A women in tears on BBC News explaining the horrific position she is in now with her Universal Credit being effectively cut as the 3% increase is far behind the inflation rate .
These are the real life impacts of the Tories disgusting abandonement of those on in work benefits who are in a desperate situation .
Though the UK median pay rise this year also only 3%
I just love the idea that the Government can keep affording all these increases in benefit
The government could if they taxed the wealthy.
Take a tithe from millionaires to allow people on benefits to afford heating and eating. Seems fair to me.
Tax the wealthy? if only it was that easy
Oh well, now you've explained in detail why it can't be done...
The top 1% of earners already pay around 28-29% of all income tax collected.
They are paying more in tax now then they have ever done, more than under 13 years of Labour.
If rates go up much more than the total collected from the wealthy will go down as they will find ways to avoid paying tax.
I don't think many are looking at income on the 1% being a big new source of revenue. Hasn't the debate moved elsewhere? Land, property, gains, inheritance etc.
A women in tears on BBC News explaining the horrific position she is in now with her Universal Credit being effectively cut as the 3% increase is far behind the inflation rate .
These are the real life impacts of the Tories disgusting abandonement of those on in work benefits who are in a desperate situation .
Though the UK median pay rise this year also only 3%
I just love the idea that the Government can keep affording all these increases in benefit
The government could if they taxed the wealthy.
Take a tithe from millionaires to allow people on benefits to afford heating and eating. Seems fair to me.
Tax the wealthy? if only it was that easy
Oh well, now you've explained in detail why it can't be done...
The top 1% of earners already pay around 28-29% of all income tax collected.
They are paying more in tax now then they have ever done, more than under 13 years of Labour.
If rates go up much more than the total collected from the wealthy will go down as they will find ways to avoid paying tax.
I don't think many are looking at income on the 1% being a big new source of revenue. Hasn't the debate moved elsewhere? Land, property, gains, inheritance etc.
Yes there needs to be significant extra tax on UNEARNED wealth 👍
A women in tears on BBC News explaining the horrific position she is in now with her Universal Credit being effectively cut as the 3% increase is far behind the inflation rate .
These are the real life impacts of the Tories disgusting abandonement of those on in work benefits who are in a desperate situation .
Though the UK median pay rise this year also only 3%
I just love the idea that the Government can keep affording all these increases in benefit
The government could if they taxed the wealthy.
Take a tithe from millionaires to allow people on benefits to afford heating and eating. Seems fair to me.
Tax the wealthy? if only it was that easy
Oh well, now you've explained in detail why it can't be done...
The top 1% of earners already pay around 28-29% of all income tax collected.
They are paying more in tax now then they have ever done, more than under 13 years of Labour.
If rates go up much more than the total collected from the wealthy will go down as they will find ways to avoid paying tax.
I don't think many are looking at income on the 1% being a big new source of revenue. Hasn't the debate moved elsewhere? Land, property, gains, inheritance etc.
The tax burden is now at its highest for 60 years. Im not sure increasing taxes even further is the answer.
On my way down to Portbou, the last town in Spain. Took this picture next to a group of firemen on a coffee and fag break in a lay-by. They were all wearing t-shirts or jackets saying “BOMBERS” which rather tickled me
I don't think thats true, but there are limits on what can be done. We can argue about that, and certainly many on here would support going after unearned income more, but its not possible to completely mitigated all the issues right now.
Take the NHS. Arguably it needs a shed load of cash to hire more staff and more capacity for patients. Money alone won't fix that - either you get staff from overseas or you train more at home, Covid has had a big impact on training. But medical schools are expanding, pharmacy admissions are on the up. But these will take years to reach the front line.
I think you believe all tories are heartless and uncaring about other people, I don't think thats true. Most want to support people in need, but also don't like people getting something for nothing. They read stories about free loaders on benefits and come to believe that there is a life out there on state handouts. They believe people who can work should. Where this breaks down is now we have work not paying enough to support a family. Housing costs too much, inflation and the rises in fuels costs are horrific. Tories do understand this, its just that the solutions are not easy.
I'm going to offer up two realpolitik simplistic observations
1. The problem in the NHS isn't the amount of money going in, its what it gets spent on. Both "record amounts being spent" and "a crisis in front-line budgets" are true/ Why? Because the structure hoovers up cash at absurd rates. A mass of bureaucratic complexity with endless tiers of overlapping and competing management. Remove much of the marketisation and more of the money gets to where it needs to get to. The Tories know this but its their people syphoning off the cash so we continue as is
2. Benefit fraud is a spectacularly low percentage - half a percent or so. Lets assume that only captures some of the anecdotage and increase it by a factor of 10 - so 5% is fraud and 95% is genuine. So the war against freeloaders and scroungers is done by ministers knowing it is an outright lie told to weaponise "benefits" and harden voters against human misery. Simply pointing this out, and asking that people treat others as they would be tret themselves will take away so much of the angst around the subject so we can have a grown up discussion.
I think ..... hope ..... that the idea of 'competition' between Trusts is dead.I know my experience is out of date now, but if there was any competition between groups of health serve staff, it was a race to the top, who could best provide the service, and the staff I met just didn't understand the idea of hospital A 'winning' patients from Hospital B. Or GP surgeries, come to that. Pharmacies did, because they were operating in a retail environment, and big business had, by the time I left pretty well taken over the sector.
"While each case is dealt with individually, the guidance says that if a detainee’s refusal to be searched “is based on discriminatory views” then police should consider recording a non-crime hate incident."
just wow
How would the detainee know if a search officer is transgender?
Transgender mtf is reasonably easy to spot. Generally hand size, adams apple etc.
More to the point given what we now know about the met and the number of officers like wayne couzens it seems to contain are you happy to give that sort the opportunity to self ID as woman in order to get some cheap thrills.
What people keep seeming to miss is in this debate is it is usually not the genuine trans people themselves that are the problem (with the exception of womens sports) but the number of sexual predators who will take up with glee self ID to enhance their opportunities.
Hell if self ID comes in and I get a prison sentence I will happily self ID as female as female prisons are a) cushier and b) I will have a muscle advantage on most of the inmates in case of trouble
Quite so. It would be irrational not to.
But I think even referring to the conceptual possibility of fakers faking it marks you out as "transphobic" in the eyes of the bien pensant
The issue with this guidance is that it appears to breach the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 - section 55(7).
This states that an intimate body search must not be done by an officer of the opposite sex to that of the person being searched. A trans officer (male identifying as a woman) remains of the male sex (even if identifying as a woman and even if he has a GRC under the GRA).
As the PACE provision refers to "sex" not "gender", an officer committing such a search is potentially committing a sexual assault on a woman. Also any evidence obtained in breach of PACE is potentially inadmissible.
The guidance (and it will need reading carefully - so usual caveats apply) appears to confuse 3 things:-
1. The need for the police not to discriminate against officers who are trans on the basis of their gender disorder/reassignment (I am using the words in the GRA and Equality Act). This is quite right. But this applies to them in their capacity as employers in their duties to their employees.
2. The necessity of all officers, whatever they are, to comply with the law. PACE for instance. The fact that an officer is trans does not override this and, as the Equality Act makes clear, in certain circumstances it is possible to discriminate against a trans person on the grounds of their sex not their gender. In any case, this is not discrimination because a male officer would not be permitted to perform an intimate search on a woman. The discrimination is on the grounds of sex not gender reassignment.
3. The importance of not giving officers unlawful instructions. Putting a trans police officer in the position of doing a search which is illegal and may constitute a criminal offence is utterly wrong. That officer could find themselves sued or prosecuted. The same would apply if a woman police officer was ordered to - or put under pressure to - do an intimate search on a trans identifying male. If such officers were then disciplined for not carrying out what they believe to be unlawful orders, the police would then also face employment law issues.
It is also, needless to say, not the way to rebuild womens' trust in the police.
The suggestion I have read that if a women objects to PACE being breached she will be recorded as having committed a hate crime is utterly absurd and also potentially unlawful.
It is about time - ABOUT FUCKING TIME, FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE - for the police to stop making things up, read the bloody law and follow it.
Sorry for the shouting (actually not sorry) but this is the same nonsense they got up to with Covid regulations and the law and again in the Miller case.
Apologies for being a bit grumpy earlier. My excuse is being awake since 2.30 with this blasted rib which is hurting like heck. Bear with a sore paw and all that.
OT Anyone know anything about politics in Pakistan? It seems kind of wild, if I've got this right: - The PM was governing with the support of some minor parties - The minor parties pulled their support and were about to pass a no confidence motion - The PM pulled a Boris Johnson and dissolved parliament rather than let them take a vote he was going to lose (or technically the speaker, who was on his side, did this) - The Supreme Court did something like that lady with enormous spider broach and ruled that the dissolution was illegal and would everyone please stop mucking around - Parliament passed their No Confidence vote and chose a new PM - The outgoing PM just announced that his party's MPs are resigning. It's not clear to me whether they intend to just let their opponents win the seats or whether they're doing a David Davis and asking the voters to vote them back in again.
#Russian driver Artyom Severyukhin, competing under the Italian flag at the #European Junior Karting Championship, showed a #Nazi salute at the awards ceremony.
He competing under the #Italian flag because of the sanctions imposed on #Russia.
Apologies for being a bit grumpy earlier. My excuse is being awake since 2.30 with this blasted rib which is hurting like heck. Bear with a sore paw and all that.
We all get more grumpy when in pain. Did you manage to get seen in A and E yet? Hopefully some decent painkillers will be taking the edge off?
"While each case is dealt with individually, the guidance says that if a detainee’s refusal to be searched “is based on discriminatory views” then police should consider recording a non-crime hate incident."
just wow
How would the detainee know if a search officer is transgender?
Transgender mtf is reasonably easy to spot. Generally hand size, adams apple etc.
More to the point given what we now know about the met and the number of officers like wayne couzens it seems to contain are you happy to give that sort the opportunity to self ID as woman in order to get some cheap thrills.
What people keep seeming to miss is in this debate is it is usually not the genuine trans people themselves that are the problem (with the exception of womens sports) but the number of sexual predators who will take up with glee self ID to enhance their opportunities.
Hell if self ID comes in and I get a prison sentence I will happily self ID as female as female prisons are a) cushier and b) I will have a muscle advantage on most of the inmates in case of trouble
I'm not really sure how Wayne Couzens, who relied on his real warrant card to kidnap and then murder Sarah Everard, gets dragged into the trans debate. And suppose the "real woman" who conducts the search is a lesbian. Oh the horrors!
A women in tears on BBC News explaining the horrific position she is in now with her Universal Credit being effectively cut as the 3% increase is far behind the inflation rate .
These are the real life impacts of the Tories disgusting abandonement of those on in work benefits who are in a desperate situation .
Though the UK median pay rise this year also only 3%
I just love the idea that the Government can keep affording all these increases in benefit
The government could if they taxed the wealthy.
Take a tithe from millionaires to allow people on benefits to afford heating and eating. Seems fair to me.
Tax the wealthy? if only it was that easy
Oh well, now you've explained in detail why it can't be done...
The top 1% of earners already pay around 28-29% of all income tax collected.
They are paying more in tax now then they have ever done, more than under 13 years of Labour.
If rates go up much more than the total collected from the wealthy will go down as they will find ways to avoid paying tax.
"More than they have ever done." Hmm, please, is that corrected for inflation? £10 in 2010 was worth £13.64 in 2021 according to the B of E. So that's a one-third increase in tax right there accounted for by inflation.
I'd also want to know how much more the top 1% own of UK wealth, including stuff stashed in tax havens.
I don't think thats true, but there are limits on what can be done. We can argue about that, and certainly many on here would support going after unearned income more, but its not possible to completely mitigated all the issues right now.
Take the NHS. Arguably it needs a shed load of cash to hire more staff and more capacity for patients. Money alone won't fix that - either you get staff from overseas or you train more at home, Covid has had a big impact on training. But medical schools are expanding, pharmacy admissions are on the up. But these will take years to reach the front line.
I think you believe all tories are heartless and uncaring about other people, I don't think thats true. Most want to support people in need, but also don't like people getting something for nothing. They read stories about free loaders on benefits and come to believe that there is a life out there on state handouts. They believe people who can work should. Where this breaks down is now we have work not paying enough to support a family. Housing costs too much, inflation and the rises in fuels costs are horrific. Tories do understand this, its just that the solutions are not easy.
I'm going to offer up two realpolitik simplistic observations
1. The problem in the NHS isn't the amount of money going in, its what it gets spent on. Both "record amounts being spent" and "a crisis in front-line budgets" are true/ Why? Because the structure hoovers up cash at absurd rates. A mass of bureaucratic complexity with endless tiers of overlapping and competing management. Remove much of the marketisation and more of the money gets to where it needs to get to. The Tories know this but its their people syphoning off the cash so we continue as is
2. Benefit fraud is a spectacularly low percentage - half a percent or so. Lets assume that only captures some of the anecdotage and increase it by a factor of 10 - so 5% is fraud and 95% is genuine. So the war against freeloaders and scroungers is done by ministers knowing it is an outright lie told to weaponise "benefits" and harden voters against human misery. Simply pointing this out, and asking that people treat others as they would be tret themselves will take away so much of the angst around the subject so we can have a grown up discussion.
Spot on.
My only addition, which might not sit well with you, is that much of your paragraph 1 began under Tony Blair. The ludicrous top-loading of the NHS: stuffing it full of middle managers earning huge amounts of money and clogging the system with bureaucracy also coincided with the insistence that nurses have degrees: why should a nurse have to have a degree?! This latter by the way then created a two-tier attitude in nursing so that some nurses would refuse to do jobs deemed beneath them.
The NHS does need proper funding. It also needs a serious clear out of the kind of bureaucratic complexity of which you rightly speak.
OT Anyone know anything about politics in Pakistan? It seems kind of wild, if I've got this right: - The PM was governing with the support of some minor parties - The minor parties pulled their support and were about to pass a no confidence motion - The PM pulled a Boris Johnson and dissolved parliament rather than let them take a vote he was going to lose (or technically the speaker, who was on his side, did this) - The Supreme Court did something like that lady with enormous spider broach and ruled that the dissolution was illegal and would everyone please stop mucking around - Parliament passed their No Confidence vote and chose a new PM - The outgoing PM just announced that his party's MPs are resigning. It's not clear to me whether they intend to just let their opponents win the seats or whether they're doing a David Davis and asking the voters to vote them back in again.
The PM is also blaming much of the turmoil on 'outside forces' which is Pakistani for India.
#Russian driver Artyom Severyukhin, competing under the Italian flag at the #European Junior Karting Championship, showed a #Nazi salute at the awards ceremony.
He competing under the #Italian flag because of the sanctions imposed on #Russia.
To be fair it looks like he was responding to the Italian national anthem by making fun of the Roman salute rather than making a statement.
A generous interpretation when his homeland is involved in invasion and war crimes in the name of 'de-nazification". The bigger question is why he's competing at all.
Why are you shocked by the latter? Should trans people be banned from the police force?
I don't think they should be banned from the police force, no. But trans people are surely a tiny, tiny minority of people. I just wouldn't have thought there would be enough of them that this sort of thing would be an issue.
"While each case is dealt with individually, the guidance says that if a detainee’s refusal to be searched “is based on discriminatory views” then police should consider recording a non-crime hate incident."
just wow
How would the detainee know if a search officer is transgender?
Transgender mtf is reasonably easy to spot. Generally hand size, adams apple etc.
More to the point given what we now know about the met and the number of officers like wayne couzens it seems to contain are you happy to give that sort the opportunity to self ID as woman in order to get some cheap thrills.
What people keep seeming to miss is in this debate is it is usually not the genuine trans people themselves that are the problem (with the exception of womens sports) but the number of sexual predators who will take up with glee self ID to enhance their opportunities.
Hell if self ID comes in and I get a prison sentence I will happily self ID as female as female prisons are a) cushier and b) I will have a muscle advantage on most of the inmates in case of trouble
I'm not really sure how Wayne Couzens, who relied on his real warrant card to kidnap and then murder Sarah Everard, gets dragged into the trans debate. And suppose the "real woman" who conducts the search is a lesbian. Oh the horrors!
Apologies for being a bit grumpy earlier. My excuse is being awake since 2.30 with this blasted rib which is hurting like heck. Bear with a sore paw and all that.
We all get more grumpy when in pain. Did you manage to get seen in A and E yet? Hopefully some decent painkillers will be taking the edge off?
Thank you. That's very kind of you.
In the end they transferred me to a doctor outside A&E the following morning who was able to examine me, heard the rib shifting around, and yes offered me codeine. The trouble is, I'm allergic to morphine which codeine converts to. So I'm relying on nurofen and paracetamol which isn't really doing the job especially at night.
I hadn't intended going to A&E but was ordered there by a 111 doctor as they needed to check for lung damage. A&E was rammed full of people, some of whom were there for wound dressings. They can't get appointments at their GP's.
I am honestly not joking that I would have been 10000 x better off in Thailand. Turn up at one of the regional medical centres and they will see you in 5 minutes. I might have had to pay a little bit for it but it wouldn't have been more than £50 max and they're really good there.
The NHS is on its knees at the moment. Really sad.
A women in tears on BBC News explaining the horrific position she is in now with her Universal Credit being effectively cut as the 3% increase is far behind the inflation rate .
These are the real life impacts of the Tories disgusting abandonement of those on in work benefits who are in a desperate situation .
Though the UK median pay rise this year also only 3%
I just love the idea that the Government can keep affording all these increases in benefit
The government could if they taxed the wealthy.
Take a tithe from millionaires to allow people on benefits to afford heating and eating. Seems fair to me.
Tax the wealthy? if only it was that easy
Oh well, now you've explained in detail why it can't be done...
The top 1% of earners already pay around 28-29% of all income tax collected.
They are paying more in tax now then they have ever done, more than under 13 years of Labour.
If rates go up much more than the total collected from the wealthy will go down as they will find ways to avoid paying tax.
"More than they have ever done." Hmm, please, is that corrected for inflation? £10 in 2010 was worth £13.64 in 2021 according to the B of E. So that's a one-third increase in tax right there accounted for by inflation.
I'd also want to know how much more the top 1% own of UK wealth, including stuff stashed in tax havens.
This article is a bit old but taxes have increased even further for the wealthy since it was published.
A women in tears on BBC News explaining the horrific position she is in now with her Universal Credit being effectively cut as the 3% increase is far behind the inflation rate .
These are the real life impacts of the Tories disgusting abandonement of those on in work benefits who are in a desperate situation .
Though the UK median pay rise this year also only 3%
I just love the idea that the Government can keep affording all these increases in benefit
The government could if they taxed the wealthy.
Take a tithe from millionaires to allow people on benefits to afford heating and eating. Seems fair to me.
Tax the wealthy? if only it was that easy
Oh well, now you've explained in detail why it can't be done...
The top 1% of earners already pay around 28-29% of all income tax collected.
They are paying more in tax now then they have ever done, more than under 13 years of Labour.
If rates go up much more than the total collected from the wealthy will go down as they will find ways to avoid paying tax.
I don't think many are looking at income on the 1% being a big new source of revenue. Hasn't the debate moved elsewhere? Land, property, gains, inheritance etc.
The tax burden is now at its highest for 60 years. Im not sure increasing taxes even further is the answer.
For me this is not about tax, its about incentive. We have oceans of money tied up in both large corporates and with individuals, and we have the need for significant investments into everything from education to power generation to manufacturing capabilities.
So, find ways to incentivise companies to invest money in their staff and in their facilities. As I said earlier we should only be offering the lowest corporation tax rates to the companies who actually pay and treat their staff properly, and we can incentivise investment in capability.
We can offer government bonds with more generous terms to let companies help us invest in the things these companies need to be successful, whether that be schools or roads or broadband.
There is no point saying "just increase tax" if we are corrupt and incompetent enough to not actually have cash to invest and spend (as we are now). We need to plan. Invest. Build. Remember that all of these mega schemes generate a return on investment. Stop saying "how will we pay" and ask how we will benefit.
I don't think thats true, but there are limits on what can be done. We can argue about that, and certainly many on here would support going after unearned income more, but its not possible to completely mitigated all the issues right now.
Take the NHS. Arguably it needs a shed load of cash to hire more staff and more capacity for patients. Money alone won't fix that - either you get staff from overseas or you train more at home, Covid has had a big impact on training. But medical schools are expanding, pharmacy admissions are on the up. But these will take years to reach the front line.
I think you believe all tories are heartless and uncaring about other people, I don't think thats true. Most want to support people in need, but also don't like people getting something for nothing. They read stories about free loaders on benefits and come to believe that there is a life out there on state handouts. They believe people who can work should. Where this breaks down is now we have work not paying enough to support a family. Housing costs too much, inflation and the rises in fuels costs are horrific. Tories do understand this, its just that the solutions are not easy.
I'm going to offer up two realpolitik simplistic observations
1. The problem in the NHS isn't the amount of money going in, its what it gets spent on. Both "record amounts being spent" and "a crisis in front-line budgets" are true/ Why? Because the structure hoovers up cash at absurd rates. A mass of bureaucratic complexity with endless tiers of overlapping and competing management. Remove much of the marketisation and more of the money gets to where it needs to get to. The Tories know this but its their people syphoning off the cash so we continue as is
2. Benefit fraud is a spectacularly low percentage - half a percent or so. Lets assume that only captures some of the anecdotage and increase it by a factor of 10 - so 5% is fraud and 95% is genuine. So the war against freeloaders and scroungers is done by ministers knowing it is an outright lie told to weaponise "benefits" and harden voters against human misery. Simply pointing this out, and asking that people treat others as they would be tret themselves will take away so much of the angst around the subject so we can have a grown up discussion.
Spot on.
My only addition, which might not sit well with you, is that much of your paragraph 1 began under Tony Blair. The ludicrous top-loading of the NHS: stuffing it full of middle managers earning huge amounts of money and clogging the system with bureaucracy also coincided with the insistence that nurses have degrees: why should a nurse have to have a degree?! This latter by the way then created a two-tier attitude in nursing so that some nurses would refuse to do jobs deemed beneath them.
The NHS does need proper funding. It also needs a serious clear out of the kind of bureaucratic complexity of which you rightly speak.
It sits fine with me. Labour abolished the widely mocked Major era market reforms, and then a few years later created their own. Bonkers. Always was. And I said so at the time.
"While each case is dealt with individually, the guidance says that if a detainee’s refusal to be searched “is based on discriminatory views” then police should consider recording a non-crime hate incident."
just wow
How would the detainee know if a search officer is transgender?
Transgender mtf is reasonably easy to spot. Generally hand size, adams apple etc.
More to the point given what we now know about the met and the number of officers like wayne couzens it seems to contain are you happy to give that sort the opportunity to self ID as woman in order to get some cheap thrills.
What people keep seeming to miss is in this debate is it is usually not the genuine trans people themselves that are the problem (with the exception of womens sports) but the number of sexual predators who will take up with glee self ID to enhance their opportunities.
Hell if self ID comes in and I get a prison sentence I will happily self ID as female as female prisons are a) cushier and b) I will have a muscle advantage on most of the inmates in case of trouble
Agree regarding the last point. But this is only an issue if we link prisons (and sport) to gender rather than to sex.
Regarding the other matter - maybe I'm naive but I can't see men pretending to be women so they can have a grope. Seems unlikely to me - I know there will be exceptions but still.
I don't think thats true, but there are limits on what can be done. We can argue about that, and certainly many on here would support going after unearned income more, but its not possible to completely mitigated all the issues right now.
Take the NHS. Arguably it needs a shed load of cash to hire more staff and more capacity for patients. Money alone won't fix that - either you get staff from overseas or you train more at home, Covid has had a big impact on training. But medical schools are expanding, pharmacy admissions are on the up. But these will take years to reach the front line.
I think you believe all tories are heartless and uncaring about other people, I don't think thats true. Most want to support people in need, but also don't like people getting something for nothing. They read stories about free loaders on benefits and come to believe that there is a life out there on state handouts. They believe people who can work should. Where this breaks down is now we have work not paying enough to support a family. Housing costs too much, inflation and the rises in fuels costs are horrific. Tories do understand this, its just that the solutions are not easy.
I'm going to offer up two realpolitik simplistic observations
1. The problem in the NHS isn't the amount of money going in, its what it gets spent on. Both "record amounts being spent" and "a crisis in front-line budgets" are true/ Why? Because the structure hoovers up cash at absurd rates. A mass of bureaucratic complexity with endless tiers of overlapping and competing management. Remove much of the marketisation and more of the money gets to where it needs to get to. The Tories know this but its their people syphoning off the cash so we continue as is
2. Benefit fraud is a spectacularly low percentage - half a percent or so. Lets assume that only captures some of the anecdotage and increase it by a factor of 10 - so 5% is fraud and 95% is genuine. So the war against freeloaders and scroungers is done by ministers knowing it is an outright lie told to weaponise "benefits" and harden voters against human misery. Simply pointing this out, and asking that people treat others as they would be tret themselves will take away so much of the angst around the subject so we can have a grown up discussion.
Spot on.
My only addition, which might not sit well with you, is that much of your paragraph 1 began under Tony Blair. The ludicrous top-loading of the NHS: stuffing it full of middle managers earning huge amounts of money and clogging the system with bureaucracy also coincided with the insistence that nurses have degrees: why should a nurse have to have a degree?! This latter by the way then created a two-tier attitude in nursing so that some nurses would refuse to do jobs deemed beneath them.
The NHS does need proper funding. It also needs a serious clear out of the kind of bureaucratic complexity of which you rightly speak.
IIRC the NHS spend less on managers than many (at least) comparable organisations. Issues arise because people have the title 'manager' but are actually health professionals providing a leadership role.
It does seem to me, though, that nursing as a profession has been re-organised far too often.
"While each case is dealt with individually, the guidance says that if a detainee’s refusal to be searched “is based on discriminatory views” then police should consider recording a non-crime hate incident."
just wow
How would the detainee know if a search officer is transgender?
Transgender mtf is reasonably easy to spot. Generally hand size, adams apple etc.
More to the point given what we now know about the met and the number of officers like wayne couzens it seems to contain are you happy to give that sort the opportunity to self ID as woman in order to get some cheap thrills.
What people keep seeming to miss is in this debate is it is usually not the genuine trans people themselves that are the problem (with the exception of womens sports) but the number of sexual predators who will take up with glee self ID to enhance their opportunities.
Hell if self ID comes in and I get a prison sentence I will happily self ID as female as female prisons are a) cushier and b) I will have a muscle advantage on most of the inmates in case of trouble
I'm not really sure how Wayne Couzens, who relied on his real warrant card to kidnap and then murder Sarah Everard, gets dragged into the trans debate. And suppose the "real woman" who conducts the search is a lesbian. Oh the horrors!
It got dragged in because as we have seen documented earlier forces like the met seem to have rather a lot of sex offenders as serving officers. Sex offenders are predators and seek easy ways to get at their prey just as in the Wayne Couzens case using his warrant card.
While currently that is the guidlines issued we already see the trans activists pushing things further and further and I have no doubt this will expand from transitioned>GRC>Identify as.
We already have seen with the prison service a complete lax of sense sticking not transition prisoners guilty of sexual assaults of women into womens prisons because they say they self identify as women. I have no faith in the police chiefs not to do the same and fall inline under the trans lobby onslaught.
Apologies for being a bit grumpy earlier. My excuse is being awake since 2.30 with this blasted rib which is hurting like heck. Bear with a sore paw and all that.
"While each case is dealt with individually, the guidance says that if a detainee’s refusal to be searched “is based on discriminatory views” then police should consider recording a non-crime hate incident."
just wow
How would the detainee know if a search officer is transgender?
Transgender mtf is reasonably easy to spot. Generally hand size, adams apple etc.
More to the point given what we now know about the met and the number of officers like wayne couzens it seems to contain are you happy to give that sort the opportunity to self ID as woman in order to get some cheap thrills.
What people keep seeming to miss is in this debate is it is usually not the genuine trans people themselves that are the problem (with the exception of womens sports) but the number of sexual predators who will take up with glee self ID to enhance their opportunities.
Hell if self ID comes in and I get a prison sentence I will happily self ID as female as female prisons are a) cushier and b) I will have a muscle advantage on most of the inmates in case of trouble
I'm not really sure how Wayne Couzens, who relied on his real warrant card to kidnap and then murder Sarah Everard, gets dragged into the trans debate. And suppose the "real woman" who conducts the search is a lesbian. Oh the horrors!
A bit of French number crunching, comparing first round 2017 with first round 2022.
- Macron increased his first round lead over Le Pen by 1.5%, so a small first round swing in Macron's favour. - Swing from right of centre candidates to left of centre candidates was around 6%, 48-28 -> 40-32. Drop on right because the Republican vote was not fully compensated, rise on left because Greens fully balanced Socialist losses, whilst the remainder of the left edged up across the board. - If you include Macron on the left swing is slightly bigger. - That said Melenchon was only up 2.5% again with tiny swings relative to Macron and Le Pen.
So looking at Macron-Le Pen-Melenchon 2022 first round is remarkably similar to 2017.
If you are looking for reasons that 2022 might be different, you are mainly banking on this:
- A substantial drop in the vote for mainstream, comfortably coalitionable parties, from 56 to 40%, including the uncomfortable right rising from 22.5 to 34% (the uncomfortable right vote was just a smidge below Le Pen's second round share last time).
"While each case is dealt with individually, the guidance says that if a detainee’s refusal to be searched “is based on discriminatory views” then police should consider recording a non-crime hate incident."
just wow
How would the detainee know if a search officer is transgender?
Transgender mtf is reasonably easy to spot. Generally hand size, adams apple etc.
More to the point given what we now know about the met and the number of officers like wayne couzens it seems to contain are you happy to give that sort the opportunity to self ID as woman in order to get some cheap thrills.
What people keep seeming to miss is in this debate is it is usually not the genuine trans people themselves that are the problem (with the exception of womens sports) but the number of sexual predators who will take up with glee self ID to enhance their opportunities.
Hell if self ID comes in and I get a prison sentence I will happily self ID as female as female prisons are a) cushier and b) I will have a muscle advantage on most of the inmates in case of trouble
I'm not really sure how Wayne Couzens, who relied on his real warrant card to kidnap and then murder Sarah Everard, gets dragged into the trans debate. And suppose the "real woman" who conducts the search is a lesbian. Oh the horrors!
A bit of French number crunching, comparing first round 2017 with first round 2022.
- Macron increased his first round lead over Le Pen by 1.5%, so a small first round swing in Macron's favour. - Swing from right of centre candidates to left of centre candidates was around 6%, 48-28 -> 40-32. Drop on right because the Republican vote was not fully compensated, rise on left because Greens fully balanced Socialist losses, whilst the remainder of the left edged up across the board. - If you include Macron on the left swing is slightly bigger. - That said Melenchon was only up 2.5% again with tiny swings relative to Macron and Le Pen.
So looking at Macron-Le Pen-Melenchon 2022 first round is remarkably similar to 2017.
If you are looking for reasons that 2022 might be different, you are mainly banking on this:
- A substantial drop in the vote for mainstream, comfortably coalitionable parties, from 56 to 40%, including the uncomfortable right rising from 22.5 to 34% (the uncomfortable right vote was just a smidge below Le Pen's second round share last time).
Also, an increased unwillingness on the part of left wing voters to hold their noses and vote for Macron.
A year later, Andrew had further reason to feel snubbed. Shortly before he boarded the number two barge – an insult in itself – at the Diamond Jubilee river pageant, he learned that he and his daughters had been cut from the iconic royal photo finish on the Buckingham Palace balcony. Nor were they on the list for an event with 700 dignitaries at Westminster Hall just beforehand. Another guest on the barge heard him whingeing about it to Sophie Wessex, whose invitation was also lost in the mail. The image of a curated Royal Family struck the right note at a time of economic austerity. But a former aide told me: “I hear there were literally people restraining members of the family trying to get on the balcony.”
...
Privately, Epstein told people that Andrew was an idiot, but – to him – a useful one. A senior royal, even if tainted, is always a potent magnet abroad. Epstein confided to a friend that he used to fly the Duke of York to obscure foreign markets, where governments were obliged to receive him, and Epstein went along as HRH’s investment adviser. With Andrew as frontman, Epstein could negotiate deals with these (often) shady players.
...
I am told that former US ambassador to the UK Walter Annenberg’s wife, Lee, was appalled when the Duke made a private visit in 1993 to Sunnylands, their magnificent Palm Springs estate in California, and holed up in his bedroom for two days, apparently watching porn on cable TV.
Former Editor of Vanity Fair, so it must all be true ....
"While each case is dealt with individually, the guidance says that if a detainee’s refusal to be searched “is based on discriminatory views” then police should consider recording a non-crime hate incident."
just wow
How would the detainee know if a search officer is transgender?
Transgender mtf is reasonably easy to spot. Generally hand size, adams apple etc.
More to the point given what we now know about the met and the number of officers like wayne couzens it seems to contain are you happy to give that sort the opportunity to self ID as woman in order to get some cheap thrills.
What people keep seeming to miss is in this debate is it is usually not the genuine trans people themselves that are the problem (with the exception of womens sports) but the number of sexual predators who will take up with glee self ID to enhance their opportunities.
Hell if self ID comes in and I get a prison sentence I will happily self ID as female as female prisons are a) cushier and b) I will have a muscle advantage on most of the inmates in case of trouble
I'm not really sure how Wayne Couzens, who relied on his real warrant card to kidnap and then murder Sarah Everard, gets dragged into the trans debate. And suppose the "real woman" who conducts the search is a lesbian. Oh the horrors!
Apologies for being a bit grumpy earlier. My excuse is being awake since 2.30 with this blasted rib which is hurting like heck. Bear with a sore paw and all that.
We all get more grumpy when in pain. Did you manage to get seen in A and E yet? Hopefully some decent painkillers will be taking the edge off?
Thank you. That's very kind of you.
In the end they transferred me to a doctor outside A&E the following morning who was able to examine me, heard the rib shifting around, and yes offered me codeine. The trouble is, I'm allergic to morphine which codeine converts to. So I'm relying on nurofen and paracetamol which isn't really doing the job especially at night.
I hadn't intended going to A&E but was ordered there by a 111 doctor as they needed to check for lung damage. A&E was rammed full of people, some of whom were there for wound dressings. They can't get appointments at their GP's.
I am honestly not joking that I would have been 10000 x better off in Thailand. Turn up at one of the regional medical centres and they will see you in 5 minutes. I might have had to pay a little bit for it but it wouldn't have been more than £50 max and they're really good there.
The NHS is on its knees at the moment. Really sad.
If someone cannot take morphine, people trying to treat the pain, and the patient have a real problem. And you wouldn't be much, if any, better off in Thailand as far as your 'allergy' is concerned. Has anyone suggested a fentanyl patch?
So about 1% are out as trans. True figure may be a lot higher.
A minority but not a minority to drive a bulldozer into.
"We tentatively estimate that there are approximately 200,000-500,000 trans people in the UK" does not equate to "about 1% are out as trans," it is 0.4%-1% and it is a tentative estimate of everyone, not just the "out."
Why are you shocked by the latter? Should trans people be banned from the police force?
I don't think they should be banned from the police force, no. But trans people are surely a tiny, tiny minority of people. I just wouldn't have thought there would be enough of them that this sort of thing would be an issue.
The more fundamental point is that the College of Policing has form for issuing guidance which is not in compliance with the law. I am absolutely fed up with the police announcing in advance that they will break the law or interpret it how they feel and then dare people to challenge them over it. It is utterly wrong.
Those who enforce the law should not be law breakers. We should not have to rely on bolshy citizens challenging them to get them to do their job.
Honestly, were I younger I'd go into politics just to become Home Secretary and do to the police what Thatcher had to do to overmighty unions. Police leadership in this country is an utter disgrace. Pull the whole edifice down and start again.
The US and Nato allies are making unprecedented amounts of classified intelligence public in a bid to expose Moscow's plans in Ukraine, but it's even quicker if the Russians just share it direct
Continuing the great tradition of top notch OPSEC that the Russian military has established in this war, Kadyrov on his daily Telegram video shows operational maps he says he has just received from his commanders
"While each case is dealt with individually, the guidance says that if a detainee’s refusal to be searched “is based on discriminatory views” then police should consider recording a non-crime hate incident."
just wow
How would the detainee know if a search officer is transgender?
Transgender mtf is reasonably easy to spot. Generally hand size, adams apple etc.
More to the point given what we now know about the met and the number of officers like wayne couzens it seems to contain are you happy to give that sort the opportunity to self ID as woman in order to get some cheap thrills.
What people keep seeming to miss is in this debate is it is usually not the genuine trans people themselves that are the problem (with the exception of womens sports) but the number of sexual predators who will take up with glee self ID to enhance their opportunities.
Hell if self ID comes in and I get a prison sentence I will happily self ID as female as female prisons are a) cushier and b) I will have a muscle advantage on most of the inmates in case of trouble
I'm not really sure how Wayne Couzens, who relied on his real warrant card to kidnap and then murder Sarah Everard, gets dragged into the trans debate. And suppose the "real woman" who conducts the search is a lesbian. Oh the horrors!
That is irrelevant. The relevant law - PACE - refers to sex. Not gender. Or "lived gender" or anything else.
"(7)A constable may not carry out an intimate search of a person of the opposite sex."
And the Gender Recognition Act surely covers this.
Surely the Gender Recognition Act only refers to gender, not sex?
That is not my lay understanding. Taking the police guidelines together with the act, a post-transition woman is a woman and can search female but not male suspects. Whether there are any trans women police officers is left as an exercise for the reader.
A bit of French number crunching, comparing first round 2017 with first round 2022.
- Macron increased his first round lead over Le Pen by 1.5%, so a small first round swing in Macron's favour. - Swing from right of centre candidates to left of centre candidates was around 6%, 48-28 -> 40-32. Drop on right because the Republican vote was not fully compensated, rise on left because Greens fully balanced Socialist losses, whilst the remainder of the left edged up across the board. - If you include Macron on the left swing is slightly bigger. - That said Melenchon was only up 2.5% again with tiny swings relative to Macron and Le Pen.
So looking at Macron-Le Pen-Melenchon 2022 first round is remarkably similar to 2017.
If you are looking for reasons that 2022 might be different, you are mainly banking on this:
- A substantial drop in the vote for mainstream, comfortably coalitionable parties, from 56 to 40%, including the uncomfortable right rising from 22.5 to 34% (the uncomfortable right vote was just a smidge below Le Pen's second round share last time).
My conclusion from looking at the numbers is that the only way Le Pen can come first is if she wins outright on transfers from Melenchon. It will make for an interesting campaign.
P&O still have no Dover/Calais services running. What a shambles.
The head of UK ports in apologising for the delays affirmed the cause at Dover is the loss of P & O ferries but also poor weather in the channel
He said the rest of UK ports are operating at 92% but of course some will be wanting to blame brexit
Can I ask when this quote was given? Because the evidence of eyes and ears demonstrates it to be false. "Loss of P&O ferries". Its true that ferry capacity has been reduced. But ships are leaving half empty - trucks cannot get through customs. So the bottleneck is not the P&O issue. "poor weather in the channel" - all you need to do is check the weather forecast today and any day you like last week. There is no poor weather.
The issue is the collapse of the Goods Vehicle Movement Service, where the computer system which HMRC told your government 6 years ago could not cope with the number of post-Brexit transactions has failed because it can't cope with the number of post-Brexit transactions. We have suspended making any inbound checks - trucks are waved through. But outbound we need to show paperwork for the French in that oven-ready deal we insisted on implementing. So without a working computer its manual checks.
Remember that there is no room to park trucks at Dover. So even when GVMS and CHIEF were working the time taken forces trucks to be stacked elsewhere and paperwork to be examined at various pre-channel locations. So even the best case scenario will have queues forever. When the system fails its entirely manual, which creates this chaos.
"Its the fault of P&O" is a demonstrable lie. "Its the fault of poor weather" is a demonstrable lie. You are being spun. You are a smarter man than just believe the lies fed to you in easily digestible portions. DFDS - the people running the ferries - have confirmed their boats are departing half full. So either DFDS are lying about their own business or your quote from UK Ports was a joke at the time and is utterly discredited now.
He commented on 5 live last week and you are clearly suggesting the head of UK ports is lying to the public
I would suggest he knows this subject and you are to be fair hardly a neutral observer
I'm not surprised RP Isn't a neutral observer. He's trying to import stuff into the UK through this chaos. Of course he isn't a neutral observer. He's a critical, and well-informed, one. I'd be surprised if he has any hair left.
You can be well informed, or neutral - both seems a stretch. I'm not sure Big_G is either on this.
Worth noting that I am not a FBPE ultra. Leaving the EU has not caused this. What we chose to do after leaving the single market and customs union is what caused this. I advocate merely the removal of false trade barriers and the return to Thatcherite free trade.
If we agree to align with EU standards on trade (easy, apparently) does that affect our ability to do trade deals elsewhere? If not then it ought to be a no brainer. But there must be some benefit to wanting 3rd party status?
1. We are already wholly aligned on standards. 2. Removing barriers only an issue if we dispute "dynamic" alignment on standards. Yet both parties claim they will not drop food standards, so as with (1) this is easy 3. We aren't signing trade deals. We have done some roll-over deals. And a deal with AUSNZ which only kicks in in 2036. America has told us to do one. So we're protecting the theoretical right to sign trade deals with partners shockingly refusing to small UK better terms than large EU.
Cheers. So to clarify if we do formally align, it could impact on other deals? I agree with you that we should align with the EU and I hope/suspect the next government will do so, but I'm trying to see why we have chosen 3rd party status?
Why? Because sovvrinty innit? We sold people that Brexit would make things cheaper. That being able to get our own trade deals would mean better trade deals.
It sounds like you knew what you were voting for.
You clearly didn't because you have changed your mind, and bizarrely from Remain to Leave, when most people are going the other way when they realise how pointless it is. How long before the wind changes and you also realise it was pointless?
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock pushes for the delivery of "heavy weapons" — meaning tanks — to Ukraine.
"One thing is clear: Ukraine needs more military material, especially heavy weapons," Baerbock said at EU Foreign Ministers meeting in Luxembourg.
Last week we reported that Baerbock and her Green party colleague Robert Habeck push internally for the delivery of German tanks to Ukraine, but that Chancellor Olaf Scholz has held up the decision.
I don't think thats true, but there are limits on what can be done. We can argue about that, and certainly many on here would support going after unearned income more, but its not possible to completely mitigated all the issues right now.
Take the NHS. Arguably it needs a shed load of cash to hire more staff and more capacity for patients. Money alone won't fix that - either you get staff from overseas or you train more at home, Covid has had a big impact on training. But medical schools are expanding, pharmacy admissions are on the up. But these will take years to reach the front line.
I think you believe all tories are heartless and uncaring about other people, I don't think thats true. Most want to support people in need, but also don't like people getting something for nothing. They read stories about free loaders on benefits and come to believe that there is a life out there on state handouts. They believe people who can work should. Where this breaks down is now we have work not paying enough to support a family. Housing costs too much, inflation and the rises in fuels costs are horrific. Tories do understand this, its just that the solutions are not easy.
I'm going to offer up two realpolitik simplistic observations
1. The problem in the NHS isn't the amount of money going in, its what it gets spent on. Both "record amounts being spent" and "a crisis in front-line budgets" are true/ Why? Because the structure hoovers up cash at absurd rates. A mass of bureaucratic complexity with endless tiers of overlapping and competing management. Remove much of the marketisation and more of the money gets to where it needs to get to. The Tories know this but its their people syphoning off the cash so we continue as is
2. Benefit fraud is a spectacularly low percentage - half a percent or so. Lets assume that only captures some of the anecdotage and increase it by a factor of 10 - so 5% is fraud and 95% is genuine. So the war against freeloaders and scroungers is done by ministers knowing it is an outright lie told to weaponise "benefits" and harden voters against human misery. Simply pointing this out, and asking that people treat others as they would be tret themselves will take away so much of the angst around the subject so we can have a grown up discussion.
Spot on.
My only addition, which might not sit well with you, is that much of your paragraph 1 began under Tony Blair. The ludicrous top-loading of the NHS: stuffing it full of middle managers earning huge amounts of money and clogging the system with bureaucracy also coincided with the insistence that nurses have degrees: why should a nurse have to have a degree?! This latter by the way then created a two-tier attitude in nursing so that some nurses would refuse to do jobs deemed beneath them.
The NHS does need proper funding. It also needs a serious clear out of the kind of bureaucratic complexity of which you rightly speak.
I'm not against nurses having degrees - much of the course is on placements on wards anyway and generally more training is a good thing. Regards two tiers of nurses, staff should be managed and should be able to do and do the tasks they are paid to do.
Pharmacy is in an interesting place - Health Education England is trying to shoe-horn a lot more placement time into the course. This is probably meaning we will remove science content. Its arguable what science content a pharmacist needs (OKC will know this - you don't get asked much about science in practice). But it will also push pharmacy down a similar route to nursing in terms of how we train.
It's not a right of female police officers to be able to strip search female suspects. It's a right of female citizens not to be strip-searched by male police officers.
Why do they keep on getting this sort of thing wrong? It seems obvious that the right of the person being strip-searched should take precedence in this situation.
So about 1% are out as trans. True figure may be a lot higher.
A minority but not a minority to drive a bulldozer into.
"We tentatively estimate that there are approximately 200,000-500,000 trans people in the UK" does not equate to "about 1% are out as trans," it is 0.4%-1% and it is a tentative estimate of everyone, not just the "out."
Define transgender. It is a very elastic term these days. Much harder to define than woman.
Does it just mean those with gender dysphoria? Or anybody who dresses from time to time in woman's clothes? Or those with autogynephilia? (Men who become sexually aroused at the thought or image of themselves as a woman) Or those who would just like to be a woman - well just because. Or those who decide to identify as a woman if it is convenient eg male sex offenders who identify as women when sent to prison?
Or what?
I'd like to see that question posed to politicians.
Until you have clarity on the terms used, I'd be sceptical of drawing any conclusions from statistics.
It's not a right of female police officers to be able to strip search female suspects. It's a right of female citizens not to be strip-searched by male police officers.
Why do they keep on getting this sort of thing wrong? It seems obvious that the right of the person being strip-searched should take precedence in this situation.
And the law does indeed say this.
But the police and the law seem to be barely on speaking terms these days.
Apologies for being a bit grumpy earlier. My excuse is being awake since 2.30 with this blasted rib which is hurting like heck. Bear with a sore paw and all that.
"While each case is dealt with individually, the guidance says that if a detainee’s refusal to be searched “is based on discriminatory views” then police should consider recording a non-crime hate incident."
just wow
How would the detainee know if a search officer is transgender?
Transgender mtf is reasonably easy to spot. Generally hand size, adams apple etc.
More to the point given what we now know about the met and the number of officers like wayne couzens it seems to contain are you happy to give that sort the opportunity to self ID as woman in order to get some cheap thrills.
What people keep seeming to miss is in this debate is it is usually not the genuine trans people themselves that are the problem (with the exception of womens sports) but the number of sexual predators who will take up with glee self ID to enhance their opportunities.
Hell if self ID comes in and I get a prison sentence I will happily self ID as female as female prisons are a) cushier and b) I will have a muscle advantage on most of the inmates in case of trouble
I'm not really sure how Wayne Couzens, who relied on his real warrant card to kidnap and then murder Sarah Everard, gets dragged into the trans debate. And suppose the "real woman" who conducts the search is a lesbian. Oh the horrors!
That is irrelevant. The relevant law - PACE - refers to sex. Not gender. Or "lived gender" or anything else.
"(7)A constable may not carry out an intimate search of a person of the opposite sex."
And the Gender Recognition Act surely covers this.
Surely the Gender Recognition Act only refers to gender, not sex?
That is not my lay understanding. Taking the police guidelines together with the act, a post-transition woman is a woman and can search female but not male suspects. Whether there are any trans women police officers is left as an exercise for the reader.
A post-transition person is treated in law as the gender they have transitioned to. But not for all purposes. And their sex does not change. And it is sex which is the relevant consideration under PACE.
Sounds as though Dnipro airport has been totally destroyed by Russian missiles.
Yes. Naively I had expected that fixed targets like airports would have been day 1, or at least week 1, targets for an initial missile and air bombardment campaign. Is it week 7 now?
I don't think thats true, but there are limits on what can be done. We can argue about that, and certainly many on here would support going after unearned income more, but its not possible to completely mitigated all the issues right now.
Take the NHS. Arguably it needs a shed load of cash to hire more staff and more capacity for patients. Money alone won't fix that - either you get staff from overseas or you train more at home, Covid has had a big impact on training. But medical schools are expanding, pharmacy admissions are on the up. But these will take years to reach the front line.
I think you believe all tories are heartless and uncaring about other people, I don't think thats true. Most want to support people in need, but also don't like people getting something for nothing. They read stories about free loaders on benefits and come to believe that there is a life out there on state handouts. They believe people who can work should. Where this breaks down is now we have work not paying enough to support a family. Housing costs too much, inflation and the rises in fuels costs are horrific. Tories do understand this, its just that the solutions are not easy.
I'm going to offer up two realpolitik simplistic observations
1. The problem in the NHS isn't the amount of money going in, its what it gets spent on. Both "record amounts being spent" and "a crisis in front-line budgets" are true/ Why? Because the structure hoovers up cash at absurd rates. A mass of bureaucratic complexity with endless tiers of overlapping and competing management. Remove much of the marketisation and more of the money gets to where it needs to get to. The Tories know this but its their people syphoning off the cash so we continue as is
2. Benefit fraud is a spectacularly low percentage - half a percent or so. Lets assume that only captures some of the anecdotage and increase it by a factor of 10 - so 5% is fraud and 95% is genuine. So the war against freeloaders and scroungers is done by ministers knowing it is an outright lie told to weaponise "benefits" and harden voters against human misery. Simply pointing this out, and asking that people treat others as they would be tret themselves will take away so much of the angst around the subject so we can have a grown up discussion.
Spot on.
My only addition, which might not sit well with you, is that much of your paragraph 1 began under Tony Blair. The ludicrous top-loading of the NHS: stuffing it full of middle managers earning huge amounts of money and clogging the system with bureaucracy also coincided with the insistence that nurses have degrees: why should a nurse have to have a degree?! This latter by the way then created a two-tier attitude in nursing so that some nurses would refuse to do jobs deemed beneath them.
The NHS does need proper funding. It also needs a serious clear out of the kind of bureaucratic complexity of which you rightly speak.
Ooh, hooray, a Heathener post I can agree with, particularly the second half of the third sentence. I would also add that nursing is probably the most conspicuous but far from the only profession to fall into this category. The Blairite insistence that everyone must have degrees was baffling; compounded only by the Cameron/Osborne insistence that everyone must have degrees and take on a crippling level of debt in order to enter the Labour market. Fewer students, better funded.
So about 1% are out as trans. True figure may be a lot higher.
A minority but not a minority to drive a bulldozer into.
"We tentatively estimate that there are approximately 200,000-500,000 trans people in the UK" does not equate to "about 1% are out as trans," it is 0.4%-1% and it is a tentative estimate of everyone, not just the "out."
Define transgender. It is a very elastic term these days. Much harder to define than woman.
Does it just mean those with gender dysphoria? Or anybody who dresses from time to time in woman's clothes? Or those with autogynephilia? (Men who become sexually aroused at the thought or image of themselves as a woman) Or those who would just like to be a woman - well just because. Or those who decide to identify as a woman if it is convenient eg male sex offenders who identify as women when sent to prison?
Or what?
I'd like to see that question posed to politicians.
Until you have clarity on the terms used, I'd be sceptical of drawing any conclusions from statistics.
As Mandy Rhodes writes:
And legislators are rightly nervous about cementing in statute a gender ideology which currently has no status in law and no clear definitions. What can you ban that you can’t name?
I don't think thats true, but there are limits on what can be done. We can argue about that, and certainly many on here would support going after unearned income more, but its not possible to completely mitigated all the issues right now.
Take the NHS. Arguably it needs a shed load of cash to hire more staff and more capacity for patients. Money alone won't fix that - either you get staff from overseas or you train more at home, Covid has had a big impact on training. But medical schools are expanding, pharmacy admissions are on the up. But these will take years to reach the front line.
I think you believe all tories are heartless and uncaring about other people, I don't think thats true. Most want to support people in need, but also don't like people getting something for nothing. They read stories about free loaders on benefits and come to believe that there is a life out there on state handouts. They believe people who can work should. Where this breaks down is now we have work not paying enough to support a family. Housing costs too much, inflation and the rises in fuels costs are horrific. Tories do understand this, its just that the solutions are not easy.
I'm going to offer up two realpolitik simplistic observations
1. The problem in the NHS isn't the amount of money going in, its what it gets spent on. Both "record amounts being spent" and "a crisis in front-line budgets" are true/ Why? Because the structure hoovers up cash at absurd rates. A mass of bureaucratic complexity with endless tiers of overlapping and competing management. Remove much of the marketisation and more of the money gets to where it needs to get to. The Tories know this but its their people syphoning off the cash so we continue as is
2. Benefit fraud is a spectacularly low percentage - half a percent or so. Lets assume that only captures some of the anecdotage and increase it by a factor of 10 - so 5% is fraud and 95% is genuine. So the war against freeloaders and scroungers is done by ministers knowing it is an outright lie told to weaponise "benefits" and harden voters against human misery. Simply pointing this out, and asking that people treat others as they would be tret themselves will take away so much of the angst around the subject so we can have a grown up discussion.
Spot on.
My only addition, which might not sit well with you, is that much of your paragraph 1 began under Tony Blair. The ludicrous top-loading of the NHS: stuffing it full of middle managers earning huge amounts of money and clogging the system with bureaucracy also coincided with the insistence that nurses have degrees: why should a nurse have to have a degree?! This latter by the way then created a two-tier attitude in nursing so that some nurses would refuse to do jobs deemed beneath them.
The NHS does need proper funding. It also needs a serious clear out of the kind of bureaucratic complexity of which you rightly speak.
I'm not against nurses having degrees - much of the course is on placements on wards anyway and generally more training is a good thing. Regards two tiers of nurses, staff should be managed and should be able to do and do the tasks they are paid to do.
Pharmacy is in an interesting place - Health Education England is trying to shoe-horn a lot more placement time into the course. This is probably meaning we will remove science content. Its arguable what science content a pharmacist needs (OKC will know this - you don't get asked much about science in practice). But it will also push pharmacy down a similar route to nursing in terms of how we train.
From what I have seen, the NHS relies on a very steep pyramid of management - quite 1950s in style. In addition management practises I’ve encountered were startling in their obsolescence.
So about 1% are out as trans. True figure may be a lot higher.
A minority but not a minority to drive a bulldozer into.
"We tentatively estimate that there are approximately 200,000-500,000 trans people in the UK" does not equate to "about 1% are out as trans," it is 0.4%-1% and it is a tentative estimate of everyone, not just the "out."
Define transgender. It is a very elastic term these days. Much harder to define than woman.
Does it just mean those with gender dysphoria? Or anybody who dresses from time to time in woman's clothes? Or those with autogynephilia? (Men who become sexually aroused at the thought or image of themselves as a woman) Or those who would just like to be a woman - well just because. Or those who decide to identify as a woman if it is convenient eg male sex offenders who identify as women when sent to prison?
Or what?
I'd like to see that question posed to politicians.
Until you have clarity on the terms used, I'd be sceptical of drawing any conclusions from statistics.
Would anyone admit to a pollster (or psychiatrist if appropriate) to having autogynephilia?
Remember when Alba was going to end Nicola Sturgeon ROFL
I enjoyed not voting for Alex Salmond last May. Its a pity he chose not to stand for council election this May so I would have the pleasure of not voting for him again/
Sounds as though Dnipro airport has been totally destroyed by Russian missiles.
Yes. Naively I had expected that fixed targets like airports would have been day 1, or at least week 1, targets for an initial missile and air bombardment campaign. Is it week 7 now?
Kinda suggests that Russia won't be supporting any new assaults with airborne troops and supplies. Overland meatgrinder all the way.
Haven't fully grokked quordle. did it first time yesterday and was surprised by the boringness of the solutions. Wordle words tend to be interesting, we've had nymph and foray recently.
Remember when Alba was going to end Nicola Sturgeon ROFL
I enjoyed not voting for Alex Salmond last May. Its a pity he chose not to stand for council election this May so I would have the pleasure of not voting for him again/
"While each case is dealt with individually, the guidance says that if a detainee’s refusal to be searched “is based on discriminatory views” then police should consider recording a non-crime hate incident."
just wow
How would the detainee know if a search officer is transgender?
Transgender mtf is reasonably easy to spot. Generally hand size, adams apple etc.
More to the point given what we now know about the met and the number of officers like wayne couzens it seems to contain are you happy to give that sort the opportunity to self ID as woman in order to get some cheap thrills.
What people keep seeming to miss is in this debate is it is usually not the genuine trans people themselves that are the problem (with the exception of womens sports) but the number of sexual predators who will take up with glee self ID to enhance their opportunities.
Hell if self ID comes in and I get a prison sentence I will happily self ID as female as female prisons are a) cushier and b) I will have a muscle advantage on most of the inmates in case of trouble
I'm not really sure how Wayne Couzens, who relied on his real warrant card to kidnap and then murder Sarah Everard, gets dragged into the trans debate. And suppose the "real woman" who conducts the search is a lesbian. Oh the horrors!
That is irrelevant. The relevant law - PACE - refers to sex. Not gender. Or "lived gender" or anything else.
"(7)A constable may not carry out an intimate search of a person of the opposite sex."
And the Gender Recognition Act surely covers this.
Surely the Gender Recognition Act only refers to gender, not sex?
That is not my lay understanding. Taking the police guidelines together with the act, a post-transition woman is a woman and can search female but not male suspects. Whether there are any trans women police officers is left as an exercise for the reader.
A post-transition person is treated in law as the gender they have transitioned to. But not for all purposes. And their sex does not change. And it is sex which is the relevant consideration under PACE.
It is PACE which needs to be complied with.
** thumps head on desk - again **
Their sex has changed. The guidelines refer to post-transition women, not a chancer who has self-ID'd on a whim. It seems to me the police guidelines are reasonable. In any case, what is the alternative? How would suspects know the woman searching them is trans? A special coloured hat band?
Remember when Alba was going to end Nicola Sturgeon ROFL
I enjoyed not voting for Alex Salmond last May. Its a pity he chose not to stand for council election this May so I would have the pleasure of not voting for him again/
I don't think thats true, but there are limits on what can be done. We can argue about that, and certainly many on here would support going after unearned income more, but its not possible to completely mitigated all the issues right now.
Take the NHS. Arguably it needs a shed load of cash to hire more staff and more capacity for patients. Money alone won't fix that - either you get staff from overseas or you train more at home, Covid has had a big impact on training. But medical schools are expanding, pharmacy admissions are on the up. But these will take years to reach the front line.
I think you believe all tories are heartless and uncaring about other people, I don't think thats true. Most want to support people in need, but also don't like people getting something for nothing. They read stories about free loaders on benefits and come to believe that there is a life out there on state handouts. They believe people who can work should. Where this breaks down is now we have work not paying enough to support a family. Housing costs too much, inflation and the rises in fuels costs are horrific. Tories do understand this, its just that the solutions are not easy.
I'm going to offer up two realpolitik simplistic observations
1. The problem in the NHS isn't the amount of money going in, its what it gets spent on. Both "record amounts being spent" and "a crisis in front-line budgets" are true/ Why? Because the structure hoovers up cash at absurd rates. A mass of bureaucratic complexity with endless tiers of overlapping and competing management. Remove much of the marketisation and more of the money gets to where it needs to get to. The Tories know this but its their people syphoning off the cash so we continue as is
2. Benefit fraud is a spectacularly low percentage - half a percent or so. Lets assume that only captures some of the anecdotage and increase it by a factor of 10 - so 5% is fraud and 95% is genuine. So the war against freeloaders and scroungers is done by ministers knowing it is an outright lie told to weaponise "benefits" and harden voters against human misery. Simply pointing this out, and asking that people treat others as they would be tret themselves will take away so much of the angst around the subject so we can have a grown up discussion.
Spot on.
My only addition, which might not sit well with you, is that much of your paragraph 1 began under Tony Blair. The ludicrous top-loading of the NHS: stuffing it full of middle managers earning huge amounts of money and clogging the system with bureaucracy also coincided with the insistence that nurses have degrees: why should a nurse have to have a degree?! This latter by the way then created a two-tier attitude in nursing so that some nurses would refuse to do jobs deemed beneath them.
The NHS does need proper funding. It also needs a serious clear out of the kind of bureaucratic complexity of which you rightly speak.
Ooh, hooray, a Heathener post I can agree with, particularly the second half of the third sentence. I would also add that nursing is probably the most conspicuous but far from the only profession to fall into this category. The Blairite insistence that everyone must have degrees was baffling; compounded only by the Cameron/Osborne insistence that everyone must have degrees and take on a crippling level of debt in order to enter the Labour market. Fewer students, better funded.
On nurses, there was another unique factor. Student nurses used to live on site, as did some qualified nurses (think army barracks or police section houses). These nurses homes were closed and sold off, so that calling in nurses to cover for shortages or emergencies became a lot more difficult. It also added immensely to nurses' costs.
I don't think thats true, but there are limits on what can be done. We can argue about that, and certainly many on here would support going after unearned income more, but its not possible to completely mitigated all the issues right now.
Take the NHS. Arguably it needs a shed load of cash to hire more staff and more capacity for patients. Money alone won't fix that - either you get staff from overseas or you train more at home, Covid has had a big impact on training. But medical schools are expanding, pharmacy admissions are on the up. But these will take years to reach the front line.
I think you believe all tories are heartless and uncaring about other people, I don't think thats true. Most want to support people in need, but also don't like people getting something for nothing. They read stories about free loaders on benefits and come to believe that there is a life out there on state handouts. They believe people who can work should. Where this breaks down is now we have work not paying enough to support a family. Housing costs too much, inflation and the rises in fuels costs are horrific. Tories do understand this, its just that the solutions are not easy.
I'm going to offer up two realpolitik simplistic observations
1. The problem in the NHS isn't the amount of money going in, its what it gets spent on. Both "record amounts being spent" and "a crisis in front-line budgets" are true/ Why? Because the structure hoovers up cash at absurd rates. A mass of bureaucratic complexity with endless tiers of overlapping and competing management. Remove much of the marketisation and more of the money gets to where it needs to get to. The Tories know this but its their people syphoning off the cash so we continue as is
2. Benefit fraud is a spectacularly low percentage - half a percent or so. Lets assume that only captures some of the anecdotage and increase it by a factor of 10 - so 5% is fraud and 95% is genuine. So the war against freeloaders and scroungers is done by ministers knowing it is an outright lie told to weaponise "benefits" and harden voters against human misery. Simply pointing this out, and asking that people treat others as they would be tret themselves will take away so much of the angst around the subject so we can have a grown up discussion.
Spot on.
My only addition, which might not sit well with you, is that much of your paragraph 1 began under Tony Blair. The ludicrous top-loading of the NHS: stuffing it full of middle managers earning huge amounts of money and clogging the system with bureaucracy also coincided with the insistence that nurses have degrees: why should a nurse have to have a degree?! This latter by the way then created a two-tier attitude in nursing so that some nurses would refuse to do jobs deemed beneath them.
The NHS does need proper funding. It also needs a serious clear out of the kind of bureaucratic complexity of which you rightly speak.
I'm not against nurses having degrees - much of the course is on placements on wards anyway and generally more training is a good thing. Regards two tiers of nurses, staff should be managed and should be able to do and do the tasks they are paid to do.
Pharmacy is in an interesting place - Health Education England is trying to shoe-horn a lot more placement time into the course. This is probably meaning we will remove science content. Its arguable what science content a pharmacist needs (OKC will know this - you don't get asked much about science in practice). But it will also push pharmacy down a similar route to nursing in terms of how we train.
Hmm. Thanks for that. Over my lifetime the pharmacy course has changed from a primarily technical and supply base to a much more scientific one. When I qualified 60 years ago I'd done a course which was rather out of date and orientated towards a world were I would expect to prepare medicines in much the same way as one of my 3 x Gt Grandfathers did, as an apprentice to an Apothecary in the 1830's. Except that we didn't. We 'dispensed' a decreasing number of medicines but supplied an increasing number of pre-prepared ones. What we did meet up with in practice was an increasing number of interactions of medicines, both with each other and with life styles. (See Ms Heatherners posts about inability to tolerate morphine.) And one has to know something of the 'science' to be able to handle this. Secondly there's a considerable difference in the way medicines are handled in hospital and community, and the problems with which one is faced and a two-level course might well create a situation where a pharmacy student would have to make a decision at 18 which would forever bar him or her from moving, as I did out of the 'shop' environment and into hospital.
Haven't fully grokked quordle. did it first time yesterday and was surprised by the boringness of the solutions. Wordle words tend to be interesting, we've had nymph and foray recently.
Today's Wordle is towards challenging too.
Not managed it yet.
I had doggedly chased it down so that by row 6 - I knew the first four letters, and I also knew what the other letter was - but in a massive brain fart forgot that I also knew what the other letter was, and lost. Still annoyed with myself four hours later.
French pollsters are generally pretty good. I know they sometimes get things somewhat wrong - eg overstating Le Pen. But they rarely seem to have disasters
I therefore see no reason to doubt their 2nd round predictions. A rather narrow but tolerable win for Macron
Why are you shocked by the latter? Should trans people be banned from the police force?
I don't think they should be banned from the police force, no. But trans people are surely a tiny, tiny minority of people. I just wouldn't have thought there would be enough of them that this sort of thing would be an issue.
The more fundamental point is that the College of Policing has form for issuing guidance which is not in compliance with the law. I am absolutely fed up with the police announcing in advance that they will break the law or interpret it how they feel and then dare people to challenge them over it. It is utterly wrong.
Those who enforce the law should not be law breakers. We should not have to rely on bolshy citizens challenging them to get them to do their job.
Honestly, were I younger I'd go into politics just to become Home Secretary and do to the police what Thatcher had to do to overmighty unions. Police leadership in this country is an utter disgrace. Pull the whole edifice down and start again.
That was also your solution to the Post Office. Pulling things down and starting again sounds fine but here in the real world, we still need people to deliver letters and stop traffic so politicians can sweep by in their limousines.
I don't think thats true, but there are limits on what can be done. We can argue about that, and certainly many on here would support going after unearned income more, but its not possible to completely mitigated all the issues right now.
Take the NHS. Arguably it needs a shed load of cash to hire more staff and more capacity for patients. Money alone won't fix that - either you get staff from overseas or you train more at home, Covid has had a big impact on training. But medical schools are expanding, pharmacy admissions are on the up. But these will take years to reach the front line.
I think you believe all tories are heartless and uncaring about other people, I don't think thats true. Most want to support people in need, but also don't like people getting something for nothing. They read stories about free loaders on benefits and come to believe that there is a life out there on state handouts. They believe people who can work should. Where this breaks down is now we have work not paying enough to support a family. Housing costs too much, inflation and the rises in fuels costs are horrific. Tories do understand this, its just that the solutions are not easy.
I'm going to offer up two realpolitik simplistic observations
1. The problem in the NHS isn't the amount of money going in, its what it gets spent on. Both "record amounts being spent" and "a crisis in front-line budgets" are true/ Why? Because the structure hoovers up cash at absurd rates. A mass of bureaucratic complexity with endless tiers of overlapping and competing management. Remove much of the marketisation and more of the money gets to where it needs to get to. The Tories know this but its their people syphoning off the cash so we continue as is
2. Benefit fraud is a spectacularly low percentage - half a percent or so. Lets assume that only captures some of the anecdotage and increase it by a factor of 10 - so 5% is fraud and 95% is genuine. So the war against freeloaders and scroungers is done by ministers knowing it is an outright lie told to weaponise "benefits" and harden voters against human misery. Simply pointing this out, and asking that people treat others as they would be tret themselves will take away so much of the angst around the subject so we can have a grown up discussion.
Spot on.
My only addition, which might not sit well with you, is that much of your paragraph 1 began under Tony Blair. The ludicrous top-loading of the NHS: stuffing it full of middle managers earning huge amounts of money and clogging the system with bureaucracy also coincided with the insistence that nurses have degrees: why should a nurse have to have a degree?! This latter by the way then created a two-tier attitude in nursing so that some nurses would refuse to do jobs deemed beneath them.
The NHS does need proper funding. It also needs a serious clear out of the kind of bureaucratic complexity of which you rightly speak.
Ooh, hooray, a Heathener post I can agree with, particularly the second half of the third sentence. I would also add that nursing is probably the most conspicuous but far from the only profession to fall into this category. The Blairite insistence that everyone must have degrees was baffling; compounded only by the Cameron/Osborne insistence that everyone must have degrees and take on a crippling level of debt in order to enter the Labour market. Fewer students, better funded.
On nurses, there was another unique factor. Student nurses used to live on site, as did some qualified nurses (think army barracks or police section houses). These nurses homes were closed and sold off, so that calling in nurses to cover for shortages or emergencies became a lot more difficult. It also added immensely to nurses' costs.
It wasn't only nurses who were disadvantaged. Junior medical staff and other people on rotational trainee posts.
A women in tears on BBC News explaining the horrific position she is in now with her Universal Credit being effectively cut as the 3% increase is far behind the inflation rate .
These are the real life impacts of the Tories disgusting abandonement of those on in work benefits who are in a desperate situation .
Though the UK median pay rise this year also only 3%
I just love the idea that the Government can keep affording all these increases in benefit
The government could if they taxed the wealthy.
Take a tithe from millionaires to allow people on benefits to afford heating and eating. Seems fair to me.
Tax the wealthy? if only it was that easy
Oh well, now you've explained in detail why it can't be done...
The top 1% of earners already pay around 28-29% of all income tax collected.
They are paying more in tax now then they have ever done, more than under 13 years of Labour.
If rates go up much more than the total collected from the wealthy will go down as they will find ways to avoid paying tax.
"More than they have ever done." Hmm, please, is that corrected for inflation? £10 in 2010 was worth £13.64 in 2021 according to the B of E. So that's a one-third increase in tax right there accounted for by inflation.
I'd also want to know how much more the top 1% own of UK wealth, including stuff stashed in tax havens.
This article is a bit old but taxes have increased even further for the wealthy since it was published.
Another fun* morning doing recruitment. Have found the perfect candidates for the big 3 roles, the Romanian CEO is flying in on Wednesday for chats with the shortlist (of 1) candidates. Need to hurry them along with regards to contracts as offers need to be made asap.
Nothing so dull as employment contracts and employee policies handbooks...
So about 1% are out as trans. True figure may be a lot higher.
A minority but not a minority to drive a bulldozer into.
Some of the definitions for "trans" that I have seen used for the purposes of estimating population levels are absurd, though. For example, I saw one definition that would include anyone with behaviour that was not stereotypical of their gender defined as being trans. As a result you get wildly varying estimates depending on the definition used.
The one concern I have about the French election now is that the final result will be decided by people whose British equivalents believe that there is no difference between the Tories and Labour.
A women in tears on BBC News explaining the horrific position she is in now with her Universal Credit being effectively cut as the 3% increase is far behind the inflation rate .
These are the real life impacts of the Tories disgusting abandonement of those on in work benefits who are in a desperate situation .
Though the UK median pay rise this year also only 3%
I just love the idea that the Government can keep affording all these increases in benefit
The government could if they taxed the wealthy.
Take a tithe from millionaires to allow people on benefits to afford heating and eating. Seems fair to me.
Tax the wealthy? if only it was that easy
Oh well, now you've explained in detail why it can't be done...
The top 1% of earners already pay around 28-29% of all income tax collected.
They are paying more in tax now then they have ever done, more than under 13 years of Labour.
If rates go up much more than the total collected from the wealthy will go down as they will find ways to avoid paying tax.
"More than they have ever done." Hmm, please, is that corrected for inflation? £10 in 2010 was worth £13.64 in 2021 according to the B of E. So that's a one-third increase in tax right there accounted for by inflation.
I'd also want to know how much more the top 1% own of UK wealth, including stuff stashed in tax havens.
This article is a bit old but taxes have increased even further for the wealthy since it was published.
A women in tears on BBC News explaining the horrific position she is in now with her Universal Credit being effectively cut as the 3% increase is far behind the inflation rate .
These are the real life impacts of the Tories disgusting abandonement of those on in work benefits who are in a desperate situation .
Though the UK median pay rise this year also only 3%
I just love the idea that the Government can keep affording all these increases in benefit
The government could if they taxed the wealthy.
Take a tithe from millionaires to allow people on benefits to afford heating and eating. Seems fair to me.
Tax the wealthy? if only it was that easy
Oh well, now you've explained in detail why it can't be done...
The top 1% of earners already pay around 28-29% of all income tax collected.
They are paying more in tax now then they have ever done, more than under 13 years of Labour.
If rates go up much more than the total collected from the wealthy will go down as they will find ways to avoid paying tax.
"More than they have ever done." Hmm, please, is that corrected for inflation? £10 in 2010 was worth £13.64 in 2021 according to the B of E. So that's a one-third increase in tax right there accounted for by inflation.
I'd also want to know how much more the top 1% own of UK wealth, including stuff stashed in tax havens.
This article is a bit old but taxes have increased even further for the wealthy since it was published.
The idea that the rich have paid less under the Tories is just nonsense.
"Income tax." Massively evaded by the wealthy, as they can structure their income differently, aka fiddling. The Tories slashed dividend taxes during the period in question. Ditto IHT.
The writer is editor in chief of 'The Cosmopolitan Globalist'.
Sorry, but just *what* is a Cosmopolitan Globalist?
It sounds like "I'm a citizen of somewhere; I'm just not sure where."
(Checks)
This is their definition, which looks like a positive spin on Laïcité, and is - I'll give you - interesting:
This publication was borne of the observation that genuinely global news coverage has all but disappeared from the Anglophone media. Thus the Cosmopolitan Globalist: a new publication that is neither national, nationalist, partisan, narrow-minded, nor provincial. The Cosmopolitan Globalist is, as the name suggests, cosmopolitan and worldly—and the center of our world is not Washington, D.C.
We are 68 writers, journalists, academics, politicians, and analysts around the globe, shepherded into a single platform by Claire Berlinski in Paris and Vivek Kelkar in Mumbai. We are united by our attachment to 18th-century Enlightenment ideals: rational inquiry, free speech, free trade, progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional governance, the rule of law, and the separation of state from church, temple, and mosque alike. We are united, too, by concern that these ideals can’t survive the digital age.
We firmly reject the far-right, the far-left, and populism, but beyond favoring decency and common sense, we are not passionately ideological. Our aim is to offer educated, erudite, and credible reporting and analysis from the world around, treating issues of genuinely global import.
I don't think thats true, but there are limits on what can be done. We can argue about that, and certainly many on here would support going after unearned income more, but its not possible to completely mitigated all the issues right now.
Take the NHS. Arguably it needs a shed load of cash to hire more staff and more capacity for patients. Money alone won't fix that - either you get staff from overseas or you train more at home, Covid has had a big impact on training. But medical schools are expanding, pharmacy admissions are on the up. But these will take years to reach the front line.
I think you believe all tories are heartless and uncaring about other people, I don't think thats true. Most want to support people in need, but also don't like people getting something for nothing. They read stories about free loaders on benefits and come to believe that there is a life out there on state handouts. They believe people who can work should. Where this breaks down is now we have work not paying enough to support a family. Housing costs too much, inflation and the rises in fuels costs are horrific. Tories do understand this, its just that the solutions are not easy.
I'm going to offer up two realpolitik simplistic observations
1. The problem in the NHS isn't the amount of money going in, its what it gets spent on. Both "record amounts being spent" and "a crisis in front-line budgets" are true/ Why? Because the structure hoovers up cash at absurd rates. A mass of bureaucratic complexity with endless tiers of overlapping and competing management. Remove much of the marketisation and more of the money gets to where it needs to get to. The Tories know this but its their people syphoning off the cash so we continue as is
2. Benefit fraud is a spectacularly low percentage - half a percent or so. Lets assume that only captures some of the anecdotage and increase it by a factor of 10 - so 5% is fraud and 95% is genuine. So the war against freeloaders and scroungers is done by ministers knowing it is an outright lie told to weaponise "benefits" and harden voters against human misery. Simply pointing this out, and asking that people treat others as they would be tret themselves will take away so much of the angst around the subject so we can have a grown up discussion.
Spot on.
My only addition, which might not sit well with you, is that much of your paragraph 1 began under Tony Blair. The ludicrous top-loading of the NHS: stuffing it full of middle managers earning huge amounts of money and clogging the system with bureaucracy also coincided with the insistence that nurses have degrees: why should a nurse have to have a degree?! This latter by the way then created a two-tier attitude in nursing so that some nurses would refuse to do jobs deemed beneath them.
The NHS does need proper funding. It also needs a serious clear out of the kind of bureaucratic complexity of which you rightly speak.
I'm not against nurses having degrees - much of the course is on placements on wards anyway and generally more training is a good thing. Regards two tiers of nurses, staff should be managed and should be able to do and do the tasks they are paid to do.
Pharmacy is in an interesting place - Health Education England is trying to shoe-horn a lot more placement time into the course. This is probably meaning we will remove science content. Its arguable what science content a pharmacist needs (OKC will know this - you don't get asked much about science in practice). But it will also push pharmacy down a similar route to nursing in terms of how we train.
Hmm. Thanks for that. Over my lifetime the pharmacy course has changed from a primarily technical and supply base to a much more scientific one. When I qualified 60 years ago I'd done a course which was rather out of date and orientated towards a world were I would expect to prepare medicines in much the same way as one of my 3 x Gt Grandfathers did, as an apprentice to an Apothecary in the 1830's. Except that we didn't. We 'dispensed' a decreasing number of medicines but supplied an increasing number of pre-prepared ones. What we did meet up with in practice was an increasing number of interactions of medicines, both with each other and with life styles. (See Ms Heatherners posts about inability to tolerate morphine.) And one has to know something of the 'science' to be able to handle this. Secondly there's a considerable difference in the way medicines are handled in hospital and community, and the problems with which one is faced and a two-level course might well create a situation where a pharmacy student would have to make a decision at 18 which would forever bar him or her from moving, as I did out of the 'shop' environment and into hospital.
Yes - its interesting times in the profession. There is a huge emphasis on soft skills coming in. Science content is still important and some of us are fighting to retain it. Interactions is interesting - does a pharmacist need to know that A and B interact so cannot be jointly given or do they need to know that interact and WHY? We believe its the latter, but I'm not sure that all at the top of the profession do.
Plus the demands on a community pharmacist are very different from a hospital role. Most in the community just want to get their medication, and would not ask why they couldn't say have grapefruit juice with it...
I don't think thats true, but there are limits on what can be done. We can argue about that, and certainly many on here would support going after unearned income more, but its not possible to completely mitigated all the issues right now.
Take the NHS. Arguably it needs a shed load of cash to hire more staff and more capacity for patients. Money alone won't fix that - either you get staff from overseas or you train more at home, Covid has had a big impact on training. But medical schools are expanding, pharmacy admissions are on the up. But these will take years to reach the front line.
I think you believe all tories are heartless and uncaring about other people, I don't think thats true. Most want to support people in need, but also don't like people getting something for nothing. They read stories about free loaders on benefits and come to believe that there is a life out there on state handouts. They believe people who can work should. Where this breaks down is now we have work not paying enough to support a family. Housing costs too much, inflation and the rises in fuels costs are horrific. Tories do understand this, its just that the solutions are not easy.
I'm going to offer up two realpolitik simplistic observations
1. The problem in the NHS isn't the amount of money going in, its what it gets spent on. Both "record amounts being spent" and "a crisis in front-line budgets" are true/ Why? Because the structure hoovers up cash at absurd rates. A mass of bureaucratic complexity with endless tiers of overlapping and competing management. Remove much of the marketisation and more of the money gets to where it needs to get to. The Tories know this but its their people syphoning off the cash so we continue as is
2. Benefit fraud is a spectacularly low percentage - half a percent or so. Lets assume that only captures some of the anecdotage and increase it by a factor of 10 - so 5% is fraud and 95% is genuine. So the war against freeloaders and scroungers is done by ministers knowing it is an outright lie told to weaponise "benefits" and harden voters against human misery. Simply pointing this out, and asking that people treat others as they would be tret themselves will take away so much of the angst around the subject so we can have a grown up discussion.
Spot on.
My only addition, which might not sit well with you, is that much of your paragraph 1 began under Tony Blair. The ludicrous top-loading of the NHS: stuffing it full of middle managers earning huge amounts of money and clogging the system with bureaucracy also coincided with the insistence that nurses have degrees: why should a nurse have to have a degree?! This latter by the way then created a two-tier attitude in nursing so that some nurses would refuse to do jobs deemed beneath them.
The NHS does need proper funding. It also needs a serious clear out of the kind of bureaucratic complexity of which you rightly speak.
I'm not against nurses having degrees - much of the course is on placements on wards anyway and generally more training is a good thing. Regards two tiers of nurses, staff should be managed and should be able to do and do the tasks they are paid to do.
Pharmacy is in an interesting place - Health Education England is trying to shoe-horn a lot more placement time into the course. This is probably meaning we will remove science content. Its arguable what science content a pharmacist needs (OKC will know this - you don't get asked much about science in practice). But it will also push pharmacy down a similar route to nursing in terms of how we train.
Hmm. Thanks for that. Over my lifetime the pharmacy course has changed from a primarily technical and supply base to a much more scientific one. When I qualified 60 years ago I'd done a course which was rather out of date and orientated towards a world were I would expect to prepare medicines in much the same way as one of my 3 x Gt Grandfathers did, as an apprentice to an Apothecary in the 1830's. Except that we didn't. We 'dispensed' a decreasing number of medicines but supplied an increasing number of pre-prepared ones. What we did meet up with in practice was an increasing number of interactions of medicines, both with each other and with life styles. (See Ms Heatherners posts about inability to tolerate morphine.) And one has to know something of the 'science' to be able to handle this. Secondly there's a considerable difference in the way medicines are handled in hospital and community, and the problems with which one is faced and a two-level course might well create a situation where a pharmacy student would have to make a decision at 18 which would forever bar him or her from moving, as I did out of the 'shop' environment and into hospital.
Yes - its interesting times in the profession. There is a huge emphasis on soft skills coming in. Science content is still important and some of us are fighting to retain it. Interactions is interesting - does a pharmacist need to know that A and B interact so cannot be jointly given or do they need to know that interact and WHY? We believe its the latter, but I'm not sure that all at the top of the profession do.
Plus the demands on a community pharmacist are very different from a hospital role. Most in the community just want to get their medication, and would not ask why they couldn't say have grapefruit juice with it...
Fun times!
I had no idea that grapefruit juice could be a problem (though had some dim notion of red wines, broad beans etc. interacting with certain drugs).
So about 1% are out as trans. True figure may be a lot higher.
A minority but not a minority to drive a bulldozer into.
Some of the definitions for "trans" that I have seen used for the purposes of estimating population levels are absurd, though. For example, I saw one definition that would include anyone with behaviour that was not stereotypical of their gender defined as being trans. As a result you get wildly varying estimates depending on the definition used.
Serious but peripheral question: do we have stats on re-transition. I am aware that there are hundreds of anecdotal examples, and I have very interesting interviews with people who have transitioned several times. But I have seen no serious academic research.
I've ben having a look at the gender transitioning process after the earlier exchanges this morning, and it certainly allows for retransition.
A women in tears on BBC News explaining the horrific position she is in now with her Universal Credit being effectively cut as the 3% increase is far behind the inflation rate .
These are the real life impacts of the Tories disgusting abandonement of those on in work benefits who are in a desperate situation .
Though the UK median pay rise this year also only 3%
I just love the idea that the Government can keep affording all these increases in benefit
The government could if they taxed the wealthy.
Take a tithe from millionaires to allow people on benefits to afford heating and eating. Seems fair to me.
Tax the wealthy? if only it was that easy
Oh well, now you've explained in detail why it can't be done...
The top 1% of earners already pay around 28-29% of all income tax collected.
They are paying more in tax now then they have ever done, more than under 13 years of Labour.
If rates go up much more than the total collected from the wealthy will go down as they will find ways to avoid paying tax.
"More than they have ever done." Hmm, please, is that corrected for inflation? £10 in 2010 was worth £13.64 in 2021 according to the B of E. So that's a one-third increase in tax right there accounted for by inflation.
I'd also want to know how much more the top 1% own of UK wealth, including stuff stashed in tax havens.
This article is a bit old but taxes have increased even further for the wealthy since it was published.
The idea that the rich have paid less under the Tories is just nonsense.
"Income tax." Massively evaded by the wealthy, as they can structure their income differently, aka fiddling. The Tories slashed dividend taxes during the period in question. Ditto IHT.
From the report referred to:
"Taxes on UK incomes are progressive – those at the top of the income distribution pay a greater share of their (fiscal) income in tax than those at the bottom. The top 1% of adults paid 34% of income tax in 2018–19. They paid 28% of income tax and National Insurance contributions (NICs) combined – a substantial increase from 20% in 2003–04. Taxes are less skewed to the top when including NICs because the marginal NICs rate falls from 12% to 2% for higher-rate taxpayers. Income taxes reduce post-tax top income inequality, and have done so to a larger degree since 2010. The top 1% (0.1%) received 11% (4.6%) of post-tax income in 2018–19, compared with 14% (6.1%) in 2009–10. The fall in post-tax top income shares is in part due to policies that raised more tax from the top, most notably through a new ‘additional rate’ of income tax."
That bloody socialist George Osborne has a lot to answer for.
A women in tears on BBC News explaining the horrific position she is in now with her Universal Credit being effectively cut as the 3% increase is far behind the inflation rate .
These are the real life impacts of the Tories disgusting abandonement of those on in work benefits who are in a desperate situation .
Though the UK median pay rise this year also only 3%
I just love the idea that the Government can keep affording all these increases in benefit
The government could if they taxed the wealthy.
Take a tithe from millionaires to allow people on benefits to afford heating and eating. Seems fair to me.
Tax the wealthy? if only it was that easy
Oh well, now you've explained in detail why it can't be done...
The top 1% of earners already pay around 28-29% of all income tax collected.
They are paying more in tax now then they have ever done, more than under 13 years of Labour.
If rates go up much more than the total collected from the wealthy will go down as they will find ways to avoid paying tax.
"More than they have ever done." Hmm, please, is that corrected for inflation? £10 in 2010 was worth £13.64 in 2021 according to the B of E. So that's a one-third increase in tax right there accounted for by inflation.
I'd also want to know how much more the top 1% own of UK wealth, including stuff stashed in tax havens.
This article is a bit old but taxes have increased even further for the wealthy since it was published.
The idea that the rich have paid less under the Tories is just nonsense.
"Income tax." Massively evaded by the wealthy, as they can structure their income differently, aka fiddling. The Tories slashed dividend taxes during the period in question. Ditto IHT.
From the report referred to:
"Taxes on UK incomes are progressive – those at the top of the income distribution pay a greater share of their (fiscal) income in tax than those at the bottom. The top 1% of adults paid 34% of income tax in 2018–19. They paid 28% of income tax and National Insurance contributions (NICs) combined – a substantial increase from 20% in 2003–04. Taxes are less skewed to the top when including NICs because the marginal NICs rate falls from 12% to 2% for higher-rate taxpayers. Income taxes reduce post-tax top income inequality, and have done so to a larger degree since 2010. The top 1% (0.1%) received 11% (4.6%) of post-tax income in 2018–19, compared with 14% (6.1%) in 2009–10. The fall in post-tax top income shares is in part due to policies that raised more tax from the top, most notably through a new ‘additional rate’ of income tax."
That bloody socialist George Osborne has a lot to answer for.
It was Alastair Darling who increased the top rate of tax and there were plenty of people saying after the 2008 crash that one of the silver linings would be a fall in inequality since the astonishing pay in the financial sector couldn't continue.
Haven't fully grokked quordle. did it first time yesterday and was surprised by the boringness of the solutions. Wordle words tend to be interesting, we've had nymph and foray recently.
Today's Wordle is towards challenging too.
Not managed it yet.
I had doggedly chased it down so that by row 6 - I knew the first four letters, and I also knew what the other letter was - but in a massive brain fart forgot that I also knew what the other letter was, and lost. Still annoyed with myself four hours later.
A women in tears on BBC News explaining the horrific position she is in now with her Universal Credit being effectively cut as the 3% increase is far behind the inflation rate .
These are the real life impacts of the Tories disgusting abandonement of those on in work benefits who are in a desperate situation .
Though the UK median pay rise this year also only 3%
I just love the idea that the Government can keep affording all these increases in benefit
The government could if they taxed the wealthy.
Take a tithe from millionaires to allow people on benefits to afford heating and eating. Seems fair to me.
Tax the wealthy? if only it was that easy
Oh well, now you've explained in detail why it can't be done...
The top 1% of earners already pay around 28-29% of all income tax collected.
They are paying more in tax now then they have ever done, more than under 13 years of Labour.
If rates go up much more than the total collected from the wealthy will go down as they will find ways to avoid paying tax.
"More than they have ever done." Hmm, please, is that corrected for inflation? £10 in 2010 was worth £13.64 in 2021 according to the B of E. So that's a one-third increase in tax right there accounted for by inflation.
I'd also want to know how much more the top 1% own of UK wealth, including stuff stashed in tax havens.
This article is a bit old but taxes have increased even further for the wealthy since it was published.
The writer is editor in chief of 'The Cosmopolitan Globalist'.
Sorry, but just *what* is a Cosmopolitan Globalist?
It sounds like "I'm a citizen of somewhere; I'm just not sure where."
(Checks)
This is their definition, which looks like a positive spin on Laïcité, and is - I'll give you - interesting:
This publication was borne of the observation that genuinely global news coverage has all but disappeared from the Anglophone media. Thus the Cosmopolitan Globalist: a new publication that is neither national, nationalist, partisan, narrow-minded, nor provincial. The Cosmopolitan Globalist is, as the name suggests, cosmopolitan and worldly—and the center of our world is not Washington, D.C.
We are 68 writers, journalists, academics, politicians, and analysts around the globe, shepherded into a single platform by Claire Berlinski in Paris and Vivek Kelkar in Mumbai. We are united by our attachment to 18th-century Enlightenment ideals: rational inquiry, free speech, free trade, progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional governance, the rule of law, and the separation of state from church, temple, and mosque alike. We are united, too, by concern that these ideals can’t survive the digital age.
We firmly reject the far-right, the far-left, and populism, but beyond favoring decency and common sense, we are not passionately ideological. Our aim is to offer educated, erudite, and credible reporting and analysis from the world around, treating issues of genuinely global import.
A women in tears on BBC News explaining the horrific position she is in now with her Universal Credit being effectively cut as the 3% increase is far behind the inflation rate .
These are the real life impacts of the Tories disgusting abandonement of those on in work benefits who are in a desperate situation .
Though the UK median pay rise this year also only 3%
I just love the idea that the Government can keep affording all these increases in benefit
The government could if they taxed the wealthy.
Take a tithe from millionaires to allow people on benefits to afford heating and eating. Seems fair to me.
Tax the wealthy? if only it was that easy
Oh well, now you've explained in detail why it can't be done...
The top 1% of earners already pay around 28-29% of all income tax collected.
They are paying more in tax now then they have ever done, more than under 13 years of Labour.
If rates go up much more than the total collected from the wealthy will go down as they will find ways to avoid paying tax.
"More than they have ever done." Hmm, please, is that corrected for inflation? £10 in 2010 was worth £13.64 in 2021 according to the B of E. So that's a one-third increase in tax right there accounted for by inflation.
I'd also want to know how much more the top 1% own of UK wealth, including stuff stashed in tax havens.
This article is a bit old but taxes have increased even further for the wealthy since it was published.
The idea that the rich have paid less under the Tories is just nonsense.
"Income tax." Massively evaded by the wealthy, as they can structure their income differently, aka fiddling. The Tories slashed dividend taxes during the period in question. Ditto IHT.
From the report referred to:
"Taxes on UK incomes are progressive – those at the top of the income distribution pay a greater share of their (fiscal) income in tax than those at the bottom. The top 1% of adults paid 34% of income tax in 2018–19. They paid 28% of income tax and National Insurance contributions (NICs) combined – a substantial increase from 20% in 2003–04. Taxes are less skewed to the top when including NICs because the marginal NICs rate falls from 12% to 2% for higher-rate taxpayers. Income taxes reduce post-tax top income inequality, and have done so to a larger degree since 2010. The top 1% (0.1%) received 11% (4.6%) of post-tax income in 2018–19, compared with 14% (6.1%) in 2009–10. The fall in post-tax top income shares is in part due to policies that raised more tax from the top, most notably through a new ‘additional rate’ of income tax."
That bloody socialist George Osborne has a lot to answer for.
It was Alastair Darling who increased the top rate of tax and there were plenty of people saying after the 2008 crash that one of the silver linings would be a fall in inequality since the astonishing pay in the financial sector couldn't continue.
It was George Osborne who took away both the personal allowance and Child Benefit from the higher paid, as well as the traditional sleight of hand by failing to index link rates bringing more of the taxable income into the higher bracket. I reckon that cost me something like £15k a year. And he was quite right to do so, of course.
Note that the report specifically says that these changes were since 2010, not before.
So about 1% are out as trans. True figure may be a lot higher.
A minority but not a minority to drive a bulldozer into.
Some of the definitions for "trans" that I have seen used for the purposes of estimating population levels are absurd, though. For example, I saw one definition that would include anyone with behaviour that was not stereotypical of their gender defined as being trans. As a result you get wildly varying estimates depending on the definition used.
I still have not caught with all this. When people are born, they are either male or female. It is supposed that people in one group feel attracted by people in the other group.
Some people find that they are attracted by people in the same group. These call themselves gay. I can understand that, and have no problem with it.
But this latest fashion - which I understand started in American - I am finding much more difficult, and I don't really believe in it. The nearest I can get to making sense of it is that some people who are really gay don't want to face up to it, and think that an operation will make life easier for them.
Or is there something more to it than that?
Apologies if I sound like a backwoods Tory, but I have not yet identified the problem that these people have. Perhaps the only real Conservative in the village can help sort this out for me?
P&O still have no Dover/Calais services running. What a shambles.
The head of UK ports in apologising for the delays affirmed the cause at Dover is the loss of P & O ferries but also poor weather in the channel
He said the rest of UK ports are operating at 92% but of course some will be wanting to blame brexit
Can I ask when this quote was given? Because the evidence of eyes and ears demonstrates it to be false. "Loss of P&O ferries". Its true that ferry capacity has been reduced. But ships are leaving half empty - trucks cannot get through customs. So the bottleneck is not the P&O issue. "poor weather in the channel" - all you need to do is check the weather forecast today and any day you like last week. There is no poor weather.
The issue is the collapse of the Goods Vehicle Movement Service, where the computer system which HMRC told your government 6 years ago could not cope with the number of post-Brexit transactions has failed because it can't cope with the number of post-Brexit transactions. We have suspended making any inbound checks - trucks are waved through. But outbound we need to show paperwork for the French in that oven-ready deal we insisted on implementing. So without a working computer its manual checks.
Remember that there is no room to park trucks at Dover. So even when GVMS and CHIEF were working the time taken forces trucks to be stacked elsewhere and paperwork to be examined at various pre-channel locations. So even the best case scenario will have queues forever. When the system fails its entirely manual, which creates this chaos.
"Its the fault of P&O" is a demonstrable lie. "Its the fault of poor weather" is a demonstrable lie. You are being spun. You are a smarter man than just believe the lies fed to you in easily digestible portions. DFDS - the people running the ferries - have confirmed their boats are departing half full. So either DFDS are lying about their own business or your quote from UK Ports was a joke at the time and is utterly discredited now.
He commented on 5 live last week and you are clearly suggesting the head of UK ports is lying to the public
I would suggest he knows this subject and you are to be fair hardly a neutral observer
I'm not surprised RP Isn't a neutral observer. He's trying to import stuff into the UK through this chaos. Of course he isn't a neutral observer. He's a critical, and well-informed, one. I'd be surprised if he has any hair left.
You can be well informed, or neutral - both seems a stretch. I'm not sure Big_G is either on this.
Worth noting that I am not a FBPE ultra. Leaving the EU has not caused this. What we chose to do after leaving the single market and customs union is what caused this. I advocate merely the removal of false trade barriers and the return to Thatcherite free trade.
If we agree to align with EU standards on trade (easy, apparently) does that affect our ability to do trade deals elsewhere? If not then it ought to be a no brainer. But there must be some benefit to wanting 3rd party status?
1. We are already wholly aligned on standards. 2. Removing barriers only an issue if we dispute "dynamic" alignment on standards. Yet both parties claim they will not drop food standards, so as with (1) this is easy 3. We aren't signing trade deals. We have done some roll-over deals. And a deal with AUSNZ which only kicks in in 2036. America has told us to do one. So we're protecting the theoretical right to sign trade deals with partners shockingly refusing to small UK better terms than large EU.
Cheers. So to clarify if we do formally align, it could impact on other deals? I agree with you that we should align with the EU and I hope/suspect the next government will do so, but I'm trying to see why we have chosen 3rd party status?
Why? Because sovvrinty innit? We sold people that Brexit would make things cheaper. That being able to get our own trade deals would mean better trade deals.
It sounds like you knew what you were voting for.
You clearly didn't because you have changed your mind, and bizarrely from Remain to Leave, when most people are going the other way when they realise how pointless it is. How long before the wind changes and you also realise it was pointless?
Pointless? Pointless would be a significant improvement on where we seem to be now.
I don't think thats true, but there are limits on what can be done. We can argue about that, and certainly many on here would support going after unearned income more, but its not possible to completely mitigated all the issues right now.
Take the NHS. Arguably it needs a shed load of cash to hire more staff and more capacity for patients. Money alone won't fix that - either you get staff from overseas or you train more at home, Covid has had a big impact on training. But medical schools are expanding, pharmacy admissions are on the up. But these will take years to reach the front line.
I think you believe all tories are heartless and uncaring about other people, I don't think thats true. Most want to support people in need, but also don't like people getting something for nothing. They read stories about free loaders on benefits and come to believe that there is a life out there on state handouts. They believe people who can work should. Where this breaks down is now we have work not paying enough to support a family. Housing costs too much, inflation and the rises in fuels costs are horrific. Tories do understand this, its just that the solutions are not easy.
I'm going to offer up two realpolitik simplistic observations
1. The problem in the NHS isn't the amount of money going in, its what it gets spent on. Both "record amounts being spent" and "a crisis in front-line budgets" are true/ Why? Because the structure hoovers up cash at absurd rates. A mass of bureaucratic complexity with endless tiers of overlapping and competing management. Remove much of the marketisation and more of the money gets to where it needs to get to. The Tories know this but its their people syphoning off the cash so we continue as is
2. Benefit fraud is a spectacularly low percentage - half a percent or so. Lets assume that only captures some of the anecdotage and increase it by a factor of 10 - so 5% is fraud and 95% is genuine. So the war against freeloaders and scroungers is done by ministers knowing it is an outright lie told to weaponise "benefits" and harden voters against human misery. Simply pointing this out, and asking that people treat others as they would be tret themselves will take away so much of the angst around the subject so we can have a grown up discussion.
Spot on.
My only addition, which might not sit well with you, is that much of your paragraph 1 began under Tony Blair. The ludicrous top-loading of the NHS: stuffing it full of middle managers earning huge amounts of money and clogging the system with bureaucracy also coincided with the insistence that nurses have degrees: why should a nurse have to have a degree?! This latter by the way then created a two-tier attitude in nursing so that some nurses would refuse to do jobs deemed beneath them.
The NHS does need proper funding. It also needs a serious clear out of the kind of bureaucratic complexity of which you rightly speak.
I'm not against nurses having degrees - much of the course is on placements on wards anyway and generally more training is a good thing. Regards two tiers of nurses, staff should be managed and should be able to do and do the tasks they are paid to do.
Pharmacy is in an interesting place - Health Education England is trying to shoe-horn a lot more placement time into the course. This is probably meaning we will remove science content. Its arguable what science content a pharmacist needs (OKC will know this - you don't get asked much about science in practice). But it will also push pharmacy down a similar route to nursing in terms of how we train.
Hmm. Thanks for that. Over my lifetime the pharmacy course has changed from a primarily technical and supply base to a much more scientific one. When I qualified 60 years ago I'd done a course which was rather out of date and orientated towards a world were I would expect to prepare medicines in much the same way as one of my 3 x Gt Grandfathers did, as an apprentice to an Apothecary in the 1830's. Except that we didn't. We 'dispensed' a decreasing number of medicines but supplied an increasing number of pre-prepared ones. What we did meet up with in practice was an increasing number of interactions of medicines, both with each other and with life styles. (See Ms Heatherners posts about inability to tolerate morphine.) And one has to know something of the 'science' to be able to handle this. Secondly there's a considerable difference in the way medicines are handled in hospital and community, and the problems with which one is faced and a two-level course might well create a situation where a pharmacy student would have to make a decision at 18 which would forever bar him or her from moving, as I did out of the 'shop' environment and into hospital.
Yes - its interesting times in the profession. There is a huge emphasis on soft skills coming in. Science content is still important and some of us are fighting to retain it. Interactions is interesting - does a pharmacist need to know that A and B interact so cannot be jointly given or do they need to know that interact and WHY? We believe its the latter, but I'm not sure that all at the top of the profession do.
Plus the demands on a community pharmacist are very different from a hospital role. Most in the community just want to get their medication, and would not ask why they couldn't say have grapefruit juice with it...
Fun times!
I had no idea that grapefruit juice could be a problem (though had some dim notion of red wines, broad beans etc. interacting with certain drugs).
Grapefruit juice can be a problem with drugs to reduce blood pressure. And yes, although my experience is from long ago, patients do ask why.
On the why and how question, I agree that one needs to know why interactions occur because, see my reply above. And in the community one gets, or at least I certainly used to get, a wide range of questions on medicine related (sometimes but distantly related) topics.
So about 1% are out as trans. True figure may be a lot higher.
A minority but not a minority to drive a bulldozer into.
Some of the definitions for "trans" that I have seen used for the purposes of estimating population levels are absurd, though. For example, I saw one definition that would include anyone with behaviour that was not stereotypical of their gender defined as being trans. As a result you get wildly varying estimates depending on the definition used.
Serious but peripheral question: do we have stats on re-transition. I am aware that there are hundreds of anecdotal examples, and I have very interesting interviews with people who have transitioned several times. But I have seen no serious academic research.
I've ben having a look at the gender transitioning process after the earlier exchanges this morning, and it certainly allows for retransition.
Once again definitions are problematic.
If a Trans-person stops medication because of side effects but still lives as that gender, have they detransitioned? If someone abandons transition because of social and family pressure, have they detransitioned, or just given in and remain Trans at heart?
Comments
This states that an intimate body search must not be done by an officer of the opposite sex to that of the person being searched. A trans officer (male identifying as a woman) remains of the male sex (even if identifying as a woman and even if he has a GRC under the GRA).
As the PACE provision refers to "sex" not "gender", an officer committing such a search is potentially committing a sexual assault on a woman. Also any evidence obtained in breach of PACE is potentially inadmissible.
The guidance (and it will need reading carefully - so usual caveats apply) appears to confuse 3 things:-
1. The need for the police not to discriminate against officers who are trans on the basis of their gender disorder/reassignment (I am using the words in the GRA and Equality Act). This is quite right. But this applies to them in their capacity as employers in their duties to their employees.
2. The necessity of all officers, whatever they are, to comply with the law. PACE for instance. The fact that an officer is trans does not override this and, as the Equality Act makes clear, in certain circumstances it is possible to discriminate against a trans person on the grounds of their sex not their gender. In any case, this is not discrimination because a male officer would not be permitted to perform an intimate search on a woman. The discrimination is on the grounds of sex not gender reassignment.
3. The importance of not giving officers unlawful instructions. Putting a trans police officer in the position of doing a search which is illegal and may constitute a criminal offence is utterly wrong. That officer could find themselves sued or prosecuted. The same would apply if a woman police officer was ordered to - or put under pressure to - do an intimate search on a trans identifying male. If such officers were then disciplined for not carrying out what they believe to be unlawful orders, the police would then also face employment law issues.
It is also, needless to say, not the way to rebuild womens' trust in the police.
The suggestion I have read that if a women objects to PACE being breached she will be recorded as having committed a hate crime is utterly absurd and also potentially unlawful.
It is about time - ABOUT FUCKING TIME, FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE - for the police to stop making things up, read the bloody law and follow it.
Sorry for the shouting (actually not sorry) but this is the same nonsense they got up to with Covid regulations and the law and again in the Miller case.
See here - https://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/04/01/taking-liberties/.
And here for my analysis of the Miller case and how the police got it wrong again - https://medium.com/@cyclefree2/perception-and-reality-7cbe78a2b679.
- The PM was governing with the support of some minor parties
- The minor parties pulled their support and were about to pass a no confidence motion
- The PM pulled a Boris Johnson and dissolved parliament rather than let them take a vote he was going to lose (or technically the speaker, who was on his side, did this)
- The Supreme Court did something like that lady with enormous spider broach and ruled that the dissolution was illegal and would everyone please stop mucking around
- Parliament passed their No Confidence vote and chose a new PM
- The outgoing PM just announced that his party's MPs are resigning. It's not clear to me whether they intend to just let their opponents win the seats or whether they're doing a David Davis and asking the voters to vote them back in again.
And if you paid the Telegraph and read the story, you'd see it is not about self-ID:-
Guidelines from the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), which represents senior officers, states that once officers have transitioned they can “search persons of the same gender as their own lived gender”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/04/10/transgender-police-officers-born-male-permitted-strip-search/ (£££)
I'd also want to know how much more the top 1% own of UK wealth, including stuff stashed in tax havens.
My only addition, which might not sit well with you, is that much of your paragraph 1 began under Tony Blair. The ludicrous top-loading of the NHS: stuffing it full of middle managers earning huge amounts of money and clogging the system with bureaucracy also coincided with the insistence that nurses have degrees: why should a nurse have to have a degree?! This latter by the way then created a two-tier attitude in nursing so that some nurses would refuse to do jobs deemed beneath them.
The NHS does need proper funding. It also needs a serious clear out of the kind of bureaucratic complexity of which you rightly speak.
"(7)A constable may not carry out an intimate search of a person of the opposite sex."
In the end they transferred me to a doctor outside A&E the following morning who was able to examine me, heard the rib shifting around, and yes offered me codeine. The trouble is, I'm allergic to morphine which codeine converts to. So I'm relying on nurofen and paracetamol which isn't really doing the job especially at night.
I hadn't intended going to A&E but was ordered there by a 111 doctor as they needed to check for lung damage. A&E was rammed full of people, some of whom were there for wound dressings. They can't get appointments at their GP's.
I am honestly not joking that I would have been 10000 x better off in Thailand. Turn up at one of the regional medical centres and they will see you in 5 minutes. I might have had to pay a little bit for it but it wouldn't have been more than £50 max and they're really good there.
The NHS is on its knees at the moment. Really sad.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/nov/13/richest-britain-income-tax-revenues-institute-fiscal-studies
The idea that the rich have paid less under the Tories is just nonsense.
So, find ways to incentivise companies to invest money in their staff and in their facilities. As I said earlier we should only be offering the lowest corporation tax rates to the companies who actually pay and treat their staff properly, and we can incentivise investment in capability.
We can offer government bonds with more generous terms to let companies help us invest in the things these companies need to be successful, whether that be schools or roads or broadband.
There is no point saying "just increase tax" if we are corrupt and incompetent enough to not actually have cash to invest and spend (as we are now). We need to plan. Invest. Build. Remember that all of these mega schemes generate a return on investment. Stop saying "how will we pay" and ask how we will benefit.
Regarding the other matter - maybe I'm naive but I can't see men pretending to be women so they can have a grope. Seems unlikely to me - I know there will be exceptions but still.
It does seem to me, though, that nursing as a profession has been re-organised far too often.
An interesting if novel idea. Surely before such a potentially dangerous innovation, a pilot program and study needs to be done.
“An examination of legal vs illegal law enforcement methodologies and their sociological and procedural consequences” - PhD by Konstable T. Savage
While currently that is the guidlines issued we already see the trans activists pushing things further and further and I have no doubt this will expand from transitioned>GRC>Identify as.
We already have seen with the prison service a complete lax of sense sticking not transition prisoners guilty of sexual assaults of women into womens prisons because they say they self identify as women. I have no faith in the police chiefs not to do the same and fall inline under the trans lobby onslaught.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/721642/GEO-LGBT-factsheet.pdf
So about 1% are out as trans. True figure may be a lot higher.
A minority but not a minority to drive a bulldozer into.
- Macron increased his first round lead over Le Pen by 1.5%, so a small first round swing in Macron's favour.
- Swing from right of centre candidates to left of centre candidates was around 6%, 48-28 -> 40-32. Drop on right because the Republican vote was not fully compensated, rise on left because Greens fully balanced Socialist losses, whilst the remainder of the left edged up across the board.
- If you include Macron on the left swing is slightly bigger.
- That said Melenchon was only up 2.5% again with tiny swings relative to Macron and Le Pen.
So looking at Macron-Le Pen-Melenchon 2022 first round is remarkably similar to 2017.
If you are looking for reasons that 2022 might be different, you are mainly banking on this:
- A substantial drop in the vote for mainstream, comfortably coalitionable parties, from 56 to 40%, including the uncomfortable right rising from 22.5 to 34% (the uncomfortable right vote was just a smidge below Le Pen's second round share last time).
Has anyone suggested a fentanyl patch?
Those who enforce the law should not be law breakers. We should not have to rely on bolshy citizens challenging them to get them to do their job.
Honestly, were I younger I'd go into politics just to become Home Secretary and do to the police what Thatcher had to do to overmighty unions. Police leadership in this country is an utter disgrace. Pull the whole edifice down and start again.
The US and Nato allies are making unprecedented amounts of classified intelligence public in a bid to expose Moscow's plans in Ukraine, but it's even quicker if the Russians just share it direct
Continuing the great tradition of top notch OPSEC that the Russian military has established in this war, Kadyrov on his daily Telegram video shows operational maps he says he has just received from his commanders
https://twitter.com/HenryJFoy/status/1513457224286363650
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/04/09/macron-cant-quit-putin-french-election-00023781
The writer is editor in chief of 'The Cosmopolitan Globalist'.
"One thing is clear: Ukraine needs more military material, especially heavy weapons," Baerbock said at EU Foreign Ministers meeting in Luxembourg.
Last week we reported that Baerbock and her Green party colleague Robert Habeck push internally for the delivery of German tanks to Ukraine, but that Chancellor Olaf Scholz has held up the decision.
https://twitter.com/vonderburchard/status/1513459077120241666
Pharmacy is in an interesting place - Health Education England is trying to shoe-horn a lot more placement time into the course. This is probably meaning we will remove science content. Its arguable what science content a pharmacist needs (OKC will know this - you don't get asked much about science in practice). But it will also push pharmacy down a similar route to nursing in terms of how we train.
Why do they keep on getting this sort of thing wrong? It seems obvious that the right of the person being strip-searched should take precedence in this situation.
Does it just mean those with gender dysphoria?
Or anybody who dresses from time to time in woman's clothes?
Or those with autogynephilia? (Men who become sexually aroused at the thought or image of themselves as a woman)
Or those who would just like to be a woman - well just because.
Or those who decide to identify as a woman if it is convenient eg male sex offenders who identify as women when sent to prison?
Or what?
I'd like to see that question posed to politicians.
Until you have clarity on the terms used, I'd be sceptical of drawing any conclusions from statistics.
But the police and the law seem to be barely on speaking terms these days.
It is PACE which needs to be complied with.
** thumps head on desk - again **
Fewer students, better funded.
And legislators are rightly nervous about cementing in statute a gender ideology which currently has no status in law and no clear definitions. What can you ban that you can’t name?
https://www.holyrood.com/editors-column/view,editors-column-pressing-pause
It's a good contribution to coffee-break land!
Except that we didn't. We 'dispensed' a decreasing number of medicines but supplied an increasing number of pre-prepared ones. What we did meet up with in practice was an increasing number of interactions of medicines, both with each other and with life styles. (See Ms Heatherners posts about inability to tolerate morphine.) And one has to know something of the 'science' to be able to handle this.
Secondly there's a considerable difference in the way medicines are handled in hospital and community, and the problems with which one is faced and a two-level course might well create a situation where a pharmacy student would have to make a decision at 18 which would forever bar him or her from moving, as I did out of the 'shop' environment and into hospital.
French pollsters are generally pretty good. I know they sometimes get things somewhat wrong - eg overstating Le Pen. But they rarely seem to have disasters
I therefore see no reason to doubt their 2nd round predictions. A rather narrow but tolerable win for Macron
https://ifs.org.uk/inequality/themes/taxes/
Nothing so dull as employment contracts and employee policies handbooks...
New Labour is back baby!
(minus Iraq)
It sounds like "I'm a citizen of somewhere; I'm just not sure where."
(Checks)
This is their definition, which looks like a positive spin on Laïcité, and is - I'll give you - interesting:
This publication was borne of the observation that genuinely global news coverage has all but disappeared from the Anglophone media. Thus the Cosmopolitan Globalist: a new publication that is neither national, nationalist, partisan, narrow-minded, nor provincial. The Cosmopolitan Globalist is, as the name suggests, cosmopolitan and worldly—and the center of our world is not Washington, D.C.
We are 68 writers, journalists, academics, politicians, and analysts around the globe, shepherded into a single platform by Claire Berlinski in Paris and Vivek Kelkar in Mumbai. We are united by our attachment to 18th-century Enlightenment ideals: rational inquiry, free speech, free trade, progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional governance, the rule of law, and the separation of state from church, temple, and mosque alike. We are united, too, by concern that these ideals can’t survive the digital age.
We firmly reject the far-right, the far-left, and populism, but beyond favoring decency and common sense, we are not passionately ideological. Our aim is to offer educated, erudite, and credible reporting and analysis from the world around, treating issues of genuinely global import.
Plus the demands on a community pharmacist are very different from a hospital role. Most in the community just want to get their medication, and would not ask why they couldn't say have grapefruit juice with it...
Fun times!
https://twitter.com/vpecresse/status/1513434989379174406
I've ben having a look at the gender transitioning process after the earlier exchanges this morning, and it certainly allows for retransition.
"Taxes on UK incomes are progressive – those at the top of the income distribution pay a greater share of their (fiscal) income in tax than those at the bottom. The top 1% of adults paid 34% of income tax in 2018–19. They paid 28% of income tax and National Insurance contributions (NICs) combined – a substantial increase from 20% in 2003–04. Taxes are less skewed to the top when including NICs because the marginal NICs rate falls from 12% to 2% for higher-rate taxpayers.
Income taxes reduce post-tax top income inequality, and have done so to a larger degree since 2010. The top 1% (0.1%) received 11% (4.6%) of post-tax income in 2018–19, compared with 14% (6.1%) in 2009–10. The fall in post-tax top income shares is in part due to policies that raised more tax from the top, most notably through a new ‘additional rate’ of income tax."
That bloody socialist George Osborne has a lot to answer for.
Got it on the sixth.
Tough one.
The problem is not in over reliance on income tax for the 1%, it is the problem of why income is so concentrated in the first place.
Note that the report specifically says that these changes were since 2010, not before.
Some people find that they are attracted by people in the same group. These call themselves gay. I can understand that, and have no problem with it.
But this latest fashion - which I understand started in American - I am finding much more difficult, and I don't really believe in it. The nearest I can get to making sense of it is that some people who are really gay don't want to face up to it, and think that an operation will make life easier for them.
Or is there something more to it than that?
Apologies if I sound like a backwoods Tory, but I have not yet identified the problem that these people have. Perhaps the only real Conservative in the village can help sort this out for me?
On the why and how question, I agree that one needs to know why interactions occur because, see my reply above.
And in the community one gets, or at least I certainly used to get, a wide range of questions on medicine related (sometimes but distantly related) topics.
If a Trans-person stops medication because of side effects but still lives as that gender, have they detransitioned? If someone abandons transition because of social and family pressure, have they detransitioned, or just given in and remain Trans at heart?
Made me laugh. Who the hell is that going to convince. He was confident there were no parties.
If I were the chancellor I would rather he wasn't confident.