This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
What makes teachers special is that like many in the private sector there simply aren't enough of them. It's market forces. And of course it will feed through to costs. That's the market again. Not a "complaint".
Market forces is one thing and no complaints if it drives up pay it was the sentiment that because they were having conversations about heating the house they should get paid more than I objected too.
Many in the private sector will have that same conversation was the point. Yet when people like hospitality staff and lorry drivers get paid more you get lefties like Rochdale pioneers bemoaning it because it will raise the cost of things. I think most people in the country are underpaid because bosses could get away with it and profits have increased while pay has remained static for most. Now the boot is on the other foot and employees have the whip hand in pay negotiations for the first time in 20 years.
By all means argue from that perspective.....just dont come with the we should be paid more because we are public sector bull.
You're a bit tetchy today, with the "bull" and using lefties regularly. Perhaps some of our contributors should be using "right wingers" and "fascists" more.
I used lefties in the context there were many who claim to be of the left persuasion complaining about people like hospitality workers and lorry drivers getting pay rises as it would drive up costs. And yes the argument came across from MaxH as we deserve more because we are talking about heating and we are public sector so yes used the term bull. Sorry if it offends you but it is true. And to note I am not saying teachers don't deserve a payrise just saying that isn't a reason.
The thing is, I've yet to come across any of my fellow lefties (notwithstanding your comment about a couple on here) complaining about low paid workers getting big pay rises - whether private sector or public sector. We think that all low paid workers should get rises that at least match inflation, and this should be financed by acquiring money from the grotesque profiteering that is in evidence across much of industry - whether private or public. Like the P&O chap who earns a fortune but then sacks all the workers rather than paying them more. Or the Bank of England Chair earning a fortune telling us not to be greedy. And thousands more of their ilk.
I reckon you're a secret socialist, really.
Rochdale Pioneers is definitely a leftie and has been bemoaning the fact that lorry drivers getting a payrise would feed through into higher food prices
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
What makes teachers special is that like many in the private sector there simply aren't enough of them. It's market forces. And of course it will feed through to costs. That's the market again. Not a "complaint".
Market forces is one thing and no complaints if it drives up pay it was the sentiment that because they were having conversations about heating the house they should get paid more than I objected too.
Many in the private sector will have that same conversation was the point. Yet when people like hospitality staff and lorry drivers get paid more you get lefties like Rochdale pioneers bemoaning it because it will raise the cost of things. I think most people in the country are underpaid because bosses could get away with it and profits have increased while pay has remained static for most. Now the boot is on the other foot and employees have the whip hand in pay negotiations for the first time in 20 years.
By all means argue from that perspective.....just dont come with the we should be paid more because we are public sector bull.
You're a bit tetchy today, with the "bull" and using lefties regularly. Perhaps some of our contributors should be using "right wingers" and "fascists" more.
I used lefties in the context there were many who claim to be of the left persuasion complaining about people like hospitality workers and lorry drivers getting pay rises as it would drive up costs. And yes the argument came across from MaxH as we deserve more because we are talking about heating and we are public sector so yes used the term bull. Sorry if it offends you but it is true. And to note I am not saying teachers don't deserve a payrise just saying that isn't a reason.
The thing is, I've yet to come across any of my fellow lefties (notwithstanding your comment about a couple on here) complaining about low paid workers getting big pay rises - whether private sector or public sector. We think that all low paid workers should get rises that at least match inflation, and this should be financed by acquiring money from the grotesque profiteering that is in evidence across much of industry - whether private or public. Like the P&O chap who earns a fortune but then sacks all the workers rather than paying them more. Or the Bank of England Chair earning a fortune telling us not to be greedy. And thousands more of their ilk.
I reckon you're a secret socialist, really.
Rochdale Pioneers is definitely a leftie and has been bemoaning the fact that lorry drivers getting a payrise would feed through into higher food prices
He's a Lib Dem.
He has been a lib dem for a little while he was a labour member for a lot of years before that, and after all lib dems keep getting claimed for the so called progressive alliance
I’m not sure I’ve been to a more immediately appealing city
Did you take a midnight train to get there?
Midnight plane from Athens. Arrived dawn. Am knackered but consoling myself with delicious cold Georgian wine at £2 a glass
It’s also absurdly easy to get in. Show your vax status - takes 30 seconds - no visa required. Nothing. You’re in. And you can stay for a year
Also, they are REALLY grateful for our help with Ukraine. There are probably more England flags than Ukrainian
It's no coincidence that those closest to Russia best understand what's at stake in this war.
Best for the entire world that it ends as quickly as possible, in a Russian defeat.
Whilst that is correct, there is no way of reaching that endpoint swiftly.
It is a bit like saying we need to eliminate world hunger swiftly by making sure everyone is fed. Well, no-one disputes it, but without a practical means of achieving it, then it is just vapour.
So, as in most problems, it is a trade-off. There is huge damage that is done by the ongoing war (to Ukraine and the wider world, some poor countries will soon be in real food difficulties) and there is huge damage that is done by finding an unpalatable compromise and rewarding the original violence.
The war was far worse than conceding the original plebiscites under Minsk. If Ukraine had lost the plebiscites (arguable, in fact, as @rcs1000 has pointed out), it would at most have lost the whole of the Donbas.
The war will unfortunately end with Ukraine losing all the Donbas and a swathe of southern Ukraine. There is no way that Putin (or any likely successor) will give up the water supply to the Crimea, or the land corridor to the Crimea, or the Crimea itself.
Wars often end with the bad guys winning. Violence is often rewarded. The recent histories of Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland & Tibet show exactly that.
The script for the Ukraine War was not written in Hollywood ...
As @Dura_Ace predicted, the Russian army will grind out a slow, remorseless, destructive victory of sorts.
It ends with a de facto annexation of some of East Ukraine, and destabilisation of the rest of Ukraine.
Our very own Jeremy Corbyn said on day one that the only certainty was that this war -if it happens -is going to end in a negotiated settlement. 'Why not save thousands of lives and have the negotiation now without the war'. It might sound simplistic but if the Russians prevail it will sound like the most sane thing he has ever said.
Because, you stupid appeasing c*nt, wherever Russia has taken territory it has raped the women wholesale, tortured and slaughtered many civilians, dragged thousands off to Siberia, and liquidated the intelligentsia.
You cannot ‘negotiate’ with this. You fight
I am sure atrocities have been committed by the Russian side, but at this point it's impossible to verify most what we're hearing, as it comes from a Ukrainian side desperate for greater Western intervention, reported unquestioningly by a Western media anxious to be supportive.
Total bollocks, russian forces have form for this long before ukraine, if someone is a serial rapist we take there protestation they are innocent with huge pinches of salt and thats before we look at the fact that a lot of those bodies in mass graves have been shown to have predated the russian retreats.....stop making excuses for evil
Yes they do - they are brutal, destructive, ignorant invaders. However, there have also been false allegations. It's a horrible situation, but when a Government lies in order to inveigle my country into a potential nuclear conflict, my sympathy evaporates fairly fast.
There is no evidence ukraine has lied
Yeah, that Jack Russell really has dug up 200 mines.
I was talking of course about atrocities not silly propaganda stories like Jack russells or the ghost of kyiv.
So they'd make up 'silly propaganda stories', but definitely not make up big things that could actually command the news agenda and push the overton window?
We had the maternity hospital attack, in which in transpired that (tragically) three people lost their lives.
We had the theatre attack where there were alleged to be over a thousand buried in the rubble, then it got very vague and mealy mouthed. There's an interesting on the ground report here, it's Iranian, and I can't and don't vouch for the slant, but he tries to be balanced, and I don't think any Western agencies are now on the ground. It appears that casualties actually sit in the low 10s. Still a tragedy, but nothing like what has been portrayed. How can you miscount by 1000 people? https://www.presstv.co.uk/Detail/2022/05/22/682520/Mariupol-Drama-Theatre-bombing-Ukraine-Russia-conflict-
These things aren't scrutinised or questioned, we just get the outrage, then forget it and move to the next atrocity.
Ah so not denying the attacks took place just the scale of the tragedy and as I remember the reports they werent claiming 1000's of deaths they were saying there was x in there and we don't know how many dead because we are digging out the rubble .
By all means though condone your boys for shelling a maternity hospital and a theatre where civillians were sheltering makes your side seem so civillised I know.
I am not condoning anyone's boys. I am gently disagreeing with your notion that whilst they might exaggerate their tally of tanks and downed enemy aircraft, the Ukranian side are too jolly sporting to really mislead us about anything big. On the contrary, the big things *are* what they'd lie about, quite understandably, because they are desperate to drive the enemy out of their country. You don't see that because you don't want to.
While you swallow everything the russians say hook line and sinker. When it comes to Russia your credibility is less than Boris Johnson saying I have been faithful honest darling
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
Conservative doctrine is clear that high pay is necessary to attract talent in the private sector, but that this does not translate to the public sector because… well, I think because high-paid people in the private sector vote for them and high-paid people in the public sector don’t.
HYUFD keeps saying that non-Tories don't count in Tory thinking. The Tories will only do anything for their voters - which means, given that life is in part a zero sum game, that the Tories will deliberately and with full malice screw people who don't vote for them.
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
Conservative doctrine is clear that high pay is necessary to attract talent in the private sector, but that this does not translate to the public sector because… well, I think because high-paid people in the private sector vote for them and high-paid people in the public sector don’t.
HYUFD keeps saying that non-Tories don't count in Tory thinking. The Tories will only do anything for their voters - which means, given that life is in part a zero sum game, that the Tories will deliberately and with full malice screw people who don't vote for them.
HYUFD confuses conservatives with himself however. There are decent minded conservatives out there. HYUFD however stole his moral compass of Gordon Brown then broke it even more than it already was
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
What makes teachers special is that like many in the private sector there simply aren't enough of them. It's market forces. And of course it will feed through to costs. That's the market again. Not a "complaint".
Market forces is one thing and no complaints if it drives up pay it was the sentiment that because they were having conversations about heating the house they should get paid more than I objected too.
Many in the private sector will have that same conversation was the point. Yet when people like hospitality staff and lorry drivers get paid more you get lefties like Rochdale pioneers bemoaning it because it will raise the cost of things. I think most people in the country are underpaid because bosses could get away with it and profits have increased while pay has remained static for most. Now the boot is on the other foot and employees have the whip hand in pay negotiations for the first time in 20 years.
By all means argue from that perspective.....just dont come with the we should be paid more because we are public sector bull.
You're a bit tetchy today, with the "bull" and using lefties regularly. Perhaps some of our contributors should be using "right wingers" and "fascists" more.
I used lefties in the context there were many who claim to be of the left persuasion complaining about people like hospitality workers and lorry drivers getting pay rises as it would drive up costs. And yes the argument came across from MaxH as we deserve more because we are talking about heating and we are public sector so yes used the term bull. Sorry if it offends you but it is true. And to note I am not saying teachers don't deserve a payrise just saying that isn't a reason.
The thing is, I've yet to come across any of my fellow lefties (notwithstanding your comment about a couple on here) complaining about low paid workers getting big pay rises - whether private sector or public sector. We think that all low paid workers should get rises that at least match inflation, and this should be financed by acquiring money from the grotesque profiteering that is in evidence across much of industry - whether private or public. Like the P&O chap who earns a fortune but then sacks all the workers rather than paying them more. Or the Bank of England Chair earning a fortune telling us not to be greedy. And thousands more of their ilk.
I reckon you're a secret socialist, really.
Rochdale Pioneers is definitely a leftie and has been bemoaning the fact that lorry drivers getting a payrise would feed through into higher food prices
He's a Lib Dem.
He has been a lib dem for a little while he was a labour member for a lot of years before that, and after all lib dems keep getting claimed for the so called progressive alliance
He lives in Scotland, now anyway.
In Scotland, Labour are light blue, and the LDs are almost as much hard right as the Tories. Edit: though, as RP shows, containing a range of views!
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
What makes teachers special is that like many in the private sector there simply aren't enough of them. It's market forces. And of course it will feed through to costs. That's the market again. Not a "complaint".
Market forces is one thing and no complaints if it drives up pay it was the sentiment that because they were having conversations about heating the house they should get paid more than I objected too.
Many in the private sector will have that same conversation was the point. Yet when people like hospitality staff and lorry drivers get paid more you get lefties like Rochdale pioneers bemoaning it because it will raise the cost of things. I think most people in the country are underpaid because bosses could get away with it and profits have increased while pay has remained static for most. Now the boot is on the other foot and employees have the whip hand in pay negotiations for the first time in 20 years.
By all means argue from that perspective.....just dont come with the we should be paid more because we are public sector bull.
You're a bit tetchy today, with the "bull" and using lefties regularly. Perhaps some of our contributors should be using "right wingers" and "fascists" more.
I used lefties in the context there were many who claim to be of the left persuasion complaining about people like hospitality workers and lorry drivers getting pay rises as it would drive up costs. And yes the argument came across from MaxH as we deserve more because we are talking about heating and we are public sector so yes used the term bull. Sorry if it offends you but it is true. And to note I am not saying teachers don't deserve a payrise just saying that isn't a reason.
The thing is, I've yet to come across any of my fellow lefties (notwithstanding your comment about a couple on here) complaining about low paid workers getting big pay rises - whether private sector or public sector. We think that all low paid workers should get rises that at least match inflation, and this should be financed by acquiring money from the grotesque profiteering that is in evidence across much of industry - whether private or public. Like the P&O chap who earns a fortune but then sacks all the workers rather than paying them more. Or the Bank of England Chair earning a fortune telling us not to be greedy. And thousands more of their ilk.
I reckon you're a secret socialist, really.
Rochdale Pioneers is definitely a leftie and has been bemoaning the fact that lorry drivers getting a payrise would feed through into higher food prices
He's a Lib Dem.
He has been a lib dem for a little while he was a labour member for a lot of years before that, and after all lib dems keep getting claimed for the so called progressive alliance
He lives in Scotland, now anyway.
In Scotland, Labour are light blue, and the LDs are almost as much hard right as the Tories. Edit: though, as RP shows, containing a range of views!
I’m not sure I’ve been to a more immediately appealing city
Did you take a midnight train to get there?
Midnight plane from Athens. Arrived dawn. Am knackered but consoling myself with delicious cold Georgian wine at £2 a glass
It’s also absurdly easy to get in. Show your vax status - takes 30 seconds - no visa required. Nothing. You’re in. And you can stay for a year
Also, they are REALLY grateful for our help with Ukraine. There are probably more England flags than Ukrainian
It's no coincidence that those closest to Russia best understand what's at stake in this war.
Best for the entire world that it ends as quickly as possible, in a Russian defeat.
Whilst that is correct, there is no way of reaching that endpoint swiftly.
It is a bit like saying we need to eliminate world hunger swiftly by making sure everyone is fed. Well, no-one disputes it, but without a practical means of achieving it, then it is just vapour.
So, as in most problems, it is a trade-off. There is huge damage that is done by the ongoing war (to Ukraine and the wider world, some poor countries will soon be in real food difficulties) and there is huge damage that is done by finding an unpalatable compromise and rewarding the original violence.
The war was far worse than conceding the original plebiscites under Minsk. If Ukraine had lost the plebiscites (arguable, in fact, as @rcs1000 has pointed out), it would at most have lost the whole of the Donbas.
The war will unfortunately end with Ukraine losing all the Donbas and a swathe of southern Ukraine. There is no way that Putin (or any likely successor) will give up the water supply to the Crimea, or the land corridor to the Crimea, or the Crimea itself.
Wars often end with the bad guys winning. Violence is often rewarded. The recent histories of Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland & Tibet show exactly that.
The script for the Ukraine War was not written in Hollywood ...
As @Dura_Ace predicted, the Russian army will grind out a slow, remorseless, destructive victory of sorts.
It ends with a de facto annexation of some of East Ukraine, and destabilisation of the rest of Ukraine.
Our very own Jeremy Corbyn said on day one that the only certainty was that this war -if it happens -is going to end in a negotiated settlement. 'Why not save thousands of lives and have the negotiation now without the war'. It might sound simplistic but if the Russians prevail it will sound like the most sane thing he has ever said.
Because, you stupid appeasing c*nt, wherever Russia has taken territory it has raped the women wholesale, tortured and slaughtered many civilians, dragged thousands off to Siberia, and liquidated the intelligentsia.
You cannot ‘negotiate’ with this. You fight
Fuck off to the Donbas then, and fight.
Oh God! Oh God! My boots are WET! We have to surrender NOW!
I’m not sure I’ve been to a more immediately appealing city
Did you take a midnight train to get there?
Midnight plane from Athens. Arrived dawn. Am knackered but consoling myself with delicious cold Georgian wine at £2 a glass
It’s also absurdly easy to get in. Show your vax status - takes 30 seconds - no visa required. Nothing. You’re in. And you can stay for a year
Also, they are REALLY grateful for our help with Ukraine. There are probably more England flags than Ukrainian
It's no coincidence that those closest to Russia best understand what's at stake in this war.
Best for the entire world that it ends as quickly as possible, in a Russian defeat.
Whilst that is correct, there is no way of reaching that endpoint swiftly.
It is a bit like saying we need to eliminate world hunger swiftly by making sure everyone is fed. Well, no-one disputes it, but without a practical means of achieving it, then it is just vapour.
So, as in most problems, it is a trade-off. There is huge damage that is done by the ongoing war (to Ukraine and the wider world, some poor countries will soon be in real food difficulties) and there is huge damage that is done by finding an unpalatable compromise and rewarding the original violence.
The war was far worse than conceding the original plebiscites under Minsk. If Ukraine had lost the plebiscites (arguable, in fact, as @rcs1000 has pointed out), it would at most have lost the whole of the Donbas.
The war will unfortunately end with Ukraine losing all the Donbas and a swathe of southern Ukraine. There is no way that Putin (or any likely successor) will give up the water supply to the Crimea, or the land corridor to the Crimea, or the Crimea itself.
Wars often end with the bad guys winning. Violence is often rewarded. The recent histories of Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland & Tibet show exactly that.
The script for the Ukraine War was not written in Hollywood ...
As @Dura_Ace predicted, the Russian army will grind out a slow, remorseless, destructive victory of sorts.
It ends with a de facto annexation of some of East Ukraine, and destabilisation of the rest of Ukraine.
Our very own Jeremy Corbyn said on day one that the only certainty was that this war -if it happens -is going to end in a negotiated settlement. 'Why not save thousands of lives and have the negotiation now without the war'. It might sound simplistic but if the Russians prevail it will sound like the most sane thing he has ever said.
Because, you stupid appeasing c*nt, wherever Russia has taken territory it has raped the women wholesale, tortured and slaughtered many civilians, dragged thousands off to Siberia, and liquidated the intelligentsia.
You cannot ‘negotiate’ with this. You fight
I am sure atrocities have been committed by the Russian side, but at this point it's impossible to verify most what we're hearing, as it comes from a Ukrainian side desperate for greater Western intervention, reported unquestioningly by a Western media anxious to be supportive.
Is this guy a troll or what
Not a troll, but a slightly nutty controversialist. Believes in homeopathy, that Russia didn’t shot down the Malaysian airliner, etc. generally takes the position that the evidence provided by the west is incomplete or unreliable.
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
What makes teachers special is that like many in the private sector there simply aren't enough of them. It's market forces. And of course it will feed through to costs. That's the market again. Not a "complaint".
Market forces is one thing and no complaints if it drives up pay it was the sentiment that because they were having conversations about heating the house they should get paid more than I objected too.
Many in the private sector will have that same conversation was the point. Yet when people like hospitality staff and lorry drivers get paid more you get lefties like Rochdale pioneers bemoaning it because it will raise the cost of things. I think most people in the country are underpaid because bosses could get away with it and profits have increased while pay has remained static for most. Now the boot is on the other foot and employees have the whip hand in pay negotiations for the first time in 20 years.
By all means argue from that perspective.....just dont come with the we should be paid more because we are public sector bull.
You're a bit tetchy today, with the "bull" and using lefties regularly. Perhaps some of our contributors should be using "right wingers" and "fascists" more.
I used lefties in the context there were many who claim to be of the left persuasion complaining about people like hospitality workers and lorry drivers getting pay rises as it would drive up costs. And yes the argument came across from MaxH as we deserve more because we are talking about heating and we are public sector so yes used the term bull. Sorry if it offends you but it is true. And to note I am not saying teachers don't deserve a payrise just saying that isn't a reason.
The thing is, I've yet to come across any of my fellow lefties (notwithstanding your comment about a couple on here) complaining about low paid workers getting big pay rises - whether private sector or public sector. We think that all low paid workers should get rises that at least match inflation, and this should be financed by acquiring money from the grotesque profiteering that is in evidence across much of industry - whether private or public. Like the P&O chap who earns a fortune but then sacks all the workers rather than paying them more. Or the Bank of England Chair earning a fortune telling us not to be greedy. And thousands more of their ilk.
I reckon you're a secret socialist, really.
Rochdale Pioneers is definitely a leftie and has been bemoaning the fact that lorry drivers getting a payrise would feed through into higher food prices
He's a Lib Dem.
He has been a lib dem for a little while he was a labour member for a lot of years before that, and after all lib dems keep getting claimed for the so called progressive alliance
He lives in Scotland, now anyway.
In Scotland, Labour are light blue, and the LDs are almost as much hard right as the Tories. Edit: though, as RP shows, containing a range of views!
I’m not sure I’ve been to a more immediately appealing city
Did you take a midnight train to get there?
Midnight plane from Athens. Arrived dawn. Am knackered but consoling myself with delicious cold Georgian wine at £2 a glass
It’s also absurdly easy to get in. Show your vax status - takes 30 seconds - no visa required. Nothing. You’re in. And you can stay for a year
Also, they are REALLY grateful for our help with Ukraine. There are probably more England flags than Ukrainian
It's no coincidence that those closest to Russia best understand what's at stake in this war.
Best for the entire world that it ends as quickly as possible, in a Russian defeat.
Whilst that is correct, there is no way of reaching that endpoint swiftly.
It is a bit like saying we need to eliminate world hunger swiftly by making sure everyone is fed. Well, no-one disputes it, but without a practical means of achieving it, then it is just vapour.
So, as in most problems, it is a trade-off. There is huge damage that is done by the ongoing war (to Ukraine and the wider world, some poor countries will soon be in real food difficulties) and there is huge damage that is done by finding an unpalatable compromise and rewarding the original violence.
The war was far worse than conceding the original plebiscites under Minsk. If Ukraine had lost the plebiscites (arguable, in fact, as @rcs1000 has pointed out), it would at most have lost the whole of the Donbas.
The war will unfortunately end with Ukraine losing all the Donbas and a swathe of southern Ukraine. There is no way that Putin (or any likely successor) will give up the water supply to the Crimea, or the land corridor to the Crimea, or the Crimea itself.
Wars often end with the bad guys winning. Violence is often rewarded. The recent histories of Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland & Tibet show exactly that.
The script for the Ukraine War was not written in Hollywood ...
As @Dura_Ace predicted, the Russian army will grind out a slow, remorseless, destructive victory of sorts.
It ends with a de facto annexation of some of East Ukraine, and destabilisation of the rest of Ukraine.
Our very own Jeremy Corbyn said on day one that the only certainty was that this war -if it happens -is going to end in a negotiated settlement. 'Why not save thousands of lives and have the negotiation now without the war'. It might sound simplistic but if the Russians prevail it will sound like the most sane thing he has ever said.
Because, you stupid appeasing c*nt, wherever Russia has taken territory it has raped the women wholesale, tortured and slaughtered many civilians, dragged thousands off to Siberia, and liquidated the intelligentsia.
You cannot ‘negotiate’ with this. You fight
I am sure atrocities have been committed by the Russian side, but at this point it's impossible to verify most what we're hearing, as it comes from a Ukrainian side desperate for greater Western intervention, reported unquestioningly by a Western media anxious to be supportive.
Total bollocks, russian forces have form for this long before ukraine, if someone is a serial rapist we take there protestation they are innocent with huge pinches of salt and thats before we look at the fact that a lot of those bodies in mass graves have been shown to have predated the russian retreats.....stop making excuses for evil
Yes they do - they are brutal, destructive, ignorant invaders. However, there have also been false allegations. It's a horrible situation, but when a Government lies in order to inveigle my country into a potential nuclear conflict, my sympathy evaporates fairly fast.
There is no evidence ukraine has lied
Yeah, that Jack Russell really has dug up 200 mines.
I was talking of course about atrocities not silly propaganda stories like Jack russells or the ghost of kyiv.
So they'd make up 'silly propaganda stories', but definitely not make up big things that could actually command the news agenda and push the overton window?
We had the maternity hospital attack, in which in transpired that (tragically) three people lost their lives.
We had the theatre attack where there were alleged to be over a thousand buried in the rubble, then it got very vague and mealy mouthed. There's an interesting on the ground report here, it's Iranian, and I can't and don't vouch for the slant, but he tries to be balanced, and I don't think any Western agencies are now on the ground. It appears that casualties actually sit in the low 10s. Still a tragedy, but nothing like what has been portrayed. How can you miscount by 1000 people? https://www.presstv.co.uk/Detail/2022/05/22/682520/Mariupol-Drama-Theatre-bombing-Ukraine-Russia-conflict-
These things aren't scrutinised or questioned, we just get the outrage, then forget it and move to the next atrocity.
So it’s ok to bomb a maternity hospital if you don’t do a good job?
I’m not sure I’ve been to a more immediately appealing city
Did you take a midnight train to get there?
Midnight plane from Athens. Arrived dawn. Am knackered but consoling myself with delicious cold Georgian wine at £2 a glass
It’s also absurdly easy to get in. Show your vax status - takes 30 seconds - no visa required. Nothing. You’re in. And you can stay for a year
Also, they are REALLY grateful for our help with Ukraine. There are probably more England flags than Ukrainian
It's no coincidence that those closest to Russia best understand what's at stake in this war.
Best for the entire world that it ends as quickly as possible, in a Russian defeat.
Whilst that is correct, there is no way of reaching that endpoint swiftly.
It is a bit like saying we need to eliminate world hunger swiftly by making sure everyone is fed. Well, no-one disputes it, but without a practical means of achieving it, then it is just vapour.
So, as in most problems, it is a trade-off. There is huge damage that is done by the ongoing war (to Ukraine and the wider world, some poor countries will soon be in real food difficulties) and there is huge damage that is done by finding an unpalatable compromise and rewarding the original violence.
The war was far worse than conceding the original plebiscites under Minsk. If Ukraine had lost the plebiscites (arguable, in fact, as @rcs1000 has pointed out), it would at most have lost the whole of the Donbas.
The war will unfortunately end with Ukraine losing all the Donbas and a swathe of southern Ukraine. There is no way that Putin (or any likely successor) will give up the water supply to the Crimea, or the land corridor to the Crimea, or the Crimea itself.
Wars often end with the bad guys winning. Violence is often rewarded. The recent histories of Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland & Tibet show exactly that.
The script for the Ukraine War was not written in Hollywood ...
As @Dura_Ace predicted, the Russian army will grind out a slow, remorseless, destructive victory of sorts.
It ends with a de facto annexation of some of East Ukraine, and destabilisation of the rest of Ukraine.
Our very own Jeremy Corbyn said on day one that the only certainty was that this war -if it happens -is going to end in a negotiated settlement. 'Why not save thousands of lives and have the negotiation now without the war'. It might sound simplistic but if the Russians prevail it will sound like the most sane thing he has ever said.
Because, you stupid appeasing c*nt, wherever Russia has taken territory it has raped the women wholesale, tortured and slaughtered many civilians, dragged thousands off to Siberia, and liquidated the intelligentsia.
You cannot ‘negotiate’ with this. You fight
I am sure atrocities have been committed by the Russian side, but at this point it's impossible to verify most what we're hearing, as it comes from a Ukrainian side desperate for greater Western intervention, reported unquestioningly by a Western media anxious to be supportive.
Is this guy a troll or what
Not a troll, but a slightly nutty controversialist. Believes in homeopathy, that Russia didn’t shot down the Malaysian airliner, etc. generally takes the position that the evidence provided by the west is incomplete or unreliable.
I’m not sure I’ve been to a more immediately appealing city
Did you take a midnight train to get there?
Midnight plane from Athens. Arrived dawn. Am knackered but consoling myself with delicious cold Georgian wine at £2 a glass
It’s also absurdly easy to get in. Show your vax status - takes 30 seconds - no visa required. Nothing. You’re in. And you can stay for a year
Also, they are REALLY grateful for our help with Ukraine. There are probably more England flags than Ukrainian
It's no coincidence that those closest to Russia best understand what's at stake in this war.
Best for the entire world that it ends as quickly as possible, in a Russian defeat.
Whilst that is correct, there is no way of reaching that endpoint swiftly.
It is a bit like saying we need to eliminate world hunger swiftly by making sure everyone is fed. Well, no-one disputes it, but without a practical means of achieving it, then it is just vapour.
So, as in most problems, it is a trade-off. There is huge damage that is done by the ongoing war (to Ukraine and the wider world, some poor countries will soon be in real food difficulties) and there is huge damage that is done by finding an unpalatable compromise and rewarding the original violence.
The war was far worse than conceding the original plebiscites under Minsk. If Ukraine had lost the plebiscites (arguable, in fact, as @rcs1000 has pointed out), it would at most have lost the whole of the Donbas.
The war will unfortunately end with Ukraine losing all the Donbas and a swathe of southern Ukraine. There is no way that Putin (or any likely successor) will give up the water supply to the Crimea, or the land corridor to the Crimea, or the Crimea itself.
Wars often end with the bad guys winning. Violence is often rewarded. The recent histories of Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland & Tibet show exactly that.
The script for the Ukraine War was not written in Hollywood ...
As @Dura_Ace predicted, the Russian army will grind out a slow, remorseless, destructive victory of sorts.
It ends with a de facto annexation of some of East Ukraine, and destabilisation of the rest of Ukraine.
Our very own Jeremy Corbyn said on day one that the only certainty was that this war -if it happens -is going to end in a negotiated settlement. 'Why not save thousands of lives and have the negotiation now without the war'. It might sound simplistic but if the Russians prevail it will sound like the most sane thing he has ever said.
Because, you stupid appeasing c*nt, wherever Russia has taken territory it has raped the women wholesale, tortured and slaughtered many civilians, dragged thousands off to Siberia, and liquidated the intelligentsia.
You cannot ‘negotiate’ with this. You fight
I am sure atrocities have been committed by the Russian side, but at this point it's impossible to verify most what we're hearing, as it comes from a Ukrainian side desperate for greater Western intervention, reported unquestioningly by a Western media anxious to be supportive.
Is this guy a troll or what
Not a troll, but a slightly nutty controversialist. Believes in homeopathy, that Russia didn’t shot down the Malaysian airliner, etc. generally takes the position that the evidence provided by the west is incomplete or unreliable.
Believes in homeopathy? Surely not.
No; I was wondering too. Was LG the PBer who advocated injections of oxidising disinfectants - hydrogen peroxide? - as a cure for covid? I hesitate to be at all definite as memory is faint after 2 and a bit years of pandemic, but if it was him it sure is not homoeopathic!
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
What makes teachers special is that like many in the private sector there simply aren't enough of them. It's market forces. And of course it will feed through to costs. That's the market again. Not a "complaint".
Market forces is one thing and no complaints if it drives up pay it was the sentiment that because they were having conversations about heating the house they should get paid more than I objected too.
Many in the private sector will have that same conversation was the point. Yet when people like hospitality staff and lorry drivers get paid more you get lefties like Rochdale pioneers bemoaning it because it will raise the cost of things. I think most people in the country are underpaid because bosses could get away with it and profits have increased while pay has remained static for most. Now the boot is on the other foot and employees have the whip hand in pay negotiations for the first time in 20 years.
By all means argue from that perspective.....just dont come with the we should be paid more because we are public sector bull.
You're a bit tetchy today, with the "bull" and using lefties regularly. Perhaps some of our contributors should be using "right wingers" and "fascists" more.
I used lefties in the context there were many who claim to be of the left persuasion complaining about people like hospitality workers and lorry drivers getting pay rises as it would drive up costs. And yes the argument came across from MaxH as we deserve more because we are talking about heating and we are public sector so yes used the term bull. Sorry if it offends you but it is true. And to note I am not saying teachers don't deserve a payrise just saying that isn't a reason.
The thing is, I've yet to come across any of my fellow lefties (notwithstanding your comment about a couple on here) complaining about low paid workers getting big pay rises - whether private sector or public sector. We think that all low paid workers should get rises that at least match inflation, and this should be financed by acquiring money from the grotesque profiteering that is in evidence across much of industry - whether private or public. Like the P&O chap who earns a fortune but then sacks all the workers rather than paying them more. Or the Bank of England Chair earning a fortune telling us not to be greedy. And thousands more of their ilk.
I reckon you're a secret socialist, really.
Rochdale Pioneers is definitely a leftie and has been bemoaning the fact that lorry drivers getting a payrise would feed through into higher food prices
He's a Lib Dem.
My point about driver pay was simple. Unless and until more drivers appear you pay more without actually fixing the problem. There is still a shortage of drivers - albeit not as acute as it was - and despite deliveries still being affected by it the transport costs are way higher for no real benefit. Great for the drivers, though they are contributing to the runaway price inflation they are being hit by.
Which of course is the curse of inflation - the more inflation goes up the more pay people demand, Which increases inflation, and then pay demands again...
I’m not sure I’ve been to a more immediately appealing city
Did you take a midnight train to get there?
Midnight plane from Athens. Arrived dawn. Am knackered but consoling myself with delicious cold Georgian wine at £2 a glass
It’s also absurdly easy to get in. Show your vax status - takes 30 seconds - no visa required. Nothing. You’re in. And you can stay for a year
Also, they are REALLY grateful for our help with Ukraine. There are probably more England flags than Ukrainian
It's no coincidence that those closest to Russia best understand what's at stake in this war.
Best for the entire world that it ends as quickly as possible, in a Russian defeat.
Whilst that is correct, there is no way of reaching that endpoint swiftly.
It is a bit like saying we need to eliminate world hunger swiftly by making sure everyone is fed. Well, no-one disputes it, but without a practical means of achieving it, then it is just vapour.
So, as in most problems, it is a trade-off. There is huge damage that is done by the ongoing war (to Ukraine and the wider world, some poor countries will soon be in real food difficulties) and there is huge damage that is done by finding an unpalatable compromise and rewarding the original violence.
The war was far worse than conceding the original plebiscites under Minsk. If Ukraine had lost the plebiscites (arguable, in fact, as @rcs1000 has pointed out), it would at most have lost the whole of the Donbas.
The war will unfortunately end with Ukraine losing all the Donbas and a swathe of southern Ukraine. There is no way that Putin (or any likely successor) will give up the water supply to the Crimea, or the land corridor to the Crimea, or the Crimea itself.
Wars often end with the bad guys winning. Violence is often rewarded. The recent histories of Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland & Tibet show exactly that.
The script for the Ukraine War was not written in Hollywood ...
As @Dura_Ace predicted, the Russian army will grind out a slow, remorseless, destructive victory of sorts.
It ends with a de facto annexation of some of East Ukraine, and destabilisation of the rest of Ukraine.
Our very own Jeremy Corbyn said on day one that the only certainty was that this war -if it happens -is going to end in a negotiated settlement. 'Why not save thousands of lives and have the negotiation now without the war'. It might sound simplistic but if the Russians prevail it will sound like the most sane thing he has ever said.
Because, you stupid appeasing c*nt, wherever Russia has taken territory it has raped the women wholesale, tortured and slaughtered many civilians, dragged thousands off to Siberia, and liquidated the intelligentsia.
You cannot ‘negotiate’ with this. You fight
I am sure atrocities have been committed by the Russian side, but at this point it's impossible to verify most what we're hearing, as it comes from a Ukrainian side desperate for greater Western intervention, reported unquestioningly by a Western media anxious to be supportive.
Is this guy a troll or what
Not a troll, but a slightly nutty controversialist. Believes in homeopathy, that Russia didn’t shot down the Malaysian airliner, etc. generally takes the position that the evidence provided by the west is incomplete or unreliable.
Believes in homeopathy? Surely not.
Do you think someone can read between the lines to infer my views on homeopathy?
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
What makes teachers special is that like many in the private sector there simply aren't enough of them. It's market forces. And of course it will feed through to costs. That's the market again. Not a "complaint".
Market forces is one thing and no complaints if it drives up pay it was the sentiment that because they were having conversations about heating the house they should get paid more than I objected too.
Many in the private sector will have that same conversation was the point. Yet when people like hospitality staff and lorry drivers get paid more you get lefties like Rochdale pioneers bemoaning it because it will raise the cost of things. I think most people in the country are underpaid because bosses could get away with it and profits have increased while pay has remained static for most. Now the boot is on the other foot and employees have the whip hand in pay negotiations for the first time in 20 years.
By all means argue from that perspective.....just dont come with the we should be paid more because we are public sector bull.
You're a bit tetchy today, with the "bull" and using lefties regularly. Perhaps some of our contributors should be using "right wingers" and "fascists" more.
I used lefties in the context there were many who claim to be of the left persuasion complaining about people like hospitality workers and lorry drivers getting pay rises as it would drive up costs. And yes the argument came across from MaxH as we deserve more because we are talking about heating and we are public sector so yes used the term bull. Sorry if it offends you but it is true. And to note I am not saying teachers don't deserve a payrise just saying that isn't a reason.
The thing is, I've yet to come across any of my fellow lefties (notwithstanding your comment about a couple on here) complaining about low paid workers getting big pay rises - whether private sector or public sector. We think that all low paid workers should get rises that at least match inflation, and this should be financed by acquiring money from the grotesque profiteering that is in evidence across much of industry - whether private or public. Like the P&O chap who earns a fortune but then sacks all the workers rather than paying them more. Or the Bank of England Chair earning a fortune telling us not to be greedy. And thousands more of their ilk.
I reckon you're a secret socialist, really.
Rochdale Pioneers is definitely a leftie and has been bemoaning the fact that lorry drivers getting a payrise would feed through into higher food prices
He's a Lib Dem.
He has been a lib dem for a little while he was a labour member for a lot of years before that, and after all lib dems keep getting claimed for the so called progressive alliance
I'm a centre-leftie. I am not remotely supported by my actual leftie friends in pointing to the futility of some pay rises. BTW was always the same even when I was a Labour member - stuff like firemen demanding 40% more was stupid and I said so at the time.
I’m not sure I’ve been to a more immediately appealing city
Did you take a midnight train to get there?
Midnight plane from Athens. Arrived dawn. Am knackered but consoling myself with delicious cold Georgian wine at £2 a glass
It’s also absurdly easy to get in. Show your vax status - takes 30 seconds - no visa required. Nothing. You’re in. And you can stay for a year
Also, they are REALLY grateful for our help with Ukraine. There are probably more England flags than Ukrainian
It's no coincidence that those closest to Russia best understand what's at stake in this war.
Best for the entire world that it ends as quickly as possible, in a Russian defeat.
Whilst that is correct, there is no way of reaching that endpoint swiftly.
It is a bit like saying we need to eliminate world hunger swiftly by making sure everyone is fed. Well, no-one disputes it, but without a practical means of achieving it, then it is just vapour.
So, as in most problems, it is a trade-off. There is huge damage that is done by the ongoing war (to Ukraine and the wider world, some poor countries will soon be in real food difficulties) and there is huge damage that is done by finding an unpalatable compromise and rewarding the original violence.
The war was far worse than conceding the original plebiscites under Minsk. If Ukraine had lost the plebiscites (arguable, in fact, as @rcs1000 has pointed out), it would at most have lost the whole of the Donbas.
The war will unfortunately end with Ukraine losing all the Donbas and a swathe of southern Ukraine. There is no way that Putin (or any likely successor) will give up the water supply to the Crimea, or the land corridor to the Crimea, or the Crimea itself.
Wars often end with the bad guys winning. Violence is often rewarded. The recent histories of Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland & Tibet show exactly that.
The script for the Ukraine War was not written in Hollywood ...
As @Dura_Ace predicted, the Russian army will grind out a slow, remorseless, destructive victory of sorts.
It ends with a de facto annexation of some of East Ukraine, and destabilisation of the rest of Ukraine.
Our very own Jeremy Corbyn said on day one that the only certainty was that this war -if it happens -is going to end in a negotiated settlement. 'Why not save thousands of lives and have the negotiation now without the war'. It might sound simplistic but if the Russians prevail it will sound like the most sane thing he has ever said.
Because, you stupid appeasing c*nt, wherever Russia has taken territory it has raped the women wholesale, tortured and slaughtered many civilians, dragged thousands off to Siberia, and liquidated the intelligentsia.
You cannot ‘negotiate’ with this. You fight
I am sure atrocities have been committed by the Russian side, but at this point it's impossible to verify most what we're hearing, as it comes from a Ukrainian side desperate for greater Western intervention, reported unquestioningly by a Western media anxious to be supportive.
Is this guy a troll or what
Not a troll, but a slightly nutty controversialist. Believes in homeopathy, that Russia didn’t shot down the Malaysian airliner, etc. generally takes the position that the evidence provided by the west is incomplete or unreliable.
Believes in homeopathy? Surely not.
No; I was wondering too. Was LG the PBer who advocated injections of oxidising disinfectants - hydrogen peroxide? - as a cure for covid? I hesitate to be at all definite as memory is faint after 2 and a bit years of pandemic, but if it was him it sure is not homoeopathic!
I don’t think so. That was @rpjs (at least he believed in ivermectin so I assume he was open to hydrogen peroxide). @Luckyguy1983 believes in various diet fads (although I’d be first to say that nutrition is viral) over vaccines and red dust over sustainable agriculture
I’m not sure I’ve been to a more immediately appealing city
Did you take a midnight train to get there?
Midnight plane from Athens. Arrived dawn. Am knackered but consoling myself with delicious cold Georgian wine at £2 a glass
It’s also absurdly easy to get in. Show your vax status - takes 30 seconds - no visa required. Nothing. You’re in. And you can stay for a year
Also, they are REALLY grateful for our help with Ukraine. There are probably more England flags than Ukrainian
It's no coincidence that those closest to Russia best understand what's at stake in this war.
Best for the entire world that it ends as quickly as possible, in a Russian defeat.
Whilst that is correct, there is no way of reaching that endpoint swiftly.
It is a bit like saying we need to eliminate world hunger swiftly by making sure everyone is fed. Well, no-one disputes it, but without a practical means of achieving it, then it is just vapour.
So, as in most problems, it is a trade-off. There is huge damage that is done by the ongoing war (to Ukraine and the wider world, some poor countries will soon be in real food difficulties) and there is huge damage that is done by finding an unpalatable compromise and rewarding the original violence.
The war was far worse than conceding the original plebiscites under Minsk. If Ukraine had lost the plebiscites (arguable, in fact, as @rcs1000 has pointed out), it would at most have lost the whole of the Donbas.
The war will unfortunately end with Ukraine losing all the Donbas and a swathe of southern Ukraine. There is no way that Putin (or any likely successor) will give up the water supply to the Crimea, or the land corridor to the Crimea, or the Crimea itself.
Wars often end with the bad guys winning. Violence is often rewarded. The recent histories of Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland & Tibet show exactly that.
The script for the Ukraine War was not written in Hollywood ...
As @Dura_Ace predicted, the Russian army will grind out a slow, remorseless, destructive victory of sorts.
It ends with a de facto annexation of some of East Ukraine, and destabilisation of the rest of Ukraine.
Our very own Jeremy Corbyn said on day one that the only certainty was that this war -if it happens -is going to end in a negotiated settlement. 'Why not save thousands of lives and have the negotiation now without the war'. It might sound simplistic but if the Russians prevail it will sound like the most sane thing he has ever said.
Because, you stupid appeasing c*nt, wherever Russia has taken territory it has raped the women wholesale, tortured and slaughtered many civilians, dragged thousands off to Siberia, and liquidated the intelligentsia.
You cannot ‘negotiate’ with this. You fight
I am sure atrocities have been committed by the Russian side, but at this point it's impossible to verify most what we're hearing, as it comes from a Ukrainian side desperate for greater Western intervention, reported unquestioningly by a Western media anxious to be supportive.
Is this guy a troll or what
Not a troll, but a slightly nutty controversialist. Believes in homeopathy, that Russia didn’t shot down the Malaysian airliner, etc. generally takes the position that the evidence provided by the west is incomplete or unreliable.
I didn't realise that LG was an MH17 conspiracy theorist. What an absolute turd.
He just has an unrealistically high standard of proof for anything Russia is accused of…
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
What makes teachers special is that like many in the private sector there simply aren't enough of them. It's market forces. And of course it will feed through to costs. That's the market again. Not a "complaint".
Market forces is one thing and no complaints if it drives up pay it was the sentiment that because they were having conversations about heating the house they should get paid more than I objected too.
Many in the private sector will have that same conversation was the point. Yet when people like hospitality staff and lorry drivers get paid more you get lefties like Rochdale pioneers bemoaning it because it will raise the cost of things. I think most people in the country are underpaid because bosses could get away with it and profits have increased while pay has remained static for most. Now the boot is on the other foot and employees have the whip hand in pay negotiations for the first time in 20 years.
By all means argue from that perspective.....just dont come with the we should be paid more because we are public sector bull.
You're a bit tetchy today, with the "bull" and using lefties regularly. Perhaps some of our contributors should be using "right wingers" and "fascists" more.
I used lefties in the context there were many who claim to be of the left persuasion complaining about people like hospitality workers and lorry drivers getting pay rises as it would drive up costs. And yes the argument came across from MaxH as we deserve more because we are talking about heating and we are public sector so yes used the term bull. Sorry if it offends you but it is true. And to note I am not saying teachers don't deserve a payrise just saying that isn't a reason.
The thing is, I've yet to come across any of my fellow lefties (notwithstanding your comment about a couple on here) complaining about low paid workers getting big pay rises - whether private sector or public sector. We think that all low paid workers should get rises that at least match inflation, and this should be financed by acquiring money from the grotesque profiteering that is in evidence across much of industry - whether private or public. Like the P&O chap who earns a fortune but then sacks all the workers rather than paying them more. Or the Bank of England Chair earning a fortune telling us not to be greedy. And thousands more of their ilk.
I reckon you're a secret socialist, really.
Rochdale Pioneers is definitely a leftie and has been bemoaning the fact that lorry drivers getting a payrise would feed through into higher food prices
He's a Lib Dem.
My point about driver pay was simple. Unless and until more drivers appear you pay more without actually fixing the problem. There is still a shortage of drivers - albeit not as acute as it was - and despite deliveries still being affected by it the transport costs are way higher for no real benefit. Great for the drivers, though they are contributing to the runaway price inflation they are being hit by.
Which of course is the curse of inflation - the more inflation goes up the more pay people demand, Which increases inflation, and then pay demands again...
The latter part though you have in the past argued people need to be paid more so a job actually delivers a life rather than get by. One sector gets some payrise and you immediately up in horror because them being payed more might be inflationary. So how do you suggest people get more money so they can actually live rather than merely try to stagger from paypacket to paypacket merely scratching by without increasing their pay?
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
Really interesting piece on the parallels between slave owning oligarchs in US a couple of hundred years ago and the way the GOP is imposing a heavily armed society on a majority who don't want one. Unreformed Senate is major part of problem.
Its almost too late for meaningful gun control anyway. With torrents of physibles no more than a few clicks away, the manufacture of 3d printed ghost guns gets easier all the time.
Baby steps. It is not guns that are the problem but people. Specifically people with semi-automatic assault rifles that can't (yet) be 3d-printed. As President Biden said, it is not as if deer are running through the forest in kevlar body armour.
And within a decade, batteries and capacitors will be up to the job of coilguns with rapid fire.
No parts that need special work - no hammerforged barrels. Ammunition can be a ball bearing. Silent. The whole thing will be 3D printed. No explosives.
All this focus on the type of gun, particularly scary "assault rifles" and "AR-15s" misses the crucial point that, if all you want to do is shoot kids at close range, then ANY gun will do. So trying to stop school shootings by restricting ownership of certain ill-defined types of firearms is pointless.
Not really. Limit people to 5 in the magazine, have to work the bolt between shots, sporting rifles, and that really slows you down compared to 100 round AR drums unless possibly you have a sack of prefilled magazines and have practised a fuck of a lot. Which the arse at Uvalde prolly hadn't.
Plenty of stats showing that AR15 type sprees are I think 6x as deadly as their competitors.
I read on Twitter (disclaimer of responsibility for veracity etc) that the cops in Uvalde found 53 magazines in the school; being able to buy all that without alarm bells going off seems almost as heinous as buying the weapons.
He must have been a strong little fcuker to hump that around.
I’m not sure I’ve been to a more immediately appealing city
Did you take a midnight train to get there?
Midnight plane from Athens. Arrived dawn. Am knackered but consoling myself with delicious cold Georgian wine at £2 a glass
It’s also absurdly easy to get in. Show your vax status - takes 30 seconds - no visa required. Nothing. You’re in. And you can stay for a year
Also, they are REALLY grateful for our help with Ukraine. There are probably more England flags than Ukrainian
It's no coincidence that those closest to Russia best understand what's at stake in this war.
Best for the entire world that it ends as quickly as possible, in a Russian defeat.
Whilst that is correct, there is no way of reaching that endpoint swiftly.
It is a bit like saying we need to eliminate world hunger swiftly by making sure everyone is fed. Well, no-one disputes it, but without a practical means of achieving it, then it is just vapour.
So, as in most problems, it is a trade-off. There is huge damage that is done by the ongoing war (to Ukraine and the wider world, some poor countries will soon be in real food difficulties) and there is huge damage that is done by finding an unpalatable compromise and rewarding the original violence.
The war was far worse than conceding the original plebiscites under Minsk. If Ukraine had lost the plebiscites (arguable, in fact, as @rcs1000 has pointed out), it would at most have lost the whole of the Donbas.
The war will unfortunately end with Ukraine losing all the Donbas and a swathe of southern Ukraine. There is no way that Putin (or any likely successor) will give up the water supply to the Crimea, or the land corridor to the Crimea, or the Crimea itself.
Wars often end with the bad guys winning. Violence is often rewarded. The recent histories of Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland & Tibet show exactly that.
The script for the Ukraine War was not written in Hollywood ...
As @Dura_Ace predicted, the Russian army will grind out a slow, remorseless, destructive victory of sorts.
It ends with a de facto annexation of some of East Ukraine, and destabilisation of the rest of Ukraine.
Our very own Jeremy Corbyn said on day one that the only certainty was that this war -if it happens -is going to end in a negotiated settlement. 'Why not save thousands of lives and have the negotiation now without the war'. It might sound simplistic but if the Russians prevail it will sound like the most sane thing he has ever said.
Because, you stupid appeasing c*nt, wherever Russia has taken territory it has raped the women wholesale, tortured and slaughtered many civilians, dragged thousands off to Siberia, and liquidated the intelligentsia.
You cannot ‘negotiate’ with this. You fight
I am sure atrocities have been committed by the Russian side, but at this point it's impossible to verify most what we're hearing, as it comes from a Ukrainian side desperate for greater Western intervention, reported unquestioningly by a Western media anxious to be supportive.
Is this guy a troll or what
Not a troll, but a slightly nutty controversialist. Believes in homeopathy, that Russia didn’t shot down the Malaysian airliner, etc. generally takes the position that the evidence provided by the west is incomplete or unreliable.
Believes in homeopathy? Surely not.
No; I was wondering too. Was LG the PBer who advocated injections of oxidising disinfectants - hydrogen peroxide? - as a cure for covid? I hesitate to be at all definite as memory is faint after 2 and a bit years of pandemic, but if it was him it sure is not homoeopathic!
I don’t think so. That was @rpjs (at least he believed in ivermectin so I assume he was open to hydrogen peroxide). @Luckyguy1983 believes in various diet fads (although I’d be first to say that nutrition is viral) over vaccines and red dust over sustainable agriculture
rural voter I think was ivermectin guy I seem to remember putinguy banging on about zinc however. But he definitely is one of the russia tells the truth and anything contradictory is western misinformation people
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
I’m not sure I’ve been to a more immediately appealing city
Did you take a midnight train to get there?
Midnight plane from Athens. Arrived dawn. Am knackered but consoling myself with delicious cold Georgian wine at £2 a glass
It’s also absurdly easy to get in. Show your vax status - takes 30 seconds - no visa required. Nothing. You’re in. And you can stay for a year
Also, they are REALLY grateful for our help with Ukraine. There are probably more England flags than Ukrainian
It's no coincidence that those closest to Russia best understand what's at stake in this war.
Best for the entire world that it ends as quickly as possible, in a Russian defeat.
Whilst that is correct, there is no way of reaching that endpoint swiftly.
It is a bit like saying we need to eliminate world hunger swiftly by making sure everyone is fed. Well, no-one disputes it, but without a practical means of achieving it, then it is just vapour.
So, as in most problems, it is a trade-off. There is huge damage that is done by the ongoing war (to Ukraine and the wider world, some poor countries will soon be in real food difficulties) and there is huge damage that is done by finding an unpalatable compromise and rewarding the original violence.
The war was far worse than conceding the original plebiscites under Minsk. If Ukraine had lost the plebiscites (arguable, in fact, as @rcs1000 has pointed out), it would at most have lost the whole of the Donbas.
The war will unfortunately end with Ukraine losing all the Donbas and a swathe of southern Ukraine. There is no way that Putin (or any likely successor) will give up the water supply to the Crimea, or the land corridor to the Crimea, or the Crimea itself.
Wars often end with the bad guys winning. Violence is often rewarded. The recent histories of Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland & Tibet show exactly that.
The script for the Ukraine War was not written in Hollywood ...
As @Dura_Ace predicted, the Russian army will grind out a slow, remorseless, destructive victory of sorts.
It ends with a de facto annexation of some of East Ukraine, and destabilisation of the rest of Ukraine.
Our very own Jeremy Corbyn said on day one that the only certainty was that this war -if it happens -is going to end in a negotiated settlement. 'Why not save thousands of lives and have the negotiation now without the war'. It might sound simplistic but if the Russians prevail it will sound like the most sane thing he has ever said.
Because, you stupid appeasing c*nt, wherever Russia has taken territory it has raped the women wholesale, tortured and slaughtered many civilians, dragged thousands off to Siberia, and liquidated the intelligentsia.
You cannot ‘negotiate’ with this. You fight
I am sure atrocities have been committed by the Russian side, but at this point it's impossible to verify most what we're hearing, as it comes from a Ukrainian side desperate for greater Western intervention, reported unquestioningly by a Western media anxious to be supportive.
Total bollocks, russian forces have form for this long before ukraine, if someone is a serial rapist we take there protestation they are innocent with huge pinches of salt and thats before we look at the fact that a lot of those bodies in mass graves have been shown to have predated the russian retreats.....stop making excuses for evil
Yes they do - they are brutal, destructive, ignorant invaders. However, there have also been false allegations. It's a horrible situation, but when a Government lies in order to inveigle my country into a potential nuclear conflict, my sympathy evaporates fairly fast.
There is no evidence ukraine has lied
Yeah, that Jack Russell really has dug up 200 mines.
I was talking of course about atrocities not silly propaganda stories like Jack russells or the ghost of kyiv.
So they'd make up 'silly propaganda stories', but definitely not make up big things that could actually command the news agenda and push the overton window?
We had the maternity hospital attack, in which in transpired that (tragically) three people lost their lives.
We had the theatre attack where there were alleged to be over a thousand buried in the rubble, then it got very vague and mealy mouthed. There's an interesting on the ground report here, it's Iranian, and I can't and don't vouch for the slant, but he tries to be balanced, and I don't think any Western agencies are now on the ground. It appears that casualties actually sit in the low 10s. Still a tragedy, but nothing like what has been portrayed. How can you miscount by 1000 people? https://www.presstv.co.uk/Detail/2022/05/22/682520/Mariupol-Drama-Theatre-bombing-Ukraine-Russia-conflict-
These things aren't scrutinised or questioned, we just get the outrage, then forget it and move to the next atrocity.
I’m not sure I’ve been to a more immediately appealing city
Did you take a midnight train to get there?
Midnight plane from Athens. Arrived dawn. Am knackered but consoling myself with delicious cold Georgian wine at £2 a glass
It’s also absurdly easy to get in. Show your vax status - takes 30 seconds - no visa required. Nothing. You’re in. And you can stay for a year
Also, they are REALLY grateful for our help with Ukraine. There are probably more England flags than Ukrainian
It's no coincidence that those closest to Russia best understand what's at stake in this war.
Best for the entire world that it ends as quickly as possible, in a Russian defeat.
Whilst that is correct, there is no way of reaching that endpoint swiftly.
It is a bit like saying we need to eliminate world hunger swiftly by making sure everyone is fed. Well, no-one disputes it, but without a practical means of achieving it, then it is just vapour.
So, as in most problems, it is a trade-off. There is huge damage that is done by the ongoing war (to Ukraine and the wider world, some poor countries will soon be in real food difficulties) and there is huge damage that is done by finding an unpalatable compromise and rewarding the original violence.
The war was far worse than conceding the original plebiscites under Minsk. If Ukraine had lost the plebiscites (arguable, in fact, as @rcs1000 has pointed out), it would at most have lost the whole of the Donbas.
The war will unfortunately end with Ukraine losing all the Donbas and a swathe of southern Ukraine. There is no way that Putin (or any likely successor) will give up the water supply to the Crimea, or the land corridor to the Crimea, or the Crimea itself.
Wars often end with the bad guys winning. Violence is often rewarded. The recent histories of Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland & Tibet show exactly that.
The script for the Ukraine War was not written in Hollywood ...
As @Dura_Ace predicted, the Russian army will grind out a slow, remorseless, destructive victory of sorts.
It ends with a de facto annexation of some of East Ukraine, and destabilisation of the rest of Ukraine.
Our very own Jeremy Corbyn said on day one that the only certainty was that this war -if it happens -is going to end in a negotiated settlement. 'Why not save thousands of lives and have the negotiation now without the war'. It might sound simplistic but if the Russians prevail it will sound like the most sane thing he has ever said.
Because, you stupid appeasing c*nt, wherever Russia has taken territory it has raped the women wholesale, tortured and slaughtered many civilians, dragged thousands off to Siberia, and liquidated the intelligentsia.
You cannot ‘negotiate’ with this. You fight
I am sure atrocities have been committed by the Russian side, but at this point it's impossible to verify most what we're hearing, as it comes from a Ukrainian side desperate for greater Western intervention, reported unquestioningly by a Western media anxious to be supportive.
Is this guy a troll or what
Not a troll, but a slightly nutty controversialist. Believes in homeopathy, that Russia didn’t shot down the Malaysian airliner, etc. generally takes the position that the evidence provided by the west is incomplete or unreliable.
Believes in homeopathy? Surely not.
No; I was wondering too. Was LG the PBer who advocated injections of oxidising disinfectants - hydrogen peroxide? - as a cure for covid? I hesitate to be at all definite as memory is faint after 2 and a bit years of pandemic, but if it was him it sure is not homoeopathic!
I don’t think so. That was @rpjs (at least he believed in ivermectin so I assume he was open to hydrogen peroxide). @Luckyguy1983 believes in various diet fads (although I’d be first to say that nutrition is viral) over vaccines and red dust over sustainable agriculture
rural voter I think was ivermectin guy I seem to remember putinguy banging on about zinc however. But he definitely is one of the russia tells the truth and anything contradictory is western misinformation people
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Is it a tricky question or no brainier for West to supply the sort of range heavy guns that can go 300 miles and allow them to blast Russia territory, towns and cities?
If you care about stopping Putin winning his colonial war, care and properly stand with the innocent Ukrainians you surely have no choice but to give Ukraine the weapons to strike deep and hard inside Russia?
If you want 300 miles of range, that’s ballistic missiles (or cruise missiles), not guns.
The West doesn’t go for short range ballistic missiles, in general.
I’m not sure I’ve been to a more immediately appealing city
Did you take a midnight train to get there?
Midnight plane from Athens. Arrived dawn. Am knackered but consoling myself with delicious cold Georgian wine at £2 a glass
It’s also absurdly easy to get in. Show your vax status - takes 30 seconds - no visa required. Nothing. You’re in. And you can stay for a year
Also, they are REALLY grateful for our help with Ukraine. There are probably more England flags than Ukrainian
It's no coincidence that those closest to Russia best understand what's at stake in this war.
Best for the entire world that it ends as quickly as possible, in a Russian defeat.
Whilst that is correct, there is no way of reaching that endpoint swiftly.
It is a bit like saying we need to eliminate world hunger swiftly by making sure everyone is fed. Well, no-one disputes it, but without a practical means of achieving it, then it is just vapour.
So, as in most problems, it is a trade-off. There is huge damage that is done by the ongoing war (to Ukraine and the wider world, some poor countries will soon be in real food difficulties) and there is huge damage that is done by finding an unpalatable compromise and rewarding the original violence.
The war was far worse than conceding the original plebiscites under Minsk. If Ukraine had lost the plebiscites (arguable, in fact, as @rcs1000 has pointed out), it would at most have lost the whole of the Donbas.
The war will unfortunately end with Ukraine losing all the Donbas and a swathe of southern Ukraine. There is no way that Putin (or any likely successor) will give up the water supply to the Crimea, or the land corridor to the Crimea, or the Crimea itself.
Wars often end with the bad guys winning. Violence is often rewarded. The recent histories of Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland & Tibet show exactly that.
The script for the Ukraine War was not written in Hollywood ...
As @Dura_Ace predicted, the Russian army will grind out a slow, remorseless, destructive victory of sorts.
It ends with a de facto annexation of some of East Ukraine, and destabilisation of the rest of Ukraine.
Our very own Jeremy Corbyn said on day one that the only certainty was that this war -if it happens -is going to end in a negotiated settlement. 'Why not save thousands of lives and have the negotiation now without the war'. It might sound simplistic but if the Russians prevail it will sound like the most sane thing he has ever said.
Because, you stupid appeasing c*nt, wherever Russia has taken territory it has raped the women wholesale, tortured and slaughtered many civilians, dragged thousands off to Siberia, and liquidated the intelligentsia.
You cannot ‘negotiate’ with this. You fight
I am sure atrocities have been committed by the Russian side, but at this point it's impossible to verify most what we're hearing, as it comes from a Ukrainian side desperate for greater Western intervention, reported unquestioningly by a Western media anxious to be supportive.
Is this guy a troll or what
Not a troll, but a slightly nutty controversialist. Believes in homeopathy, that Russia didn’t shot down the Malaysian airliner, etc. generally takes the position that the evidence provided by the west is incomplete or unreliable.
Believes in homeopathy? Surely not.
No; I was wondering too. Was LG the PBer who advocated injections of oxidising disinfectants - hydrogen peroxide? - as a cure for covid? I hesitate to be at all definite as memory is faint after 2 and a bit years of pandemic, but if it was him it sure is not homoeopathic!
I don’t think so. That was @rpjs (at least he believed in ivermectin so I assume he was open to hydrogen peroxide). @Luckyguy1983 believes in various diet fads (although I’d be first to say that nutrition is viral) over vaccines and red dust over sustainable agriculture
Really interesting piece on the parallels between slave owning oligarchs in US a couple of hundred years ago and the way the GOP is imposing a heavily armed society on a majority who don't want one. Unreformed Senate is major part of problem.
Its almost too late for meaningful gun control anyway. With torrents of physibles no more than a few clicks away, the manufacture of 3d printed ghost guns gets easier all the time.
Baby steps. It is not guns that are the problem but people. Specifically people with semi-automatic assault rifles that can't (yet) be 3d-printed. As President Biden said, it is not as if deer are running through the forest in kevlar body armour.
And within a decade, batteries and capacitors will be up to the job of coilguns with rapid fire.
No parts that need special work - no hammerforged barrels. Ammunition can be a ball bearing. Silent. The whole thing will be 3D printed. No explosives.
All this focus on the type of gun, particularly scary "assault rifles" and "AR-15s" misses the crucial point that, if all you want to do is shoot kids at close range, then ANY gun will do. So trying to stop school shootings by restricting ownership of certain ill-defined types of firearms is pointless.
Not really. Limit people to 5 in the magazine, have to work the bolt between shots, sporting rifles, and that really slows you down compared to 100 round AR drums unless possibly you have a sack of prefilled magazines and have practised a fuck of a lot. Which the arse at Uvalde prolly hadn't.
Plenty of stats showing that AR15 type sprees are I think 6x as deadly as their competitors.
I read on Twitter (disclaimer of responsibility for veracity etc) that the cops in Uvalde found 53 magazines in the school; being able to buy all that without alarm bells going off seems almost as heinous as buying the weapons.
He must have been a strong little fcuker to hump that around.
You'd think the Americans would have the sense to restrict the 2nd Amendment to weapons that were in use at the time when it was passed. That is, single-shot flintlock muskets and pistols. Now that would really even the balance.
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
What makes teachers special is that like many in the private sector there simply aren't enough of them. It's market forces. And of course it will feed through to costs. That's the market again. Not a "complaint".
Market forces is one thing and no complaints if it drives up pay it was the sentiment that because they were having conversations about heating the house they should get paid more than I objected too.
Many in the private sector will have that same conversation was the point. Yet when people like hospitality staff and lorry drivers get paid more you get lefties like Rochdale pioneers bemoaning it because it will raise the cost of things. I think most people in the country are underpaid because bosses could get away with it and profits have increased while pay has remained static for most. Now the boot is on the other foot and employees have the whip hand in pay negotiations for the first time in 20 years.
By all means argue from that perspective.....just dont come with the we should be paid more because we are public sector bull.
You're a bit tetchy today, with the "bull" and using lefties regularly. Perhaps some of our contributors should be using "right wingers" and "fascists" more.
I used lefties in the context there were many who claim to be of the left persuasion complaining about people like hospitality workers and lorry drivers getting pay rises as it would drive up costs. And yes the argument came across from MaxH as we deserve more because we are talking about heating and we are public sector so yes used the term bull. Sorry if it offends you but it is true. And to note I am not saying teachers don't deserve a payrise just saying that isn't a reason.
The thing is, I've yet to come across any of my fellow lefties (notwithstanding your comment about a couple on here) complaining about low paid workers getting big pay rises - whether private sector or public sector. We think that all low paid workers should get rises that at least match inflation, and this should be financed by acquiring money from the grotesque profiteering that is in evidence across much of industry - whether private or public. Like the P&O chap who earns a fortune but then sacks all the workers rather than paying them more. Or the Bank of England Chair earning a fortune telling us not to be greedy. And thousands more of their ilk.
I reckon you're a secret socialist, really.
Rochdale Pioneers is definitely a leftie and has been bemoaning the fact that lorry drivers getting a payrise would feed through into higher food prices
He's a Lib Dem.
My point about driver pay was simple. Unless and until more drivers appear you pay more without actually fixing the problem. There is still a shortage of drivers - albeit not as acute as it was - and despite deliveries still being affected by it the transport costs are way higher for no real benefit. Great for the drivers, though they are contributing to the runaway price inflation they are being hit by.
Which of course is the curse of inflation - the more inflation goes up the more pay people demand, Which increases inflation, and then pay demands again...
The latter part though you have in the past argued people need to be paid more so a job actually delivers a life rather than get by. One sector gets some payrise and you immediately up in horror because them being payed more might be inflationary. So how do you suggest people get more money so they can actually live rather than merely try to stagger from paypacket to paypacket merely scratching by without increasing their pay?
You utterly miss the point. There are a whole swathe of jobs where people do not get paid enough to be able to live on. So we have to give in-work assistance to people via UC where working loing hard hours is not enough to pay their bills.
Spending power will not increase if we pay more for jobs at the bottom end and reduce in work benefits. "Make Work Pay" was the Tory slogan, but they never did - witness the appalling taper rate in UC where more work is punitively taxed.
I’m not sure I’ve been to a more immediately appealing city
Did you take a midnight train to get there?
Midnight plane from Athens. Arrived dawn. Am knackered but consoling myself with delicious cold Georgian wine at £2 a glass
It’s also absurdly easy to get in. Show your vax status - takes 30 seconds - no visa required. Nothing. You’re in. And you can stay for a year
Also, they are REALLY grateful for our help with Ukraine. There are probably more England flags than Ukrainian
It's no coincidence that those closest to Russia best understand what's at stake in this war.
Best for the entire world that it ends as quickly as possible, in a Russian defeat.
Whilst that is correct, there is no way of reaching that endpoint swiftly.
It is a bit like saying we need to eliminate world hunger swiftly by making sure everyone is fed. Well, no-one disputes it, but without a practical means of achieving it, then it is just vapour.
So, as in most problems, it is a trade-off. There is huge damage that is done by the ongoing war (to Ukraine and the wider world, some poor countries will soon be in real food difficulties) and there is huge damage that is done by finding an unpalatable compromise and rewarding the original violence.
The war was far worse than conceding the original plebiscites under Minsk. If Ukraine had lost the plebiscites (arguable, in fact, as @rcs1000 has pointed out), it would at most have lost the whole of the Donbas.
The war will unfortunately end with Ukraine losing all the Donbas and a swathe of southern Ukraine. There is no way that Putin (or any likely successor) will give up the water supply to the Crimea, or the land corridor to the Crimea, or the Crimea itself.
Wars often end with the bad guys winning. Violence is often rewarded. The recent histories of Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland & Tibet show exactly that.
The script for the Ukraine War was not written in Hollywood ...
As @Dura_Ace predicted, the Russian army will grind out a slow, remorseless, destructive victory of sorts.
It ends with a de facto annexation of some of East Ukraine, and destabilisation of the rest of Ukraine.
Our very own Jeremy Corbyn said on day one that the only certainty was that this war -if it happens -is going to end in a negotiated settlement. 'Why not save thousands of lives and have the negotiation now without the war'. It might sound simplistic but if the Russians prevail it will sound like the most sane thing he has ever said.
Because, you stupid appeasing c*nt, wherever Russia has taken territory it has raped the women wholesale, tortured and slaughtered many civilians, dragged thousands off to Siberia, and liquidated the intelligentsia.
You cannot ‘negotiate’ with this. You fight
I am sure atrocities have been committed by the Russian side, but at this point it's impossible to verify most what we're hearing, as it comes from a Ukrainian side desperate for greater Western intervention, reported unquestioningly by a Western media anxious to be supportive.
Total bollocks, russian forces have form for this long before ukraine, if someone is a serial rapist we take there protestation they are innocent with huge pinches of salt and thats before we look at the fact that a lot of those bodies in mass graves have been shown to have predated the russian retreats.....stop making excuses for evil
Yes they do - they are brutal, destructive, ignorant invaders. However, there have also been false allegations. It's a horrible situation, but when a Government lies in order to inveigle my country into a potential nuclear conflict, my sympathy evaporates fairly fast.
There is no evidence ukraine has lied
Yeah, that Jack Russell really has dug up 200 mines.
I was talking of course about atrocities not silly propaganda stories like Jack russells or the ghost of kyiv.
So they'd make up 'silly propaganda stories', but definitely not make up big things that could actually command the news agenda and push the overton window?
We had the maternity hospital attack, in which in transpired that (tragically) three people lost their lives.
We had the theatre attack where there were alleged to be over a thousand buried in the rubble, then it got very vague and mealy mouthed. There's an interesting on the ground report here, it's Iranian, and I can't and don't vouch for the slant, but he tries to be balanced, and I don't think any Western agencies are now on the ground. It appears that casualties actually sit in the low 10s. Still a tragedy, but nothing like what has been portrayed. How can you miscount by 1000 people? https://www.presstv.co.uk/Detail/2022/05/22/682520/Mariupol-Drama-Theatre-bombing-Ukraine-Russia-conflict-
These things aren't scrutinised or questioned, we just get the outrage, then forget it and move to the next atrocity.
I would urge you, please, to think about who PressTV are and what their agenda is.
Put it like this - when Iran chose to hold a conference about the Holocaust of the kind where David Irving was a guest speaker, which channel covered it as a serious, sensible conference, asking important questions?
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
Did you luck out with the bag lady?
Aha. She got off around Patras. That’s not a sexual euphemism
My recent sexual diet has been meagre, but not non-existent. Ship’s biscuits
Really interesting piece on the parallels between slave owning oligarchs in US a couple of hundred years ago and the way the GOP is imposing a heavily armed society on a majority who don't want one. Unreformed Senate is major part of problem.
Its almost too late for meaningful gun control anyway. With torrents of physibles no more than a few clicks away, the manufacture of 3d printed ghost guns gets easier all the time.
Baby steps. It is not guns that are the problem but people. Specifically people with semi-automatic assault rifles that can't (yet) be 3d-printed. As President Biden said, it is not as if deer are running through the forest in kevlar body armour.
And within a decade, batteries and capacitors will be up to the job of coilguns with rapid fire.
No parts that need special work - no hammerforged barrels. Ammunition can be a ball bearing. Silent. The whole thing will be 3D printed. No explosives.
All this focus on the type of gun, particularly scary "assault rifles" and "AR-15s" misses the crucial point that, if all you want to do is shoot kids at close range, then ANY gun will do. So trying to stop school shootings by restricting ownership of certain ill-defined types of firearms is pointless.
Not really. Limit people to 5 in the magazine, have to work the bolt between shots, sporting rifles, and that really slows you down compared to 100 round AR drums unless possibly you have a sack of prefilled magazines and have practised a fuck of a lot. Which the arse at Uvalde prolly hadn't.
Plenty of stats showing that AR15 type sprees are I think 6x as deadly as their competitors.
I read on Twitter (disclaimer of responsibility for veracity etc) that the cops in Uvalde found 53 magazines in the school; being able to buy all that without alarm bells going off seems almost as heinous as buying the weapons.
He must have been a strong little fcuker to hump that around.
Hey @Theuniondivvie - both myself and @foxy have asked if your photo shows the location of the Wannsee Conference. It looks roughly right, and that is certainly grim, but there are many places around Berlin with a grim history…
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
What makes teachers special is that like many in the private sector there simply aren't enough of them. It's market forces. And of course it will feed through to costs. That's the market again. Not a "complaint".
Market forces is one thing and no complaints if it drives up pay it was the sentiment that because they were having conversations about heating the house they should get paid more than I objected too.
Many in the private sector will have that same conversation was the point. Yet when people like hospitality staff and lorry drivers get paid more you get lefties like Rochdale pioneers bemoaning it because it will raise the cost of things. I think most people in the country are underpaid because bosses could get away with it and profits have increased while pay has remained static for most. Now the boot is on the other foot and employees have the whip hand in pay negotiations for the first time in 20 years.
By all means argue from that perspective.....just dont come with the we should be paid more because we are public sector bull.
You're a bit tetchy today, with the "bull" and using lefties regularly. Perhaps some of our contributors should be using "right wingers" and "fascists" more.
I used lefties in the context there were many who claim to be of the left persuasion complaining about people like hospitality workers and lorry drivers getting pay rises as it would drive up costs. And yes the argument came across from MaxH as we deserve more because we are talking about heating and we are public sector so yes used the term bull. Sorry if it offends you but it is true. And to note I am not saying teachers don't deserve a payrise just saying that isn't a reason.
The thing is, I've yet to come across any of my fellow lefties (notwithstanding your comment about a couple on here) complaining about low paid workers getting big pay rises - whether private sector or public sector. We think that all low paid workers should get rises that at least match inflation, and this should be financed by acquiring money from the grotesque profiteering that is in evidence across much of industry - whether private or public. Like the P&O chap who earns a fortune but then sacks all the workers rather than paying them more. Or the Bank of England Chair earning a fortune telling us not to be greedy. And thousands more of their ilk.
I reckon you're a secret socialist, really.
Rochdale Pioneers is definitely a leftie and has been bemoaning the fact that lorry drivers getting a payrise would feed through into higher food prices
He's a Lib Dem.
My point about driver pay was simple. Unless and until more drivers appear you pay more without actually fixing the problem. There is still a shortage of drivers - albeit not as acute as it was - and despite deliveries still being affected by it the transport costs are way higher for no real benefit. Great for the drivers, though they are contributing to the runaway price inflation they are being hit by.
Which of course is the curse of inflation - the more inflation goes up the more pay people demand, Which increases inflation, and then pay demands again...
The latter part though you have in the past argued people need to be paid more so a job actually delivers a life rather than get by. One sector gets some payrise and you immediately up in horror because them being payed more might be inflationary. So how do you suggest people get more money so they can actually live rather than merely try to stagger from paypacket to paypacket merely scratching by without increasing their pay?
You utterly miss the point. There are a whole swathe of jobs where people do not get paid enough to be able to live on. So we have to give in-work assistance to people via UC where working loing hard hours is not enough to pay their bills.
Spending power will not increase if we pay more for jobs at the bottom end and reduce in work benefits. "Make Work Pay" was the Tory slogan, but they never did - witness the appalling taper rate in UC where more work is punitively taxed.
Yes there are, hospitality workers and lorry drivers were on that list. I know my ex step brother was a lorry driver and got min wage. So you dont actually want them to earn more from what you say you merely want the governement to increase the money they still give them from uc?
How does that help anyone if they are still reliant on state handouts except for people who want voters reliant on state handouts so they keep voting for parties that might up them.....ah now I get where you are coming from.
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
Did you luck out with the bag lady?
Aha. She got off around Patras. That’s not a sexual euphemism
My recent sexual diet has been meagre, but not non-existent. Ship’s biscuits
Are you trying to tell us diplomatically that you got weevils from your last conquest?
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
What do you mean "...accusing you!"
It is not against the law for @Leon to drink beer and have sex.
That fact that @Leon is having to drink wine and having to make do with meagre rations of sex with bag ladies shows his commitment to the cause.
Really interesting piece on the parallels between slave owning oligarchs in US a couple of hundred years ago and the way the GOP is imposing a heavily armed society on a majority who don't want one. Unreformed Senate is major part of problem.
Its almost too late for meaningful gun control anyway. With torrents of physibles no more than a few clicks away, the manufacture of 3d printed ghost guns gets easier all the time.
Baby steps. It is not guns that are the problem but people. Specifically people with semi-automatic assault rifles that can't (yet) be 3d-printed. As President Biden said, it is not as if deer are running through the forest in kevlar body armour.
And within a decade, batteries and capacitors will be up to the job of coilguns with rapid fire.
No parts that need special work - no hammerforged barrels. Ammunition can be a ball bearing. Silent. The whole thing will be 3D printed. No explosives.
All this focus on the type of gun, particularly scary "assault rifles" and "AR-15s" misses the crucial point that, if all you want to do is shoot kids at close range, then ANY gun will do. So trying to stop school shootings by restricting ownership of certain ill-defined types of firearms is pointless.
Not really. Limit people to 5 in the magazine, have to work the bolt between shots, sporting rifles, and that really slows you down compared to 100 round AR drums unless possibly you have a sack of prefilled magazines and have practised a fuck of a lot. Which the arse at Uvalde prolly hadn't.
Plenty of stats showing that AR15 type sprees are I think 6x as deadly as their competitors.
I read on Twitter (disclaimer of responsibility for veracity etc) that the cops in Uvalde found 53 magazines in the school; being able to buy all that without alarm bells going off seems almost as heinous as buying the weapons.
He must have been a strong little fcuker to hump that around.
Hey @Theuniondivvie - both myself and @foxy have asked if your photo shows the location of the Wannsee Conference. It looks roughly right, and that is certainly grim, but there are many places around Berlin with a grim history…
Is it? I do love a travel quiz
Ah sorry, I’ve been making the most of my last day in Berlin so only dipping in. It is indeed the villa where the Wannsee conference took place viewed from the lesser seen lakeside pov.
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
Did you luck out with the bag lady?
Aha. She got off around Patras. That’s not a sexual euphemism
My recent sexual diet has been meagre, but not non-existent. Ship’s biscuits
Are you trying to tell us diplomatically that you got weevils from your last conquest?
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
Did you luck out with the bag lady?
Aha. She got off around Patras. That’s not a sexual euphemism
My recent sexual diet has been meagre, but not non-existent. Ship’s biscuits
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
The pro Russia pimps are a weird bunch. From old lefties like @roger and NPXMP (tho Nick ascribes his carefully curated ambivalence to Russian ancestry) to Welsh Nats and rightwing eccentrics
We have an unexpected couple in our extended family. A hardcore right winger of advanced years who just loves Russian culture to a middle aged conspiracy theorist who simply likes being contrary (I think); as a family we have stopped debating it. Gets too heated
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
What makes teachers special is that like many in the private sector there simply aren't enough of them. It's market forces. And of course it will feed through to costs. That's the market again. Not a "complaint".
Market forces is one thing and no complaints if it drives up pay it was the sentiment that because they were having conversations about heating the house they should get paid more than I objected too.
Many in the private sector will have that same conversation was the point. Yet when people like hospitality staff and lorry drivers get paid more you get lefties like Rochdale pioneers bemoaning it because it will raise the cost of things. I think most people in the country are underpaid because bosses could get away with it and profits have increased while pay has remained static for most. Now the boot is on the other foot and employees have the whip hand in pay negotiations for the first time in 20 years.
By all means argue from that perspective.....just dont come with the we should be paid more because we are public sector bull.
You're a bit tetchy today, with the "bull" and using lefties regularly. Perhaps some of our contributors should be using "right wingers" and "fascists" more.
I used lefties in the context there were many who claim to be of the left persuasion complaining about people like hospitality workers and lorry drivers getting pay rises as it would drive up costs. And yes the argument came across from MaxH as we deserve more because we are talking about heating and we are public sector so yes used the term bull. Sorry if it offends you but it is true. And to note I am not saying teachers don't deserve a payrise just saying that isn't a reason.
The thing is, I've yet to come across any of my fellow lefties (notwithstanding your comment about a couple on here) complaining about low paid workers getting big pay rises - whether private sector or public sector. We think that all low paid workers should get rises that at least match inflation, and this should be financed by acquiring money from the grotesque profiteering that is in evidence across much of industry - whether private or public. Like the P&O chap who earns a fortune but then sacks all the workers rather than paying them more. Or the Bank of England Chair earning a fortune telling us not to be greedy. And thousands more of their ilk.
I reckon you're a secret socialist, really.
Rochdale Pioneers is definitely a leftie and has been bemoaning the fact that lorry drivers getting a payrise would feed through into higher food prices
He's a Lib Dem.
My point about driver pay was simple. Unless and until more drivers appear you pay more without actually fixing the problem. There is still a shortage of drivers - albeit not as acute as it was - and despite deliveries still being affected by it the transport costs are way higher for no real benefit. Great for the drivers, though they are contributing to the runaway price inflation they are being hit by.
Which of course is the curse of inflation - the more inflation goes up the more pay people demand, Which increases inflation, and then pay demands again...
The latter part though you have in the past argued people need to be paid more so a job actually delivers a life rather than get by. One sector gets some payrise and you immediately up in horror because them being payed more might be inflationary. So how do you suggest people get more money so they can actually live rather than merely try to stagger from paypacket to paypacket merely scratching by without increasing their pay?
You utterly miss the point. There are a whole swathe of jobs where people do not get paid enough to be able to live on. So we have to give in-work assistance to people via UC where working loing hard hours is not enough to pay their bills.
Spending power will not increase if we pay more for jobs at the bottom end and reduce in work benefits. "Make Work Pay" was the Tory slogan, but they never did - witness the appalling taper rate in UC where more work is punitively taxed.
Yes there are, hospitality workers and lorry drivers were on that list. I know my ex step brother was a lorry driver and got min wage. So you dont actually want them to earn more from what you say you merely want the governement to increase the money they still give them from uc?
How does that help anyone if they are still reliant on state handouts except for people who want voters reliant on state handouts so they keep voting for parties that might up them.....ah now I get where you are coming from.
I want them *not* to be reliant on state handouts. For jobs to pay wages sufficient to live on. As I wrote above. If you read it and stop guessing where you want me to be "coming from".
Whilst in-work assistance is better than not being there at all it is appalling that so many jobs are so poorly paid. Would be far better had the government tax cuts for companies been predicated on them paying decent wages rather than our taxes being used to subsidise Asda et al and boost shareholder dividends.
Really interesting piece on the parallels between slave owning oligarchs in US a couple of hundred years ago and the way the GOP is imposing a heavily armed society on a majority who don't want one. Unreformed Senate is major part of problem.
Its almost too late for meaningful gun control anyway. With torrents of physibles no more than a few clicks away, the manufacture of 3d printed ghost guns gets easier all the time.
Baby steps. It is not guns that are the problem but people. Specifically people with semi-automatic assault rifles that can't (yet) be 3d-printed. As President Biden said, it is not as if deer are running through the forest in kevlar body armour.
And within a decade, batteries and capacitors will be up to the job of coilguns with rapid fire.
No parts that need special work - no hammerforged barrels. Ammunition can be a ball bearing. Silent. The whole thing will be 3D printed. No explosives.
All this focus on the type of gun, particularly scary "assault rifles" and "AR-15s" misses the crucial point that, if all you want to do is shoot kids at close range, then ANY gun will do. So trying to stop school shootings by restricting ownership of certain ill-defined types of firearms is pointless.
Not really. Limit people to 5 in the magazine, have to work the bolt between shots, sporting rifles, and that really slows you down compared to 100 round AR drums unless possibly you have a sack of prefilled magazines and have practised a fuck of a lot. Which the arse at Uvalde prolly hadn't.
Plenty of stats showing that AR15 type sprees are I think 6x as deadly as their competitors.
I read on Twitter (disclaimer of responsibility for veracity etc) that the cops in Uvalde found 53 magazines in the school; being able to buy all that without alarm bells going off seems almost as heinous as buying the weapons.
He must have been a strong little fcuker to hump that around.
Hey @Theuniondivvie - both myself and @foxy have asked if your photo shows the location of the Wannsee Conference. It looks roughly right, and that is certainly grim, but there are many places around Berlin with a grim history…
Is it? I do love a travel quiz
Ah sorry, I’ve been making the most of my last day in Berlin so only dipping in. It is indeed the villa where the Wannsee conference took place viewed from the lesser seen lakeside pov.
Ta for that. What is it like?
I’ve always wanted to go there. In a macabre way. Just to see if it has a mood to match its history. I’m a firm believer in Sinclarian psychogeography
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
The pro Russia pimps are a weird bunch. From old lefties like @roger and NPXMP (tho Nick ascribes his carefully curated ambivalence to Russian ancestry) to Welsh Nats and rightwing eccentrics
We have an unexpected couple in our extended family. A hardcore right winger of advanced years who just loves Russian culture to a middle aged conspiracy theorist who simply likes being contrary (I think); as a family we have stopped debating it. Gets too heated
@Roger is just upset about some friends who’ve been deprived of their yachts.
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
Did you luck out with the bag lady?
Aha. She got off around Patras. That’s not a sexual euphemism
My recent sexual diet has been meagre, but not non-existent. Ship’s biscuits
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
The pro Russia pimps are a weird bunch. From old lefties like @roger and NPXMP (tho Nick ascribes his carefully curated ambivalence to Russian ancestry) to Welsh Nats and rightwing eccentrics
We have an unexpected couple in our extended family. A hardcore right winger of advanced years who just loves Russian culture to a middle aged conspiracy theorist who simply likes being contrary (I think); as a family we have stopped debating it. Gets too heated
I think you're overstating NPXMP's pro Russia creds. He seems fairly straight about it and doesn't come across at all like one of these mealy-mouthed "I'm only asking questions" types. He's set out a coherent position. I don't agree with that position, he's too dovish for my tastes on this subject, but that's a long way from being a pro-Russia "pimp".
LG is a 100% wholewheat turd though.
Dunno about NPXMP. To be fair he does admit upfront his familial Russian sympathies and he does always piously ‘hope for a negotiated peace soon’, but he also seems awfully unfussed about the undoubted atrocities. File under Maybe
Really interesting piece on the parallels between slave owning oligarchs in US a couple of hundred years ago and the way the GOP is imposing a heavily armed society on a majority who don't want one. Unreformed Senate is major part of problem.
Its almost too late for meaningful gun control anyway. With torrents of physibles no more than a few clicks away, the manufacture of 3d printed ghost guns gets easier all the time.
Baby steps. It is not guns that are the problem but people. Specifically people with semi-automatic assault rifles that can't (yet) be 3d-printed. As President Biden said, it is not as if deer are running through the forest in kevlar body armour.
And within a decade, batteries and capacitors will be up to the job of coilguns with rapid fire.
No parts that need special work - no hammerforged barrels. Ammunition can be a ball bearing. Silent. The whole thing will be 3D printed. No explosives.
All this focus on the type of gun, particularly scary "assault rifles" and "AR-15s" misses the crucial point that, if all you want to do is shoot kids at close range, then ANY gun will do. So trying to stop school shootings by restricting ownership of certain ill-defined types of firearms is pointless.
Not really. Limit people to 5 in the magazine, have to work the bolt between shots, sporting rifles, and that really slows you down compared to 100 round AR drums unless possibly you have a sack of prefilled magazines and have practised a fuck of a lot. Which the arse at Uvalde prolly hadn't.
Plenty of stats showing that AR15 type sprees are I think 6x as deadly as their competitors.
I read on Twitter (disclaimer of responsibility for veracity etc) that the cops in Uvalde found 53 magazines in the school; being able to buy all that without alarm bells going off seems almost as heinous as buying the weapons.
He must have been a strong little fcuker to hump that around.
You'd think the Americans would have the sense to restrict the 2nd Amendment to weapons that were in use at the time when it was passed. That is, single-shot flintlock muskets and pistols. Now that would really even the balance.
Isn't there a group on the Supreme Court who are "constitutionalists" (I think that is the term), who argue that the Founding Fathers meant every word and it should be interpreted exactly as written as per the time. So they should be in favour of flintlocks all round.
Really interesting piece on the parallels between slave owning oligarchs in US a couple of hundred years ago and the way the GOP is imposing a heavily armed society on a majority who don't want one. Unreformed Senate is major part of problem.
Its almost too late for meaningful gun control anyway. With torrents of physibles no more than a few clicks away, the manufacture of 3d printed ghost guns gets easier all the time.
Baby steps. It is not guns that are the problem but people. Specifically people with semi-automatic assault rifles that can't (yet) be 3d-printed. As President Biden said, it is not as if deer are running through the forest in kevlar body armour.
And within a decade, batteries and capacitors will be up to the job of coilguns with rapid fire.
No parts that need special work - no hammerforged barrels. Ammunition can be a ball bearing. Silent. The whole thing will be 3D printed. No explosives.
All this focus on the type of gun, particularly scary "assault rifles" and "AR-15s" misses the crucial point that, if all you want to do is shoot kids at close range, then ANY gun will do. So trying to stop school shootings by restricting ownership of certain ill-defined types of firearms is pointless.
Not really. Limit people to 5 in the magazine, have to work the bolt between shots, sporting rifles, and that really slows you down compared to 100 round AR drums unless possibly you have a sack of prefilled magazines and have practised a fuck of a lot. Which the arse at Uvalde prolly hadn't.
Plenty of stats showing that AR15 type sprees are I think 6x as deadly as their competitors.
I read on Twitter (disclaimer of responsibility for veracity etc) that the cops in Uvalde found 53 magazines in the school; being able to buy all that without alarm bells going off seems almost as heinous as buying the weapons.
He must have been a strong little fcuker to hump that around.
Hey @Theuniondivvie - both myself and @foxy have asked if your photo shows the location of the Wannsee Conference. It looks roughly right, and that is certainly grim, but there are many places around Berlin with a grim history…
Is it? I do love a travel quiz
Ah sorry, I’ve been making the most of my last day in Berlin so only dipping in. It is indeed the villa where the Wannsee conference took place viewed from the lesser seen lakeside pov.
I found Filmmuseum Potsdam very interesting.
It had a screening of Veit Harlan's film of Jew Suss (made at Goebbels' behest) when I was there.
The potency of its mixture of antisemitism & sex & violence was still very shocking.
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
The pro Russia pimps are a weird bunch. From old lefties like @roger and NPXMP (tho Nick ascribes his carefully curated ambivalence to Russian ancestry) to Welsh Nats and rightwing eccentrics
We have an unexpected couple in our extended family. A hardcore right winger of advanced years who just loves Russian culture to a middle aged conspiracy theorist who simply likes being contrary (I think); as a family we have stopped debating it. Gets too heated
Actually, all I have done is point out that Russia is grinding out a victory of sorts.
You seem to conflate what I think is going to happen with what I actually want to happen.
Still, let's discuss in 6 months time.
We'll know then who called this right -- and if I am proved wrong, I am sure you will remind me.
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
The pro Russia pimps are a weird bunch. From old lefties like @roger and NPXMP (tho Nick ascribes his carefully curated ambivalence to Russian ancestry) to Welsh Nats and rightwing eccentrics
We have an unexpected couple in our extended family. A hardcore right winger of advanced years who just loves Russian culture to a middle aged conspiracy theorist who simply likes being contrary (I think); as a family we have stopped debating it. Gets too heated
I think you're overstating NPXMP's pro Russia creds. He seems fairly straight about it and doesn't come across at all like one of these mealy-mouthed "I'm only asking questions" types. He's set out a coherent position. I don't agree with that position, he's too dovish for my tastes on this subject, but that's a long way from being a pro-Russia "pimp".
LG is a 100% wholewheat turd though.
Foreign policy does do fascinating things in the way it cuts across other political beliefs. The f**k Putin tendency is found amongst Brexiteer and Remainer, libertarian and authoritarian, it unites Poland’s traditionalist far right with the Nordic liberal left, Starmer with Johnson. And friendly ambivalence towards Russia not only unites India and Pakistan but gets close to being the common policy of Israel and the Palestinians.
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
The pro Russia pimps are a weird bunch. From old lefties like @roger and NPXMP (tho Nick ascribes his carefully curated ambivalence to Russian ancestry) to Welsh Nats and rightwing eccentrics
We have an unexpected couple in our extended family. A hardcore right winger of advanced years who just loves Russian culture to a middle aged conspiracy theorist who simply likes being contrary (I think); as a family we have stopped debating it. Gets too heated
Actually, all I have done is point out that Russia is grinding out a victory of sorts.
You seem to conflate what I think is going to happen with what I actually want to happen.
Still, let's discuss in 6 months time.
We'll know then who called this right -- and if I am proved wrong, I am sure you will remind me.
Really interesting piece on the parallels between slave owning oligarchs in US a couple of hundred years ago and the way the GOP is imposing a heavily armed society on a majority who don't want one. Unreformed Senate is major part of problem.
Its almost too late for meaningful gun control anyway. With torrents of physibles no more than a few clicks away, the manufacture of 3d printed ghost guns gets easier all the time.
Baby steps. It is not guns that are the problem but people. Specifically people with semi-automatic assault rifles that can't (yet) be 3d-printed. As President Biden said, it is not as if deer are running through the forest in kevlar body armour.
And within a decade, batteries and capacitors will be up to the job of coilguns with rapid fire.
No parts that need special work - no hammerforged barrels. Ammunition can be a ball bearing. Silent. The whole thing will be 3D printed. No explosives.
All this focus on the type of gun, particularly scary "assault rifles" and "AR-15s" misses the crucial point that, if all you want to do is shoot kids at close range, then ANY gun will do. So trying to stop school shootings by restricting ownership of certain ill-defined types of firearms is pointless.
Not really. Limit people to 5 in the magazine, have to work the bolt between shots, sporting rifles, and that really slows you down compared to 100 round AR drums unless possibly you have a sack of prefilled magazines and have practised a fuck of a lot. Which the arse at Uvalde prolly hadn't.
Plenty of stats showing that AR15 type sprees are I think 6x as deadly as their competitors.
I read on Twitter (disclaimer of responsibility for veracity etc) that the cops in Uvalde found 53 magazines in the school; being able to buy all that without alarm bells going off seems almost as heinous as buying the weapons.
He must have been a strong little fcuker to hump that around.
Hey @Theuniondivvie - both myself and @foxy have asked if your photo shows the location of the Wannsee Conference. It looks roughly right, and that is certainly grim, but there are many places around Berlin with a grim history…
Is it? I do love a travel quiz
Ah sorry, I’ve been making the most of my last day in Berlin so only dipping in. It is indeed the villa where the Wannsee conference took place viewed from the lesser seen lakeside pov.
Ta for that. What is it like?
I’ve always wanted to go there. In a macabre way. Just to see if it has a mood to match its history. I’m a firm believer in Sinclarian psychogeography
Didn’t actually visit it, just sailed by. My partner’s appetite for the weird tension between modern gemütlich Germany and its unarguably horrific past is a good deal less than mine. I can’t deny it’s why I find Berlin endlessly fascinating: step over a couple of Stolperstein on the way to breakfast, walk past an old SA hq & torture centre on the way to TK Maxx (which is crap in Germany by the wat) and then on to a flea market with disconcerting piles of old specs and shoes.
Really interesting piece on the parallels between slave owning oligarchs in US a couple of hundred years ago and the way the GOP is imposing a heavily armed society on a majority who don't want one. Unreformed Senate is major part of problem.
Its almost too late for meaningful gun control anyway. With torrents of physibles no more than a few clicks away, the manufacture of 3d printed ghost guns gets easier all the time.
Baby steps. It is not guns that are the problem but people. Specifically people with semi-automatic assault rifles that can't (yet) be 3d-printed. As President Biden said, it is not as if deer are running through the forest in kevlar body armour.
And within a decade, batteries and capacitors will be up to the job of coilguns with rapid fire.
No parts that need special work - no hammerforged barrels. Ammunition can be a ball bearing. Silent. The whole thing will be 3D printed. No explosives.
All this focus on the type of gun, particularly scary "assault rifles" and "AR-15s" misses the crucial point that, if all you want to do is shoot kids at close range, then ANY gun will do. So trying to stop school shootings by restricting ownership of certain ill-defined types of firearms is pointless.
Not really. Limit people to 5 in the magazine, have to work the bolt between shots, sporting rifles, and that really slows you down compared to 100 round AR drums unless possibly you have a sack of prefilled magazines and have practised a fuck of a lot. Which the arse at Uvalde prolly hadn't.
Plenty of stats showing that AR15 type sprees are I think 6x as deadly as their competitors.
I read on Twitter (disclaimer of responsibility for veracity etc) that the cops in Uvalde found 53 magazines in the school; being able to buy all that without alarm bells going off seems almost as heinous as buying the weapons.
He must have been a strong little fcuker to hump that around.
Hey @Theuniondivvie - both myself and @foxy have asked if your photo shows the location of the Wannsee Conference. It looks roughly right, and that is certainly grim, but there are many places around Berlin with a grim history…
Is it? I do love a travel quiz
Ah sorry, I’ve been making the most of my last day in Berlin so only dipping in. It is indeed the villa where the Wannsee conference took place viewed from the lesser seen lakeside pov.
Ta for that. What is it like?
I’ve always wanted to go there. In a macabre way. Just to see if it has a mood to match its history. I’m a firm believer in Sinclarian psychogeography
I had exactly that experience in Terezin. Will never go there again
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
The pro Russia pimps are a weird bunch. From old lefties like @roger and NPXMP (tho Nick ascribes his carefully curated ambivalence to Russian ancestry) to Welsh Nats and rightwing eccentrics
We have an unexpected couple in our extended family. A hardcore right winger of advanced years who just loves Russian culture to a middle aged conspiracy theorist who simply likes being contrary (I think); as a family we have stopped debating it. Gets too heated
Actually, all I have done is point out that Russia is grinding out a victory of sorts.
You seem to conflate what I think is going to happen with what I actually want to happen.
Still, let's discuss in 6 months time.
We'll know then who called this right -- and if I am proved wrong, I am sure you will remind me.
If Russia is to grind out a victory of sorts, which does seem more on the cards now than back in March, I hope the West and Ukraine will ensure it’s a grubby, expensive, Pyrrhic victory that leaves Russia exhausted and bankrupt.
Really interesting piece on the parallels between slave owning oligarchs in US a couple of hundred years ago and the way the GOP is imposing a heavily armed society on a majority who don't want one. Unreformed Senate is major part of problem.
Its almost too late for meaningful gun control anyway. With torrents of physibles no more than a few clicks away, the manufacture of 3d printed ghost guns gets easier all the time.
Baby steps. It is not guns that are the problem but people. Specifically people with semi-automatic assault rifles that can't (yet) be 3d-printed. As President Biden said, it is not as if deer are running through the forest in kevlar body armour.
And within a decade, batteries and capacitors will be up to the job of coilguns with rapid fire.
No parts that need special work - no hammerforged barrels. Ammunition can be a ball bearing. Silent. The whole thing will be 3D printed. No explosives.
All this focus on the type of gun, particularly scary "assault rifles" and "AR-15s" misses the crucial point that, if all you want to do is shoot kids at close range, then ANY gun will do. So trying to stop school shootings by restricting ownership of certain ill-defined types of firearms is pointless.
Not really. Limit people to 5 in the magazine, have to work the bolt between shots, sporting rifles, and that really slows you down compared to 100 round AR drums unless possibly you have a sack of prefilled magazines and have practised a fuck of a lot. Which the arse at Uvalde prolly hadn't.
Plenty of stats showing that AR15 type sprees are I think 6x as deadly as their competitors.
I read on Twitter (disclaimer of responsibility for veracity etc) that the cops in Uvalde found 53 magazines in the school; being able to buy all that without alarm bells going off seems almost as heinous as buying the weapons.
He must have been a strong little fcuker to hump that around.
You'd think the Americans would have the sense to restrict the 2nd Amendment to weapons that were in use at the time when it was passed. That is, single-shot flintlock muskets and pistols. Now that would really even the balance.
Isn't there a group on the Supreme Court who are "constitutionalists" (I think that is the term), who argue that the Founding Fathers meant every word and it should be interpreted exactly as written as per the time. So they should be in favour of flintlocks all round.
Sounds like what they tell themselves to justify doing whatever they want on a whole range of issues. Perhaps I am wrong, but I'm going to guess the constitutionalists have a much more fluid view of what the FF meant than they might claim.
Really interesting piece on the parallels between slave owning oligarchs in US a couple of hundred years ago and the way the GOP is imposing a heavily armed society on a majority who don't want one. Unreformed Senate is major part of problem.
Its almost too late for meaningful gun control anyway. With torrents of physibles no more than a few clicks away, the manufacture of 3d printed ghost guns gets easier all the time.
Baby steps. It is not guns that are the problem but people. Specifically people with semi-automatic assault rifles that can't (yet) be 3d-printed. As President Biden said, it is not as if deer are running through the forest in kevlar body armour.
And within a decade, batteries and capacitors will be up to the job of coilguns with rapid fire.
No parts that need special work - no hammerforged barrels. Ammunition can be a ball bearing. Silent. The whole thing will be 3D printed. No explosives.
All this focus on the type of gun, particularly scary "assault rifles" and "AR-15s" misses the crucial point that, if all you want to do is shoot kids at close range, then ANY gun will do. So trying to stop school shootings by restricting ownership of certain ill-defined types of firearms is pointless.
Not really. Limit people to 5 in the magazine, have to work the bolt between shots, sporting rifles, and that really slows you down compared to 100 round AR drums unless possibly you have a sack of prefilled magazines and have practised a fuck of a lot. Which the arse at Uvalde prolly hadn't.
Plenty of stats showing that AR15 type sprees are I think 6x as deadly as their competitors.
I read on Twitter (disclaimer of responsibility for veracity etc) that the cops in Uvalde found 53 magazines in the school; being able to buy all that without alarm bells going off seems almost as heinous as buying the weapons.
He must have been a strong little fcuker to hump that around.
You'd think the Americans would have the sense to restrict the 2nd Amendment to weapons that were in use at the time when it was passed. That is, single-shot flintlock muskets and pistols. Now that would really even the balance.
Isn't there a group on the Supreme Court who are "constitutionalists" (I think that is the term), who argue that the Founding Fathers meant every word and it should be interpreted exactly as written as per the time. So they should be in favour of flintlocks all round.
A sane view of the 2nd amendment for today's world, whatever was intended, is that it means that countries need armies, sadly, and that therefore any pacifists and Quakers around the place are free to think there shouldn't be a state militia, but but the state can't compel everyone to think so. Read it not as a pro-gun provision but an anti-pacifist one.
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Tom Larkin @TomLarkinSky · 2h 24 is a lot less than 54, obviously.
But worth noting that in 2018 the threshold to challenge May was 48. Public letters when the VONC was triggered? About 20.
Yes, the question is whether fewer are being discreet this time, or if we are in fact very close. Impossible to know I suppose, but it feels more dragged out.
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
What makes teachers special is that like many in the private sector there simply aren't enough of them. It's market forces. And of course it will feed through to costs. That's the market again. Not a "complaint".
Market forces is one thing and no complaints if it drives up pay it was the sentiment that because they were having conversations about heating the house they should get paid more than I objected too.
Many in the private sector will have that same conversation was the point. Yet when people like hospitality staff and lorry drivers get paid more you get lefties like Rochdale pioneers bemoaning it because it will raise the cost of things. I think most people in the country are underpaid because bosses could get away with it and profits have increased while pay has remained static for most. Now the boot is on the other foot and employees have the whip hand in pay negotiations for the first time in 20 years.
By all means argue from that perspective.....just dont come with the we should be paid more because we are public sector bull.
You're a bit tetchy today, with the "bull" and using lefties regularly. Perhaps some of our contributors should be using "right wingers" and "fascists" more.
I used lefties in the context there were many who claim to be of the left persuasion complaining about people like hospitality workers and lorry drivers getting pay rises as it would drive up costs. And yes the argument came across from MaxH as we deserve more because we are talking about heating and we are public sector so yes used the term bull. Sorry if it offends you but it is true. And to note I am not saying teachers don't deserve a payrise just saying that isn't a reason.
The thing is, I've yet to come across any of my fellow lefties (notwithstanding your comment about a couple on here) complaining about low paid workers getting big pay rises - whether private sector or public sector. We think that all low paid workers should get rises that at least match inflation, and this should be financed by acquiring money from the grotesque profiteering that is in evidence across much of industry - whether private or public. Like the P&O chap who earns a fortune but then sacks all the workers rather than paying them more. Or the Bank of England Chair earning a fortune telling us not to be greedy. And thousands more of their ilk.
I reckon you're a secret socialist, really.
Rochdale Pioneers is definitely a leftie and has been bemoaning the fact that lorry drivers getting a payrise would feed through into higher food prices
He's a Lib Dem.
My point about driver pay was simple. Unless and until more drivers appear you pay more without actually fixing the problem. There is still a shortage of drivers - albeit not as acute as it was - and despite deliveries still being affected by it the transport costs are way higher for no real benefit. Great for the drivers, though they are contributing to the runaway price inflation they are being hit by.
Which of course is the curse of inflation - the more inflation goes up the more pay people demand, Which increases inflation, and then pay demands again...
The latter part though you have in the past argued people need to be paid more so a job actually delivers a life rather than get by. One sector gets some payrise and you immediately up in horror because them being payed more might be inflationary. So how do you suggest people get more money so they can actually live rather than merely try to stagger from paypacket to paypacket merely scratching by without increasing their pay?
You utterly miss the point. There are a whole swathe of jobs where people do not get paid enough to be able to live on. So we have to give in-work assistance to people via UC where working loing hard hours is not enough to pay their bills.
Spending power will not increase if we pay more for jobs at the bottom end and reduce in work benefits. "Make Work Pay" was the Tory slogan, but they never did - witness the appalling taper rate in UC where more work is punitively taxed.
Yes there are, hospitality workers and lorry drivers were on that list. I know my ex step brother was a lorry driver and got min wage. So you dont actually want them to earn more from what you say you merely want the governement to increase the money they still give them from uc?
How does that help anyone if they are still reliant on state handouts except for people who want voters reliant on state handouts so they keep voting for parties that might up them.....ah now I get where you are coming from.
I want them *not* to be reliant on state handouts. For jobs to pay wages sufficient to live on. As I wrote above. If you read it and stop guessing where you want me to be "coming from".
Whilst in-work assistance is better than not being there at all it is appalling that so many jobs are so poorly paid. Would be far better had the government tax cuts for companies been predicated on them paying decent wages rather than our taxes being used to subsidise Asda et al and boost shareholder dividends.
Ok then we agree we want jobs to pay without government assistance and those working to not be living from hand to mouth.
How do we get there without those people getting payrises which in your words will lead to an inflationary spiral I quote you here "and despite deliveries still being affected by it the transport costs are way higher for no real benefit. Great for the drivers, though they are contributing to the runaway price inflation they are being hit by."
Really interesting piece on the parallels between slave owning oligarchs in US a couple of hundred years ago and the way the GOP is imposing a heavily armed society on a majority who don't want one. Unreformed Senate is major part of problem.
Its almost too late for meaningful gun control anyway. With torrents of physibles no more than a few clicks away, the manufacture of 3d printed ghost guns gets easier all the time.
Baby steps. It is not guns that are the problem but people. Specifically people with semi-automatic assault rifles that can't (yet) be 3d-printed. As President Biden said, it is not as if deer are running through the forest in kevlar body armour.
And within a decade, batteries and capacitors will be up to the job of coilguns with rapid fire.
No parts that need special work - no hammerforged barrels. Ammunition can be a ball bearing. Silent. The whole thing will be 3D printed. No explosives.
All this focus on the type of gun, particularly scary "assault rifles" and "AR-15s" misses the crucial point that, if all you want to do is shoot kids at close range, then ANY gun will do. So trying to stop school shootings by restricting ownership of certain ill-defined types of firearms is pointless.
Not really. Limit people to 5 in the magazine, have to work the bolt between shots, sporting rifles, and that really slows you down compared to 100 round AR drums unless possibly you have a sack of prefilled magazines and have practised a fuck of a lot. Which the arse at Uvalde prolly hadn't.
Plenty of stats showing that AR15 type sprees are I think 6x as deadly as their competitors.
I read on Twitter (disclaimer of responsibility for veracity etc) that the cops in Uvalde found 53 magazines in the school; being able to buy all that without alarm bells going off seems almost as heinous as buying the weapons.
He must have been a strong little fcuker to hump that around.
You'd think the Americans would have the sense to restrict the 2nd Amendment to weapons that were in use at the time when it was passed. That is, single-shot flintlock muskets and pistols. Now that would really even the balance.
Isn't there a group on the Supreme Court who are "constitutionalists" (I think that is the term), who argue that the Founding Fathers meant every word and it should be interpreted exactly as written as per the time. So they should be in favour of flintlocks all round.
A sane view of the 2nd amendment for today's world, whatever was intended, is that it means that countries need armies, sadly, and that therefore any pacifists and Quakers around the place are free to think there shouldn't be a state militia, but but the state can't compel everyone to think so. Read it not as a pro-gun provision but an anti-pacifist one.
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
The problem is precisely the need to invent new meanings to old laws.
This is because the politicians have failed to keep up. Now the Supreme Court is another legislative body, knitting law from whatever they can find. Because they are the last people legislating……
The original framers wanted a living constitution - one that *changed* with the times. Through the amendment process.
Lincoln could have packed the court with a bunch of lawyers who could of re-interpreted the constitution to abolish slavery. Instead, he got the 13th Amendment passed.
Really interesting piece on the parallels between slave owning oligarchs in US a couple of hundred years ago and the way the GOP is imposing a heavily armed society on a majority who don't want one. Unreformed Senate is major part of problem.
Its almost too late for meaningful gun control anyway. With torrents of physibles no more than a few clicks away, the manufacture of 3d printed ghost guns gets easier all the time.
Baby steps. It is not guns that are the problem but people. Specifically people with semi-automatic assault rifles that can't (yet) be 3d-printed. As President Biden said, it is not as if deer are running through the forest in kevlar body armour.
And within a decade, batteries and capacitors will be up to the job of coilguns with rapid fire.
No parts that need special work - no hammerforged barrels. Ammunition can be a ball bearing. Silent. The whole thing will be 3D printed. No explosives.
All this focus on the type of gun, particularly scary "assault rifles" and "AR-15s" misses the crucial point that, if all you want to do is shoot kids at close range, then ANY gun will do. So trying to stop school shootings by restricting ownership of certain ill-defined types of firearms is pointless.
Not really. Limit people to 5 in the magazine, have to work the bolt between shots, sporting rifles, and that really slows you down compared to 100 round AR drums unless possibly you have a sack of prefilled magazines and have practised a fuck of a lot. Which the arse at Uvalde prolly hadn't.
Plenty of stats showing that AR15 type sprees are I think 6x as deadly as their competitors.
I read on Twitter (disclaimer of responsibility for veracity etc) that the cops in Uvalde found 53 magazines in the school; being able to buy all that without alarm bells going off seems almost as heinous as buying the weapons.
He must have been a strong little fcuker to hump that around.
Hey @Theuniondivvie - both myself and @foxy have asked if your photo shows the location of the Wannsee Conference. It looks roughly right, and that is certainly grim, but there are many places around Berlin with a grim history…
Is it? I do love a travel quiz
Ah sorry, I’ve been making the most of my last day in Berlin so only dipping in. It is indeed the villa where the Wannsee conference took place viewed from the lesser seen lakeside pov.
Ta for that. What is it like?
I’ve always wanted to go there. In a macabre way. Just to see if it has a mood to match its history. I’m a firm believer in Sinclarian psychogeography
Didn’t actually visit it, just sailed by. My partner’s appetite for the weird tension between modern gemütlich Germany and its unarguably horrific past is a good deal less than mine. I can’t deny it’s why I find Berlin endlessly fascinating: step over a couple of Stolperstein on the way to breakfast, walk past an old SA hq & torture centre on the way to TK Maxx (which is crap in Germany by the wat) and then on to a flea market with disconcerting piles of old specs and shoes.
We are of like mind on the history. Is is exactly this tension which makes Berlin compelling - to me. You can still see the scars of the Red Army shrapnel on the Reichstag (and the graffiti). You can still follow the course of the Berlin Wall, noting the difference either side
i read Anthony Beevor’s Berlin on my first visit there. Made it unforgettable
It’s not a great world city but it is hypnotising. Also: gotta love a currywurst
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
Did you luck out with the bag lady?
Aha. She got off around Patras. That’s not a sexual euphemism
My recent sexual diet has been meagre, but not non-existent. Ship’s biscuits
Could have been these biscuits.
Read the other day that they have found another copy of the Wicked Bible (1631) the one which says "thou shalt commit adultery." Apparently it is thought this was delibgerate trolling by a typesetter, and he also altered a bit of Deuteronomy from "The Lord sheweth His Greatnesse to us" to "The Lord sheweth His Great asse to us." have been laughing about this for over a week now.
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
I'm struggling to find anything at all in the post you're responding to that says teachers are a special case, so I'm not sure why you're attacking a new poster (welcome).
Thanks! I don't mind the response. I enjoy reading the bickering on here, so would feel hypocritical if I wasn't OK to be part of it. Anyway, I'm not sure that was an attack so much as a valid point (albeit misreading my poorly expressed point).
Welcome aboard. If you enjoy bickering you have come to the right place
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
I'm struggling to find anything at all in the post you're responding to that says teachers are a special case, so I'm not sure why you're attacking a new poster (welcome).
Thanks! I don't mind the response. I enjoy reading the bickering on here, so would feel hypocritical if I wasn't OK to be part of it. Anyway, I'm not sure that was an attack so much as a valid point (albeit misreading my poorly expressed point).
Welcome aboard. If you enjoy bickering you have come to the right place
amateur bickering that is, want professional bickering get elected to stormont nods
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
I'm struggling to find anything at all in the post you're responding to that says teachers are a special case, so I'm not sure why you're attacking a new poster (welcome).
Thanks! I don't mind the response. I enjoy reading the bickering on here, so would feel hypocritical if I wasn't OK to be part of it. Anyway, I'm not sure that was an attack so much as a valid point (albeit misreading my poorly expressed point).
Welcome aboard. If you enjoy bickering you have come to the right place
amateur bickering that is, want professional bickering get elected to stormont nods
True enough My very Unionist mother is now spitting teeth because the Irish language bill that the Unionists have stalled for years at Stormont is now being pushed by Westminster.
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
The pro Russia pimps are a weird bunch. From old lefties like @roger and NPXMP (tho Nick ascribes his carefully curated ambivalence to Russian ancestry) to Welsh Nats and rightwing eccentrics
We have an unexpected couple in our extended family. A hardcore right winger of advanced years who just loves Russian culture to a middle aged conspiracy theorist who simply likes being contrary (I think); as a family we have stopped debating it. Gets too heated
Actually, all I have done is point out that Russia is grinding out a victory of sorts.
You seem to conflate what I think is going to happen with what I actually want to happen.
Still, let's discuss in 6 months time.
We'll know then who called this right -- and if I am proved wrong, I am sure you will remind me.
What do you want to happen in Ukraine?
In an ideal world, the fates of these territories would be decided by free and fair plebiscites, not by guns.
Russia has invaded & there is a bloody war & lots of killing. There are Russians and Ukrainians being killed, probably in roughly equal measure. It is a great tragedy for both Russia and Ukraine (for which Putin bears most of the blame).
The best outcome is for Putin to be deposed and Russia to withdraw.
However, that does not seem to me remotely likely. Even if Putin is deposed, I am pretty unconvinced any successor will withdraw from the conquered territory. Putin is much more likely to be deposed because he has been ineffective in subduing Ukraine, and his successor will be tougher.
Eventually, when enough people have been killed, the two countries will stop fighting.
I want that to happen earlier rather than later. So, I think Corbyn (and NPXMP) are right. We need to think about what final negotiated settlement might actually be possible.
Ultimately, the economic effects of the war will drive everyone to the negotiating table.
And there will be a compromise, because that is how most wars end.
As to the progress of the War, Ukraine have done better than I originally thought. But they are still slowly losing territory, that they are unlikely to get back, IMO.
(As regards Welsh nationalism and Ukraine, I am just amazed at the double standards of most of pb.com. They routinely dismiss the concerns of Welsh language speakers, yet now they now regard the rights of Ukrainian language speakers as something they are willing to die for in the Donbas. Or more accurately ... others to die for while they get drunk and have sex in Georgia).
Tom Larkin @TomLarkinSky · 2h 24 is a lot less than 54, obviously.
But worth noting that in 2018 the threshold to challenge May was 48. Public letters when the VONC was triggered? About 20.
Yes, the question is whether fewer are being discreet this time, or if we are in fact very close. Impossible to know I suppose, but it feels more dragged out.
If I were an MP I don't think I'd be scared of May whereas I'd be scared shitless of Johnson. So you'd expect a greater spiral of silence with him (unless the fear is enough to stop people submitting letters not just keep quiet about them).
Can someone explain this yougov poll to me - for the last seven- eight months we have had some fairly reasonable (not big) Labour leads but when these polls have been tested at elections Labour haven't done well enough. I'm not convinced Labour have sealed the deal with the electorate.
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
Did you luck out with the bag lady?
Aha. She got off around Patras. That’s not a sexual euphemism
My recent sexual diet has been meagre, but not non-existent. Ship’s biscuits
Could have been these biscuits.
Read the other day that they have found another copy of the Wicked Bible (1631) the one which says "thou shalt commit adultery." Apparently it is thought this was delibgerate trolling by a typesetter, and he also altered a bit of Deuteronomy from "The Lord sheweth His Greatnesse to us" to "The Lord sheweth His Great asse to us." have been laughing about this for over a week now.
Doesn't seem that different from lewd doodles in manuscripts by bored monks. I hope he got a good laugh from it.
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
I'm struggling to find anything at all in the post you're responding to that says teachers are a special case, so I'm not sure why you're attacking a new poster (welcome).
Thanks! I don't mind the response. I enjoy reading the bickering on here, so would feel hypocritical if I wasn't OK to be part of it. Anyway, I'm not sure that was an attack so much as a valid point (albeit misreading my poorly expressed point).
Welcome aboard. If you enjoy bickering you have come to the right place
amateur bickering that is, want professional bickering get elected to stormont nods
True enough My very Unionist mother is now spitting teeth because the Irish language bill that the Unionists have stalled for years at Stormont is now being pushed by Westminster.
hehe well I discovered I actually have a half sister living in belfast about 4 years ago and we are in touch but while I like and enjoy political discussion have never actually asked her about whether she is union or republican as seems too hairy a subject over there. I did buy her a flag though as every house where she lives seems to have a flag pole
Really interesting piece on the parallels between slave owning oligarchs in US a couple of hundred years ago and the way the GOP is imposing a heavily armed society on a majority who don't want one. Unreformed Senate is major part of problem.
Its almost too late for meaningful gun control anyway. With torrents of physibles no more than a few clicks away, the manufacture of 3d printed ghost guns gets easier all the time.
Baby steps. It is not guns that are the problem but people. Specifically people with semi-automatic assault rifles that can't (yet) be 3d-printed. As President Biden said, it is not as if deer are running through the forest in kevlar body armour.
And within a decade, batteries and capacitors will be up to the job of coilguns with rapid fire.
No parts that need special work - no hammerforged barrels. Ammunition can be a ball bearing. Silent. The whole thing will be 3D printed. No explosives.
All this focus on the type of gun, particularly scary "assault rifles" and "AR-15s" misses the crucial point that, if all you want to do is shoot kids at close range, then ANY gun will do. So trying to stop school shootings by restricting ownership of certain ill-defined types of firearms is pointless.
Not really. Limit people to 5 in the magazine, have to work the bolt between shots, sporting rifles, and that really slows you down compared to 100 round AR drums unless possibly you have a sack of prefilled magazines and have practised a fuck of a lot. Which the arse at Uvalde prolly hadn't.
Plenty of stats showing that AR15 type sprees are I think 6x as deadly as their competitors.
I read on Twitter (disclaimer of responsibility for veracity etc) that the cops in Uvalde found 53 magazines in the school; being able to buy all that without alarm bells going off seems almost as heinous as buying the weapons.
He must have been a strong little fcuker to hump that around.
Hey @Theuniondivvie - both myself and @foxy have asked if your photo shows the location of the Wannsee Conference. It looks roughly right, and that is certainly grim, but there are many places around Berlin with a grim history…
Is it? I do love a travel quiz
Ah sorry, I’ve been making the most of my last day in Berlin so only dipping in. It is indeed the villa where the Wannsee conference took place viewed from the lesser seen lakeside pov.
Ta for that. What is it like?
I’ve always wanted to go there. In a macabre way. Just to see if it has a mood to match its history. I’m a firm believer in Sinclarian psychogeography
I had exactly that experience in Terezin. Will never go there again
I’ve been to a few places with an intense feeling of sadness or desolation. Guilty secret: I seek them out. I like the frisson. Also it’s good to know the darker places, along with great restaurants and gorgeous views. A necessary balance
Auschwitz is of course unforgettable, but it is kind of expected?
Tuol Sleng the Khmer Rouge “torture garden” in Phnom Penh is somehow even darker in mood. The heat, the blood stains, the photos
Some of the mesoAmerican sites of human sacrifice are unspeakable. The sullen Moche adobe pyramids, crumbling into great dust. The chac mools of the Aztecs
But two obscure ones stand out. One was another site of human sacrifice, in the far north of Big island Hawaii. A sacrificial altar on a spectacular cliff top (people forget that the Polynesian/Pacific cultures could be brutally cruel). The roasting wind off the sea. the total silence except for some whirring grasses, the relentless blue of sky and ocean
At the other end, the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea. The first ever Soviet Gulag on an impossible remote sub-arctic archipelago with an incredible history of monastic settlement. The commies used the cyclopean monastery as a torture chamber, they would roll prisoners down the cliffs for fun to see if they bounced. Yet it is also holy and beautiful. So strange
Can someone explain this yougov poll to me - for the last seven- eight months we have had some fairly reasonable (not big) Labour leads but when these polls have been tested at elections Labour haven't done well enough. I'm not convinced Labour have sealed the deal with the electorate.
I'd have Rory Stewart as PM, he warned us about Johnson very early on
It was obvious from the very first time he appeared on HIGNFY that Johnson was a malignant shit. The curiosity for me is still why couldn't the English see it?
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
The pro Russia pimps are a weird bunch. From old lefties like @roger and NPXMP (tho Nick ascribes his carefully curated ambivalence to Russian ancestry) to Welsh Nats and rightwing eccentrics
We have an unexpected couple in our extended family. A hardcore right winger of advanced years who just loves Russian culture to a middle aged conspiracy theorist who simply likes being contrary (I think); as a family we have stopped debating it. Gets too heated
Actually, all I have done is point out that Russia is grinding out a victory of sorts.
You seem to conflate what I think is going to happen with what I actually want to happen.
Still, let's discuss in 6 months time.
We'll know then who called this right -- and if I am proved wrong, I am sure you will remind me.
What do you want to happen in Ukraine?
In an ideal world, the fates of these territories would be decided by free and fair plebiscites, not by guns.
Russia has invaded & there is a bloody war & lots of killing. There are Russians and Ukrainians being killed, probably in roughly equal measure. It is a great tragedy for both Russia and Ukraine (for which Putin bears most of the blame).
The best outcome is for Putin to be deposed and Russia to withdraw.
However, that does not seem to me remotely likely. Even if Putin is deposed, I am pretty unconvinced any successor will withdraw from the conquered territory. Putin is much more likely to be deposed because he has been ineffective in subduing Ukraine, and his successor will be tougher.
Eventually, when enough people have been killed, the two countries will stop fighting.
I want that to happen earlier rather than later. So, I think Corbyn (and NPXMP) are right. We need to think about what final negotiated settlement might actually be possible.
Ultimately, the economic effects of the war will drive everyone to the negotiating table.
And there will be a compromise, because that is how most wars end.
As to the progress of the War, Ukraine have done better than I originally thought. But they are still slowly losing territory, that they are unlikely to get back, IMO.
(As regards Welsh nationalism and Ukraine, I am just amazed at the double standards of most of pb.com. They routinely dismiss the concerns of Welsh language speakers, yet now they now regard the rights of Ukrainian language speakers as something they are willing to die for in the Donbas. Or more accurately ... others to die for while they get drunk and have sex in Georgia).
If there is a negotiated peace do you think it will stop ukranians being killed, I don't believe so, the ukranians don't believe so. I don't think many western governements believe so though some like germany are willing to turn a blind eye
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
The pro Russia pimps are a weird bunch. From old lefties like @roger and NPXMP (tho Nick ascribes his carefully curated ambivalence to Russian ancestry) to Welsh Nats and rightwing eccentrics
We have an unexpected couple in our extended family. A hardcore right winger of advanced years who just loves Russian culture to a middle aged conspiracy theorist who simply likes being contrary (I think); as a family we have stopped debating it. Gets too heated
Actually, all I have done is point out that Russia is grinding out a victory of sorts.
You seem to conflate what I think is going to happen with what I actually want to happen.
Still, let's discuss in 6 months time.
We'll know then who called this right -- and if I am proved wrong, I am sure you will remind me.
If Russia is to grind out a victory of sorts, which does seem more on the cards now than back in March, I hope the West and Ukraine will ensure it’s a grubby, expensive, Pyrrhic victory that leaves Russia exhausted and bankrupt.
Agree. From a UK/NATO perspective, we get a highly successful proxy war out of this. We are compromising Russia's ability to invade Eastern Europe, destroying her economy, and rushing Green energy and self-reliance even faster than before. Also get excellent insight on which of our kit works or is useful on a modern battlefield.
For Ukraine none of us can speak. Up to them - of they go for a negotiated peace then fine. If they don't want NATO, fine. If they want pre-2014 borders, fine.
Russia is a parasite country, milking the host for cash with its provision of energy. Nerve agents in Salisbury ffs. Let's get rid.
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
I'm struggling to find anything at all in the post you're responding to that says teachers are a special case, so I'm not sure why you're attacking a new poster (welcome).
Thanks! I don't mind the response. I enjoy reading the bickering on here, so would feel hypocritical if I wasn't OK to be part of it. Anyway, I'm not sure that was an attack so much as a valid point (albeit misreading my poorly expressed point).
Welcome aboard. If you enjoy bickering you have come to the right place
amateur bickering that is, want professional bickering get elected to stormont nods
True enough My very Unionist mother is now spitting teeth because the Irish language bill that the Unionists have stalled for years at Stormont is now being pushed by Westminster.
hehe well I discovered I actually have a half sister living in belfast about 4 years ago and we are in touch but while I like and enjoy political discussion have never actually asked her about whether she is union or republican as seems too hairy a subject over there. I did buy her a flag though as every house where she lives seems to have a flag pole
Er, how did you know which fleg to buy? Or did you get one of each?
Obligatory booze-with-view photo. Tbilisi is really really lovely. Quite unexpectedly so
One of my wanderlust friends loves Tbilisi. She was raving about a trip to Tashkent she'd had the summer before covid hit - another unexpected 'hit'.
It somehow seems to have escaped the endless-Stalinist-blocks and brutalist-towers-in-the-middle that blight most once-Soviet cities. The old town is near perfect in its preservation - and of course many old buildings are now being speedily turned into boutique hotels and chic wine bars, tho there are still plenty left in a state of greatly picturesque dilapidation. A brilliant mix
I wonder if there was a tacit edict from Stalin, who must have known Tbilisi so well. “Don’t touch Tbilisi!”
I'd have Rory Stewart as PM, he warned us about Johnson very early on
It was obvious from the very first time he appeared on HIGNFY that Johnson was a malignant shit. The curiosity for me is still why couldn't the English see it?
I think let's say 30-40% of the country are immune to Johnson. I consider myself one of those.
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
I'm struggling to find anything at all in the post you're responding to that says teachers are a special case, so I'm not sure why you're attacking a new poster (welcome).
Thanks! I don't mind the response. I enjoy reading the bickering on here, so would feel hypocritical if I wasn't OK to be part of it. Anyway, I'm not sure that was an attack so much as a valid point (albeit misreading my poorly expressed point).
Welcome aboard. If you enjoy bickering you have come to the right place
amateur bickering that is, want professional bickering get elected to stormont nods
True enough My very Unionist mother is now spitting teeth because the Irish language bill that the Unionists have stalled for years at Stormont is now being pushed by Westminster.
Isn't that because the Unionists have closed Stormont down?
Really interesting piece on the parallels between slave owning oligarchs in US a couple of hundred years ago and the way the GOP is imposing a heavily armed society on a majority who don't want one. Unreformed Senate is major part of problem.
Its almost too late for meaningful gun control anyway. With torrents of physibles no more than a few clicks away, the manufacture of 3d printed ghost guns gets easier all the time.
Baby steps. It is not guns that are the problem but people. Specifically people with semi-automatic assault rifles that can't (yet) be 3d-printed. As President Biden said, it is not as if deer are running through the forest in kevlar body armour.
And within a decade, batteries and capacitors will be up to the job of coilguns with rapid fire.
No parts that need special work - no hammerforged barrels. Ammunition can be a ball bearing. Silent. The whole thing will be 3D printed. No explosives.
All this focus on the type of gun, particularly scary "assault rifles" and "AR-15s" misses the crucial point that, if all you want to do is shoot kids at close range, then ANY gun will do. So trying to stop school shootings by restricting ownership of certain ill-defined types of firearms is pointless.
Not really. Limit people to 5 in the magazine, have to work the bolt between shots, sporting rifles, and that really slows you down compared to 100 round AR drums unless possibly you have a sack of prefilled magazines and have practised a fuck of a lot. Which the arse at Uvalde prolly hadn't.
Plenty of stats showing that AR15 type sprees are I think 6x as deadly as their competitors.
I read on Twitter (disclaimer of responsibility for veracity etc) that the cops in Uvalde found 53 magazines in the school; being able to buy all that without alarm bells going off seems almost as heinous as buying the weapons.
He must have been a strong little fcuker to hump that around.
Hey @Theuniondivvie - both myself and @foxy have asked if your photo shows the location of the Wannsee Conference. It looks roughly right, and that is certainly grim, but there are many places around Berlin with a grim history…
Is it? I do love a travel quiz
Ah sorry, I’ve been making the most of my last day in Berlin so only dipping in. It is indeed the villa where the Wannsee conference took place viewed from the lesser seen lakeside pov.
Ta for that. What is it like?
I’ve always wanted to go there. In a macabre way. Just to see if it has a mood to match its history. I’m a firm believer in Sinclarian psychogeography
I had exactly that experience in Terezin. Will never go there again
Terezin was upsetting.
Not least because when I visited, there was a loud party of Czech school kids presuably on a compulsory school trip, busy with their phones and their music and unconcerned with what had happened at the place.
Also, I was amazed to discover that the place -- 30 miles North of Prague -- had a German-speaking majority in the years before the Second World War.
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
I'm struggling to find anything at all in the post you're responding to that says teachers are a special case, so I'm not sure why you're attacking a new poster (welcome).
Thanks! I don't mind the response. I enjoy reading the bickering on here, so would feel hypocritical if I wasn't OK to be part of it. Anyway, I'm not sure that was an attack so much as a valid point (albeit misreading my poorly expressed point).
Welcome aboard. If you enjoy bickering you have come to the right place
amateur bickering that is, want professional bickering get elected to stormont nods
True enough My very Unionist mother is now spitting teeth because the Irish language bill that the Unionists have stalled for years at Stormont is now being pushed by Westminster.
hehe well I discovered I actually have a half sister living in belfast about 4 years ago and we are in touch but while I like and enjoy political discussion have never actually asked her about whether she is union or republican as seems too hairy a subject over there. I did buy her a flag though as every house where she lives seems to have a flag pole
Er, how did you know which fleg to buy? Or did you get one of each?
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
I'm struggling to find anything at all in the post you're responding to that says teachers are a special case, so I'm not sure why you're attacking a new poster (welcome).
Thanks! I don't mind the response. I enjoy reading the bickering on here, so would feel hypocritical if I wasn't OK to be part of it. Anyway, I'm not sure that was an attack so much as a valid point (albeit misreading my poorly expressed point).
Welcome aboard. If you enjoy bickering you have come to the right place
amateur bickering that is, want professional bickering get elected to stormont nods
True enough My very Unionist mother is now spitting teeth because the Irish language bill that the Unionists have stalled for years at Stormont is now being pushed by Westminster.
hehe well I discovered I actually have a half sister living in belfast about 4 years ago and we are in touch but while I like and enjoy political discussion have never actually asked her about whether she is union or republican as seems too hairy a subject over there. I did buy her a flag though as every house where she lives seems to have a flag pole
Er, how did you know which fleg to buy? Or did you get one of each?
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
The pro Russia pimps are a weird bunch. From old lefties like @roger and NPXMP (tho Nick ascribes his carefully curated ambivalence to Russian ancestry) to Welsh Nats and rightwing eccentrics
We have an unexpected couple in our extended family. A hardcore right winger of advanced years who just loves Russian culture to a middle aged conspiracy theorist who simply likes being contrary (I think); as a family we have stopped debating it. Gets too heated
Actually, all I have done is point out that Russia is grinding out a victory of sorts.
You seem to conflate what I think is going to happen with what I actually want to happen.
Still, let's discuss in 6 months time.
We'll know then who called this right -- and if I am proved wrong, I am sure you will remind me.
What do you want to happen in Ukraine?
In an ideal world, the fates of these territories would be decided by free and fair plebiscites, not by guns.
Russia has invaded & there is a bloody war & lots of killing. There are Russians and Ukrainians being killed, probably in roughly equal measure. It is a great tragedy for both Russia and Ukraine (for which Putin bears most of the blame).
The best outcome is for Putin to be deposed and Russia to withdraw.
However, that does not seem to me remotely likely. Even if Putin is deposed, I am pretty unconvinced any successor will withdraw from the conquered territory. Putin is much more likely to be deposed because he has been ineffective in subduing Ukraine, and his successor will be tougher.
Eventually, when enough people have been killed, the two countries will stop fighting.
I want that to happen earlier rather than later. So, I think Corbyn (and NPXMP) are right. We need to think about what final negotiated settlement might actually be possible.
Ultimately, the economic effects of the war will drive everyone to the negotiating table.
And there will be a compromise, because that is how most wars end.
As to the progress of the War, Ukraine have done better than I originally thought. But they are still slowly losing territory, that they are unlikely to get back, IMO.
(As regards Welsh nationalism and Ukraine, I am just amazed at the double standards of most of pb.com. They routinely dismiss the concerns of Welsh language speakers, yet now they now regard the rights of Ukrainian language speakers as something they are willing to die for in the Donbas. Or more accurately ... others to die for while they get drunk and have sex in Georgia).
A fair answer, tho naive, to my mind. No way the Ukrainians will stop fighting. And if they do finally stop fighting, any compromise peace agreement will last a few months and then Ukraine - if it survives - will go back on the attack, overtly or covertly. There are 44m Ukrainians and Putin has embitttered nearly all of them. They now hate Russia, they feel extremely and angrily Ukrainian, they will want revenge
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
The pro Russia pimps are a weird bunch. From old lefties like @roger and NPXMP (tho Nick ascribes his carefully curated ambivalence to Russian ancestry) to Welsh Nats and rightwing eccentrics
We have an unexpected couple in our extended family. A hardcore right winger of advanced years who just loves Russian culture to a middle aged conspiracy theorist who simply likes being contrary (I think); as a family we have stopped debating it. Gets too heated
Actually, all I have done is point out that Russia is grinding out a victory of sorts.
You seem to conflate what I think is going to happen with what I actually want to happen.
Still, let's discuss in 6 months time.
We'll know then who called this right -- and if I am proved wrong, I am sure you will remind me.
What do you want to happen in Ukraine?
In an ideal world, the fates of these territories would be decided by free and fair plebiscites, not by guns.
Russia has invaded & there is a bloody war & lots of killing. There are Russians and Ukrainians being killed, probably in roughly equal measure. It is a great tragedy for both Russia and Ukraine (for which Putin bears most of the blame).
The best outcome is for Putin to be deposed and Russia to withdraw.
However, that does not seem to me remotely likely. Even if Putin is deposed, I am pretty unconvinced any successor will withdraw from the conquered territory. Putin is much more likely to be deposed because he has been ineffective in subduing Ukraine, and his successor will be tougher.
Eventually, when enough people have been killed, the two countries will stop fighting.
I want that to happen earlier rather than later. So, I think Corbyn (and NPXMP) are right. We need to think about what final negotiated settlement might actually be possible.
Ultimately, the economic effects of the war will drive everyone to the negotiating table.
And there will be a compromise, because that is how most wars end.
As to the progress of the War, Ukraine have done better than I originally thought. But they are still slowly losing territory, that they are unlikely to get back, IMO.
(As regards Welsh nationalism and Ukraine, I am just amazed at the double standards of most of pb.com. They routinely dismiss the concerns of Welsh language speakers, yet now they now regard the rights of Ukrainian language speakers as something they are willing to die for in the Donbas. Or more accurately ... others to die for while they get drunk and have sex in Georgia).
If there is a negotiated peace do you think it will stop ukranians being killed, I don't believe so, the ukranians don't believe so. I don't think many western governements believe so though some like germany are willing to turn a blind eye
I am not sure there are good options for Ukraine, there are just different shades of bad options.
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
I'm struggling to find anything at all in the post you're responding to that says teachers are a special case, so I'm not sure why you're attacking a new poster (welcome).
Thanks! I don't mind the response. I enjoy reading the bickering on here, so would feel hypocritical if I wasn't OK to be part of it. Anyway, I'm not sure that was an attack so much as a valid point (albeit misreading my poorly expressed point).
Welcome aboard. If you enjoy bickering you have come to the right place
amateur bickering that is, want professional bickering get elected to stormont nods
True enough My very Unionist mother is now spitting teeth because the Irish language bill that the Unionists have stalled for years at Stormont is now being pushed by Westminster.
Isn't that because the Unionists have closed Stormont down?
Yes indeed, but what she is moaning about is that years of loyalty to the UK from the Unionist community are being "rewarded" with a nationalist piece of legislation supported by Sinn Fein.
She is still has not figured out that the easiest way for Westminster to resolve their Brexit dilemma is to ignore the Unionists and enable Irish unity or federalism.
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
The pro Russia pimps are a weird bunch. From old lefties like @roger and NPXMP (tho Nick ascribes his carefully curated ambivalence to Russian ancestry) to Welsh Nats and rightwing eccentrics
We have an unexpected couple in our extended family. A hardcore right winger of advanced years who just loves Russian culture to a middle aged conspiracy theorist who simply likes being contrary (I think); as a family we have stopped debating it. Gets too heated
Actually, all I have done is point out that Russia is grinding out a victory of sorts.
You seem to conflate what I think is going to happen with what I actually want to happen.
Still, let's discuss in 6 months time.
We'll know then who called this right -- and if I am proved wrong, I am sure you will remind me.
If Russia is to grind out a victory of sorts, which does seem more on the cards now than back in March, I hope the West and Ukraine will ensure it’s a grubby, expensive, Pyrrhic victory that leaves Russia exhausted and bankrupt.
Agree. From a UK/NATO perspective, we get a highly successful proxy war out of this. We are compromising Russia's ability to invade Eastern Europe, destroying her economy, and rushing Green energy and self-reliance even faster than before. Also get excellent insight on which of our kit works or is useful on a modern battlefield.
For Ukraine none of us can speak. Up to them - of they go for a negotiated peace then fine. If they don't want NATO, fine. If they want pre-2014 borders, fine.
Russia is a parasite country, milking the host for cash with its provision of energy. Nerve agents in Salisbury ffs. Let's get rid.
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
I'm struggling to find anything at all in the post you're responding to that says teachers are a special case, so I'm not sure why you're attacking a new poster (welcome).
Thanks! I don't mind the response. I enjoy reading the bickering on here, so would feel hypocritical if I wasn't OK to be part of it. Anyway, I'm not sure that was an attack so much as a valid point (albeit misreading my poorly expressed point).
Welcome aboard. If you enjoy bickering you have come to the right place
amateur bickering that is, want professional bickering get elected to stormont nods
True enough My very Unionist mother is now spitting teeth because the Irish language bill that the Unionists have stalled for years at Stormont is now being pushed by Westminster.
hehe well I discovered I actually have a half sister living in belfast about 4 years ago and we are in touch but while I like and enjoy political discussion have never actually asked her about whether she is union or republican as seems too hairy a subject over there. I did buy her a flag though as every house where she lives seems to have a flag pole
Er, how did you know which fleg to buy? Or did you get one of each?
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
The pro Russia pimps are a weird bunch. From old lefties like @roger and NPXMP (tho Nick ascribes his carefully curated ambivalence to Russian ancestry) to Welsh Nats and rightwing eccentrics
We have an unexpected couple in our extended family. A hardcore right winger of advanced years who just loves Russian culture to a middle aged conspiracy theorist who simply likes being contrary (I think); as a family we have stopped debating it. Gets too heated
Actually, all I have done is point out that Russia is grinding out a victory of sorts.
You seem to conflate what I think is going to happen with what I actually want to happen.
Still, let's discuss in 6 months time.
We'll know then who called this right -- and if I am proved wrong, I am sure you will remind me.
What do you want to happen in Ukraine?
In an ideal world, the fates of these territories would be decided by free and fair plebiscites, not by guns.
Russia has invaded & there is a bloody war & lots of killing. There are Russians and Ukrainians being killed, probably in roughly equal measure. It is a great tragedy for both Russia and Ukraine (for which Putin bears most of the blame).
The best outcome is for Putin to be deposed and Russia to withdraw.
However, that does not seem to me remotely likely. Even if Putin is deposed, I am pretty unconvinced any successor will withdraw from the conquered territory. Putin is much more likely to be deposed because he has been ineffective in subduing Ukraine, and his successor will be tougher.
Eventually, when enough people have been killed, the two countries will stop fighting.
I want that to happen earlier rather than later. So, I think Corbyn (and NPXMP) are right. We need to think about what final negotiated settlement might actually be possible.
Ultimately, the economic effects of the war will drive everyone to the negotiating table.
And there will be a compromise, because that is how most wars end.
As to the progress of the War, Ukraine have done better than I originally thought. But they are still slowly losing territory, that they are unlikely to get back, IMO.
(As regards Welsh nationalism and Ukraine, I am just amazed at the double standards of most of pb.com. They routinely dismiss the concerns of Welsh language speakers, yet now they now regard the rights of Ukrainian language speakers as something they are willing to die for in the Donbas. Or more accurately ... others to die for while they get drunk and have sex in Georgia).
If there is a negotiated peace do you think it will stop ukranians being killed, I don't believe so, the ukranians don't believe so. I don't think many western governements believe so though some like germany are willing to turn a blind eye
I am not sure there are good options for Ukraine, there are just different shades of bad options.
For ukranians the worst option is to stop resisting in their minds I suspect. They don't want to surrender to a regime that will rape their mothers and daughters, murder sons and husbands and abduct their children on a whim. I wouldn't want to surrender to such a regime either I suspect neither would you.
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
I'm struggling to find anything at all in the post you're responding to that says teachers are a special case, so I'm not sure why you're attacking a new poster (welcome).
Thanks! I don't mind the response. I enjoy reading the bickering on here, so would feel hypocritical if I wasn't OK to be part of it. Anyway, I'm not sure that was an attack so much as a valid point (albeit misreading my poorly expressed point).
Welcome aboard. If you enjoy bickering you have come to the right place
amateur bickering that is, want professional bickering get elected to stormont nods
True enough My very Unionist mother is now spitting teeth because the Irish language bill that the Unionists have stalled for years at Stormont is now being pushed by Westminster.
hehe well I discovered I actually have a half sister living in belfast about 4 years ago and we are in touch but while I like and enjoy political discussion have never actually asked her about whether she is union or republican as seems too hairy a subject over there. I did buy her a flag though as every house where she lives seems to have a flag pole
Er, how did you know which fleg to buy? Or did you get one of each?
Interestimg, though, as dinosaur = coeval with people is a standard creationist view, and some of the Unionists don't like geological time. So there is a curious inverted dilemma there - either interpretation is going to be unacceptable ...
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
I'm struggling to find anything at all in the post you're responding to that says teachers are a special case, so I'm not sure why you're attacking a new poster (welcome).
Thanks! I don't mind the response. I enjoy reading the bickering on here, so would feel hypocritical if I wasn't OK to be part of it. Anyway, I'm not sure that was an attack so much as a valid point (albeit misreading my poorly expressed point).
Welcome aboard. If you enjoy bickering you have come to the right place
amateur bickering that is, want professional bickering get elected to stormont nods
True enough My very Unionist mother is now spitting teeth because the Irish language bill that the Unionists have stalled for years at Stormont is now being pushed by Westminster.
hehe well I discovered I actually have a half sister living in belfast about 4 years ago and we are in touch but while I like and enjoy political discussion have never actually asked her about whether she is union or republican as seems too hairy a subject over there. I did buy her a flag though as every house where she lives seems to have a flag pole
Er, how did you know which fleg to buy? Or did you get one of each?
Interestimg, though, as dinosaur = coeval with people is a standard creationist view, and some of the Unionists don't like geological time. So there is a curious inverted dilemma there - either interpretation is going to be unacceptable ...
Will send you a private message as no need to burden the board
Comments
In Scotland, Labour are light blue, and the LDs are almost as much hard right as the Tories. Edit: though, as RP shows, containing a range of views!
https://www.politicalcompass.org/scotland2021
Which of course is the curse of inflation - the more inflation goes up the more pay people demand, Which increases inflation, and then pay demands again...
1. I’m on the wine
2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia)
3. I’m not getting much sex
4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
He must have been a strong little fcuker to hump that around.
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
One might detect a theme
Apologies @rpjs
The West doesn’t go for short range ballistic missiles, in general.
Spending power will not increase if we pay more for jobs at the bottom end and reduce in work benefits. "Make Work Pay" was the Tory slogan, but they never did - witness the appalling taper rate in UC where more work is punitively taxed.
My recent sexual diet has been meagre, but not non-existent. Ship’s biscuits
Is it? I do love a travel quiz
How does that help anyone if they are still reliant on state handouts except for people who want voters reliant on state handouts so they keep voting for parties that might up them.....ah now I get where you are coming from.
It is not against the law for @Leon to drink beer and have sex.
That fact that @Leon is having to drink wine and having to make do with meagre rations of sex with bag ladies shows his commitment to the cause.
We are all making sacrifices for Ukraine ...
It is indeed the villa where the Wannsee conference took place viewed from the lesser seen lakeside pov.
We have an unexpected couple in our extended family. A hardcore right winger of advanced years who just loves Russian culture to a middle aged conspiracy theorist who simply likes being contrary (I think); as a family we have stopped debating it. Gets too heated
Whilst in-work assistance is better than not being there at all it is appalling that so many jobs are so poorly paid. Would be far better had the government tax cuts for companies been predicated on them paying decent wages rather than our taxes being used to subsidise Asda et al and boost shareholder dividends.
I’ve always wanted to go there. In a macabre way. Just to see if it has a mood to match its history. I’m a firm believer in Sinclarian psychogeography
#JusticeForOligarchs
https://metro.co.uk/2015/01/03/is-your-name-marie-then-youre-not-going-to-like-mcvities-swedens-rich-tea-biscuit-5008328/
Tom Larkin
@TomLarkinSky
·
2h
24 is a lot less than 54, obviously.
But worth noting that in 2018 the threshold to challenge May was 48. Public letters when the VONC was triggered? About 20.
It had a screening of Veit Harlan's film of Jew Suss (made at Goebbels' behest) when I was there.
The potency of its mixture of antisemitism & sex & violence was still very shocking.
You seem to conflate what I think is going to happen with what I actually want to happen.
Still, let's discuss in 6 months time.
We'll know then who called this right -- and if I am proved wrong, I am sure you will remind me.
On the other hand Mary Poppins Returns was a bit meh.
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Did everyone, the moment that a certain plane was mentioned as being used by the enemy, guess that part of the ending?
How do we get there without those people getting payrises which in your words will lead to an inflationary spiral I quote you here "and despite deliveries still being affected by it the transport costs are way higher for no real benefit. Great for the drivers, though they are contributing to the runaway price inflation they are being hit by."
This is because the politicians have failed to keep up. Now the Supreme Court is another legislative body, knitting law from whatever they can find. Because they are the last people legislating……
The original framers wanted a living constitution - one that *changed* with the times. Through the amendment process.
Lincoln could have packed the court with a bunch of lawyers who could of re-interpreted the constitution to abolish slavery. Instead, he got the 13th Amendment passed.
i read Anthony Beevor’s Berlin on my first visit there. Made it unforgettable
It’s not a great world city but it is hypnotising. Also: gotta love a currywurst
Russia has invaded & there is a bloody war & lots of killing. There are Russians and Ukrainians being killed, probably in roughly equal measure. It is a great tragedy for both Russia and Ukraine (for which Putin bears most of the blame).
The best outcome is for Putin to be deposed and Russia to withdraw.
However, that does not seem to me remotely likely. Even if Putin is deposed, I am pretty unconvinced any successor will withdraw from the conquered territory. Putin is much more likely to be deposed because he has been ineffective in subduing Ukraine, and his successor will be tougher.
Eventually, when enough people have been killed, the two countries will stop fighting.
I want that to happen earlier rather than later. So, I think Corbyn (and NPXMP) are right. We need to think about what final negotiated settlement might actually be possible.
Ultimately, the economic effects of the war will drive everyone to the negotiating table.
And there will be a compromise, because that is how most wars end.
As to the progress of the War, Ukraine have done better than I originally thought. But they are still slowly losing territory, that they are unlikely to get back, IMO.
(As regards Welsh nationalism and Ukraine, I am just amazed at the double standards of most of pb.com. They routinely dismiss the concerns of Welsh language speakers, yet now they now regard the rights of Ukrainian language speakers as something they are willing to die for in the Donbas. Or more accurately ... others to die for while they get drunk and have sex in Georgia).
Auschwitz is of course unforgettable, but it is kind of expected?
Tuol Sleng the Khmer Rouge “torture garden” in Phnom Penh is somehow even darker in mood. The heat, the blood stains, the photos
Some of the mesoAmerican sites of human sacrifice are unspeakable. The sullen Moche adobe pyramids, crumbling into great dust. The chac mools of the Aztecs
But two obscure ones stand out. One was another site of human sacrifice, in the far north of Big island Hawaii. A sacrificial altar on a spectacular cliff top (people forget that the Polynesian/Pacific cultures could be brutally cruel). The roasting wind off the sea. the total silence except for some whirring grasses, the relentless blue of sky and ocean
At the other end, the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea. The first ever Soviet Gulag on an impossible remote sub-arctic archipelago with an incredible history of monastic settlement. The commies used the cyclopean monastery as a torture chamber, they would roll prisoners down the cliffs for fun to see if they bounced. Yet it is also holy and beautiful. So strange
For Ukraine none of us can speak. Up to them - of they go for a negotiated peace then fine. If they don't want NATO, fine. If they want pre-2014 borders, fine.
Russia is a parasite country, milking the host for cash with its provision of energy. Nerve agents in Salisbury ffs. Let's get rid.
I wonder if there was a tacit edict from Stalin, who must have known Tbilisi so well. “Don’t touch Tbilisi!”
Sadly the other lot are not.
Not least because when I visited, there was a loud party of Czech school kids presuably on a compulsory school trip, busy with their phones and their music and unconcerned with what had happened at the place.
Also, I was amazed to discover that the place -- 30 miles North of Prague -- had a German-speaking majority in the years before the Second World War.
How do you get peace out of that?
She is still has not figured out that the easiest way for Westminster to resolve their Brexit dilemma is to ignore the Unionists and enable Irish unity or federalism.
Obligatory coffee and motorway service station pic, at the very pleasant and to be recommended Aire de Chateauvilain, heading South.
Best outdoor seating, best parking, quietest setting of all the aires along the Autoroute from Northern France to Lyon.
EDIT: photo oddly on its side
TOTALLY FUCKING WEIRD AND SCARY AND HAUNTED