At least I used to. Not any more.
More than livid I am utterly contemptuous of people like you who are so dismissive of what is happening to the young. And even more contemptuous of people like Sunak, cosseted by their money, who have no clue at the damage they are doing.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
This country has been shafting the young for years. It was similar under Labour - they pulled up many ladders behind them: free education, good pensions, etc. The Millennials et al have been used as a human bank account by the older generations to feather-bed their existence and protect their inheritances.
It is why I have encouraged my kids to use their dual nationality to seek work overseas. The UK was a great country once and being British was something you could take pride in. Nowadays it is a joke with a comedy govt which is mapping the way to becoming a shabby, insular backwater.
Some excellent points - I think you are right about the young being systematically shxfted - the interest rate on the govt student loan scheme is a scandal is an excellent example, meanwhile the wealthy over 60s remain absolutely steadfast in their grip on political power - one of the great political shifts in the 21C has been the systematic hoovering up of the grey vote by the Conservatives in England - its given us BREXIT, a sex-crazed liar as PM, a series of culture wars and an inflated sense of national importance that will culminate in disaster at some point. I do think the Blues will edge it (but will watch with an enthusiasm for a byelection I've not had in years)
That RPI plus 3% on Student Loans is just cruel.
I was talking to my neighbour. She is in her 20's, a teaching assistant, doing a teaching degree at night school. So, about the most sensible and cost effective way of doing a degree. Will leave with 18k of debt. We worked out that it could well be cheaper for her to get a loan from the bank upon graduation then pay it off over 5 years when she gets a teaching job (should be about 3% interest, if the current bank interest rates are sustained), than stay with the student loans company.
Aside from vocational degrees such as the above; University education is for the wealthy only. An extension of private school; but the student loans system enables the poor and naive to be exploited under the guise of 'access'.
Commercial bank offering unsecured personal loan for 3%?
Colour me sceptical.
I've taken out unsecured loans at this rate. Admittedly not recently though.
Another option is mortgage equity withdrawal, that could bring the rate down to sub 2%, dependent on personal circumstances. Or just borrow the money off a wealthy relative and pay it back at 1-2%; win win as the savings rate is hopeless.
What was the politicos rationale for the interest rate being so high? If you get a high flying job and reach six figures in your 20s, you pay it off early. The bigger chunk will presumably never pay it off. But there will be plenty in the middle who do pay it off but take most of their working life to do so.
Was it purely so they could privatise the loan book with as small a discount as possible? Poor form if so.
It's really, really hard to repay the student loan (deliberately so). I've just done the calculation, assuming CPI at 2% (increasing the repayment threshold each year), RPI at 3% (so the interest is 6% each year) for someone who starts earning at £25,000 and receives a 4% pay rise every year. They never pay back the £27,000 borrowed. Not only that, they never reduce the amount of debt owed. They make repayments of more than £28,000, but the debt outstanding grows every year to reach nearly £120,000 when it is written off.
If you increase the average pay rise to 5% every year, then in the final year the student sees the first drop in their outstanding debt, before the remaining £81,000 or so is written off. They will have paid more than £51,000.
You have to increase the average pay rise each year to 7% to achieve repayment (in the penultimate year) with a total of about £96,000 repaid. The salary at this year is £95,473 in inflation-adjusted terms (£166k nominal). This is far above the middle.
It can't be emphasised enough that you are not meant to pay this debt off. This is why Martin Lewis advises people that they would be simply throwing their money away to use a lump sum to repay some of the principal amount outstanding. It would be a fundamental change to the system to make repayment reasonably achievable. Maybe it would be a vote winner in the Home Counties, where more people would have a decent chance of clearing the debt, and reducing the amount if interest they pay. It would make no difference to most other people.
New restrictions on travellers from the UK will NOT apply to hauliers, the French have assured the British government. Officials still awaiting the details, though.
I have a theory on Omicron. I think in many, many cases it is producing cold-like symptoms and negative LFTs. These people are carrying on as normal and spreading it around. Therefore the number of real cases is far, far higher than official statistics. Given this the actual severity is much reduced compared to previous variants.
This does not mean that it cannot put severe pressures on health systems. Given the huge case numbers even a much reduced severity would produce more hospitalisations.
The other logical outcome if this is true is that over the next few weeks Omicron will rush through the whole population. This would result in us getting to herd immunity very quickly.
No way to prove this at all. But it is a possibility.
Why would Omicron produce negative LFTs though?
We know that in the PCR tests Omicron has the S-gene target failure - this is jargon to say that one of the three proteins the PCR test looks for is sufficiently different in Omicron that it isn't identified. The positive test is determined by identifying the two other proteins.
I don't know how the LFTs work, but it could be that the protein they identify is sufficiently different in Omicron to be less easily detected.
The other possible reason is to do with how the sample is collected. If, say, Omicron produced more infection in the throat, rather than the nose, then the LFTs which use a nose swab only would be less likely to pick it up.
There might be other possible explanations.
I think the lateral flow tests are still ok for omicron (and the testing evidence suggests that too). Other factors apply - poor technique being the most likely.
We had a very successful deli nearby. When Covid struck, and they closed, and then were able to reopen with distancing etc they just said sorry, we can't make the business work with this spacing, we are closing down permanently and moving the business online. I imagine it was the right decision.
The real dilemma for the Chancellor is how to target help to those small businesses who really need it like @Cyclefree daughter while not subsidising those with shareholders who should take the hit rather than the taxpayer
So, if the Mirror is right the extremely rich Rishi Sunak is in California on business; the state where he met his wife and where he, apparently, owns a home in Santa Monica and has lots of friends there. I'm not sure why this business trip wasn't public knowledge, but it clearly wasn't. Wonder why.
Could be a problem for Sunak. Whatever one's view of Omicron and what should be done, we are in the middle of another Covid crisis and it's clearly going to have major economic implications for lots of businesses. But the man to decide whether to lend support to hospitality businesses (which are going to lose loads of money whether or not more restrictions are put in place) is on a jolly business trip in California. I'll bet Cyclefree is livid.
Sunak has relatives there. Part of his wife's family are Californian.
And Cyclefree is always livid about something, in any case.
I've just got home.
My Daughter's business is taking 40% of the revenue she was taking in November let alone December. She is beyond depressed.
She normally closes for the first 2 weeks of January. Unless support is forthcoming, as other countries faced with this variant have provided, she will not be reopening. There is no point.
A business which survived, was viable, increased its turnover and was profitable will disappear because it simply cannot survive the loss of Xmas business without support. So all the support that was given before will have been for nothing.
Jobs lost. Local suppliers and breweries lose another customer and a village loses a venue. The government loses the tax revenues. What are the chances of the owner finding a buyer or tenant in this sort of environment? And yet the government is proposing to spend £21 million in the area to increase its attractiveness as a tourist destination. Where are people supposed to eat and stay when all the local venues have closed?
She is young. She is entrepreneurial and tough. But she looks utterly beaten and abandoned. It breaks my heart. She will not be the only one who feels like this. She and her generation are this country's future and this government is treating them like shit.
I expect better. At least I used to. Not any more.
More than livid I am utterly contemptuous of people like you who are so dismissive of what is happening to the young. And even more contemptuous of people like Sunak, cosseted by their money, who have no clue at the damage they are doing.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
This country has been shafting the young for years. It was similar under Labour - they pulled up many ladders behind them: free education, good pensions, etc. The Millennials et al have been used as a human bank account by the older generations to feather-bed their existence and protect their inheritances.
It is why I have encouraged my kids to use their dual nationality to seek work overseas. The UK was a great country once and being British was something you could take pride in. Nowadays it is a joke with a comedy govt which is mapping the way to becoming a shabby, insular backwater.
Mine have dual nationality too. But this is their home. Yes - they may have to leave to find work elsewhere. Just like their Irish forebears did. Oh the irony.
I now feel as depressed as during the worst times in lockdown. Vaccines were meant to be our way out. If we're still going to be forced into a half life even with vaccines with stunted opportunities for our young, what the fuck is the point of any of it?
And as for China and that bloody lab - I'd flatten the place (the lab) and the Chinese leadership. The misery they have inflicted on the world.......
Miss Cyclefree, my sympathies, must be very tough on your daughter, and you.
Said it yesterday, but this approach by the Government is categorically stupid. I'll never support vaccine passports, but even if the other restrictions are necessary (I am yet to be persuaded, though we'll find out soon enough) then implementing them to drastically cut hospitality activity while not helping the sector at all is practically designed to kill off businesses.
Remember that as @Philip_Thompson pointed out yesterday there are no rules about vaccine passports being required for pubs.
The current issues are the consequences of people panicking rather than any direct government policy - but the timing of this really couldn't be worse. This is peak profit season for restaurants and (with pantos/shows that are struggling to keep going) theatres
Depending on the mood of Mrs Eek we will be going out of Friday night but as she had Covid just over a month ago (and I probably did) that's because it's almost risk free for us.
People, this is your future thanks to the green lobby.
Gas prices are at a near record level again and we are nowhere near a viable, fully scalable alternative that will keep the lights on and our homes warm in winter.
Still, stop drilling for oil and gas and stop further exploration. All good.
When we have five times the wind capacity then wind would still be generating a respectable 12 GW or so on a day like today, and we'd have the excess from previous days stored. If we would build the tidal lagoons, and the mini-nuke reactors too, then our exposure to fluctuations in global fossil fuel prices would be much reduced, perhaps eliminated.
Which is why, in a litany of silly mistakes, May's abandonment of tidal power was her worst one.
Our local tidal energy scheme just got conditional planning approval from the county council. It looks like the plan is to spend 2022 on the detailed plans and getting the other approvals they need, with construction 2023-4 and go live 2025.
It had been lined up to go five years ago, but the finances collapsed when the Tories withdrew the grants, as you say.
The Yar estuary? ISTR there was a tidal mill there in mediaeval/early modern times a little up from Yarmouth tourist info.
So, if the Mirror is right the extremely rich Rishi Sunak is in California on business; the state where he met his wife and where he, apparently, owns a home in Santa Monica and has lots of friends there. I'm not sure why this business trip wasn't public knowledge, but it clearly wasn't. Wonder why.
Could be a problem for Sunak. Whatever one's view of Omicron and what should be done, we are in the middle of another Covid crisis and it's clearly going to have major economic implications for lots of businesses. But the man to decide whether to lend support to hospitality businesses (which are going to lose loads of money whether or not more restrictions are put in place) is on a jolly business trip in California. I'll bet Cyclefree is livid.
Sunak has relatives there. Part of his wife's family are Californian.
And Cyclefree is always livid about something, in any case.
I've just got home.
My Daughter's business is taking 40% of the revenue she was taking in November let alone December. She is beyond depressed.
She normally closes for the first 2 weeks of January. Unless support is forthcoming, as other countries faced with this variant have provided, she will not be reopening. There is no point.
A business which survived, was viable, increased its turnover and was profitable will disappear because it simply cannot survive the loss of Xmas business without support. So all the support that was given before will have been for nothing.
Jobs lost. Local suppliers and breweries lose another customer and a village loses a venue. The government loses the tax revenues. What are the chances of the owner finding a buyer or tenant in this sort of environment? And yet the government is proposing to spend £21 million in the area to increase its attractiveness as a tourist destination. Where are people supposed to eat and stay when all the local venues have closed?
She is young. She is entrepreneurial and tough. But she looks utterly beaten and abandoned. It breaks my heart. She will not be the only one who feels like this. She and her generation are this country's future and this government is treating them like shit.
I expect better. At least I used to. Not any more.
More than livid I am utterly contemptuous of people like you who are so dismissive of what is happening to the young. And even more contemptuous of people like Sunak, cosseted by their money, who have no clue at the damage they are doing.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
This country has been shafting the young for years. It was similar under Labour - they pulled up many ladders behind them: free education, good pensions, etc. The Millennials et al have been used as a human bank account by the older generations to feather-bed their existence and protect their inheritances.
It is why I have encouraged my kids to use their dual nationality to seek work overseas. The UK was a great country once and being British was something you could take pride in. Nowadays it is a joke with a comedy govt which is mapping the way to becoming a shabby, insular backwater.
Some excellent points - I think you are right about the young being systematically shxfted - the interest rate on the govt student loan scheme is a scandal is an excellent example, meanwhile the wealthy over 60s remain absolutely steadfast in their grip on political power - one of the great political shifts in the 21C has been the systematic hoovering up of the grey vote by the Conservatives in England - its given us BREXIT, a sex-crazed liar as PM, a series of culture wars and an inflated sense of national importance that will culminate in disaster at some point. I do think the Blues will edge it (but will watch with an enthusiasm for a byelection I've not had in years)
That RPI plus 3% on Student Loans is just cruel.
I was talking to my neighbour. She is in her 20's, a teaching assistant, doing a teaching degree at night school. So, about the most sensible and cost effective way of doing a degree. Will leave with 18k of debt. We worked out that it could well be cheaper for her to get a loan from the bank upon graduation then pay it off over 5 years when she gets a teaching job (should be about 3% interest, if the current bank interest rates are sustained), than stay with the student loans company.
Aside from vocational degrees such as the above; University education is for the wealthy only. An extension of private school; but the student loans system enables the poor and naive to be exploited under the guise of 'access'.
Commercial bank offering unsecured personal loan for 3%?
Colour me sceptical.
I've taken out unsecured loans at this rate. Admittedly not recently though.
Another option is mortgage equity withdrawal, that could bring the rate down to sub 2%, dependent on personal circumstances. Or just borrow the money off a wealthy relative and pay it back at 1-2%; win win as the savings rate is hopeless.
What was the politicos rationale for the interest rate being so high? If you get a high flying job and reach six figures in your 20s, you pay it off early. The bigger chunk will presumably never pay it off. But there will be plenty in the middle who do pay it off but take most of their working life to do so.
Was it purely so they could privatise the loan book with as small a discount as possible? Poor form if so.
It's really, really hard to repay the student loan (deliberately so). I've just done the calculation, assuming CPI at 2% (increasing the repayment threshold each year), RPI at 3% (so the interest is 6% each year) for someone who starts earning at £25,000 and receives a 4% pay rise every year. They never pay back the £27,000 borrowed. Not only that, they never reduce the amount of debt owed. They make repayments of more than £28,000, but the debt outstanding grows every year to reach nearly £120,000 when it is written off.
If you increase the average pay rise to 5% every year, then in the final year the student sees the first drop in their outstanding debt, before the remaining £81,000 or so is written off. They will have paid more than £51,000.
You have to increase the average pay rise each year to 7% to achieve repayment (in the penultimate year) with a total of about £96,000 repaid. The salary at this year is £95,473 in inflation-adjusted terms (£166k nominal). This is far above the middle.
It can't be emphasised enough that you are not meant to pay this debt off. This is why Martin Lewis advises people that they would be simply throwing their money away to use a lump sum to repay some of the principal amount outstanding. It would be a fundamental change to the system to make repayment reasonably achievable. Maybe it would be a vote winner in the Home Counties, where more people would have a decent chance of clearing the debt, and reducing the amount if interest they pay. It would make no difference to most other people.
That does assume most people understand the system in the first place, that it makes no difference to them.
Today's decision for Daughter is whether to cancel the band she had booked for Saturday. It is a very popular band and the pub is normally rammed whenever it appears. But she has to pay them and if people don't turn up, it is pointless and costs her money.
She booked them ages ago - a great night out a week before Xmas. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
So another cancellation on the cards. One of the long-time regulars who has cancer is also close to the end. A lovely guy. It has been expected for a while but still a bit of a blow.
Every pub/restaurant around here is suffering in the same way.
It is not good enough to wait for a few weeks to give help. What's needed is not fannying about measures but a cash grant to cover the next 3 months.
Without this lots of businesses will close.
Daughter is not extending her lease, understandably. Still she wanted to end her lease in good order leaving a good business and having had a good Xmas season. Not now. She is heartbroken. And when it closes she can't travel anywhere or have a decent holiday because lots of other places will be shut and the health risks. So it is going to be a bleak few months, lockdown or no bloody lockdown.
I wish there was something I could do to help.
Would a one off grant of the type given before really help? The problem seems to be that businesses such as your daughter's have simply become a lot less viable when we live with the uncertainty of Covid and new variants. Its hellish that the all so important Christmas season has been hit so hard for the second year in a row but this just might be the new normal for many years to come.
People may not be inclined to believe the government but they are scared. My daughter was trying to organise a night out tonight for her year group to celebrate the end of term. She has ultimately given up because too few were willing to risk going out. We are talking a post graduate diploma so the vast majority will be very early 20s. They did not want to be isolating over Christmas and were not willing to take the risk.
It's just one anecdote but I fear nights out before Christmas are going to be a lot rarer and far more poorly attended. It may not be an official lockdown but the optimistic language of July seems a long time ago.
That's driven by fear of the rules, though, rather than fear of the disease. Which is something we can do something about.
So, if the Mirror is right the extremely rich Rishi Sunak is in California on business; the state where he met his wife and where he, apparently, owns a home in Santa Monica and has lots of friends there. I'm not sure why this business trip wasn't public knowledge, but it clearly wasn't. Wonder why.
Could be a problem for Sunak. Whatever one's view of Omicron and what should be done, we are in the middle of another Covid crisis and it's clearly going to have major economic implications for lots of businesses. But the man to decide whether to lend support to hospitality businesses (which are going to lose loads of money whether or not more restrictions are put in place) is on a jolly business trip in California. I'll bet Cyclefree is livid.
Sunak has relatives there. Part of his wife's family are Californian.
And Cyclefree is always livid about something, in any case.
I've just got home.
My Daughter's business is taking 40% of the revenue she was taking in November let alone December. She is beyond depressed.
She normally closes for the first 2 weeks of January. Unless support is forthcoming, as other countries faced with this variant have provided, she will not be reopening. There is no point.
A business which survived, was viable, increased its turnover and was profitable will disappear because it simply cannot survive the loss of Xmas business without support. So all the support that was given before will have been for nothing.
Jobs lost. Local suppliers and breweries lose another customer and a village loses a venue. The government loses the tax revenues. What are the chances of the owner finding a buyer or tenant in this sort of environment? And yet the government is proposing to spend £21 million in the area to increase its attractiveness as a tourist destination. Where are people supposed to eat and stay when all the local venues have closed?
She is young. She is entrepreneurial and tough. But she looks utterly beaten and abandoned. It breaks my heart. She will not be the only one who feels like this. She and her generation are this country's future and this government is treating them like shit.
I expect better. At least I used to. Not any more.
More than livid I am utterly contemptuous of people like you who are so dismissive of what is happening to the young. And even more contemptuous of people like Sunak, cosseted by their money, who have no clue at the damage they are doing.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
This country has been shafting the young for years. It was similar under Labour - they pulled up many ladders behind them: free education, good pensions, etc. The Millennials et al have been used as a human bank account by the older generations to feather-bed their existence and protect their inheritances.
It is why I have encouraged my kids to use their dual nationality to seek work overseas. The UK was a great country once and being British was something you could take pride in. Nowadays it is a joke with a comedy govt which is mapping the way to becoming a shabby, insular backwater.
Some excellent points - I think you are right about the young being systematically shxfted - the interest rate on the govt student loan scheme is a scandal is an excellent example, meanwhile the wealthy over 60s remain absolutely steadfast in their grip on political power - one of the great political shifts in the 21C has been the systematic hoovering up of the grey vote by the Conservatives in England - its given us BREXIT, a sex-crazed liar as PM, a series of culture wars and an inflated sense of national importance that will culminate in disaster at some point. I do think the Blues will edge it (but will watch with an enthusiasm for a byelection I've not had in years)
That RPI plus 3% on Student Loans is just cruel.
I was talking to my neighbour. She is in her 20's, a teaching assistant, doing a teaching degree at night school. So, about the most sensible and cost effective way of doing a degree. Will leave with 18k of debt. We worked out that it could well be cheaper for her to get a loan from the bank upon graduation then pay it off over 5 years when she gets a teaching job (should be about 3% interest, if the current bank interest rates are sustained), than stay with the student loans company.
Aside from vocational degrees such as the above; University education is for the wealthy only. An extension of private school; but the student loans system enables the poor and naive to be exploited under the guise of 'access'.
Commercial bank offering unsecured personal loan for 3%?
Colour me sceptical.
I've taken out unsecured loans at this rate. Admittedly not recently though.
Another option is mortgage equity withdrawal, that could bring the rate down to sub 2%, dependent on personal circumstances. Or just borrow the money off a wealthy relative and pay it back at 1-2%; win win as the savings rate is hopeless.
What was the politicos rationale for the interest rate being so high? If you get a high flying job and reach six figures in your 20s, you pay it off early. The bigger chunk will presumably never pay it off. But there will be plenty in the middle who do pay it off but take most of their working life to do so.
Was it purely so they could privatise the loan book with as small a discount as possible? Poor form if so.
It's really, really hard to repay the student loan (deliberately so). I've just done the calculation, assuming CPI at 2% (increasing the repayment threshold each year), RPI at 3% (so the interest is 6% each year) for someone who starts earning at £25,000 and receives a 4% pay rise every year. They never pay back the £27,000 borrowed. Not only that, they never reduce the amount of debt owed. They make repayments of more than £28,000, but the debt outstanding grows every year to reach nearly £120,000 when it is written off.
If you increase the average pay rise to 5% every year, then in the final year the student sees the first drop in their outstanding debt, before the remaining £81,000 or so is written off. They will have paid more than £51,000.
You have to increase the average pay rise each year to 7% to achieve repayment (in the penultimate year) with a total of about £96,000 repaid. The salary at this year is £95,473 in inflation-adjusted terms (£166k nominal). This is far above the middle.
It can't be emphasised enough that you are not meant to pay this debt off. This is why Martin Lewis advises people that they would be simply throwing their money away to use a lump sum to repay some of the principal amount outstanding. It would be a fundamental change to the system to make repayment reasonably achievable. Maybe it would be a vote winner in the Home Counties, where more people would have a decent chance of clearing the debt, and reducing the amount if interest they pay. It would make no difference to most other people.
Yes. The LibDems re-designed it as a tax while the Tories presented it as a loan. It's the worst of both worlds, and for the government means that a large amount of the amounts owing in their accounts will be written off.
People, this is your future thanks to the green lobby.
Gas prices are at a near record level again and we are nowhere near a viable, fully scalable alternative that will keep the lights on and our homes warm in winter.
Still, stop drilling for oil and gas and stop further exploration. All good.
When we have five times the wind capacity then wind would still be generating a respectable 12 GW or so on a day like today, and we'd have the excess from previous days stored. If we would build the tidal lagoons, and the mini-nuke reactors too, then our exposure to fluctuations in global fossil fuel prices would be much reduced, perhaps eliminated.
Which is why, in a litany of silly mistakes, May's abandonment of tidal power was her worst one.
Our local tidal energy scheme just got conditional planning approval from the county council. It looks like the plan is to spend 2022 on the detailed plans and getting the other approvals they need, with construction 2023-4 and go live 2025.
It had been lined up to go five years ago, but the finances collapsed when the Tories withdrew the grants, as you say.
The Yar estuary? ISTR there was a tidal mill there in mediaeval/early modern times a little up from Yarmouth tourist info.
No, out at sea off the bottom of the island
Thanks, that makes sense for a tidal current system.
I have a theory on Omicron. I think in many, many cases it is producing cold-like symptoms and negative LFTs. These people are carrying on as normal and spreading it around. Therefore the number of real cases is far, far higher than official statistics. Given this the actual severity is much reduced compared to previous variants.
This does not mean that it cannot put severe pressures on health systems. Given the huge case numbers even a much reduced severity would produce more hospitalisations.
The other logical outcome if this is true is that over the next few weeks Omicron will rush through the whole population. This would result in us getting to herd immunity very quickly.
No way to prove this at all. But it is a possibility.
Why would Omicron produce negative LFTs though?
Anecdotally heard of people with cold symptoms who have done LFTs with negative results initially. After a while it then produces a positive. Either they had a cold and then Omicron or Omicron itself has this effect.
I'm showing all of the symptoms of Omicron though not continuously and test negative. After a real "uh oh" yesterday afternoon I was back to normal by the evening and feel okish this morning.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
Very well written post at the end of the previous post and I feel awful for people like your daughter, but who to vote for at the ballot box?
Over a hundred Tories rebelled against these motions because they saw the damage this is inflicting upon the economy and those who work for a living like your daughter.
Labour and Keir Starmer nodded these measures through without even asking for support for hospitality or anything else. No qualms or concerns.
What the government is doing is bad, but the Opposition is worse. Worst of both worlds.
The strong likelihood is that hospitality would have been severely affected without the legislation. Labour is at least arguing for government support for the industry over the next couple of months; the Chancellor has disappeared.
So, if the Mirror is right the extremely rich Rishi Sunak is in California on business; the state where he met his wife and where he, apparently, owns a home in Santa Monica and has lots of friends there. I'm not sure why this business trip wasn't public knowledge, but it clearly wasn't. Wonder why.
Could be a problem for Sunak. Whatever one's view of Omicron and what should be done, we are in the middle of another Covid crisis and it's clearly going to have major economic implications for lots of businesses. But the man to decide whether to lend support to hospitality businesses (which are going to lose loads of money whether or not more restrictions are put in place) is on a jolly business trip in California. I'll bet Cyclefree is livid.
Sunak has relatives there. Part of his wife's family are Californian.
And Cyclefree is always livid about something, in any case.
I've just got home.
My Daughter's business is taking 40% of the revenue she was taking in November let alone December. She is beyond depressed.
She normally closes for the first 2 weeks of January. Unless support is forthcoming, as other countries faced with this variant have provided, she will not be reopening. There is no point.
A business which survived, was viable, increased its turnover and was profitable will disappear because it simply cannot survive the loss of Xmas business without support. So all the support that was given before will have been for nothing.
Jobs lost. Local suppliers and breweries lose another customer and a village loses a venue. The government loses the tax revenues. What are the chances of the owner finding a buyer or tenant in this sort of environment? And yet the government is proposing to spend £21 million in the area to increase its attractiveness as a tourist destination. Where are people supposed to eat and stay when all the local venues have closed?
She is young. She is entrepreneurial and tough. But she looks utterly beaten and abandoned. It breaks my heart. She will not be the only one who feels like this. She and her generation are this country's future and this government is treating them like shit.
I expect better. At least I used to. Not any more.
More than livid I am utterly contemptuous of people like you who are so dismissive of what is happening to the young. And even more contemptuous of people like Sunak, cosseted by their money, who have no clue at the damage they are doing.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
This country has been shafting the young for years. It was similar under Labour - they pulled up many ladders behind them: free education, good pensions, etc. The Millennials et al have been used as a human bank account by the older generations to feather-bed their existence and protect their inheritances.
It is why I have encouraged my kids to use their dual nationality to seek work overseas. The UK was a great country once and being British was something you could take pride in. Nowadays it is a joke with a comedy govt which is mapping the way to becoming a shabby, insular backwater.
Some excellent points - I think you are right about the young being systematically shxfted - the interest rate on the govt student loan scheme is a scandal is an excellent example, meanwhile the wealthy over 60s remain absolutely steadfast in their grip on political power - one of the great political shifts in the 21C has been the systematic hoovering up of the grey vote by the Conservatives in England - its given us BREXIT, a sex-crazed liar as PM, a series of culture wars and an inflated sense of national importance that will culminate in disaster at some point. I do think the Blues will edge it (but will watch with an enthusiasm for a byelection I've not had in years)
That RPI plus 3% on Student Loans is just cruel.
I was talking to my neighbour. She is in her 20's, a teaching assistant, doing a teaching degree at night school. So, about the most sensible and cost effective way of doing a degree. Will leave with 18k of debt. We worked out that it could well be cheaper for her to get a loan from the bank upon graduation then pay it off over 5 years when she gets a teaching job (should be about 3% interest, if the current bank interest rates are sustained), than stay with the student loans company.
Aside from vocational degrees such as the above; University education is for the wealthy only. An extension of private school; but the student loans system enables the poor and naive to be exploited under the guise of 'access'.
Commercial bank offering unsecured personal loan for 3%?
Colour me sceptical.
I've taken out unsecured loans at this rate. Admittedly not recently though.
Another option is mortgage equity withdrawal, that could bring the rate down to sub 2%, dependent on personal circumstances. Or just borrow the money off a wealthy relative and pay it back at 1-2%; win win as the savings rate is hopeless.
The "borrow off wealthy relative" approach is the only option open to most in their 20s when it comes to a first flat.
I'd probably still be saving for mine if it wasn't for my parents. It will entrench generational inequality and exposes the Tory mantra that working hard gets you ahead.
Thats exactly right. Try and calculate how much you would need to save, 2x people on mid 20k salaries to buy a £400k house to bring up a family. It will never happen. Almost all the parents at my childs school who own their houses have acquired them through inherited wealth.
My cousin is in this situation, she and her husband both work - she works for the council, he's a teacher. They have two kids and have no prospect of affording a home. Even though their rent is more than a mortgage would be - and the high rent makes it impossible to save for a deposit. She's just that bit younger than me, that prices have kept ahead of her ability to buy and she's been locked out of home ownership. My aunt is a single parent and hasn't been able to work for some time as she has a long term degenerative condition, so bank of mum and dad isn't an option. The whole situation is profoundly unfair.
So, if the Mirror is right the extremely rich Rishi Sunak is in California on business; the state where he met his wife and where he, apparently, owns a home in Santa Monica and has lots of friends there. I'm not sure why this business trip wasn't public knowledge, but it clearly wasn't. Wonder why.
Could be a problem for Sunak. Whatever one's view of Omicron and what should be done, we are in the middle of another Covid crisis and it's clearly going to have major economic implications for lots of businesses. But the man to decide whether to lend support to hospitality businesses (which are going to lose loads of money whether or not more restrictions are put in place) is on a jolly business trip in California. I'll bet Cyclefree is livid.
Sunak has relatives there. Part of his wife's family are Californian.
And Cyclefree is always livid about something, in any case.
I've just got home.
My Daughter's business is taking 40% of the revenue she was taking in November let alone December. She is beyond depressed.
She normally closes for the first 2 weeks of January. Unless support is forthcoming, as other countries faced with this variant have provided, she will not be reopening. There is no point.
A business which survived, was viable, increased its turnover and was profitable will disappear because it simply cannot survive the loss of Xmas business without support. So all the support that was given before will have been for nothing.
Jobs lost. Local suppliers and breweries lose another customer and a village loses a venue. The government loses the tax revenues. What are the chances of the owner finding a buyer or tenant in this sort of environment? And yet the government is proposing to spend £21 million in the area to increase its attractiveness as a tourist destination. Where are people supposed to eat and stay when all the local venues have closed?
She is young. She is entrepreneurial and tough. But she looks utterly beaten and abandoned. It breaks my heart. She will not be the only one who feels like this. She and her generation are this country's future and this government is treating them like shit.
I expect better. At least I used to. Not any more.
More than livid I am utterly contemptuous of people like you who are so dismissive of what is happening to the young. And even more contemptuous of people like Sunak, cosseted by their money, who have no clue at the damage they are doing.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
This country has been shafting the young for years. It was similar under Labour - they pulled up many ladders behind them: free education, good pensions, etc. The Millennials et al have been used as a human bank account by the older generations to feather-bed their existence and protect their inheritances.
It is why I have encouraged my kids to use their dual nationality to seek work overseas. The UK was a great country once and being British was something you could take pride in. Nowadays it is a joke with a comedy govt which is mapping the way to becoming a shabby, insular backwater.
Some excellent points - I think you are right about the young being systematically shxfted - the interest rate on the govt student loan scheme is a scandal is an excellent example, meanwhile the wealthy over 60s remain absolutely steadfast in their grip on political power - one of the great political shifts in the 21C has been the systematic hoovering up of the grey vote by the Conservatives in England - its given us BREXIT, a sex-crazed liar as PM, a series of culture wars and an inflated sense of national importance that will culminate in disaster at some point. I do think the Blues will edge it (but will watch with an enthusiasm for a byelection I've not had in years)
That RPI plus 3% on Student Loans is just cruel.
I was talking to my neighbour. She is in her 20's, a teaching assistant, doing a teaching degree at night school. So, about the most sensible and cost effective way of doing a degree. Will leave with 18k of debt. We worked out that it could well be cheaper for her to get a loan from the bank upon graduation then pay it off over 5 years when she gets a teaching job (should be about 3% interest, if the current bank interest rates are sustained), than stay with the student loans company.
Aside from vocational degrees such as the above; University education is for the wealthy only. An extension of private school; but the student loans system enables the poor and naive to be exploited under the guise of 'access'.
Commercial bank offering unsecured personal loan for 3%?
Colour me sceptical.
I've taken out unsecured loans at this rate. Admittedly not recently though.
Another option is mortgage equity withdrawal, that could bring the rate down to sub 2%, dependent on personal circumstances. Or just borrow the money off a wealthy relative and pay it back at 1-2%; win win as the savings rate is hopeless.
What was the politicos rationale for the interest rate being so high? If you get a high flying job and reach six figures in your 20s, you pay it off early. The bigger chunk will presumably never pay it off. But there will be plenty in the middle who do pay it off but take most of their working life to do so.
Was it purely so they could privatise the loan book with as small a discount as possible? Poor form if so.
It's really, really hard to repay the student loan (deliberately so). I've just done the calculation, assuming CPI at 2% (increasing the repayment threshold each year), RPI at 3% (so the interest is 6% each year) for someone who starts earning at £25,000 and receives a 4% pay rise every year. They never pay back the £27,000 borrowed. Not only that, they never reduce the amount of debt owed. They make repayments of more than £28,000, but the debt outstanding grows every year to reach nearly £120,000 when it is written off.
If you increase the average pay rise to 5% every year, then in the final year the student sees the first drop in their outstanding debt, before the remaining £81,000 or so is written off. They will have paid more than £51,000.
You have to increase the average pay rise each year to 7% to achieve repayment (in the penultimate year) with a total of about £96,000 repaid. The salary at this year is £95,473 in inflation-adjusted terms (£166k nominal). This is far above the middle.
It can't be emphasised enough that you are not meant to pay this debt off. This is why Martin Lewis advises people that they would be simply throwing their money away to use a lump sum to repay some of the principal amount outstanding. It would be a fundamental change to the system to make repayment reasonably achievable. Maybe it would be a vote winner in the Home Counties, where more people would have a decent chance of clearing the debt, and reducing the amount if interest they pay. It would make no difference to most other people.
Yes. The LibDems re-designed it as a tax while the Tories presented it as a loan. It's the worst of both worlds, and for the government means that a large amount of the amounts owing in their accounts will be written off.
Might one ask, if much of the capital is to be written off doesn't that make the SLC a very dodgy bank?
Miss Cyclefree, my sympathies, must be very tough on your daughter, and you.
Said it yesterday, but this approach by the Government is categorically stupid. I'll never support vaccine passports, but even if the other restrictions are necessary (I am yet to be persuaded, though we'll find out soon enough) then implementing them to drastically cut hospitality activity while not helping the sector at all is practically designed to kill off businesses.
Remember that as @Philip_Thompson pointed out yesterday there are no rules about vaccine passports being required for pubs.
The current issues are the consequences of people panicking rather than any direct government policy - but the timing of this really couldn't be worse. This is peak profit season for restaurants and (with pantos/shows that are struggling to keep going) theatres
Depending on the mood of Mrs Eek we will be going out of Friday night but as she had Covid just over a month ago (and I probably did) that's because it's almost risk free for us.
I don't think its panic. Its rational. Breakfast news quite explicit today in linking those who tested positive yesterday are now isolating until Christmas. Many people will prioritize Christmas Day over going out in the next week. I don't blame them. I have sympathy for the pubs and restaurants and theatres and cinemas. i remember working in a pub in Dec 1998 - hugely busy, worked every day for a month.
I have a theory on Omicron. I think in many, many cases it is producing cold-like symptoms and negative LFTs. These people are carrying on as normal and spreading it around. Therefore the number of real cases is far, far higher than official statistics. Given this the actual severity is much reduced compared to previous variants.
This does not mean that it cannot put severe pressures on health systems. Given the huge case numbers even a much reduced severity would produce more hospitalisations.
The other logical outcome if this is true is that over the next few weeks Omicron will rush through the whole population. This would result in us getting to herd immunity very quickly.
No way to prove this at all. But it is a possibility.
Why would Omicron produce negative LFTs though?
We know that in the PCR tests Omicron has the S-gene target failure - this is jargon to say that one of the three proteins the PCR test looks for is sufficiently different in Omicron that it isn't identified. The positive test is determined by identifying the two other proteins.
I don't know how the LFTs work, but it could be that the protein they identify is sufficiently different in Omicron to be less easily detected.
The other possible reason is to do with how the sample is collected. If, say, Omicron produced more infection in the throat, rather than the nose, then the LFTs which use a nose swab only would be less likely to pick it up.
There might be other possible explanations.
When I have done LFTs I have swabbed both my throat and my nose. Isn't that standard? The government are putting a lot of emphasis on LFTs, even if they ran out of them. I really don't see them doing that if they were not working.
The simpler solution is surely that Omicron is not quite as prevalent in the community as we fear. But it is spreading fast, no doubt about that. Our steady state of infection over the summer is now taking off and seems likely to go much, much higher. Bloody annoying that this has happened at Christmas again, especially for the hospitality industry as @Cyclefree has demonstrated with her daughter.
Which is why the backbenchers rebelling against this were entirely right and not 'loons'.
We have triply-vaccinated the vulnerable. What we're doing to people via restrictions and distancing is worse than the virus.
Yes and no. Some of them absolutely are loons. And nobody was rebelling because they want stricter measures and cash for hospitality.
The subtext of this press conference is that we feel there is a need for more restrictions but we are willing neither politically nor economically to pay for them. The end. https://twitter.com/StigAbell/status/1471172707589013504
So, if the Mirror is right the extremely rich Rishi Sunak is in California on business; the state where he met his wife and where he, apparently, owns a home in Santa Monica and has lots of friends there. I'm not sure why this business trip wasn't public knowledge, but it clearly wasn't. Wonder why.
Could be a problem for Sunak. Whatever one's view of Omicron and what should be done, we are in the middle of another Covid crisis and it's clearly going to have major economic implications for lots of businesses. But the man to decide whether to lend support to hospitality businesses (which are going to lose loads of money whether or not more restrictions are put in place) is on a jolly business trip in California. I'll bet Cyclefree is livid.
Sunak has relatives there. Part of his wife's family are Californian.
And Cyclefree is always livid about something, in any case.
I've just got home.
My Daughter's business is taking 40% of the revenue she was taking in November let alone December. She is beyond depressed.
She normally closes for the first 2 weeks of January. Unless support is forthcoming, as other countries faced with this variant have provided, she will not be reopening. There is no point.
A business which survived, was viable, increased its turnover and was profitable will disappear because it simply cannot survive the loss of Xmas business without support. So all the support that was given before will have been for nothing.
Jobs lost. Local suppliers and breweries lose another customer and a village loses a venue. The government loses the tax revenues. What are the chances of the owner finding a buyer or tenant in this sort of environment? And yet the government is proposing to spend £21 million in the area to increase its attractiveness as a tourist destination. Where are people supposed to eat and stay when all the local venues have closed?
She is young. She is entrepreneurial and tough. But she looks utterly beaten and abandoned. It breaks my heart. She will not be the only one who feels like this. She and her generation are this country's future and this government is treating them like shit.
I expect better. At least I used to. Not any more.
More than livid I am utterly contemptuous of people like you who are so dismissive of what is happening to the young. And even more contemptuous of people like Sunak, cosseted by their money, who have no clue at the damage they are doing.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
This country has been shafting the young for years. It was similar under Labour - they pulled up many ladders behind them: free education, good pensions, etc. The Millennials et al have been used as a human bank account by the older generations to feather-bed their existence and protect their inheritances.
It is why I have encouraged my kids to use their dual nationality to seek work overseas. The UK was a great country once and being British was something you could take pride in. Nowadays it is a joke with a comedy govt which is mapping the way to becoming a shabby, insular backwater.
Some excellent points - I think you are right about the young being systematically shxfted - the interest rate on the govt student loan scheme is a scandal is an excellent example, meanwhile the wealthy over 60s remain absolutely steadfast in their grip on political power - one of the great political shifts in the 21C has been the systematic hoovering up of the grey vote by the Conservatives in England - its given us BREXIT, a sex-crazed liar as PM, a series of culture wars and an inflated sense of national importance that will culminate in disaster at some point. I do think the Blues will edge it (but will watch with an enthusiasm for a byelection I've not had in years)
That RPI plus 3% on Student Loans is just cruel.
I was talking to my neighbour. She is in her 20's, a teaching assistant, doing a teaching degree at night school. So, about the most sensible and cost effective way of doing a degree. Will leave with 18k of debt. We worked out that it could well be cheaper for her to get a loan from the bank upon graduation then pay it off over 5 years when she gets a teaching job (should be about 3% interest, if the current bank interest rates are sustained), than stay with the student loans company.
Aside from vocational degrees such as the above; University education is for the wealthy only. An extension of private school; but the student loans system enables the poor and naive to be exploited under the guise of 'access'.
Commercial bank offering unsecured personal loan for 3%?
Colour me sceptical.
I've taken out unsecured loans at this rate. Admittedly not recently though.
Another option is mortgage equity withdrawal, that could bring the rate down to sub 2%, dependent on personal circumstances. Or just borrow the money off a wealthy relative and pay it back at 1-2%; win win as the savings rate is hopeless.
What was the politicos rationale for the interest rate being so high? If you get a high flying job and reach six figures in your 20s, you pay it off early. The bigger chunk will presumably never pay it off. But there will be plenty in the middle who do pay it off but take most of their working life to do so.
Was it purely so they could privatise the loan book with as small a discount as possible? Poor form if so.
Well it was all pursued in the interest of sound public finances. Balancing the books. Paying our way in the world. Cutting the deficit. Strong and stable government in the National Interest.
Well yes, but it was all based on the premise that we needed to send 50% of our youth to university. Take that arbitrary target away and it becomes somewhat easier to suppose that do go through university. We could even decide to pay the tuition fees of those doing courses we were looking to encourage (i.e. STEM courses).
The fundamental problem is the decreasing graduate premium (which is, of course, a result of there being too many graduates). It simply makes no sense to spend 4-5 years of a 45 year career training and studying incurring over £100k of debt to earn salaries of less than £50k. As you point out those that do will never repay their student "loans" and will simply pay what is effectively a higher tax rate for most of their careers making the housing ladder more inaccessible and pension provision more challenging. How distant the Tory dream of a property owning democracy seems now.
So, if the Mirror is right the extremely rich Rishi Sunak is in California on business; the state where he met his wife and where he, apparently, owns a home in Santa Monica and has lots of friends there. I'm not sure why this business trip wasn't public knowledge, but it clearly wasn't. Wonder why.
Could be a problem for Sunak. Whatever one's view of Omicron and what should be done, we are in the middle of another Covid crisis and it's clearly going to have major economic implications for lots of businesses. But the man to decide whether to lend support to hospitality businesses (which are going to lose loads of money whether or not more restrictions are put in place) is on a jolly business trip in California. I'll bet Cyclefree is livid.
Sunak has relatives there. Part of his wife's family are Californian.
And Cyclefree is always livid about something, in any case.
I've just got home.
My Daughter's business is taking 40% of the revenue she was taking in November let alone December. She is beyond depressed.
She normally closes for the first 2 weeks of January. Unless support is forthcoming, as other countries faced with this variant have provided, she will not be reopening. There is no point.
A business which survived, was viable, increased its turnover and was profitable will disappear because it simply cannot survive the loss of Xmas business without support. So all the support that was given before will have been for nothing.
Jobs lost. Local suppliers and breweries lose another customer and a village loses a venue. The government loses the tax revenues. What are the chances of the owner finding a buyer or tenant in this sort of environment? And yet the government is proposing to spend £21 million in the area to increase its attractiveness as a tourist destination. Where are people supposed to eat and stay when all the local venues have closed?
She is young. She is entrepreneurial and tough. But she looks utterly beaten and abandoned. It breaks my heart. She will not be the only one who feels like this. She and her generation are this country's future and this government is treating them like shit.
I expect better. At least I used to. Not any more.
More than livid I am utterly contemptuous of people like you who are so dismissive of what is happening to the young. And even more contemptuous of people like Sunak, cosseted by their money, who have no clue at the damage they are doing.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
This country has been shafting the young for years. It was similar under Labour - they pulled up many ladders behind them: free education, good pensions, etc. The Millennials et al have been used as a human bank account by the older generations to feather-bed their existence and protect their inheritances.
It is why I have encouraged my kids to use their dual nationality to seek work overseas. The UK was a great country once and being British was something you could take pride in. Nowadays it is a joke with a comedy govt which is mapping the way to becoming a shabby, insular backwater.
Some excellent points - I think you are right about the young being systematically shxfted - the interest rate on the govt student loan scheme is a scandal is an excellent example, meanwhile the wealthy over 60s remain absolutely steadfast in their grip on political power - one of the great political shifts in the 21C has been the systematic hoovering up of the grey vote by the Conservatives in England - its given us BREXIT, a sex-crazed liar as PM, a series of culture wars and an inflated sense of national importance that will culminate in disaster at some point. I do think the Blues will edge it (but will watch with an enthusiasm for a byelection I've not had in years)
That RPI plus 3% on Student Loans is just cruel.
I was talking to my neighbour. She is in her 20's, a teaching assistant, doing a teaching degree at night school. So, about the most sensible and cost effective way of doing a degree. Will leave with 18k of debt. We worked out that it could well be cheaper for her to get a loan from the bank upon graduation then pay it off over 5 years when she gets a teaching job (should be about 3% interest, if the current bank interest rates are sustained), than stay with the student loans company.
Aside from vocational degrees such as the above; University education is for the wealthy only. An extension of private school; but the student loans system enables the poor and naive to be exploited under the guise of 'access'.
Commercial bank offering unsecured personal loan for 3%?
Colour me sceptical.
I've taken out unsecured loans at this rate. Admittedly not recently though.
Another option is mortgage equity withdrawal, that could bring the rate down to sub 2%, dependent on personal circumstances. Or just borrow the money off a wealthy relative and pay it back at 1-2%; win win as the savings rate is hopeless.
What was the politicos rationale for the interest rate being so high? If you get a high flying job and reach six figures in your 20s, you pay it off early. The bigger chunk will presumably never pay it off. But there will be plenty in the middle who do pay it off but take most of their working life to do so.
Was it purely so they could privatise the loan book with as small a discount as possible? Poor form if so.
Well it was all pursued in the interest of sound public finances. Balancing the books. Paying our way in the world. Cutting the deficit. Strong and stable government in the National Interest.
The previous answer of privatising the debt - to make an essentially cosmetic improvement to the government finances - is the correct one.
So, if the Mirror is right the extremely rich Rishi Sunak is in California on business; the state where he met his wife and where he, apparently, owns a home in Santa Monica and has lots of friends there. I'm not sure why this business trip wasn't public knowledge, but it clearly wasn't. Wonder why.
Could be a problem for Sunak. Whatever one's view of Omicron and what should be done, we are in the middle of another Covid crisis and it's clearly going to have major economic implications for lots of businesses. But the man to decide whether to lend support to hospitality businesses (which are going to lose loads of money whether or not more restrictions are put in place) is on a jolly business trip in California. I'll bet Cyclefree is livid.
Sunak has relatives there. Part of his wife's family are Californian.
And Cyclefree is always livid about something, in any case.
I've just got home.
My Daughter's business is taking 40% of the revenue she was taking in November let alone December. She is beyond depressed.
She normally closes for the first 2 weeks of January. Unless support is forthcoming, as other countries faced with this variant have provided, she will not be reopening. There is no point.
A business which survived, was viable, increased its turnover and was profitable will disappear because it simply cannot survive the loss of Xmas business without support. So all the support that was given before will have been for nothing.
Jobs lost. Local suppliers and breweries lose another customer and a village loses a venue. The government loses the tax revenues. What are the chances of the owner finding a buyer or tenant in this sort of environment? And yet the government is proposing to spend £21 million in the area to increase its attractiveness as a tourist destination. Where are people supposed to eat and stay when all the local venues have closed?
She is young. She is entrepreneurial and tough. But she looks utterly beaten and abandoned. It breaks my heart. She will not be the only one who feels like this. She and her generation are this country's future and this government is treating them like shit.
I expect better. At least I used to. Not any more.
More than livid I am utterly contemptuous of people like you who are so dismissive of what is happening to the young. And even more contemptuous of people like Sunak, cosseted by their money, who have no clue at the damage they are doing.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
This country has been shafting the young for years. It was similar under Labour - they pulled up many ladders behind them: free education, good pensions, etc. The Millennials et al have been used as a human bank account by the older generations to feather-bed their existence and protect their inheritances.
It is why I have encouraged my kids to use their dual nationality to seek work overseas. The UK was a great country once and being British was something you could take pride in. Nowadays it is a joke with a comedy govt which is mapping the way to becoming a shabby, insular backwater.
Some excellent points - I think you are right about the young being systematically shxfted - the interest rate on the govt student loan scheme is a scandal is an excellent example, meanwhile the wealthy over 60s remain absolutely steadfast in their grip on political power - one of the great political shifts in the 21C has been the systematic hoovering up of the grey vote by the Conservatives in England - its given us BREXIT, a sex-crazed liar as PM, a series of culture wars and an inflated sense of national importance that will culminate in disaster at some point. I do think the Blues will edge it (but will watch with an enthusiasm for a byelection I've not had in years)
That RPI plus 3% on Student Loans is just cruel.
and pointless, as it merely increases the headline debt the government will have to take on to its books rather than increasing the ultimate sum repaid.
I think I understand it. Remember that we replaced capitalism with bankism in this country. Debt is now an asset - student loans are sold off and thus show as revenue on the new owner's books. Debt is now an asset. The more debt, the higher the value of the asset.
And thus the government have been able to keep injecting money into the banks under people's noses without being accused of printing money. Instead they pay the universities the student loan payments, sell the debt to a bank who then use it as an asset.
When was debt ever not an asset? And if it wasn't an asset, what did the creditor have?
Today's decision for Daughter is whether to cancel the band she had booked for Saturday. It is a very popular band and the pub is normally rammed whenever it appears. But she has to pay them and if people don't turn up, it is pointless and costs her money.
She booked them ages ago - a great night out a week before Xmas. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
So another cancellation on the cards. One of the long-time regulars who has cancer is also close to the end. A lovely guy. It has been expected for a while but still a bit of a blow.
Every pub/restaurant around here is suffering in the same way.
It is not good enough to wait for a few weeks to give help. What's needed is not fannying about measures but a cash grant to cover the next 3 months.
Without this lots of businesses will close.
Daughter is not extending her lease, understandably. Still she wanted to end her lease in good order leaving a good business and having had a good Xmas season. Not now. She is heartbroken. And when it closes she can't travel anywhere or have a decent holiday because lots of other places will be shut and the health risks. So it is going to be a bleak few months, lockdown or no bloody lockdown.
I wish there was something I could do to help.
Would a one off grant of the type given before really help? The problem seems to be that businesses such as your daughter's have simply become a lot less viable when we live with the uncertainty of Covid and new variants. Its hellish that the all so important Christmas season has been hit so hard for the second year in a row but this just might be the new normal for many years to come.
People may not be inclined to believe the government but they are scared. My daughter was trying to organise a night out tonight for her year group to celebrate the end of term. She has ultimately given up because too few were willing to risk going out. We are talking a post graduate diploma so the vast majority will be very early 20s. They did not want to be isolating over Christmas and were not willing to take the risk.
It's just one anecdote but I fear nights out before Christmas are going to be a lot rarer and far more poorly attended. It may not be an official lockdown but the optimistic language of July seems a long time ago.
Except we are not "living with the virus". Living with the virus would be saying that the vulnerable have had three vaccine doses each already and putting faith in the vaccines instead of losing our minds and changing the law because of "cases".
This damage is the direct result of panicking over cases and changing the law rather than saying to "keep calm and carry on" while we live with the virus.
You said yesterday that the devastating measures passed two days ago were "not enough" rather than too much. Well actions have consequences, these are the consequences. These are the consequences of what you deemed "not enough" so what more do you advocate?
And given all the vulnerable should have had three vaccine doses by now at what point do we say "enough is enough" and live with the virus?
Kudos to the backbench rebels, what a disgusting shame that the rest of Parliament was prepared to throw livelihoods like this under the bus due to "cases" when we have vaccines. Shame on them all.
Today's decision for Daughter is whether to cancel the band she had booked for Saturday. It is a very popular band and the pub is normally rammed whenever it appears. But she has to pay them and if people don't turn up, it is pointless and costs her money.
She booked them ages ago - a great night out a week before Xmas. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
So another cancellation on the cards. One of the long-time regulars who has cancer is also close to the end. A lovely guy. It has been expected for a while but still a bit of a blow.
Every pub/restaurant around here is suffering in the same way.
It is not good enough to wait for a few weeks to give help. What's needed is not fannying about measures but a cash grant to cover the next 3 months.
Without this lots of businesses will close.
Daughter is not extending her lease, understandably. Still she wanted to end her lease in good order leaving a good business and having had a good Xmas season. Not now. She is heartbroken. And when it closes she can't travel anywhere or have a decent holiday because lots of other places will be shut and the health risks. So it is going to be a bleak few months, lockdown or no bloody lockdown.
I wish there was something I could do to help.
Would a one off grant of the type given before really help? The problem seems to be that businesses such as your daughter's have simply become a lot less viable when we live with the uncertainty of Covid and new variants. Its hellish that the all so important Christmas season has been hit so hard for the second year in a row but this just might be the new normal for many years to come.
People may not be inclined to believe the government but they are scared. My daughter was trying to organise a night out tonight for her year group to celebrate the end of term. She has ultimately given up because too few were willing to risk going out. We are talking a post graduate diploma so the vast majority will be very early 20s. They did not want to be isolating over Christmas and were not willing to take the risk.
It's just one anecdote but I fear nights out before Christmas are going to be a lot rarer and far more poorly attended. It may not be an official lockdown but the optimistic language of July seems a long time ago.
Yes a grant would help.To pay costs until Easter. When the season traditionally starts and people are out of doors again. To give time for a new vaccine. Or as I have said before a grant to help close businesses down provided the money is also used to start up new ones so that people see some hope.
But not this nonsense - where the government wounds but does not help.
It is shabby shabby behaviour - to pretend that because it is not an official lockdown no help is needed when the reality is very different. And in the middle of it all the Chancellor avoids votes and disappears off to the other side of the world and local MPs are nowhere to be seen.
The real dilemma for the Chancellor is how to target help to those small businesses who really need it like @Cyclefree daughter while not subsidising those with shareholders who should take the hit rather than the taxpayer
Miss Cyclefree, my sympathies, must be very tough on your daughter, and you.
Said it yesterday, but this approach by the Government is categorically stupid. I'll never support vaccine passports, but even if the other restrictions are necessary (I am yet to be persuaded, though we'll find out soon enough) then implementing them to drastically cut hospitality activity while not helping the sector at all is practically designed to kill off businesses.
Remember that as @Philip_Thompson pointed out yesterday there are no rules about vaccine passports being required for pubs.
The current issues are the consequences of people panicking rather than any direct government policy - but the timing of this really couldn't be worse. This is peak profit season for restaurants and (with pantos/shows that are struggling to keep going) theatres
Depending on the mood of Mrs Eek we will be going out of Friday night but as she had Covid just over a month ago (and I probably did) that's because it's almost risk free for us.
I don't think its panic. Its rational. Breakfast news quite explicit today in linking those who tested positive yesterday are now isolating until Christmas. Many people will prioritize Christmas Day over going out in the next week. I don't blame them. I have sympathy for the pubs and restaurants and theatres and cinemas. i remember working in a pub in Dec 1998 - hugely busy, worked every day for a month.
The irony is that most years we wouldn't be going out this time of year as its just too busy. The reason we will be going out is that we can provide some of the money they would usually be getting.
So, if the Mirror is right the extremely rich Rishi Sunak is in California on business; the state where he met his wife and where he, apparently, owns a home in Santa Monica and has lots of friends there. I'm not sure why this business trip wasn't public knowledge, but it clearly wasn't. Wonder why.
Could be a problem for Sunak. Whatever one's view of Omicron and what should be done, we are in the middle of another Covid crisis and it's clearly going to have major economic implications for lots of businesses. But the man to decide whether to lend support to hospitality businesses (which are going to lose loads of money whether or not more restrictions are put in place) is on a jolly business trip in California. I'll bet Cyclefree is livid.
Sunak has relatives there. Part of his wife's family are Californian.
And Cyclefree is always livid about something, in any case.
I've just got home.
My Daughter's business is taking 40% of the revenue she was taking in November let alone December. She is beyond depressed.
She normally closes for the first 2 weeks of January. Unless support is forthcoming, as other countries faced with this variant have provided, she will not be reopening. There is no point.
A business which survived, was viable, increased its turnover and was profitable will disappear because it simply cannot survive the loss of Xmas business without support. So all the support that was given before will have been for nothing.
Jobs lost. Local suppliers and breweries lose another customer and a village loses a venue. The government loses the tax revenues. What are the chances of the owner finding a buyer or tenant in this sort of environment? And yet the government is proposing to spend £21 million in the area to increase its attractiveness as a tourist destination. Where are people supposed to eat and stay when all the local venues have closed?
She is young. She is entrepreneurial and tough. But she looks utterly beaten and abandoned. It breaks my heart. She will not be the only one who feels like this. She and her generation are this country's future and this government is treating them like shit.
I expect better. At least I used to. Not any more.
More than livid I am utterly contemptuous of people like you who are so dismissive of what is happening to the young. And even more contemptuous of people like Sunak, cosseted by their money, who have no clue at the damage they are doing.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
This country has been shafting the young for years. It was similar under Labour - they pulled up many ladders behind them: free education, good pensions, etc. The Millennials et al have been used as a human bank account by the older generations to feather-bed their existence and protect their inheritances.
It is why I have encouraged my kids to use their dual nationality to seek work overseas. The UK was a great country once and being British was something you could take pride in. Nowadays it is a joke with a comedy govt which is mapping the way to becoming a shabby, insular backwater.
Some excellent points - I think you are right about the young being systematically shxfted - the interest rate on the govt student loan scheme is a scandal is an excellent example, meanwhile the wealthy over 60s remain absolutely steadfast in their grip on political power - one of the great political shifts in the 21C has been the systematic hoovering up of the grey vote by the Conservatives in England - its given us BREXIT, a sex-crazed liar as PM, a series of culture wars and an inflated sense of national importance that will culminate in disaster at some point. I do think the Blues will edge it (but will watch with an enthusiasm for a byelection I've not had in years)
That RPI plus 3% on Student Loans is just cruel.
I was talking to my neighbour. She is in her 20's, a teaching assistant, doing a teaching degree at night school. So, about the most sensible and cost effective way of doing a degree. Will leave with 18k of debt. We worked out that it could well be cheaper for her to get a loan from the bank upon graduation then pay it off over 5 years when she gets a teaching job (should be about 3% interest, if the current bank interest rates are sustained), than stay with the student loans company.
Aside from vocational degrees such as the above; University education is for the wealthy only. An extension of private school; but the student loans system enables the poor and naive to be exploited under the guise of 'access'.
Commercial bank offering unsecured personal loan for 3%?
Colour me sceptical.
I've taken out unsecured loans at this rate. Admittedly not recently though.
Another option is mortgage equity withdrawal, that could bring the rate down to sub 2%, dependent on personal circumstances. Or just borrow the money off a wealthy relative and pay it back at 1-2%; win win as the savings rate is hopeless.
What was the politicos rationale for the interest rate being so high? If you get a high flying job and reach six figures in your 20s, you pay it off early. The bigger chunk will presumably never pay it off. But there will be plenty in the middle who do pay it off but take most of their working life to do so.
Was it purely so they could privatise the loan book with as small a discount as possible? Poor form if so.
It's really, really hard to repay the student loan (deliberately so). I've just done the calculation, assuming CPI at 2% (increasing the repayment threshold each year), RPI at 3% (so the interest is 6% each year) for someone who starts earning at £25,000 and receives a 4% pay rise every year. They never pay back the £27,000 borrowed. Not only that, they never reduce the amount of debt owed. They make repayments of more than £28,000, but the debt outstanding grows every year to reach nearly £120,000 when it is written off.
If you increase the average pay rise to 5% every year, then in the final year the student sees the first drop in their outstanding debt, before the remaining £81,000 or so is written off. They will have paid more than £51,000.
You have to increase the average pay rise each year to 7% to achieve repayment (in the penultimate year) with a total of about £96,000 repaid. The salary at this year is £95,473 in inflation-adjusted terms (£166k nominal). This is far above the middle.
It can't be emphasised enough that you are not meant to pay this debt off. This is why Martin Lewis advises people that they would be simply throwing their money away to use a lump sum to repay some of the principal amount outstanding. It would be a fundamental change to the system to make repayment reasonably achievable. Maybe it would be a vote winner in the Home Counties, where more people would have a decent chance of clearing the debt, and reducing the amount if interest they pay. It would make no difference to most other people.
And who gets a pay rise anymore? All the time I've been in the public sector, it has been frozen at less than 1%. In my case, I did some calculations and worked out that inflation has eroded gains even in the context of multiple promotions. If you add on to that the problem of progressive taxation once you start earning well (of which the post 2012 student loan situation is a feature), it becomes prohibitively difficult to ever build up wealth through employment. I've said on here that people need to look at alternatives to traditional employment if they want to build up wealth and that is still very true, and entirely a product of bad government policy.
I have a theory on Omicron. I think in many, many cases it is producing cold-like symptoms and negative LFTs. These people are carrying on as normal and spreading it around. Therefore the number of real cases is far, far higher than official statistics. Given this the actual severity is much reduced compared to previous variants.
This does not mean that it cannot put severe pressures on health systems. Given the huge case numbers even a much reduced severity would produce more hospitalisations.
The other logical outcome if this is true is that over the next few weeks Omicron will rush through the whole population. This would result in us getting to herd immunity very quickly.
No way to prove this at all. But it is a possibility.
Why would Omicron produce negative LFTs though?
We know that in the PCR tests Omicron has the S-gene target failure - this is jargon to say that one of the three proteins the PCR test looks for is sufficiently different in Omicron that it isn't identified. The positive test is determined by identifying the two other proteins.
I don't know how the LFTs work, but it could be that the protein they identify is sufficiently different in Omicron to be less easily detected.
The other possible reason is to do with how the sample is collected. If, say, Omicron produced more infection in the throat, rather than the nose, then the LFTs which use a nose swab only would be less likely to pick it up.
There might be other possible explanations.
When I have done LFTs I have swabbed both my throat and my nose. Isn't that standard? The government are putting a lot of emphasis on LFTs, even if they ran out of them. I really don't see them doing that if they were not working.
The simpler solution is surely that Omicron is not quite as prevalent in the community as we fear. But it is spreading fast, no doubt about that. Our steady state of infection over the summer is now taking off and seems likely to go much, much higher. Bloody annoying that this has happened at Christmas again, especially for the hospitality industry as @Cyclefree has demonstrated with her daughter.
Which is why the backbenchers rebelling against this were entirely right and not 'loons'.
We have triply-vaccinated the vulnerable. What we're doing to people via restrictions and distancing is worse than the virus.
Yes and no. Some of them absolutely are loons. And nobody was rebelling because they want stricter measures and cash for hospitality.
No measures and hospitality wouldn't need the cash. The bookings were there.
So, if the Mirror is right the extremely rich Rishi Sunak is in California on business; the state where he met his wife and where he, apparently, owns a home in Santa Monica and has lots of friends there. I'm not sure why this business trip wasn't public knowledge, but it clearly wasn't. Wonder why.
Could be a problem for Sunak. Whatever one's view of Omicron and what should be done, we are in the middle of another Covid crisis and it's clearly going to have major economic implications for lots of businesses. But the man to decide whether to lend support to hospitality businesses (which are going to lose loads of money whether or not more restrictions are put in place) is on a jolly business trip in California. I'll bet Cyclefree is livid.
Sunak has relatives there. Part of his wife's family are Californian.
And Cyclefree is always livid about something, in any case.
I've just got home.
My Daughter's business is taking 40% of the revenue she was taking in November let alone December. She is beyond depressed.
She normally closes for the first 2 weeks of January. Unless support is forthcoming, as other countries faced with this variant have provided, she will not be reopening. There is no point.
A business which survived, was viable, increased its turnover and was profitable will disappear because it simply cannot survive the loss of Xmas business without support. So all the support that was given before will have been for nothing.
Jobs lost. Local suppliers and breweries lose another customer and a village loses a venue. The government loses the tax revenues. What are the chances of the owner finding a buyer or tenant in this sort of environment? And yet the government is proposing to spend £21 million in the area to increase its attractiveness as a tourist destination. Where are people supposed to eat and stay when all the local venues have closed?
She is young. She is entrepreneurial and tough. But she looks utterly beaten and abandoned. It breaks my heart. She will not be the only one who feels like this. She and her generation are this country's future and this government is treating them like shit.
I expect better. At least I used to. Not any more.
More than livid I am utterly contemptuous of people like you who are so dismissive of what is happening to the young. And even more contemptuous of people like Sunak, cosseted by their money, who have no clue at the damage they are doing.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
This country has been shafting the young for years. It was similar under Labour - they pulled up many ladders behind them: free education, good pensions, etc. The Millennials et al have been used as a human bank account by the older generations to feather-bed their existence and protect their inheritances.
It is why I have encouraged my kids to use their dual nationality to seek work overseas. The UK was a great country once and being British was something you could take pride in. Nowadays it is a joke with a comedy govt which is mapping the way to becoming a shabby, insular backwater.
Some excellent points - I think you are right about the young being systematically shxfted - the interest rate on the govt student loan scheme is a scandal is an excellent example, meanwhile the wealthy over 60s remain absolutely steadfast in their grip on political power - one of the great political shifts in the 21C has been the systematic hoovering up of the grey vote by the Conservatives in England - its given us BREXIT, a sex-crazed liar as PM, a series of culture wars and an inflated sense of national importance that will culminate in disaster at some point. I do think the Blues will edge it (but will watch with an enthusiasm for a byelection I've not had in years)
That RPI plus 3% on Student Loans is just cruel.
and pointless, as it merely increases the headline debt the government will have to take on to its books rather than increasing the ultimate sum repaid.
I think I understand it. Remember that we replaced capitalism with bankism in this country. Debt is now an asset - student loans are sold off and thus show as revenue on the new owner's books. Debt is now an asset. The more debt, the higher the value of the asset.
And thus the government have been able to keep injecting money into the banks under people's noses without being accused of printing money. Instead they pay the universities the student loan payments, sell the debt to a bank who then use it as an asset.
When was debt ever not an asset? And if it wasn't an asset, what did the creditor have?
Yes there remains let's not say an illiteracy on the left (generally, I'm sure RP is using a rhetorical flourish), but a view of the world which simply ignores many elements of our current financial system both good and bad. Debt is both a liability and an asset and so they are back where they started if they try to use it politically.
Anything below Con 45 and he is in big, big trouble. The only time their vote has dipped below that in this constituency at a general election was in 1997, when it was 40% (coincidentally,the same as in the by-election of 1961).
If the Lib Dems win, he's finished.
Only two predictions, neither with much confidence,
The Tories will win NS.
That result will buy Boris time until sometime in January.
I have a theory on Omicron. I think in many, many cases it is producing cold-like symptoms and negative LFTs. These people are carrying on as normal and spreading it around. Therefore the number of real cases is far, far higher than official statistics. Given this the actual severity is much reduced compared to previous variants.
This does not mean that it cannot put severe pressures on health systems. Given the huge case numbers even a much reduced severity would produce more hospitalisations.
The other logical outcome if this is true is that over the next few weeks Omicron will rush through the whole population. This would result in us getting to herd immunity very quickly.
No way to prove this at all. But it is a possibility.
Why would Omicron produce negative LFTs though?
Anecdotally heard of people with cold symptoms who have done LFTs with negative results initially. After a while it then produces a positive. Either they had a cold and then Omicron or Omicron itself has this effect.
I had sore throat/headache last Friday/Sat, tested negative. Felt fine since, so no further tests, Am boosted + 4 weeks. Its entirely possible I had a brief tussle with covid (in @Leon style - no proof). But we don't know.
I think the difficult part of the current situation is that genuinely it could be (a) mostly fine - a huge increase in cases with a very modest increase in hospitalization/death or (b) terrible - huge cases leading to huge numbers in hospital and dying. I tend very much towards (a) rather than (b), because the SA evidence suggests that, combined with the boosters having already reached the most vulnerable.
But we don't know YET, and it will be a couple more weeks to really get an idea.
People I know are falling like flies including quite a few who are triple jabbed. All with mild symptoms however. My daughter was supposed to return from uni on Friday. It will now be Christmas Eve.
On another point my wife has spent the last 3 days trying to volunteer as a jabber unsuccessfully. She only retired as a doctor in April and maintains her GMC registration in case she ever did want to do something in the future but she doesn't have a clinical licence to practice. Bizarrely if she ever does get through this mine field they will actually pay her when she is willing to do it for free. Not impressed.
Mr. eek, the idiot in Number Ten speaking of a tidal wave is no language designed to promote a keep calm and carry on approach to life.
Vaccine papers are wretched whether applied to few or many things, for the former will soon become the latter to 'make them more effective'.
In addition, the vaccinated can have and spread disease. So what's the advantage in having the unvaccinated (but presently free of infection) and infected yet vaccinated mingling together? If you're having that then why not shun the digital paperwork and let businesses at least survive?
The passes are just a system of government intrusion with no impact on public health but extending the tentacles of the state ever more, while simultaneously shafting the hospitality sector at what should be their biggest time of the year. China's social credit system is a warning to be avoided.
Miss Cyclefree, my sympathies, must be very tough on your daughter, and you.
Said it yesterday, but this approach by the Government is categorically stupid. I'll never support vaccine passports, but even if the other restrictions are necessary (I am yet to be persuaded, though we'll find out soon enough) then implementing them to drastically cut hospitality activity while not helping the sector at all is practically designed to kill off businesses.
Remember that as @Philip_Thompson pointed out yesterday there are no rules about vaccine passports being required for pubs.
The current issues are the consequences of people panicking rather than any direct government policy - but the timing of this really couldn't be worse. This is peak profit season for restaurants and (with pantos/shows that are struggling to keep going) theatres
Depending on the mood of Mrs Eek we will be going out of Friday night but as she had Covid just over a month ago (and I probably did) that's because it's almost risk free for us.
I don't think its panic. Its rational. Breakfast news quite explicit today in linking those who tested positive yesterday are now isolating until Christmas. Many people will prioritize Christmas Day over going out in the next week. I don't blame them. I have sympathy for the pubs and restaurants and theatres and cinemas. i remember working in a pub in Dec 1998 - hugely busy, worked every day for a month.
The irony is that most years we wouldn't be going out this time of year as its just too busy. The reason we will be going out is that we can provide some of the money they would usually be getting.
Yesterday I had a pub supper arranged with some friends. Two of them didn't want to go to the pub so we had a takeout from there. I paid 2x what the food actually cost to try to make up for service, booze, some extra starters, etc that we might have had had we been there.
And of course while we were waiting for the order to be ready we (one of the guys who hadn't wanted to go to the pub and I) stood......in the pub.
So, if the Mirror is right the extremely rich Rishi Sunak is in California on business; the state where he met his wife and where he, apparently, owns a home in Santa Monica and has lots of friends there. I'm not sure why this business trip wasn't public knowledge, but it clearly wasn't. Wonder why.
Could be a problem for Sunak. Whatever one's view of Omicron and what should be done, we are in the middle of another Covid crisis and it's clearly going to have major economic implications for lots of businesses. But the man to decide whether to lend support to hospitality businesses (which are going to lose loads of money whether or not more restrictions are put in place) is on a jolly business trip in California. I'll bet Cyclefree is livid.
Sunak has relatives there. Part of his wife's family are Californian.
And Cyclefree is always livid about something, in any case.
I've just got home.
My Daughter's business is taking 40% of the revenue she was taking in November let alone December. She is beyond depressed.
She normally closes for the first 2 weeks of January. Unless support is forthcoming, as other countries faced with this variant have provided, she will not be reopening. There is no point.
A business which survived, was viable, increased its turnover and was profitable will disappear because it simply cannot survive the loss of Xmas business without support. So all the support that was given before will have been for nothing.
Jobs lost. Local suppliers and breweries lose another customer and a village loses a venue. The government loses the tax revenues. What are the chances of the owner finding a buyer or tenant in this sort of environment? And yet the government is proposing to spend £21 million in the area to increase its attractiveness as a tourist destination. Where are people supposed to eat and stay when all the local venues have closed?
She is young. She is entrepreneurial and tough. But she looks utterly beaten and abandoned. It breaks my heart. She will not be the only one who feels like this. She and her generation are this country's future and this government is treating them like shit.
I expect better. At least I used to. Not any more.
More than livid I am utterly contemptuous of people like you who are so dismissive of what is happening to the young. And even more contemptuous of people like Sunak, cosseted by their money, who have no clue at the damage they are doing.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
This country has been shafting the young for years. It was similar under Labour - they pulled up many ladders behind them: free education, good pensions, etc. The Millennials et al have been used as a human bank account by the older generations to feather-bed their existence and protect their inheritances.
It is why I have encouraged my kids to use their dual nationality to seek work overseas. The UK was a great country once and being British was something you could take pride in. Nowadays it is a joke with a comedy govt which is mapping the way to becoming a shabby, insular backwater.
Some excellent points - I think you are right about the young being systematically shxfted - the interest rate on the govt student loan scheme is a scandal is an excellent example, meanwhile the wealthy over 60s remain absolutely steadfast in their grip on political power - one of the great political shifts in the 21C has been the systematic hoovering up of the grey vote by the Conservatives in England - its given us BREXIT, a sex-crazed liar as PM, a series of culture wars and an inflated sense of national importance that will culminate in disaster at some point. I do think the Blues will edge it (but will watch with an enthusiasm for a byelection I've not had in years)
That RPI plus 3% on Student Loans is just cruel.
I was talking to my neighbour. She is in her 20's, a teaching assistant, doing a teaching degree at night school. So, about the most sensible and cost effective way of doing a degree. Will leave with 18k of debt. We worked out that it could well be cheaper for her to get a loan from the bank upon graduation then pay it off over 5 years when she gets a teaching job (should be about 3% interest, if the current bank interest rates are sustained), than stay with the student loans company.
Aside from vocational degrees such as the above; University education is for the wealthy only. An extension of private school; but the student loans system enables the poor and naive to be exploited under the guise of 'access'.
Commercial bank offering unsecured personal loan for 3%?
Colour me sceptical.
I've taken out unsecured loans at this rate. Admittedly not recently though.
Another option is mortgage equity withdrawal, that could bring the rate down to sub 2%, dependent on personal circumstances. Or just borrow the money off a wealthy relative and pay it back at 1-2%; win win as the savings rate is hopeless.
What was the politicos rationale for the interest rate being so high? If you get a high flying job and reach six figures in your 20s, you pay it off early. The bigger chunk will presumably never pay it off. But there will be plenty in the middle who do pay it off but take most of their working life to do so.
Was it purely so they could privatise the loan book with as small a discount as possible? Poor form if so.
Well it was all pursued in the interest of sound public finances. Balancing the books. Paying our way in the world. Cutting the deficit. Strong and stable government in the National Interest.
Well yes, but it was all based on the premise that we needed to send 50% of our youth to university. Take that arbitrary target away and it becomes somewhat easier to suppose that do go through university. We could even decide to pay the tuition fees of those doing courses we were looking to encourage (i.e. STEM courses).
The fundamental problem is the decreasing graduate premium (which is, of course, a result of there being too many graduates). It simply makes no sense to spend 4-5 years of a 45 year career training and studying incurring over £100k of debt to earn salaries of less than £50k. As you point out those that do will never repay their student "loans" and will simply pay what is effectively a higher tax rate for most of their careers making the housing ladder more inaccessible and pension provision more challenging. How distant the Tory dream of a property owning democracy seems now.
Mass property ownership was only feasible because decades of social democracy had flattened the income and wealth distribution. Now, decades of Thatcherism have led to an increasing concentration of wealth. In other words, mass home ownership and popular share ownership were only transitory phases. The real Tory dream is the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, and that is where we are heading.
I have a theory on Omicron. I think in many, many cases it is producing cold-like symptoms and negative LFTs. These people are carrying on as normal and spreading it around. Therefore the number of real cases is far, far higher than official statistics. Given this the actual severity is much reduced compared to previous variants.
This does not mean that it cannot put severe pressures on health systems. Given the huge case numbers even a much reduced severity would produce more hospitalisations.
The other logical outcome if this is true is that over the next few weeks Omicron will rush through the whole population. This would result in us getting to herd immunity very quickly.
No way to prove this at all. But it is a possibility.
Why would Omicron produce negative LFTs though?
We know that in the PCR tests Omicron has the S-gene target failure - this is jargon to say that one of the three proteins the PCR test looks for is sufficiently different in Omicron that it isn't identified. The positive test is determined by identifying the two other proteins.
I don't know how the LFTs work, but it could be that the protein they identify is sufficiently different in Omicron to be less easily detected.
The other possible reason is to do with how the sample is collected. If, say, Omicron produced more infection in the throat, rather than the nose, then the LFTs which use a nose swab only would be less likely to pick it up.
There might be other possible explanations.
When I have done LFTs I have swabbed both my throat and my nose. Isn't that standard? The government are putting a lot of emphasis on LFTs, even if they ran out of them. I really don't see them doing that if they were not working.
The simpler solution is surely that Omicron is not quite as prevalent in the community as we fear. But it is spreading fast, no doubt about that. Our steady state of infection over the summer is now taking off and seems likely to go much, much higher. Bloody annoying that this has happened at Christmas again, especially for the hospitality industry as @Cyclefree has demonstrated with her daughter.
Which is why the backbenchers rebelling against this were entirely right and not 'loons'.
We have triply-vaccinated the vulnerable. What we're doing to people via restrictions and distancing is worse than the virus.
Yes and no. Some of them absolutely are loons. And nobody was rebelling because they want stricter measures and cash for hospitality.
And some of it is political positioning. Amid the criticism for Starmer's backing of the regulations, his doing so gave Tories a free pass to rebel - had Labour been opposed, Tory whipping would have been more effective. Some Tory MPs can see the beginning of the end for the clown and are chalking up some political capital by rebelling now, knowing they won't change the outcome.
Today's decision for Daughter is whether to cancel the band she had booked for Saturday. It is a very popular band and the pub is normally rammed whenever it appears. But she has to pay them and if people don't turn up, it is pointless and costs her money.
She booked them ages ago - a great night out a week before Xmas. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
So another cancellation on the cards. One of the long-time regulars who has cancer is also close to the end. A lovely guy. It has been expected for a while but still a bit of a blow.
Every pub/restaurant around here is suffering in the same way.
It is not good enough to wait for a few weeks to give help. What's needed is not fannying about measures but a cash grant to cover the next 3 months.
Without this lots of businesses will close.
Daughter is not extending her lease, understandably. Still she wanted to end her lease in good order leaving a good business and having had a good Xmas season. Not now. She is heartbroken. And when it closes she can't travel anywhere or have a decent holiday because lots of other places will be shut and the health risks. So it is going to be a bleak few months, lockdown or no bloody lockdown.
I wish there was something I could do to help.
Would a one off grant of the type given before really help? The problem seems to be that businesses such as your daughter's have simply become a lot less viable when we live with the uncertainty of Covid and new variants. Its hellish that the all so important Christmas season has been hit so hard for the second year in a row but this just might be the new normal for many years to come.
People may not be inclined to believe the government but they are scared. My daughter was trying to organise a night out tonight for her year group to celebrate the end of term. She has ultimately given up because too few were willing to risk going out. We are talking a post graduate diploma so the vast majority will be very early 20s. They did not want to be isolating over Christmas and were not willing to take the risk.
It's just one anecdote but I fear nights out before Christmas are going to be a lot rarer and far more poorly attended. It may not be an official lockdown but the optimistic language of July seems a long time ago.
Yes a grant would help.To pay costs until Easter. When the season traditionally starts and people are out of doors again. To give time for a new vaccine. Or as I have said before a grant to help close businesses down provided the money is also used to start up new ones so that people see some hope.
But not this nonsense - where the government wounds but does not help.
It is shabby shabby behaviour - to pretend that because it is not an official lockdown no help is needed when the reality is very different. And in the middle of it all the Chancellor avoids votes and disappears off to the other side of the world and local MPs are nowhere to be seen.
If Sunak’s absence this week is really because he is on holiday in California, then that is sufficiently poor form that it should exclude him from the pending leadership election and call into question his fitness for high office at all.
Perhaps I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt too much, but I doubt the story.
So, if the Mirror is right the extremely rich Rishi Sunak is in California on business; the state where he met his wife and where he, apparently, owns a home in Santa Monica and has lots of friends there. I'm not sure why this business trip wasn't public knowledge, but it clearly wasn't. Wonder why.
Could be a problem for Sunak. Whatever one's view of Omicron and what should be done, we are in the middle of another Covid crisis and it's clearly going to have major economic implications for lots of businesses. But the man to decide whether to lend support to hospitality businesses (which are going to lose loads of money whether or not more restrictions are put in place) is on a jolly business trip in California. I'll bet Cyclefree is livid.
Sunak has relatives there. Part of his wife's family are Californian.
And Cyclefree is always livid about something, in any case.
I've just got home.
My Daughter's business is taking 40% of the revenue she was taking in November let alone December. She is beyond depressed.
She normally closes for the first 2 weeks of January. Unless support is forthcoming, as other countries faced with this variant have provided, she will not be reopening. There is no point.
A business which survived, was viable, increased its turnover and was profitable will disappear because it simply cannot survive the loss of Xmas business without support. So all the support that was given before will have been for nothing.
Jobs lost. Local suppliers and breweries lose another customer and a village loses a venue. The government loses the tax revenues. What are the chances of the owner finding a buyer or tenant in this sort of environment? And yet the government is proposing to spend £21 million in the area to increase its attractiveness as a tourist destination. Where are people supposed to eat and stay when all the local venues have closed?
She is young. She is entrepreneurial and tough. But she looks utterly beaten and abandoned. It breaks my heart. She will not be the only one who feels like this. She and her generation are this country's future and this government is treating them like shit.
I expect better. At least I used to. Not any more.
More than livid I am utterly contemptuous of people like you who are so dismissive of what is happening to the young. And even more contemptuous of people like Sunak, cosseted by their money, who have no clue at the damage they are doing.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
This country has been shafting the young for years. It was similar under Labour - they pulled up many ladders behind them: free education, good pensions, etc. The Millennials et al have been used as a human bank account by the older generations to feather-bed their existence and protect their inheritances.
It is why I have encouraged my kids to use their dual nationality to seek work overseas. The UK was a great country once and being British was something you could take pride in. Nowadays it is a joke with a comedy govt which is mapping the way to becoming a shabby, insular backwater.
Some excellent points - I think you are right about the young being systematically shxfted - the interest rate on the govt student loan scheme is a scandal is an excellent example, meanwhile the wealthy over 60s remain absolutely steadfast in their grip on political power - one of the great political shifts in the 21C has been the systematic hoovering up of the grey vote by the Conservatives in England - its given us BREXIT, a sex-crazed liar as PM, a series of culture wars and an inflated sense of national importance that will culminate in disaster at some point. I do think the Blues will edge it (but will watch with an enthusiasm for a byelection I've not had in years)
That RPI plus 3% on Student Loans is just cruel.
and pointless, as it merely increases the headline debt the government will have to take on to its books rather than increasing the ultimate sum repaid.
I think I understand it. Remember that we replaced capitalism with bankism in this country. Debt is now an asset - student loans are sold off and thus show as revenue on the new owner's books. Debt is now an asset. The more debt, the higher the value of the asset.
And thus the government have been able to keep injecting money into the banks under people's noses without being accused of printing money. Instead they pay the universities the student loan payments, sell the debt to a bank who then use it as an asset.
When was debt ever not an asset? And if it wasn't an asset, what did the creditor have?
Yes there remains let's not say an illiteracy on the left (generally, I'm sure RP is using a rhetorical flourish), but a view of the world which simply ignores many elements of our current financial system both good and bad. Debt is both a liability and an asset and so they are back where they started if they try to use it politically.
Same with Big G and his "shareholders".
Big G wasn't a leftwinger last time I looked - except perhaps to HYUFD.
Miss Cyclefree, my sympathies, must be very tough on your daughter, and you.
Said it yesterday, but this approach by the Government is categorically stupid. I'll never support vaccine passports, but even if the other restrictions are necessary (I am yet to be persuaded, though we'll find out soon enough) then implementing them to drastically cut hospitality activity while not helping the sector at all is practically designed to kill off businesses.
Remember that as @Philip_Thompson pointed out yesterday there are no rules about vaccine passports being required for pubs.
The current issues are the consequences of people panicking rather than any direct government policy - but the timing of this really couldn't be worse. This is peak profit season for restaurants and (with pantos/shows that are struggling to keep going) theatres
Depending on the mood of Mrs Eek we will be going out of Friday night but as she had Covid just over a month ago (and I probably did) that's because it's almost risk free for us.
I don't think its panic. Its rational. Breakfast news quite explicit today in linking those who tested positive yesterday are now isolating until Christmas. Many people will prioritize Christmas Day over going out in the next week. I don't blame them. I have sympathy for the pubs and restaurants and theatres and cinemas. i remember working in a pub in Dec 1998 - hugely busy, worked every day for a month.
The irony is that most years we wouldn't be going out this time of year as its just too busy. The reason we will be going out is that we can provide some of the money they would usually be getting.
Yesterday I had a pub supper arranged with some friends. Two of them didn't want to go to the pub so we had a takeout from there. I paid 2x what the food actually cost to try to make up for service, booze, some extra starters, etc that we might have had had we been there.
And of course while we were waiting for the order to be ready we (one of the guys who hadn't wanted to go to the pub and I) stood......in the pub.
Not really sure what your point is. Socialising in a pub or restaurant at the moment without masks and covid passports is sheer and utter madness. Most everyone apart from the Far Right thinks the same and is acting accordingly.
We vote with our feet and we're not going out now.
The real dilemma for the Chancellor is how to target help to those small businesses who really need it like @Cyclefree daughter while not subsidising those with shareholders who should take the hit rather than the taxpayer
Every business has shareholders Big G.
I think you know what I am saying
Small businesses are not the same as multi national businesses
France is to tighten up restrictions on travel from Britain following the spread of the Omicron variant. Returning travellers will need a negative test taken less than 24 hours before travel, and tourism is to be limited.
France….with around half the booster rate and higher positivity rate than the UK
It sticks in the gullet to be fair to the French, but to be fair we have just shot past them on overall cases of which we think most are Omicron.
And be glad that out Govt has imposed relatively minimal restrictions on social life. France has just removed health pass benefits from Unboosted 65+ people. These are:
enter any restaurant or cafe, inter-city train travel and going to some cultural venues
Today's decision for Daughter is whether to cancel the band she had booked for Saturday. It is a very popular band and the pub is normally rammed whenever it appears. But she has to pay them and if people don't turn up, it is pointless and costs her money.
She booked them ages ago - a great night out a week before Xmas. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
So another cancellation on the cards. One of the long-time regulars who has cancer is also close to the end. A lovely guy. It has been expected for a while but still a bit of a blow.
Every pub/restaurant around here is suffering in the same way.
It is not good enough to wait for a few weeks to give help. What's needed is not fannying about measures but a cash grant to cover the next 3 months.
Without this lots of businesses will close.
Daughter is not extending her lease, understandably. Still she wanted to end her lease in good order leaving a good business and having had a good Xmas season. Not now. She is heartbroken. And when it closes she can't travel anywhere or have a decent holiday because lots of other places will be shut and the health risks. So it is going to be a bleak few months, lockdown or no bloody lockdown.
I wish there was something I could do to help.
Would a one off grant of the type given before really help? The problem seems to be that businesses such as your daughter's have simply become a lot less viable when we live with the uncertainty of Covid and new variants. Its hellish that the all so important Christmas season has been hit so hard for the second year in a row but this just might be the new normal for many years to come.
People may not be inclined to believe the government but they are scared. My daughter was trying to organise a night out tonight for her year group to celebrate the end of term. She has ultimately given up because too few were willing to risk going out. We are talking a post graduate diploma so the vast majority will be very early 20s. They did not want to be isolating over Christmas and were not willing to take the risk.
It's just one anecdote but I fear nights out before Christmas are going to be a lot rarer and far more poorly attended. It may not be an official lockdown but the optimistic language of July seems a long time ago.
Except we are not "living with the virus". Living with the virus would be saying that the vulnerable have had three vaccine doses each already and putting faith in the vaccines instead of losing our minds and changing the law because of "cases".
This damage is the direct result of panicking over cases and changing the law rather than saying to "keep calm and carry on" while we live with the virus.
You said yesterday that the devastating measures passed two days ago were "not enough" rather than too much. Well actions have consequences, these are the consequences. These are the consequences of what you deemed "not enough" so what more do you advocate?
And given all the vulnerable should have had three vaccine doses by now at what point do we say "enough is enough" and live with the virus?
Kudos to the backbench rebels, what a disgusting shame that the rest of Parliament was prepared to throw livelihoods like this under the bus due to "cases" when we have vaccines. Shame on them all.
The need for more steps to slow the speed of spread of this variant is a matter of arithmetic. We need to flatten the curve once again or the NHS will be overwhelmed. Whitty seems to think its probably too late to avoid this. His judgment has been pretty good to date. Its now a question of how bad, not good or bad.
I agree with @Cyclefree that these necessary steps should have created support as earlier lockdowns did but I am also conscious that the younger generation that have been shafted by the old in so many ways are going to be left with the problem of repaying this debt too.
Streeting tells @TimesRadio “we understand the chancellor is currently out of the country in California. So perhaps he might want to get himself on a flight back and get a grip on the situation because businesses need certainty and confidence now." https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1471401729891905537
Yes, as I heard it the Today programme has been buried under reps of the industry demanding that support be extended from end of March through next summer. Business rates etc.
(And yes, I do have a stake in the similar leisure industry.)
Like others have said the government has asked people to use their own judgement and evaluate their risk so millions are hunkering down right now. On a human level I think it's good to see that people are not only looking after themselves best they can but also others by trying to reduce the spread and do their bit to help reduce the strain on the NHS.
But it's absolutely devastating for business and the government should be doing more to support them through this period. Omicron has had a rapid rise, but there are no excuses in terms of planning what might happen to the economy during winter. It was expected we would have increases in cases and hospitalisations in winter with Delta and some proactive pre-planning to support businesses especially the hospitality sector should have been thought out.
So, if the Mirror is right the extremely rich Rishi Sunak is in California on business; the state where he met his wife and where he, apparently, owns a home in Santa Monica and has lots of friends there. I'm not sure why this business trip wasn't public knowledge, but it clearly wasn't. Wonder why.
Could be a problem for Sunak. Whatever one's view of Omicron and what should be done, we are in the middle of another Covid crisis and it's clearly going to have major economic implications for lots of businesses. But the man to decide whether to lend support to hospitality businesses (which are going to lose loads of money whether or not more restrictions are put in place) is on a jolly business trip in California. I'll bet Cyclefree is livid.
Sunak has relatives there. Part of his wife's family are Californian.
And Cyclefree is always livid about something, in any case.
I've just got home.
My Daughter's business is taking 40% of the revenue she was taking in November let alone December. She is beyond depressed.
She normally closes for the first 2 weeks of January. Unless support is forthcoming, as other countries faced with this variant have provided, she will not be reopening. There is no point.
A business which survived, was viable, increased its turnover and was profitable will disappear because it simply cannot survive the loss of Xmas business without support. So all the support that was given before will have been for nothing.
Jobs lost. Local suppliers and breweries lose another customer and a village loses a venue. The government loses the tax revenues. What are the chances of the owner finding a buyer or tenant in this sort of environment? And yet the government is proposing to spend £21 million in the area to increase its attractiveness as a tourist destination. Where are people supposed to eat and stay when all the local venues have closed?
She is young. She is entrepreneurial and tough. But she looks utterly beaten and abandoned. It breaks my heart. She will not be the only one who feels like this. She and her generation are this country's future and this government is treating them like shit.
I expect better. At least I used to. Not any more.
More than livid I am utterly contemptuous of people like you who are so dismissive of what is happening to the young. And even more contemptuous of people like Sunak, cosseted by their money, who have no clue at the damage they are doing.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
This country has been shafting the young for years. It was similar under Labour - they pulled up many ladders behind them: free education, good pensions, etc. The Millennials et al have been used as a human bank account by the older generations to feather-bed their existence and protect their inheritances.
It is why I have encouraged my kids to use their dual nationality to seek work overseas. The UK was a great country once and being British was something you could take pride in. Nowadays it is a joke with a comedy govt which is mapping the way to becoming a shabby, insular backwater.
Some excellent points - I think you are right about the young being systematically shxfted - the interest rate on the govt student loan scheme is a scandal is an excellent example, meanwhile the wealthy over 60s remain absolutely steadfast in their grip on political power - one of the great political shifts in the 21C has been the systematic hoovering up of the grey vote by the Conservatives in England - its given us BREXIT, a sex-crazed liar as PM, a series of culture wars and an inflated sense of national importance that will culminate in disaster at some point. I do think the Blues will edge it (but will watch with an enthusiasm for a byelection I've not had in years)
That RPI plus 3% on Student Loans is just cruel.
I was talking to my neighbour. She is in her 20's, a teaching assistant, doing a teaching degree at night school. So, about the most sensible and cost effective way of doing a degree. Will leave with 18k of debt. We worked out that it could well be cheaper for her to get a loan from the bank upon graduation then pay it off over 5 years when she gets a teaching job (should be about 3% interest, if the current bank interest rates are sustained), than stay with the student loans company.
Aside from vocational degrees such as the above; University education is for the wealthy only. An extension of private school; but the student loans system enables the poor and naive to be exploited under the guise of 'access'.
Commercial bank offering unsecured personal loan for 3%?
Colour me sceptical.
I've taken out unsecured loans at this rate. Admittedly not recently though.
Another option is mortgage equity withdrawal, that could bring the rate down to sub 2%, dependent on personal circumstances. Or just borrow the money off a wealthy relative and pay it back at 1-2%; win win as the savings rate is hopeless.
What was the politicos rationale for the interest rate being so high? If you get a high flying job and reach six figures in your 20s, you pay it off early. The bigger chunk will presumably never pay it off. But there will be plenty in the middle who do pay it off but take most of their working life to do so.
Was it purely so they could privatise the loan book with as small a discount as possible? Poor form if so.
It's really, really hard to repay the student loan (deliberately so). I've just done the calculation, assuming CPI at 2% (increasing the repayment threshold each year), RPI at 3% (so the interest is 6% each year) for someone who starts earning at £25,000 and receives a 4% pay rise every year. They never pay back the £27,000 borrowed. Not only that, they never reduce the amount of debt owed. They make repayments of more than £28,000, but the debt outstanding grows every year to reach nearly £120,000 when it is written off.
If you increase the average pay rise to 5% every year, then in the final year the student sees the first drop in their outstanding debt, before the remaining £81,000 or so is written off. They will have paid more than £51,000.
You have to increase the average pay rise each year to 7% to achieve repayment (in the penultimate year) with a total of about £96,000 repaid. The salary at this year is £95,473 in inflation-adjusted terms (£166k nominal). This is far above the middle.
It can't be emphasised enough that you are not meant to pay this debt off. This is why Martin Lewis advises people that they would be simply throwing their money away to use a lump sum to repay some of the principal amount outstanding. It would be a fundamental change to the system to make repayment reasonably achievable. Maybe it would be a vote winner in the Home Counties, where more people would have a decent chance of clearing the debt, and reducing the amount if interest they pay. It would make no difference to most other people.
And who gets a pay rise anymore? All the time I've been in the public sector, it has been frozen at less than 1%. In my case, I did some calculations and worked out that inflation has eroded gains even in the context of multiple promotions. If you add on to that the problem of progressive taxation once you start earning well (of which the post 2012 student loan situation is a feature), it becomes prohibitively difficult to ever build up wealth through employment. I've said on here that people need to look at alternatives to traditional employment if they want to build up wealth and that is still very true, and entirely a product of bad government policy.
In planning, most local councils now have to take on contractors because it's simply not worth doing the job for the money they get paid. Mrs Eek was on £27,000 or so when she left planning in 2004, returning in 2018 (if you don't believe in God or freak events the story of how she returned is implausible). She is now on £35,000 doing a more senior job. No one is going to work for that money especially down south.
As for student loans - as I pointed out to twin B, unless you can pay the entire debt off there is zero point paying any of it of. The money we saved for her will eventually be a housing deposit and (if I can afford it) a monthly sub to cover some of her repayment costs.
Quite an interesting survey, though one has to fight past the spin the people who commissioned with give it (even though I generally agree with them). Essentially people want a quiet life without adventures rather than a strong military and a vigorous foreign policy:
Anything below Con 45 and he is in big, big trouble. The only time their vote has dipped below that in this constituency at a general election was in 1997, when it was 40% (coincidentally,the same as in the by-election of 1961).
If the Lib Dems win, he's finished.
Only two predictions, neither with much confidence,
The Tories will win NS.
That result will buy Boris time until sometime in January.
I am certainly less certain of Liberal win tonight than I was. I think Johnson's taking the stage with his PM broadcast will have tipped a few sit on hands Tories to turn out to support their team in a difficult time.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
Very well written post at the end of the previous post and I feel awful for people like your daughter, but who to vote for at the ballot box?
Over a hundred Tories rebelled against these motions because they saw the damage this is inflicting upon the economy and those who work for a living like your daughter.
Labour and Keir Starmer nodded these measures through without even asking for support for hospitality or anything else. No qualms or concerns.
What the government is doing is bad, but the Opposition is worse. Worst of both worlds.
The strong likelihood is that hospitality would have been severely affected without the legislation. Labour is at least arguing for government support for the industry over the next couple of months; the Chancellor has disappeared.
There appear to be a lot of people who voted Tory (or perhaps worse didn't vote!) who claim to be very unhappy with the govt, and yet can't quite bring themselves to vote for any opposition party.
Quite an interesting survey, though one has to fight past the spin the people who commissioned with give it (even though I generally agree with them). Essentially people want a quiet life without adventures rather than a strong military and a vigorous foreign policy:
I wonder what the 2% who want us to fight alongside China against the US are like, though?? A militant suicide cult?
As I have said several times western Europe is becoming a peaceful, prosperous, geopolitically irrelevant backwater and that may well prove to be a very nice place to live. Surveys like that suggest it will suit most people just fine even if those with egos like Macron want to strut the world stage rather more.
Today's decision for Daughter is whether to cancel the band she had booked for Saturday. It is a very popular band and the pub is normally rammed whenever it appears. But she has to pay them and if people don't turn up, it is pointless and costs her money.
She booked them ages ago - a great night out a week before Xmas. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
So another cancellation on the cards. One of the long-time regulars who has cancer is also close to the end. A lovely guy. It has been expected for a while but still a bit of a blow.
Every pub/restaurant around here is suffering in the same way.
It is not good enough to wait for a few weeks to give help. What's needed is not fannying about measures but a cash grant to cover the next 3 months.
Without this lots of businesses will close.
Daughter is not extending her lease, understandably. Still she wanted to end her lease in good order leaving a good business and having had a good Xmas season. Not now. She is heartbroken. And when it closes she can't travel anywhere or have a decent holiday because lots of other places will be shut and the health risks. So it is going to be a bleak few months, lockdown or no bloody lockdown.
I wish there was something I could do to help.
Would a one off grant of the type given before really help? The problem seems to be that businesses such as your daughter's have simply become a lot less viable when we live with the uncertainty of Covid and new variants. Its hellish that the all so important Christmas season has been hit so hard for the second year in a row but this just might be the new normal for many years to come.
People may not be inclined to believe the government but they are scared. My daughter was trying to organise a night out tonight for her year group to celebrate the end of term. She has ultimately given up because too few were willing to risk going out. We are talking a post graduate diploma so the vast majority will be very early 20s. They did not want to be isolating over Christmas and were not willing to take the risk.
It's just one anecdote but I fear nights out before Christmas are going to be a lot rarer and far more poorly attended. It may not be an official lockdown but the optimistic language of July seems a long time ago.
Yes a grant would help.To pay costs until Easter. When the season traditionally starts and people are out of doors again. To give time for a new vaccine. Or as I have said before a grant to help close businesses down provided the money is also used to start up new ones so that people see some hope.
But not this nonsense - where the government wounds but does not help.
It is shabby shabby behaviour - to pretend that because it is not an official lockdown no help is needed when the reality is very different. And in the middle of it all the Chancellor avoids votes and disappears off to the other side of the world and local MPs are nowhere to be seen.
If Sunak’s absence this week is really because he is on holiday in California, then that is sufficiently poor form that it should exclude him from the pending leadership election and call into question his fitness for high office at all.
Perhaps I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt too much, but I doubt the story.
What evidence do we have that Sunak is on holiday - this is an official trip (although I half suspect a holiday in the sunshine is going to be tacked onto the end of it).
France is to tighten up restrictions on travel from Britain following the spread of the Omicron variant. Returning travellers will need a negative test taken less than 24 hours before travel, and tourism is to be limited.
France….with around half the booster rate and higher positivity rate than the UK
It sticks in the gullet to be fair to the French, but to be fair we have just shot past them on overall cases of which we think most are Omicron.
And be glad that out Govt has imposed relatively minimal restrictions on social life. France has just removed health pass benefits from Unboosted 65+ people. These are:
enter any restaurant or cafe, inter-city train travel and going to some cultural venues
Their bigger risks are from Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg though - as these are open drive-over borders. So I'm sure there's an element of Muppetry of the Macron here. Belgium has previously been at double the current UK level. What was done there?
I have a theory on Omicron. I think in many, many cases it is producing cold-like symptoms and negative LFTs. These people are carrying on as normal and spreading it around. Therefore the number of real cases is far, far higher than official statistics. Given this the actual severity is much reduced compared to previous variants.
This does not mean that it cannot put severe pressures on health systems. Given the huge case numbers even a much reduced severity would produce more hospitalisations.
The other logical outcome if this is true is that over the next few weeks Omicron will rush through the whole population. This would result in us getting to herd immunity very quickly.
No way to prove this at all. But it is a possibility.
That sounds plausible.
Probably excessively optimistic. But plausible.
Except that we are told that LFTs do pick up omicron as 2 of the 3 antigens targeted in the LFTs are the same.
I have had cold symptoms for two weeks, multiple negative LFTs, have not self-isolated, but have been good with minimizing indoor time, social distancing, mask wearing and respiratory hygiene. But I have only one of the 5 new symptoms of omicron, so I think the simpler explanation is that I have a cold.
France is to tighten up restrictions on travel from Britain following the spread of the Omicron variant. Returning travellers will need a negative test taken less than 24 hours before travel, and tourism is to be limited.
France….with around half the booster rate and higher positivity rate than the UK
It sticks in the gullet to be fair to the French, but to be fair we have just shot past them on overall cases of which we think most are Omicron.
With 63,000 cases yesterday and the most recent positivity rate 47% higher than the UK's I suspect its much of a muchness. And given they are sequencing less than 10% of the cases that the UK is (1.6% vs 17.7%) I suspect they simply don't know how much Omicron they've got.
Today's decision for Daughter is whether to cancel the band she had booked for Saturday. It is a very popular band and the pub is normally rammed whenever it appears. But she has to pay them and if people don't turn up, it is pointless and costs her money.
She booked them ages ago - a great night out a week before Xmas. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
So another cancellation on the cards. One of the long-time regulars who has cancer is also close to the end. A lovely guy. It has been expected for a while but still a bit of a blow.
Every pub/restaurant around here is suffering in the same way.
It is not good enough to wait for a few weeks to give help. What's needed is not fannying about measures but a cash grant to cover the next 3 months.
Without this lots of businesses will close.
Daughter is not extending her lease, understandably. Still she wanted to end her lease in good order leaving a good business and having had a good Xmas season. Not now. She is heartbroken. And when it closes she can't travel anywhere or have a decent holiday because lots of other places will be shut and the health risks. So it is going to be a bleak few months, lockdown or no bloody lockdown.
I wish there was something I could do to help.
Would a one off grant of the type given before really help? The problem seems to be that businesses such as your daughter's have simply become a lot less viable when we live with the uncertainty of Covid and new variants. Its hellish that the all so important Christmas season has been hit so hard for the second year in a row but this just might be the new normal for many years to come.
People may not be inclined to believe the government but they are scared. My daughter was trying to organise a night out tonight for her year group to celebrate the end of term. She has ultimately given up because too few were willing to risk going out. We are talking a post graduate diploma so the vast majority will be very early 20s. They did not want to be isolating over Christmas and were not willing to take the risk.
It's just one anecdote but I fear nights out before Christmas are going to be a lot rarer and far more poorly attended. It may not be an official lockdown but the optimistic language of July seems a long time ago.
Yes a grant would help.To pay costs until Easter. When the season traditionally starts and people are out of doors again. To give time for a new vaccine. Or as I have said before a grant to help close businesses down provided the money is also used to start up new ones so that people see some hope.
But not this nonsense - where the government wounds but does not help.
It is shabby shabby behaviour - to pretend that because it is not an official lockdown no help is needed when the reality is very different. And in the middle of it all the Chancellor avoids votes and disappears off to the other side of the world and local MPs are nowhere to be seen.
If Sunak’s absence this week is really because he is on holiday in California, then that is sufficiently poor form that it should exclude him from the pending leadership election and call into question his fitness for high office at all.
Perhaps I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt too much, but I doubt the story.
What evidence do we have that Sunak is on holiday - this is an official trip (although I half suspect a holiday in the sunshine is going to be tacked onto the end of it).
He is promoting high tec investment into the UK and is due to speak to hospitality leaders later today
Miss Cyclefree, my sympathies, must be very tough on your daughter, and you.
Said it yesterday, but this approach by the Government is categorically stupid. I'll never support vaccine passports, but even if the other restrictions are necessary (I am yet to be persuaded, though we'll find out soon enough) then implementing them to drastically cut hospitality activity while not helping the sector at all is practically designed to kill off businesses.
Remember that as @Philip_Thompson pointed out yesterday there are no rules about vaccine passports being required for pubs.
The current issues are the consequences of people panicking rather than any direct government policy - but the timing of this really couldn't be worse. This is peak profit season for restaurants and (with pantos/shows that are struggling to keep going) theatres
Depending on the mood of Mrs Eek we will be going out of Friday night but as she had Covid just over a month ago (and I probably did) that's because it's almost risk free for us.
I don't think its panic. Its rational. Breakfast news quite explicit today in linking those who tested positive yesterday are now isolating until Christmas. Many people will prioritize Christmas Day over going out in the next week. I don't blame them. I have sympathy for the pubs and restaurants and theatres and cinemas. i remember working in a pub in Dec 1998 - hugely busy, worked every day for a month.
The irony is that most years we wouldn't be going out this time of year as its just too busy. The reason we will be going out is that we can provide some of the money they would usually be getting.
Yesterday I had a pub supper arranged with some friends. Two of them didn't want to go to the pub so we had a takeout from there. I paid 2x what the food actually cost to try to make up for service, booze, some extra starters, etc that we might have had had we been there.
And of course while we were waiting for the order to be ready we (one of the guys who hadn't wanted to go to the pub and I) stood......in the pub.
Not really sure what your point is. Socialising in a pub or restaurant at the moment without masks and covid passports is sheer and utter madness. Most everyone apart from the Far Right thinks the same and is acting accordingly.
We vote with our feet and we're not going out now.
Anything below Con 45 and he is in big, big trouble. The only time their vote has dipped below that in this constituency at a general election was in 1997, when it was 40% (coincidentally,the same as in the by-election of 1961).
If the Lib Dems win, he's finished.
Only two predictions, neither with much confidence,
The Tories will win NS.
That result will buy Boris time until sometime in January.
I am certainly less certain of Liberal win tonight than I was. I think Johnson's taking the stage with his PM broadcast will have tipped a few sit on hands Tories to turn out to support their team in a difficult time.
I have a theory on Omicron. I think in many, many cases it is producing cold-like symptoms and negative LFTs. These people are carrying on as normal and spreading it around. Therefore the number of real cases is far, far higher than official statistics. Given this the actual severity is much reduced compared to previous variants.
This does not mean that it cannot put severe pressures on health systems. Given the huge case numbers even a much reduced severity would produce more hospitalisations.
The other logical outcome if this is true is that over the next few weeks Omicron will rush through the whole population. This would result in us getting to herd immunity very quickly.
No way to prove this at all. But it is a possibility.
Why would Omicron produce negative LFTs though?
We know that in the PCR tests Omicron has the S-gene target failure - this is jargon to say that one of the three proteins the PCR test looks for is sufficiently different in Omicron that it isn't identified. The positive test is determined by identifying the two other proteins.
I don't know how the LFTs work, but it could be that the protein they identify is sufficiently different in Omicron to be less easily detected.
The other possible reason is to do with how the sample is collected. If, say, Omicron produced more infection in the throat, rather than the nose, then the LFTs which use a nose swab only would be less likely to pick it up.
There might be other possible explanations.
I think the lateral flow tests are still ok for omicron (and the testing evidence suggests that too). Other factors apply - poor technique being the most likely.
However, if one of the new symptoms of omicron is sneezing, this implies that it is more of a very upper respiratory tract infection than other variants, and hence will be less prone to poor sample collection from the nose. [And, incidentally, would provide more hope that this is a milder form of the disease]
So who paid for Rishi Rich to go to California? Him or the taxpayer?
Non-starter. He is the CotE he will have ensured he followed the rules, demonstrably.
Reminds me of when someone asked Ed Balls whether he had ever used cash to pay a tradesman or gardener and he said yes and the interviewer said ah-ha! gotcha bet you didn't write that down and EdB said I am the Shadow Chancellor of course I wrote it down.
I have a theory on Omicron. I think in many, many cases it is producing cold-like symptoms and negative LFTs. These people are carrying on as normal and spreading it around. Therefore the number of real cases is far, far higher than official statistics. Given this the actual severity is much reduced compared to previous variants.
This does not mean that it cannot put severe pressures on health systems. Given the huge case numbers even a much reduced severity would produce more hospitalisations.
The other logical outcome if this is true is that over the next few weeks Omicron will rush through the whole population. This would result in us getting to herd immunity very quickly.
No way to prove this at all. But it is a possibility.
Why would Omicron produce negative LFTs though?
We know that in the PCR tests Omicron has the S-gene target failure - this is jargon to say that one of the three proteins the PCR test looks for is sufficiently different in Omicron that it isn't identified. The positive test is determined by identifying the two other proteins.
I don't know how the LFTs work, but it could be that the protein they identify is sufficiently different in Omicron to be less easily detected.
The other possible reason is to do with how the sample is collected. If, say, Omicron produced more infection in the throat, rather than the nose, then the LFTs which use a nose swab only would be less likely to pick it up.
There might be other possible explanations.
When I have done LFTs I have swabbed both my throat and my nose. Isn't that standard? The government are putting a lot of emphasis on LFTs, even if they ran out of them. I really don't see them doing that if they were not working.
The simpler solution is surely that Omicron is not quite as prevalent in the community as we fear. But it is spreading fast, no doubt about that. Our steady state of infection over the summer is now taking off and seems likely to go much, much higher. Bloody annoying that this has happened at Christmas again, especially for the hospitality industry as @Cyclefree has demonstrated with her daughter.
Which is why the backbenchers rebelling against this were entirely right and not 'loons'.
We have triply-vaccinated the vulnerable. What we're doing to people via restrictions and distancing is worse than the virus.
Yes and no. Some of them absolutely are loons. And nobody was rebelling because they want stricter measures and cash for hospitality.
No measures and hospitality wouldn't need the cash. The bookings were there.
Bookings were collapsing before the vote because of the advice of the government.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
Very well written post at the end of the previous post and I feel awful for people like your daughter, but who to vote for at the ballot box?
Over a hundred Tories rebelled against these motions because they saw the damage this is inflicting upon the economy and those who work for a living like your daughter.
Labour and Keir Starmer nodded these measures through without even asking for support for hospitality or anything else. No qualms or concerns.
What the government is doing is bad, but the Opposition is worse. Worst of both worlds.
The strong likelihood is that hospitality would have been severely affected without the legislation. Labour is at least arguing for government support for the industry over the next couple of months; the Chancellor has disappeared.
There appear to be a lot of people who voted Tory (or perhaps worse didn't vote!) who claim to be very unhappy with the govt, and yet can't quite bring themselves to vote for any opposition party.
So, if the Mirror is right the extremely rich Rishi Sunak is in California on business; the state where he met his wife and where he, apparently, owns a home in Santa Monica and has lots of friends there. I'm not sure why this business trip wasn't public knowledge, but it clearly wasn't. Wonder why.
Could be a problem for Sunak. Whatever one's view of Omicron and what should be done, we are in the middle of another Covid crisis and it's clearly going to have major economic implications for lots of businesses. But the man to decide whether to lend support to hospitality businesses (which are going to lose loads of money whether or not more restrictions are put in place) is on a jolly business trip in California. I'll bet Cyclefree is livid.
Sunak has relatives there. Part of his wife's family are Californian.
And Cyclefree is always livid about something, in any case.
I've just got home.
My Daughter's business is taking 40% of the revenue she was taking in November let alone December. She is beyond depressed.
She normally closes for the first 2 weeks of January. Unless support is forthcoming, as other countries faced with this variant have provided, she will not be reopening. There is no point.
A business which survived, was viable, increased its turnover and was profitable will disappear because it simply cannot survive the loss of Xmas business without support. So all the support that was given before will have been for nothing.
Jobs lost. Local suppliers and breweries lose another customer and a village loses a venue. The government loses the tax revenues. What are the chances of the owner finding a buyer or tenant in this sort of environment? And yet the government is proposing to spend £21 million in the area to increase its attractiveness as a tourist destination. Where are people supposed to eat and stay when all the local venues have closed?
She is young. She is entrepreneurial and tough. But she looks utterly beaten and abandoned. It breaks my heart. She will not be the only one who feels like this. She and her generation are this country's future and this government is treating them like shit.
I expect better. At least I used to. Not any more.
More than livid I am utterly contemptuous of people like you who are so dismissive of what is happening to the young. And even more contemptuous of people like Sunak, cosseted by their money, who have no clue at the damage they are doing.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
This country has been shafting the young for years. It was similar under Labour - they pulled up many ladders behind them: free education, good pensions, etc. The Millennials et al have been used as a human bank account by the older generations to feather-bed their existence and protect their inheritances.
It is why I have encouraged my kids to use their dual nationality to seek work overseas. The UK was a great country once and being British was something you could take pride in. Nowadays it is a joke with a comedy govt which is mapping the way to becoming a shabby, insular backwater.
Some excellent points - I think you are right about the young being systematically shxfted - the interest rate on the govt student loan scheme is a scandal is an excellent example, meanwhile the wealthy over 60s remain absolutely steadfast in their grip on political power - one of the great political shifts in the 21C has been the systematic hoovering up of the grey vote by the Conservatives in England - its given us BREXIT, a sex-crazed liar as PM, a series of culture wars and an inflated sense of national importance that will culminate in disaster at some point. I do think the Blues will edge it (but will watch with an enthusiasm for a byelection I've not had in years)
That RPI plus 3% on Student Loans is just cruel.
I was talking to my neighbour. She is in her 20's, a teaching assistant, doing a teaching degree at night school. So, about the most sensible and cost effective way of doing a degree. Will leave with 18k of debt. We worked out that it could well be cheaper for her to get a loan from the bank upon graduation then pay it off over 5 years when she gets a teaching job (should be about 3% interest, if the current bank interest rates are sustained), than stay with the student loans company.
Aside from vocational degrees such as the above; University education is for the wealthy only. An extension of private school; but the student loans system enables the poor and naive to be exploited under the guise of 'access'.
Commercial bank offering unsecured personal loan for 3%?
Colour me sceptical.
I've taken out unsecured loans at this rate. Admittedly not recently though.
Another option is mortgage equity withdrawal, that could bring the rate down to sub 2%, dependent on personal circumstances. Or just borrow the money off a wealthy relative and pay it back at 1-2%; win win as the savings rate is hopeless.
What was the politicos rationale for the interest rate being so high? If you get a high flying job and reach six figures in your 20s, you pay it off early. The bigger chunk will presumably never pay it off. But there will be plenty in the middle who do pay it off but take most of their working life to do so.
Was it purely so they could privatise the loan book with as small a discount as possible? Poor form if so.
Well it was all pursued in the interest of sound public finances. Balancing the books. Paying our way in the world. Cutting the deficit. Strong and stable government in the National Interest.
Well yes, but it was all based on the premise that we needed to send 50% of our youth to university. Take that arbitrary target away and it becomes somewhat easier to suppose that do go through university. We could even decide to pay the tuition fees of those doing courses we were looking to encourage (i.e. STEM courses).
The fundamental problem is the decreasing graduate premium (which is, of course, a result of there being too many graduates). It simply makes no sense to spend 4-5 years of a 45 year career training and studying incurring over £100k of debt to earn salaries of less than £50k. As you point out those that do will never repay their student "loans" and will simply pay what is effectively a higher tax rate for most of their careers making the housing ladder more inaccessible and pension provision more challenging. How distant the Tory dream of a property owning democracy seems now.
Mass property ownership was only feasible because decades of social democracy had flattened the income and wealth distribution. Now, decades of Thatcherism have led to an increasing concentration of wealth. In other words, mass home ownership and popular share ownership were only transitory phases. The real Tory dream is the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, and that is where we are heading.
I think that is a little simplistic but did you hear the Reith lecture yesterday about the implications of AI for work? It was thought provoking but the central thrust is that the problem for the last 20-30 years has been that the share of profits taken by capital as opposed to labour has been increasing resulting in stagnant wages. AI is going to accelerate this trend by making labour far less competitive. Those with capital will gain but how does society keep going? UBI is one possibility but it is going to be a tricky transition.
Interesting interview on Today with (I presume) a nurse who said that hospitals are short staffed because people are getting pinged but also critically because agency staff aren't coming in as they would in other times because they don't want to be pinged over Christmas.
So, if the Mirror is right the extremely rich Rishi Sunak is in California on business; the state where he met his wife and where he, apparently, owns a home in Santa Monica and has lots of friends there. I'm not sure why this business trip wasn't public knowledge, but it clearly wasn't. Wonder why.
Could be a problem for Sunak. Whatever one's view of Omicron and what should be done, we are in the middle of another Covid crisis and it's clearly going to have major economic implications for lots of businesses. But the man to decide whether to lend support to hospitality businesses (which are going to lose loads of money whether or not more restrictions are put in place) is on a jolly business trip in California. I'll bet Cyclefree is livid.
Sunak has relatives there. Part of his wife's family are Californian.
And Cyclefree is always livid about something, in any case.
I've just got home.
My Daughter's business is taking 40% of the revenue she was taking in November let alone December. She is beyond depressed.
She normally closes for the first 2 weeks of January. Unless support is forthcoming, as other countries faced with this variant have provided, she will not be reopening. There is no point.
A business which survived, was viable, increased its turnover and was profitable will disappear because it simply cannot survive the loss of Xmas business without support. So all the support that was given before will have been for nothing.
Jobs lost. Local suppliers and breweries lose another customer and a village loses a venue. The government loses the tax revenues. What are the chances of the owner finding a buyer or tenant in this sort of environment? And yet the government is proposing to spend £21 million in the area to increase its attractiveness as a tourist destination. Where are people supposed to eat and stay when all the local venues have closed?
She is young. She is entrepreneurial and tough. But she looks utterly beaten and abandoned. It breaks my heart. She will not be the only one who feels like this. She and her generation are this country's future and this government is treating them like shit.
I expect better. At least I used to. Not any more.
More than livid I am utterly contemptuous of people like you who are so dismissive of what is happening to the young. And even more contemptuous of people like Sunak, cosseted by their money, who have no clue at the damage they are doing.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
This country has been shafting the young for years. It was similar under Labour - they pulled up many ladders behind them: free education, good pensions, etc. The Millennials et al have been used as a human bank account by the older generations to feather-bed their existence and protect their inheritances.
It is why I have encouraged my kids to use their dual nationality to seek work overseas. The UK was a great country once and being British was something you could take pride in. Nowadays it is a joke with a comedy govt which is mapping the way to becoming a shabby, insular backwater.
Some excellent points - I think you are right about the young being systematically shxfted - the interest rate on the govt student loan scheme is a scandal is an excellent example, meanwhile the wealthy over 60s remain absolutely steadfast in their grip on political power - one of the great political shifts in the 21C has been the systematic hoovering up of the grey vote by the Conservatives in England - its given us BREXIT, a sex-crazed liar as PM, a series of culture wars and an inflated sense of national importance that will culminate in disaster at some point. I do think the Blues will edge it (but will watch with an enthusiasm for a byelection I've not had in years)
That RPI plus 3% on Student Loans is just cruel.
I was talking to my neighbour. She is in her 20's, a teaching assistant, doing a teaching degree at night school. So, about the most sensible and cost effective way of doing a degree. Will leave with 18k of debt. We worked out that it could well be cheaper for her to get a loan from the bank upon graduation then pay it off over 5 years when she gets a teaching job (should be about 3% interest, if the current bank interest rates are sustained), than stay with the student loans company.
Aside from vocational degrees such as the above; University education is for the wealthy only. An extension of private school; but the student loans system enables the poor and naive to be exploited under the guise of 'access'.
Commercial bank offering unsecured personal loan for 3%?
Colour me sceptical.
I've taken out unsecured loans at this rate. Admittedly not recently though.
Another option is mortgage equity withdrawal, that could bring the rate down to sub 2%, dependent on personal circumstances. Or just borrow the money off a wealthy relative and pay it back at 1-2%; win win as the savings rate is hopeless.
What was the politicos rationale for the interest rate being so high? If you get a high flying job and reach six figures in your 20s, you pay it off early. The bigger chunk will presumably never pay it off. But there will be plenty in the middle who do pay it off but take most of their working life to do so.
Was it purely so they could privatise the loan book with as small a discount as possible? Poor form if so.
It's really, really hard to repay the student loan (deliberately so). I've just done the calculation, assuming CPI at 2% (increasing the repayment threshold each year), RPI at 3% (so the interest is 6% each year) for someone who starts earning at £25,000 and receives a 4% pay rise every year. They never pay back the £27,000 borrowed. Not only that, they never reduce the amount of debt owed. They make repayments of more than £28,000, but the debt outstanding grows every year to reach nearly £120,000 when it is written off.
If you increase the average pay rise to 5% every year, then in the final year the student sees the first drop in their outstanding debt, before the remaining £81,000 or so is written off. They will have paid more than £51,000.
You have to increase the average pay rise each year to 7% to achieve repayment (in the penultimate year) with a total of about £96,000 repaid. The salary at this year is £95,473 in inflation-adjusted terms (£166k nominal). This is far above the middle.
It can't be emphasised enough that you are not meant to pay this debt off. This is why Martin Lewis advises people that they would be simply throwing their money away to use a lump sum to repay some of the principal amount outstanding. It would be a fundamental change to the system to make repayment reasonably achievable. Maybe it would be a vote winner in the Home Counties, where more people would have a decent chance of clearing the debt, and reducing the amount if interest they pay. It would make no difference to most other people.
Yes. The LibDems re-designed it as a tax while the Tories presented it as a loan. It's the worst of both worlds, and for the government means that a large amount of the amounts owing in their accounts will be written off.
The corollary of this is that the interest rate is pretty much irrelevant. The key factors that determine how much people will pay are the tax rate (currently 9%) and the tax threshold (currently £27,295) just as with standard income tax.
Miss Cyclefree, my sympathies, must be very tough on your daughter, and you.
Said it yesterday, but this approach by the Government is categorically stupid. I'll never support vaccine passports, but even if the other restrictions are necessary (I am yet to be persuaded, though we'll find out soon enough) then implementing them to drastically cut hospitality activity while not helping the sector at all is practically designed to kill off businesses.
Remember that as @Philip_Thompson pointed out yesterday there are no rules about vaccine passports being required for pubs.
The current issues are the consequences of people panicking rather than any direct government policy - but the timing of this really couldn't be worse. This is peak profit season for restaurants and (with pantos/shows that are struggling to keep going) theatres
Depending on the mood of Mrs Eek we will be going out of Friday night but as she had Covid just over a month ago (and I probably did) that's because it's almost risk free for us.
I don't think its panic. Its rational. Breakfast news quite explicit today in linking those who tested positive yesterday are now isolating until Christmas. Many people will prioritize Christmas Day over going out in the next week. I don't blame them. I have sympathy for the pubs and restaurants and theatres and cinemas. i remember working in a pub in Dec 1998 - hugely busy, worked every day for a month.
The irony is that most years we wouldn't be going out this time of year as its just too busy. The reason we will be going out is that we can provide some of the money they would usually be getting.
Yesterday I had a pub supper arranged with some friends. Two of them didn't want to go to the pub so we had a takeout from there. I paid 2x what the food actually cost to try to make up for service, booze, some extra starters, etc that we might have had had we been there.
And of course while we were waiting for the order to be ready we (one of the guys who hadn't wanted to go to the pub and I) stood......in the pub.
Not really sure what your point is. Socialising in a pub or restaurant at the moment without masks and covid passports is sheer and utter madness. Most everyone apart from the Far Right thinks the same and is acting accordingly.
We vote with our feet and we're not going out now.
Yes, it's just a fact - even people who are inclined to Philip's fatalist view are trying to dodge the risk of pre-Xmas infection. Once again the Government seems to be doing too little, too late for the majority view. I think most people would welcome a rule of 6 lockdown plus support for the hospitality sector. I'm not especially sentimental about the giants of the sector - do we necessarily need every Premier Inn and Wetherspoons? - but both consideration of the struggling small businesses like Cyclefree's daughter and the bad luck of the pandemic hitting one particular sector make a strong case for the rest of us rallying round them through temporary subsidies.
So who paid for Rishi Rich to go to California? Him or the taxpayer?
He is on government business seeking hi tec investment into the UK
Lol. Sounds to me that pre omicron, he thought that sounded like a good wheeze for the last week of term, after which he could spend Christmas with his family in the holiday home he keeps in California.
That he didn’t have the foresight to cancel this trip is pretty telling to be honest. And extremely disappointing.
It is time the government came forward with their plans so our great British businesses and their workers have the clarity and support they need to weather this storm.
People, this is your future thanks to the green lobby.
Gas prices are at a near record level again and we are nowhere near a viable, fully scalable alternative that will keep the lights on and our homes warm in winter.
Still, stop drilling for oil and gas and stop further exploration. All good.
When we have five times the wind capacity then wind would still be generating a respectable 12 GW or so on a day like today, and we'd have the excess from previous days stored. If we would build the tidal lagoons, and the mini-nuke reactors too, then our exposure to fluctuations in global fossil fuel prices would be much reduced, perhaps eliminated.
The problem is, this is a fiction. A lovely fiction, and an admirable goal, but still a fiction.
*) "When we have five times the wind capacity". When will that be, even at current build rates? We have 11,000 wind turbines in the UK. Even if we assume we can use larger, more efficient ones, you are still talking about tens of thousands of turbines to be built and deployed. That's the work of at least a decade.
*) "we'd have the excess from previous days stored." How? We don't have that sort of pumped-storage capacity, and the battery backup required would be truly massive to cope with a week of low wind. Again, you're looking at more tan a decade.
*) "Build tidal lagoon." Again, that's great. Except we're not building them, and ones large enough to make a difference to the nation's power would be the work of a decade or more - after planning.
*) "mini-nuke reactors". They don't really exist at the moment in a deployable form. And then there is the politics of nuclear power. Again, we're probably looking at over a decade before they make a dent in our power requirements.
Your post is a wonderful vision of a future a couple of decades away. But we have to live in the present, and the problems are only going to get worse.
Miss Cyclefree, my sympathies, must be very tough on your daughter, and you.
Said it yesterday, but this approach by the Government is categorically stupid. I'll never support vaccine passports, but even if the other restrictions are necessary (I am yet to be persuaded, though we'll find out soon enough) then implementing them to drastically cut hospitality activity while not helping the sector at all is practically designed to kill off businesses.
Remember that as @Philip_Thompson pointed out yesterday there are no rules about vaccine passports being required for pubs.
The current issues are the consequences of people panicking rather than any direct government policy - but the timing of this really couldn't be worse. This is peak profit season for restaurants and (with pantos/shows that are struggling to keep going) theatres
Depending on the mood of Mrs Eek we will be going out of Friday night but as she had Covid just over a month ago (and I probably did) that's because it's almost risk free for us.
I don't think its panic. Its rational. Breakfast news quite explicit today in linking those who tested positive yesterday are now isolating until Christmas. Many people will prioritize Christmas Day over going out in the next week. I don't blame them. I have sympathy for the pubs and restaurants and theatres and cinemas. i remember working in a pub in Dec 1998 - hugely busy, worked every day for a month.
The irony is that most years we wouldn't be going out this time of year as its just too busy. The reason we will be going out is that we can provide some of the money they would usually be getting.
Yesterday I had a pub supper arranged with some friends. Two of them didn't want to go to the pub so we had a takeout from there. I paid 2x what the food actually cost to try to make up for service, booze, some extra starters, etc that we might have had had we been there.
And of course while we were waiting for the order to be ready we (one of the guys who hadn't wanted to go to the pub and I) stood......in the pub.
My Dad has decided to come and meet us for lunch in Bath on Sunday, which is nice, but we are having a tussle over whether we will eat inside or outside. It will be quite cold, but he's coming from Lambeth, which had an enormous spike in cases yesterday.
The real dilemma for the Chancellor is how to target help to those small businesses who really need it like @Cyclefree daughter while not subsidising those with shareholders who should take the hit rather than the taxpayer
So who paid for Rishi Rich to go to California? Him or the taxpayer?
He is on government business seeking hi tec investment into the UK
Lol. Sounds to me that pre omicron, he thought that sounded like a good wheeze for the last week of term, after which he could spend Christmas with his family in the holiday home he keeps in California.
That he didn’t have the foresight to cancel this trip is pretty telling to be honest. And extremely disappointing.
This was an existing government business commitment and your cynicism is getting the better of you
Miss Cyclefree, my sympathies, must be very tough on your daughter, and you.
Said it yesterday, but this approach by the Government is categorically stupid. I'll never support vaccine passports, but even if the other restrictions are necessary (I am yet to be persuaded, though we'll find out soon enough) then implementing them to drastically cut hospitality activity while not helping the sector at all is practically designed to kill off businesses.
Remember that as @Philip_Thompson pointed out yesterday there are no rules about vaccine passports being required for pubs.
The current issues are the consequences of people panicking rather than any direct government policy - but the timing of this really couldn't be worse. This is peak profit season for restaurants and (with pantos/shows that are struggling to keep going) theatres
Depending on the mood of Mrs Eek we will be going out of Friday night but as she had Covid just over a month ago (and I probably did) that's because it's almost risk free for us.
I don't think its panic. Its rational. Breakfast news quite explicit today in linking those who tested positive yesterday are now isolating until Christmas. Many people will prioritize Christmas Day over going out in the next week. I don't blame them. I have sympathy for the pubs and restaurants and theatres and cinemas. i remember working in a pub in Dec 1998 - hugely busy, worked every day for a month.
The irony is that most years we wouldn't be going out this time of year as its just too busy. The reason we will be going out is that we can provide some of the money they would usually be getting.
Yesterday I had a pub supper arranged with some friends. Two of them didn't want to go to the pub so we had a takeout from there. I paid 2x what the food actually cost to try to make up for service, booze, some extra starters, etc that we might have had had we been there.
And of course while we were waiting for the order to be ready we (one of the guys who hadn't wanted to go to the pub and I) stood......in the pub.
Not really sure what your point is. Socialising in a pub or restaurant at the moment without masks and covid passports is sheer and utter madness. Most everyone apart from the Far Right thinks the same and is acting accordingly.
We vote with our feet and we're not going out now.
Yes, it's just a fact - even people who are inclined to Philip's fatalist view are trying to dodge the risk of pre-Xmas infection. Once again the Government seems to be doing too little, too late for the majority view. I think most people would welcome a rule of 6 lockdown plus support for the hospitality sector. I'm not especially sentimental about the giants of the sector - do we necessarily need every Premier Inn and Wetherspoons? - but both consideration of the struggling small businesses like Cyclefree's daughter and the bad luck of the pandemic hitting one particular sector make a strong case for the rest of us rallying round them through temporary subsidies.
I don't think most people would welcome a rule of 6. I wouldn't. Who are these people who are clamouring for the government to impose more rules on them? No-one I know.
I'm going out for a Christmas do tonight. Because life is for living.
And if I'm going to support the hospitality sector I'd rather do so directly.
Anything below Con 45 and he is in big, big trouble. The only time their vote has dipped below that in this constituency at a general election was in 1997, when it was 40% (coincidentally,the same as in the by-election of 1961).
If the Lib Dems win, he's finished.
Only two predictions, neither with much confidence,
The Tories will win NS.
That result will buy Boris time until sometime in January.
Actually I think Johnson will survive for the moment regardless of the result. MPs will generally want to take two weeks off and think about it when they're back, by which time the result will be receding into yesterday's news. But if his fortunes don't improve by spring, that's another matter.
So, if the Mirror is right the extremely rich Rishi Sunak is in California on business; the state where he met his wife and where he, apparently, owns a home in Santa Monica and has lots of friends there. I'm not sure why this business trip wasn't public knowledge, but it clearly wasn't. Wonder why.
Could be a problem for Sunak. Whatever one's view of Omicron and what should be done, we are in the middle of another Covid crisis and it's clearly going to have major economic implications for lots of businesses. But the man to decide whether to lend support to hospitality businesses (which are going to lose loads of money whether or not more restrictions are put in place) is on a jolly business trip in California. I'll bet Cyclefree is livid.
Sunak has relatives there. Part of his wife's family are Californian.
And Cyclefree is always livid about something, in any case.
I've just got home.
My Daughter's business is taking 40% of the revenue she was taking in November let alone December. She is beyond depressed.
She normally closes for the first 2 weeks of January. Unless support is forthcoming, as other countries faced with this variant have provided, she will not be reopening. There is no point.
A business which survived, was viable, increased its turnover and was profitable will disappear because it simply cannot survive the loss of Xmas business without support. So all the support that was given before will have been for nothing.
Jobs lost. Local suppliers and breweries lose another customer and a village loses a venue. The government loses the tax revenues. What are the chances of the owner finding a buyer or tenant in this sort of environment? And yet the government is proposing to spend £21 million in the area to increase its attractiveness as a tourist destination. Where are people supposed to eat and stay when all the local venues have closed?
She is young. She is entrepreneurial and tough. But she looks utterly beaten and abandoned. It breaks my heart. She will not be the only one who feels like this. She and her generation are this country's future and this government is treating them like shit.
I expect better. At least I used to. Not any more.
More than livid I am utterly contemptuous of people like you who are so dismissive of what is happening to the young. And even more contemptuous of people like Sunak, cosseted by their money, who have no clue at the damage they are doing.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
This country has been shafting the young for years. It was similar under Labour - they pulled up many ladders behind them: free education, good pensions, etc. The Millennials et al have been used as a human bank account by the older generations to feather-bed their existence and protect their inheritances.
It is why I have encouraged my kids to use their dual nationality to seek work overseas. The UK was a great country once and being British was something you could take pride in. Nowadays it is a joke with a comedy govt which is mapping the way to becoming a shabby, insular backwater.
Some excellent points - I think you are right about the young being systematically shxfted - the interest rate on the govt student loan scheme is a scandal is an excellent example, meanwhile the wealthy over 60s remain absolutely steadfast in their grip on political power - one of the great political shifts in the 21C has been the systematic hoovering up of the grey vote by the Conservatives in England - its given us BREXIT, a sex-crazed liar as PM, a series of culture wars and an inflated sense of national importance that will culminate in disaster at some point. I do think the Blues will edge it (but will watch with an enthusiasm for a byelection I've not had in years)
That RPI plus 3% on Student Loans is just cruel.
I was talking to my neighbour. She is in her 20's, a teaching assistant, doing a teaching degree at night school. So, about the most sensible and cost effective way of doing a degree. Will leave with 18k of debt. We worked out that it could well be cheaper for her to get a loan from the bank upon graduation then pay it off over 5 years when she gets a teaching job (should be about 3% interest, if the current bank interest rates are sustained), than stay with the student loans company.
Aside from vocational degrees such as the above; University education is for the wealthy only. An extension of private school; but the student loans system enables the poor and naive to be exploited under the guise of 'access'.
Commercial bank offering unsecured personal loan for 3%?
Colour me sceptical.
I've taken out unsecured loans at this rate. Admittedly not recently though.
Another option is mortgage equity withdrawal, that could bring the rate down to sub 2%, dependent on personal circumstances. Or just borrow the money off a wealthy relative and pay it back at 1-2%; win win as the savings rate is hopeless.
What was the politicos rationale for the interest rate being so high? If you get a high flying job and reach six figures in your 20s, you pay it off early. The bigger chunk will presumably never pay it off. But there will be plenty in the middle who do pay it off but take most of their working life to do so.
Was it purely so they could privatise the loan book with as small a discount as possible? Poor form if so.
Well it was all pursued in the interest of sound public finances. Balancing the books. Paying our way in the world. Cutting the deficit. Strong and stable government in the National Interest.
The previous answer of privatising the debt - to make an essentially cosmetic improvement to the government finances - is the correct one.
This is an old article (2015(), but I don't think its essential critique of the sale of student loan debt has altered much. Basically when the government has sld off debt tranches, it has replaced state financing with more expensive private financing, while retaining the risk, purely in return for cash now rather than later. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n05/andrew-mcgettigan/cash-today
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
Very well written post at the end of the previous post and I feel awful for people like your daughter, but who to vote for at the ballot box?
Over a hundred Tories rebelled against these motions because they saw the damage this is inflicting upon the economy and those who work for a living like your daughter.
Labour and Keir Starmer nodded these measures through without even asking for support for hospitality or anything else. No qualms or concerns.
What the government is doing is bad, but the Opposition is worse. Worst of both worlds.
The strong likelihood is that hospitality would have been severely affected without the legislation. Labour is at least arguing for government support for the industry over the next couple of months; the Chancellor has disappeared.
There appear to be a lot of people who voted Tory (or perhaps worse didn't vote!) who claim to be very unhappy with the govt, and yet can't quite bring themselves to vote for any opposition party.
I might have missed it, but in all the complaining I don't remember any of the moaners congratulating the Lib Dems for voting against.
I think you'll find that one Lib Dem MP 5 years ago once voiced doubts about a fantastic opportunity for rural broadband or something and therefore the party is forever tainted.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
Very well written post at the end of the previous post and I feel awful for people like your daughter, but who to vote for at the ballot box?
Over a hundred Tories rebelled against these motions because they saw the damage this is inflicting upon the economy and those who work for a living like your daughter.
Labour and Keir Starmer nodded these measures through without even asking for support for hospitality or anything else. No qualms or concerns.
What the government is doing is bad, but the Opposition is worse. Worst of both worlds.
The strong likelihood is that hospitality would have been severely affected without the legislation. Labour is at least arguing for government support for the industry over the next couple of months; the Chancellor has disappeared.
There appear to be a lot of people who voted Tory (or perhaps worse didn't vote!) who claim to be very unhappy with the govt, and yet can't quite bring themselves to vote for any opposition party.
I might have missed it, but in all the complaining I don't remember any of the moaners congratulating the Lib Dems for voting against.
It’s sucks for them that Davey was off with covid as it meant they got barely any headlines.
But yes, pretty sure I’ll be coming back home to the Lib Dems next election the way things are (as per my first ever vote).
The real dilemma for the Chancellor is how to target help to those small businesses who really need it like @Cyclefree daughter while not subsidising those with shareholders who should take the hit rather than the taxpayer
Every business has shareholders Big G.
It is quite obvious what Big G meant.
You mean the larger businesses in which, say, your pension fund is invested.
But I will wait and when I have the opportunity I will get my own back at the ballot box. I will not be the only one.
Very well written post at the end of the previous post and I feel awful for people like your daughter, but who to vote for at the ballot box?
Over a hundred Tories rebelled against these motions because they saw the damage this is inflicting upon the economy and those who work for a living like your daughter.
Labour and Keir Starmer nodded these measures through without even asking for support for hospitality or anything else. No qualms or concerns.
What the government is doing is bad, but the Opposition is worse. Worst of both worlds.
The strong likelihood is that hospitality would have been severely affected without the legislation. Labour is at least arguing for government support for the industry over the next couple of months; the Chancellor has disappeared.
There appear to be a lot of people who voted Tory (or perhaps worse didn't vote!) who claim to be very unhappy with the govt, and yet can't quite bring themselves to vote for any opposition party.
In North Shropshire I would vote Lib Dem today
Yes, me too. They may be largely ludicrous, but they voted against Plan B; most Tories (and pretty much all of Labour) voted for it.
So who paid for Rishi Rich to go to California? Him or the taxpayer?
He is on government business seeking hi tec investment into the UK
Lol. Sounds to me that pre omicron, he thought that sounded like a good wheeze for the last week of term, after which he could spend Christmas with his family in the holiday home he keeps in California.
That he didn’t have the foresight to cancel this trip is pretty telling to be honest. And extremely disappointing.
This was an existing government business commitment and your cynicism is getting the better of you
Perhaps I am cynical because I’ve met too many finance execs over the years and know how they think and behave.
Reading the criticism of my (and Big G's) generation earlier in the thread, especially how we had, financially, thrown our grandchildren under the bus I was struck by a couple of thoughts. The generation born just before and just after WWII were the young people who marched at Aldermaston to Ban the Bomb, who backed the likes of Peter Hain in fighting apartheid. We looked for a bright new future. We were part of the Liberal Revival in the mid 60's. We were Flower Power.
As the theme tune to a popular programme ran "Oh, what happened to us?..... What became of the people we used to be?"
Miss Cyclefree, my sympathies, must be very tough on your daughter, and you.
Said it yesterday, but this approach by the Government is categorically stupid. I'll never support vaccine passports, but even if the other restrictions are necessary (I am yet to be persuaded, though we'll find out soon enough) then implementing them to drastically cut hospitality activity while not helping the sector at all is practically designed to kill off businesses.
Remember that as @Philip_Thompson pointed out yesterday there are no rules about vaccine passports being required for pubs.
The current issues are the consequences of people panicking rather than any direct government policy - but the timing of this really couldn't be worse. This is peak profit season for restaurants and (with pantos/shows that are struggling to keep going) theatres
Depending on the mood of Mrs Eek we will be going out of Friday night but as she had Covid just over a month ago (and I probably did) that's because it's almost risk free for us.
I don't think its panic. Its rational. Breakfast news quite explicit today in linking those who tested positive yesterday are now isolating until Christmas. Many people will prioritize Christmas Day over going out in the next week. I don't blame them. I have sympathy for the pubs and restaurants and theatres and cinemas. i remember working in a pub in Dec 1998 - hugely busy, worked every day for a month.
The irony is that most years we wouldn't be going out this time of year as its just too busy. The reason we will be going out is that we can provide some of the money they would usually be getting.
Yesterday I had a pub supper arranged with some friends. Two of them didn't want to go to the pub so we had a takeout from there. I paid 2x what the food actually cost to try to make up for service, booze, some extra starters, etc that we might have had had we been there.
And of course while we were waiting for the order to be ready we (one of the guys who hadn't wanted to go to the pub and I) stood......in the pub.
Not really sure what your point is. Socialising in a pub or restaurant at the moment without masks and covid passports is sheer and utter madness. Most everyone apart from the Far Right thinks the same and is acting accordingly.
We vote with our feet and we're not going out now.
Yes, it's just a fact - even people who are inclined to Philip's fatalist view are trying to dodge the risk of pre-Xmas infection. Once again the Government seems to be doing too little, too late for the majority view. I think most people would welcome a rule of 6 lockdown plus support for the hospitality sector. I'm not especially sentimental about the giants of the sector - do we necessarily need every Premier Inn and Wetherspoons? - but both consideration of the struggling small businesses like Cyclefree's daughter and the bad luck of the pandemic hitting one particular sector make a strong case for the rest of us rallying round them through temporary subsidies.
I don't think most people would welcome a rule of 6. I wouldn't. Who are these people who are clamouring for the government to impose more rules on them? No-one I know.
I'm going out for a Christmas do tonight. Because life is for living.
And if I'm going to support the hospitality sector I'd rather do so directly.
People who live on their own and have limited contact with anyone else including family would welcome a Rule of Six.
Quite an interesting survey, though one has to fight past the spin the people who commissioned with give it (even though I generally agree with them). Essentially people want a quiet life without adventures rather than a strong military and a vigorous foreign policy:
I wonder what the 2% who want us to fight alongside China against the US are like, though?? A militant suicide cult?
As I have said several times western Europe is becoming a peaceful, prosperous, geopolitically irrelevant backwater and that may well prove to be a very nice place to live. Surveys like that suggest it will suit most people just fine even if those with egos like Macron want to strut the world stage rather more.
That depends on whether the EU gets its act together or not wrt Russia, and especially wrt the frontline states from Finland/Sweden through to Ukraine. In reality we are in a new cold war, and the opportunity to be isolated, self-satisfied herbivores does not exist.
I would suggest that we have had that period already, and over-relaxed.
I am not sure how a non-vigorous foreign policy will work when much of the "heart of Europe" wants to spend its time sanctimoniously lecturing the rest of the world what to do, from a self-image of assumed moral superiority. That's not how it works.
Witness Macron's assertions at his recent press conference wrt how he will transform the EU: "Europe invented human rights". (I think that reference is probably to the French revolution, and the philosophical shift.)
I think it will be interesting to revisit in 12 months time, after 6 months of Macron as EU first-mover, and the subsequent hangover.
There are some interesting bits:
"40% said they would like foreign policy to focus primarily on strengthening the domestic economy."
Comments
We could even decide to pay the tuition fees of those doing courses we were looking to encourage (i.e. STEM courses).
and I argue that it's still too early to say, despite what appear to be early signs of milder impact in SA than past waves.
Much of our case comes down to this figure
Preprint: https://cdn1.sph.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2623/2021/12/21_Hanage_Bhattacharyya_Challenges-in-assessing-Omicron-severity_HCPDS-Working-Paper-Volume-21_No-10-1.pdf
https://twitter.com/roby_bhatt/status/1471212023576870912?s=20
If you increase the average pay rise to 5% every year, then in the final year the student sees the first drop in their outstanding debt, before the remaining £81,000 or so is written off. They will have paid more than £51,000.
You have to increase the average pay rise each year to 7% to achieve repayment (in the penultimate year) with a total of about £96,000 repaid. The salary at this year is £95,473 in inflation-adjusted terms (£166k nominal). This is far above the middle.
It can't be emphasised enough that you are not meant to pay this debt off. This is why Martin Lewis advises people that they would be simply throwing their money away to use a lump sum to repay some of the principal amount outstanding. It would be a fundamental change to the system to make repayment reasonably achievable. Maybe it would be a vote winner in the Home Counties, where more people would have a decent chance of clearing the debt, and reducing the amount if interest they pay. It would make no difference to most other people.
https://twitter.com/adamfleming/status/1471395876304269313?s=20
I now feel as depressed as during the worst times in lockdown. Vaccines were meant to be our way out. If we're still going to be forced into a half life even with vaccines with stunted opportunities for our young, what the fuck is the point of any of it?
And as for China and that bloody lab - I'd flatten the place (the lab) and the Chinese leadership. The misery they have inflicted on the world.......
The current issues are the consequences of people panicking rather than any direct government policy - but the timing of this really couldn't be worse. This is peak profit season for restaurants and (with pantos/shows that are struggling to keep going) theatres
Depending on the mood of Mrs Eek we will be going out of Friday night but as she had Covid just over a month ago (and I probably did) that's because it's almost risk free for us.
My aunt is a single parent and hasn't been able to work for some time as she has a long term degenerative condition, so bank of mum and dad isn't an option. The whole situation is profoundly unfair.
https://twitter.com/StigAbell/status/1471172707589013504
This damage is the direct result of panicking over cases and changing the law rather than saying to "keep calm and carry on" while we live with the virus.
You said yesterday that the devastating measures passed two days ago were "not enough" rather than too much. Well actions have consequences, these are the consequences. These are the consequences of what you deemed "not enough" so what more do you advocate?
And given all the vulnerable should have had three vaccine doses by now at what point do we say "enough is enough" and live with the virus?
Kudos to the backbench rebels, what a disgusting shame that the rest of Parliament was prepared to throw livelihoods like this under the bus due to "cases" when we have vaccines. Shame on them all.
But not this nonsense - where the government wounds but does not help.
It is shabby shabby behaviour - to pretend that because it is not an official lockdown no help is needed when the reality is very different. And in the middle of it all the Chancellor avoids votes and disappears off to the other side of the world and local MPs are nowhere to be seen.
Same with Big G and his "shareholders".
The Tories will win NS.
That result will buy Boris time until sometime in January.
On another point my wife has spent the last 3 days trying to volunteer as a jabber unsuccessfully. She only retired as a doctor in April and maintains her GMC registration in case she ever did want to do something in the future but she doesn't have a clinical licence to practice. Bizarrely if she ever does get through this mine field they will actually pay her when she is willing to do it for free. Not impressed.
Vaccine papers are wretched whether applied to few or many things, for the former will soon become the latter to 'make them more effective'.
In addition, the vaccinated can have and spread disease. So what's the advantage in having the unvaccinated (but presently free of infection) and infected yet vaccinated mingling together? If you're having that then why not shun the digital paperwork and let businesses at least survive?
The passes are just a system of government intrusion with no impact on public health but extending the tentacles of the state ever more, while simultaneously shafting the hospitality sector at what should be their biggest time of the year. China's social credit system is a warning to be avoided.
https://twitter.com/Mij_Europe/status/1471398411152805892?s=20
And of course while we were waiting for the order to be ready we (one of the guys who hadn't wanted to go to the pub and I) stood......in the pub.
Perhaps I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt too much, but I doubt the story.
We vote with our feet and we're not going out now.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10315099/Covid-UK-Britons-CANCEL-pre-Christmas-plans-public-heeds-Whittys-Omicron-warning.html
Small businesses are not the same as multi national businesses
And be glad that out Govt has imposed relatively minimal restrictions on social life. France has just removed health pass benefits from Unboosted 65+ people. These are:
enter any restaurant or cafe, inter-city train travel and going to some cultural venues
https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20211215-french-adults-over-65-without-a-covid-booster-shot-to-lose-health-pass-benefits
I agree with @Cyclefree that these necessary steps should have created support as earlier lockdowns did but I am also conscious that the younger generation that have been shafted by the old in so many ways are going to be left with the problem of repaying this debt too.
https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1471401729891905537
(And yes, I do have a stake in the similar leisure industry.)
But it's absolutely devastating for business and the government should be doing more to support them through this period. Omicron has had a rapid rise, but there are no excuses in terms of planning what might happen to the economy during winter. It was expected we would have increases in cases and hospitalisations in winter with Delta and some proactive pre-planning to support businesses especially the hospitality sector should have been thought out.
As for student loans - as I pointed out to twin B, unless you can pay the entire debt off there is zero point paying any of it of. The money we saved for her will eventually be a housing deposit and (if I can afford it) a monthly sub to cover some of her repayment costs.
https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-021-03621-0/index.html#section-EQqzpXoePk
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/dec/16/uk-public-dont-want-perennial-fights-of-a-permanent-brexit-with-eu-report
I wonder what the 2% who want us to fight alongside China against the US are like, though?? A militant suicide cult?
We shall see later.
Smarkets have prices available throughout the day on:
🥇 Winner
🗳️ Turnout
📈 Majority Size
🔴 Lab vote share
🔵 Con vote share
📊 Lib Dem vote share
https://smrkts.co/3pnjWyw https://twitter.com/SmarketsNews/status/1471391222984060931/photo/1
I have had cold symptoms for two weeks, multiple negative LFTs, have not self-isolated, but have been good with minimizing indoor time, social distancing, mask wearing and respiratory hygiene. But I have only one of the 5 new symptoms of omicron, so I think the simpler explanation is that I have a cold.
While I was waiting btw I noted most tables full and an average age of around 60.
Reminds me of when someone asked Ed Balls whether he had ever used cash to pay a tradesman or gardener and he said yes and the interviewer said ah-ha! gotcha bet you didn't write that down and EdB said I am the Shadow Chancellor of course I wrote it down.
That he didn’t have the foresight to cancel this trip is pretty telling to be honest. And extremely disappointing.
It is time the government came forward with their plans so our great British businesses and their workers have the clarity and support they need to weather this storm.
Mine and @jreynoldsMP letter to government this morning.
https://twitter.com/RachelReevesMP/status/1471406699525414918/photo/1
*) "When we have five times the wind capacity". When will that be, even at current build rates? We have 11,000 wind turbines in the UK. Even if we assume we can use larger, more efficient ones, you are still talking about tens of thousands of turbines to be built and deployed. That's the work of at least a decade.
*) "we'd have the excess from previous days stored." How? We don't have that sort of pumped-storage capacity, and the battery backup required would be truly massive to cope with a week of low wind. Again, you're looking at more tan a decade.
*) "Build tidal lagoon." Again, that's great. Except we're not building them, and ones large enough to make a difference to the nation's power would be the work of a decade or more - after planning.
*) "mini-nuke reactors". They don't really exist at the moment in a deployable form. And then there is the politics of nuclear power. Again, we're probably looking at over a decade before they make a dent in our power requirements.
Your post is a wonderful vision of a future a couple of decades away. But we have to live in the present, and the problems are only going to get worse.
https://twitter.com/tom_nuttall/status/1471404112680042497?s=20
I'm going out for a Christmas do tonight. Because life is for living.
And if I'm going to support the hospitality sector I'd rather do so directly.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n05/andrew-mcgettigan/cash-today
But yes, pretty sure I’ll be coming back home to the Lib Dems next election the way things are (as per my first ever vote).
Reading the criticism of my (and Big G's) generation earlier in the thread, especially how we had, financially, thrown our grandchildren under the bus I was struck by a couple of thoughts. The generation born just before and just after WWII were the young people who marched at Aldermaston to Ban the Bomb, who backed the likes of Peter Hain in fighting apartheid. We looked for a bright new future.
We were part of the Liberal Revival in the mid 60's. We were Flower Power.
As the theme tune to a popular programme ran "Oh, what happened to us?..... What became of the people we used to be?"
I would suggest that we have had that period already, and over-relaxed.
I am not sure how a non-vigorous foreign policy will work when much of the "heart of Europe" wants to spend its time sanctimoniously lecturing the rest of the world what to do, from a self-image of assumed moral superiority. That's not how it works.
Witness Macron's assertions at his recent press conference wrt how he will transform the EU: "Europe invented human rights". (I think that reference is probably to the French revolution, and the philosophical shift.)
I think it will be interesting to revisit in 12 months time, after 6 months of Macron as EU first-mover, and the subsequent hangover.
There are some interesting bits:
"40% said they would like foreign policy to focus primarily on strengthening the domestic economy."
An update on the distribution of variants in each country, based on GISAID data up to December 13.
Blue is delta, Red is omicron
https://twitter.com/redouad/status/1471405946018701313?s=20