Liz T, La Truss, The Lady of the Moment, reminds me of Mrs Thatcher re privatisation
She kinda blundered into privatisation, it wasn't in her original plan (IIRC) but then she thought: Hold on, why can't we do this? Sell off all the publicly owned companies?
Of course she got outraged pushback. NOOO! This is what we do, everyone does this, the state owns half the economy, are you mad, etc etc
Yet Thatch persisted, these companies were privatised, the sky did not fall to pieces, and Britain prospered. And everyone copied us
We need that original thinking again: because otherwise we are fucked. Say Truss abolishes the whole Diversity Industry and saves us several billion quid. Wokesters will squeal, yet nothing will collapse, the state will be leaner, taxpayers will be richer. Proceed from there. Tackle all the sacred cows, and kill half of them
Liz Truss is properly bonkers. Dominic Cummings was right.
What can we do about it?
Hand her the nuclear button, wait until she proves she's demented (Paul Keating's description), and then assess our options. But don't talk about biological warfare, because she has committed to never ordering a lockdown no matter what. F***ing hell, who needs this woman as PM in 2022?
If it weren't so serious, there'd be amusement value in how the biggest figure to point out that Liz Truss is a nutter is Dominic Cummings, himself such a nutter. That said, Cummings was right to cite Truss's comments on Crimea as prime evidence of her being off her rocker.
BREAKING: Liz Truss says she'll cut £11B from the civil service if elected Prime Minister. She'll cut civil servants' time off from 27 to 25 days, and scrap the role of diversity officers. £8.8B will be saved by cutting the pay of those living outside London and the South East.
That’s going to help with Brexit and CoL. Go Liz!
Gotta admire the politics. Save LARGE number of billions by changing contracts (good luck with that) SCRAPPING DIVERSITY OFFICERS (which will presumably save peanuts, but get some people's juices flowing) and cutting salaries in the sticks (ha ha ha ha ha).
As a programme for government, it's a complete joke, but it's smart politics.
Cutting pay for doctors, nurses, teachers and policemen outside London doesn’t sound very politically smart to me.
It's utterly insane and I'm sure it won't happen.
But in the meantime, you give it the bodyguard of a small but politically popular scheme like Abolishing Diversity Officers.
I assume that Diversity Officers exist because legislation requiring the production of certain documents exist, and it's more efficient to have Diversity Officers do it than having it done in a sort of cross-curricular way. So the legislation wants fixing at the supply end.
Of course, it's possible that diversity officers in, say, the NHS save us money, by getting people from marginalised communities in for early diagnosis. So behind all the tiresome woke, there might be sound money at work.
No. We can't afford any of this shit any more. Get rid of it all. PURGE
The Great Liz T is Right
It's all unravelling isn't it: Boris turned out to be the most embarrassing twit in British political history; Rishi is a hapless weakling and Truss is mad, quite mad. Sir Keir just has to count the days. He can then start reversing your Brexit lunacy. Ma ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Liz Truss is properly bonkers. Dominic Cummings was right.
What can we do about it?
Hand her the nuclear button, wait until she proves she's demented (Paul Keating's description), and then assess our options. But don't talk about biological warfare, because she has committed to never ordering a lockdown no matter what. F***ing hell, who needs this woman as PM in 2022?
If it weren't so serious, there'd be amusement value in how the biggest figure to point out that Liz Truss is a nutter is Dominic Cummings, himself such a nutter. That said, Cummings was right to cite Truss's comments on Crimea as prime evidence of her being off her rocker.
I am not sure the level of debate is enhanced by labelling Lis Truss or anyone else a nutter (presumably because she thinks differently on some things to the norm)
In September, I shall host the first (and probably last) great PB wine tasting.
We shall have five rounds:
Cabernet Sauvignon, where we shall pit the US vs France and Italy
Merlot, where it will be the US vs France and Australia
Syrah/Shiraz, where it will be France vs Australia
Chardonnay, where it will be France vs the US (and I might slip an English wine in there)
and
Bubbly, where it will be France vs the UK and the US (and maybe Spain and Italy)
Good man. Count me in. And, yes, fuck the spittoons
However I am not sure of your way of breaking down the wines by grape varietal is the most interesting way of doing it. Wine is so much more than the plodding Old World procession of Merlot, Shiraz, Cab Sauv
Do it by latitude or continent. Chuck in some Moldovan and Georgian wines, some Greek, Austrian and Israeli, some Saffer and Argie (Argentinian reds are the best value in the world right now, methinks)
I don't think that I have ever had a South African or Argentinian wine that I actually liked, and I am by inclination very pro African. I had a decent Brazilian Chardonnay once, and Chilean wines are generally OK.
Well, the South Africans will insist on growing Pinotage, which is not wine. Some South African Chenin Blanc can be excellent, but modest Vouvray is cheap anyway, so it's not really a singular advantage.
South Africa is now making excellent blends. This is one with delicious popular appeal
Jane Austen said that Constantia pudding wine - a species of Muscat - was a sovereign cure for heartbreak. It is that old
As with travel, I get the feeling that PB connoisseurs who claim to know a lot about drink and travel, actually know fuck all, because they don't really drink and they don't really travel.
"I am scared of driving on the right" will always go down as my favourite phrase from a PB er who was actually opining on travel
I've managed over the last decade to finally have drunk enough beer to know what beers I like and what beers I don't. I feel quite confident when I'm choosing beers now.
I freely admit to being completely clueless about wine, though. I will enjoy drinking it from time to time, but when I'm trying to choose one I am lost. I just haven't put the time in to get good at it.
I know enough about yarn to know that I still have a lot to learn about yarn, and I've been knitting for a solid 14 years now. You really do need to spend a lot of time with something to be properly knowledgeable about it. I can accept that wine will never be one of those things for me, but some people feel the need to pretend.
BREAKING: Liz Truss says she'll cut £11B from the civil service if elected Prime Minister. She'll cut civil servants' time off from 27 to 25 days, and scrap the role of diversity officers. £8.8B will be saved by cutting the pay of those living outside London and the South East.
That’s going to help with Brexit and CoL. Go Liz!
Gotta admire the politics. Save LARGE number of billions by changing contracts (good luck with that) SCRAPPING DIVERSITY OFFICERS (which will presumably save peanuts, but get some people's juices flowing) and cutting salaries in the sticks (ha ha ha ha ha).
As a programme for government, it's a complete joke, but it's smart politics.
Cutting pay for doctors, nurses, teachers and policemen outside London doesn’t sound very politically smart to me.
It's utterly insane and I'm sure it won't happen.
But in the meantime, you give it the bodyguard of a small but politically popular scheme like Abolishing Diversity Officers.
I assume that Diversity Officers exist because legislation requiring the production of certain documents exist, and it's more efficient to have Diversity Officers do it than having it done in a sort of cross-curricular way. So the legislation wants fixing at the supply end.
Of course, it's possible that diversity officers in, say, the NHS save us money, by getting people from marginalised communities in for early diagnosis. So behind all the tiresome woke, there might be sound money at work.
You assume wrong. They all started appearing long after the relevant legislation was passed, and their primary function is to defend against Twitter dogpiles, in the event someone from the organisation does something to catch the attention of a left wing hate mob.
In September, I shall host the first (and probably last) great PB wine tasting.
We shall have five rounds:
Cabernet Sauvignon, where we shall pit the US vs France and Italy
Merlot, where it will be the US vs France and Australia
Syrah/Shiraz, where it will be France vs Australia
Chardonnay, where it will be France vs the US (and I might slip an English wine in there)
and
Bubbly, where it will be France vs the UK and the US (and maybe Spain and Italy)
Good man. Count me in. And, yes, fuck the spittoons
However I am not sure of your way of breaking down the wines by grape varietal is the most interesting way of doing it. Wine is so much more than the plodding Old World procession of Merlot, Shiraz, Cab Sauv
Do it by latitude or continent. Chuck in some Moldovan and Georgian wines, some Greek, Austrian and Israeli, some Saffer and Argie (Argentinian reds are the best value in the world right now, methinks)
I don't think that I have ever had a South African or Argentinian wine that I actually liked, and I am by inclination very pro African. I had a decent Brazilian Chardonnay once, and Chilean wines are generally OK.
Well, the South Africans will insist on growing Pinotage, which is not wine. Some South African Chenin Blanc can be excellent, but modest Vouvray is cheap anyway, so it's not really a singular advantage.
South Africa is now making excellent blends. This is one with delicious popular appeal
Jane Austen said that Constantia pudding wine - a species of Muscat - was a sovereign cure for heartbreak. It is that old
As with travel, I get the feeling that PB connoisseurs who claim to know a lot about drink and travel, actually know fuck all, because they don't really drink and they don't really travel.
"I am scared of driving on the right" will always go down as my favourite phrase from a PB er who was actually opining on travel
I've managed over the last decade to finally have drunk enough beer to know what beers I like and what beers I don't. I feel quite confident when I'm choosing beers now.
I freely admit to being completely clueless about wine, though. I will enjoy drinking it from time to time, but when I'm trying to choose one I am lost. I just haven't put the time in to get good at it.
I know enough about yarn to know that I still have a lot to learn about yarn, and I've been knitting for a solid 14 years now. You really do need to spend a lot of time with something to be properly knowledgeable about it. I can accept that wine will never be one of those things for me, but some people feel the need to pretend.
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
Which of course gives the kids at Kensington and Chelsea and Surrey comps a huge inbuilt head start over the kids at Stoke and Barnsley and Grimsby comps by default
No, because another strand of the solution - to Optimal Education System - is a very marked skewing of resource to those latter type areas.
Which is irrelevant without change in intake
What particular advantages do grammar schools offer over larger, well streamed comprehensives?
My comp, for example, had seven different math sets.
As a parent currently going through this, my motivations are: 1) Grammar schools weed out most of the kids who make your kids' lives a misery. 2) Comprehensives have a lot of more challenging kidd, and a lot of kids who will need a bit more effort to get them over 5 grade Cs territory. This will leave fewer resources and focus for my kids. 3) Locally, but I don't thi k this is uncommon: the grammar school is just nicer. Better maintained, less graffiti, fewer leaks. All entirely selfish motivations, but show me someone who makes decision their kids' education based on what will be best for other kids?
Those are excellent points: but they equally mean that the 80% of kids left behind at Secondary Moderns suffer more from the problems you identify.
Because, let us be clear, the problem is not grammar schools (which are great), but how you avoid a situation where the people left behind get a worse education.
In a large comprehensive, there will be lots of movement between the second and third deciles: a significant number of kids will drop from first set maths to second... And vice versa. That's really tough to do when the sets are at different schools. Essentially you end up ossifying kids into two groups at a very early age.
And, of course, it's ok for me. If my 10 year old fails the 11+, well I can put him in private education. But what if yours has a bad day? Or is a late developer? It's much much harder for them to climb out of the Secondary Modern into a Grammar.
Finally, there's the issue of kids who are great at one thing, but not another. I was dreadful at languages (bottom in German Tanbridge School 1987!), but excellent at maths. How do you allocate people who are great at one set of subjects, but average (or worse) at another?
Most comprehensives and academies are effectively secondary moderns in all but name, apart from the minority rated Outstanding
That's simply not true.
In my comprehensive, my top set maths was full of exactly the kids who would have been at the local grammar school (had there been grammar schools).
Might have been but the vast majority of the pupils wouldn't have been and the ethos of the school will be mainly directed towards them
I don't really understand your comment.
My comprehensive school, with an upper sixth of perhaps 60 kids, got four kids into Oxbridge in my year. And, by the way, this was a school with a very high proportion of free school meals, and where English wasn't the first language.
But we also had a number of extremely smart, extremely competitive kids (of which I was one). I can see the advantage of putting more smart, competitive kids together.
Would I have really enjoyed a Grammar school?
Yep.
But my school also streamed extremely aggressively. I'm not sure my GCSE maths class would have been any more advanced. Pretty much the entire top set maths did A Level maths. And other than me, pretty much all got As at A Level.
The question is: how much do grammar schools improve the educational outcomes of the top 20%? And do they do so at the expense of the rest?
How many of those who entered the school at 11 though got good GCSE passes? 4 kids into Oxbridge, while better than most comps, is still less than 10% even of the upper sixth. Many top grammars would get more into Oxbridge than that
I was in the same school year as @rcs1000 and went to a top top Kent grammar school. While I don’t remember the exact number, our Oxbridge entrances were comparable to that, and I agree with his observations about late developers. My brother failed the 11 plus but within a couple of years was clearly streets ahead of some of those who’d made it into my school. My parents could afford to send one of us to private school (they’d have struggled with two) but it shouldn’t have been necessary.
Most grammars also have entry at 13 and 16 and they offer more choice in the state sector so fewer parents have to go private
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
You have previously posted that you went to school in Kent and you went private and your sister went to the Grammar school. Did you fail the 11 plus (like me) and if so how would you have felt about being dumped in a secondary modern if your parents could not afford a private school.
No I passed the 11 plus, just my sister wanted to go to the grammar school rather than the girls private school she was offered so went at 11 while I stayed at my prep school as I wanted to go to Tonbridge ultimately and did common entrance at 13. We were both given the choice
And a child with poor parents who fails the 11 plus gets no choice and is dumped at 11
Which is still better than a bright child from a poor area being denied the chance of a top quality state school ie a grammar
No it isn't. You are dumping 75% of the population. You are also screwing with the lives of those who having been tutored for the Grammar and can't cope. Saw lots of them when I transferred to the Grammar. And you aren't catering for kids who are gifted in certain areas but poor in others. And as has been stated over and over again most Grammars are full of tutored middle class kids. Few working class kids get through contrary to your assumption. As mentioned before nobody got into the Grammar from my very large lower class village at 11. Lots did at 16. Doesn't that rather prove the point. We didn't all of a sudden become cleverer. The school was stuffed with kids from the areas with big detached houses.
No you aren't. That 75% are not going to see much change in the jobs they do whether at a comp or secondary modern.
A working class child who gets into a grammar though has more of a chance of a top university and professional job than in a comp, life changing. As I posted more disadvantaged children get into top universities and top jobs in areas with grammar schools than without
What arrogance. I went to a Secondary Modern and did a degree in Mathematics at Manchester University in the early 70s. Many of the kids I went to school with transferred to the Grammar school at 16. Lots who went to the Grammar school at 11 left the Grammar school with only a few O levels. The changes between 11 and 16 are huge and you arrogantly dump them at 11.
I mean just compare the two of us. You passed the 11 plus and went to a private school. I failed the 11 plus and went to a Secondary Modern, yet how do we compare academically? But you would have written me off at 11.
So what, as you say many of your contemporaries transferred to the grammar at 16 as could you most likely if you had been bothered.
The fact you did well at a secondary modern anyway just proves the point, selection at 11 does not consign failures automatically to the scrapheap. However getting into a grammar at 11, 13 or 16 is a huge boost up, especially for those from deprived working class backgrounds
You obviously aren't following my posts. I did transfer to the Grammar and I was fast tracked taking A levels after a year. I was better at maths than those at the Grammar school. Just shows what a crap system the 11 plus is and it damages so many. For instances:
a) many who passed the 11 plus then dropped out
b) many who failed but transferred at 16, missed out on stuff. In the 60s it meant I could not do languages or literature in the school I was in
c) many who did well in their exams at the secondary modern were conditioned to leave and join a local firm rather than carry on with their education. They deserved better,
And you still continue with this tripe of lower class people getting into Grammars. For every one that does tens of middle class kids are tutored through. You have never responded to why nobody got to the Grammar school from the poorish area I lived in at 11 but lots of us did at 16 and in my case I was better than the Grammar school pupils.
So you ended up at a grammar school anyway which helped get you into Manchester University as a result. So even more evidence your claim that the 11 plus consigns those who fail it forever to the scrapheap is rubbish.
You even got into a grammar school yourself at 16 and hence to a top university.
Nowadays high schools in grammar school areas all do languages and literature too and follow the National Curriculum, so that argument is also redundant.
Who cares if Middle Class pupils go to grammars, they help the ethos of the school, it is the working class pupils who get into them who still see their lives transformed, including at 16 like you helping ensure you now have the ego of a self professed Maths genius to match!
Liz T, La Truss, The Lady of the Moment, reminds me of Mrs Thatcher re privatisation
She kinda blundered into privatisation, it wasn't in her original plan (IIRC) but then she thought: Hold on, why can't we do this? Sell off all the publicly owned companies?
Of course she got outraged pushback. NOOO! This is what we do, everyone does this, the state owns half the economy, are you mad, etc etc
Yet Thatch persisted, these companies were privatised, the sky did not fall to pieces, and Britain prospered. And everyone copied us
We need that original thinking again: because otherwise we are fucked. Say Truss abolishes the whole Diversity Industry and saves us several billion quid. Wokesters will squeal, yet nothing will collapse, the state will be leaner, taxpayers will be richer. Proceed from there. Tackle all the sacred cows, and kill half of them
Privatisation was planned before Thatcher got to power. See the Ridley Plan:
In September, I shall host the first (and probably last) great PB wine tasting.
We shall have five rounds:
Cabernet Sauvignon, where we shall pit the US vs France and Italy
Merlot, where it will be the US vs France and Australia
Syrah/Shiraz, where it will be France vs Australia
Chardonnay, where it will be France vs the US (and I might slip an English wine in there)
and
Bubbly, where it will be France vs the UK and the US (and maybe Spain and Italy)
Good man. Count me in. And, yes, fuck the spittoons
However I am not sure of your way of breaking down the wines by grape varietal is the most interesting way of doing it. Wine is so much more than the plodding Old World procession of Merlot, Shiraz, Cab Sauv
Do it by latitude or continent. Chuck in some Moldovan and Georgian wines, some Greek, Austrian and Israeli, some Saffer and Argie (Argentinian reds are the best value in the world right now, methinks)
I don't think that I have ever had a South African or Argentinian wine that I actually liked, and I am by inclination very pro African. I had a decent Brazilian Chardonnay once, and Chilean wines are generally OK.
Well, the South Africans will insist on growing Pinotage, which is not wine. Some South African Chenin Blanc can be excellent, but modest Vouvray is cheap anyway, so it's not really a singular advantage.
South Africa is now making excellent blends. This is one with delicious popular appeal
Jane Austen said that Constantia pudding wine - a species of Muscat - was a sovereign cure for heartbreak. It is that old
As with travel, I get the feeling that PB connoisseurs who claim to know a lot about drink and travel, actually know fuck all, because they don't really drink and they don't really travel.
"I am scared of driving on the right" will always go down as my favourite phrase from a PB er who was actually opining on travel
I've managed over the last decade to finally have drunk enough beer to know what beers I like and what beers I don't. I feel quite confident when I'm choosing beers now.
I freely admit to being completely clueless about wine, though. I will enjoy drinking it from time to time, but when I'm trying to choose one I am lost. I just haven't put the time in to get good at it.
I know enough about yarn to know that I still have a lot to learn about yarn, and I've been knitting for a solid 14 years now. You really do need to spend a lot of time with something to be properly knowledgeable about it. I can accept that wine will never be one of those things for me, but some people feel the need to pretend.
Almost ditto. I think I know about beer. I enjoy wine, but know little about it and don't spend lots of money on it.
So Truss has decided to scapegoat the civil service . Given most of the public don’t actually know what they do this should be an easy piece of red meat to throw to the baying mob and the DM readers !
For her next scapegoat perhaps she could bring back public humiliation of those on benefits , these will be portrayed as horrible fraudulent scroungers. I think it’s pretty clear what a Truss premiership will look like .
Just a constant war against something or someone , horrible divisive politics in an effort to deflect from a litany of broken pledges made during this leadership campaign .
We need that original thinking again: because otherwise we are fucked. Say Truss abolishes the whole Diversity Industry and saves us several billion quid. Wokesters will squeal, yet nothing will collapse, the state will be leaner, taxpayers will be richer. Proceed from there. Tackle all the sacred cows, and kill half of them
We would need quite a lot of high wage inflation before sacking diversity officers would save us a billion quid.
But if it keeps you happy and allows you to avoid having the big problems then it's priceless I suppose.
In September, I shall host the first (and probably last) great PB wine tasting.
We shall have five rounds:
Cabernet Sauvignon, where we shall pit the US vs France and Italy
Merlot, where it will be the US vs France and Australia
Syrah/Shiraz, where it will be France vs Australia
Chardonnay, where it will be France vs the US (and I might slip an English wine in there)
and
Bubbly, where it will be France vs the UK and the US (and maybe Spain and Italy)
Good man. Count me in. And, yes, fuck the spittoons
However I am not sure of your way of breaking down the wines by grape varietal is the most interesting way of doing it. Wine is so much more than the plodding Old World procession of Merlot, Shiraz, Cab Sauv
Do it by latitude or continent. Chuck in some Moldovan and Georgian wines, some Greek, Austrian and Israeli, some Saffer and Argie (Argentinian reds are the best value in the world right now, methinks)
I don't think that I have ever had a South African or Argentinian wine that I actually liked, and I am by inclination very pro African. I had a decent Brazilian Chardonnay once, and Chilean wines are generally OK.
Well, the South Africans will insist on growing Pinotage, which is not wine. Some South African Chenin Blanc can be excellent, but modest Vouvray is cheap anyway, so it's not really a singular advantage.
South Africa is now making excellent blends. This is one with delicious popular appeal
Jane Austen said that Constantia pudding wine - a species of Muscat - was a sovereign cure for heartbreak. It is that old
As with travel, I get the feeling that PB connoisseurs who claim to know a lot about drink and travel, actually know fuck all, because they don't really drink and they don't really travel.
"I am scared of driving on the right" will always go down as my favourite phrase from a PB er who was actually opining on travel
I've managed over the last decade to finally have drunk enough beer to know what beers I like and what beers I don't. I feel quite confident when I'm choosing beers now.
I freely admit to being completely clueless about wine, though. I will enjoy drinking it from time to time, but when I'm trying to choose one I am lost. I just haven't put the time in to get good at it.
I know enough about yarn to know that I still have a lot to learn about yarn, and I've been knitting for a solid 14 years now. You really do need to spend a lot of time with something to be properly knowledgeable about it. I can accept that wine will never be one of those things for me, but some people feel the need to pretend.
The main thing about wine is that everything, apart from drinking what you like, is nonsense.
Liz T, La Truss, The Lady of the Moment, reminds me of Mrs Thatcher re privatisation
She kinda blundered into privatisation, it wasn't in her original plan (IIRC) but then she thought: Hold on, why can't we do this? Sell off all the publicly owned companies?
Of course she got outraged pushback. NOOO! This is what we do, everyone does this, the state owns half the economy, are you mad, etc etc
Yet Thatch persisted, these companies were privatised, the sky did not fall to pieces, and Britain prospered. And everyone copied us
We need that original thinking again: because otherwise we are fucked. Say Truss abolishes the whole Diversity Industry and saves us several billion quid. Wokesters will squeal, yet nothing will collapse, the state will be leaner, taxpayers will be richer. Proceed from there. Tackle all the sacred cows, and kill half of them
Privatisation was planned before Thatcher got to power. See the Ridley Plan:
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
I do not see the justification. Liz T is right
Supply and demand.
Loads of people want to be PM- partly for the cash, but mostly for all the other perks, fame and opportunities to snub women footballers.
Not enough people want to do some other jobs in the public sector, and some of them require actual knowledge and competence.
Parkinson's Law suggests that if you get the pay, conditions and wording of the advert right, excatly one person will apply for any given vacancy, and they should be appointed forthwith. On that basis, we're clearly paying Prime Ministers far too much.
On that basis, we are paying all politicians way too much.
How many prospective Parliamentary candidates are then when a winnable seat (for whatever party) becomes vacant?
The salary needs reducing to a minimum wage job (commensurate with a typical MP's ability). And there will still be plenty of people applying to become MPs.
More seriously, we know that people differ physically, in their responses to different tastes and smells. (And our different experiences add another layer of differences.) So I am not sure to what extent we can compare our individual reactions to different wines.
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
I do not see the justification. Liz T is right
Supply and demand.
Loads of people want to be PM- partly for the cash, but mostly for all the other perks, fame and opportunities to snub women footballers.
Not enough people want to do some other jobs in the public sector, and some of them require actual knowledge and competence.
Parkinson's Law suggests that if you get the pay, conditions and wording of the advert right, excatly one person will apply for any given vacancy, and they should be appointed forthwith. On that basis, we're clearly paying Prime Ministers far too much.
On that basis, we are paying all politicians way too much.
How many prospective Parliamentary candidates are then when a winnable seat (for whatever party) becomes vacant?
The salary needs reducing to a minimum wage job (commensurate with a typical MP's ability). And there will still be plenty of people applying to become MPs.
Mainly super rich Rees Mogg clones on the Tory side and militant socialist, union backed Dave Nellist clones on the Labour side
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
I do not see the justification. Liz T is right
Supply and demand.
Loads of people want to be PM- partly for the cash, but mostly for all the other perks, fame and opportunities to snub women footballers.
Not enough people want to do some other jobs in the public sector, and some of them require actual knowledge and competence.
Parkinson's Law suggests that if you get the pay, conditions and wording of the advert right, excatly one person will apply for any given vacancy, and they should be appointed forthwith. On that basis, we're clearly paying Prime Ministers far too much.
On that basis, we are paying all politicians way too much.
How many prospective Parliamentary candidates are then when a winnable seat (for whatever party) becomes vacant?
The salary needs reducing to a minimum wage job (commensurate with a typical MP's ability). And there will still be plenty of people applying to become MPs.
Mainly super rich Rees Mogg clones on the Tory side and militant socialist, union backed Dave Nellist clones on the Labour side
My recollection is that Dave Nellist did take an average worker's wage when he was an MP for Coventry SE.
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
Which of course gives the kids at Kensington and Chelsea and Surrey comps a huge inbuilt head start over the kids at Stoke and Barnsley and Grimsby comps by default
No, because another strand of the solution - to Optimal Education System - is a very marked skewing of resource to those latter type areas.
Which is irrelevant without change in intake
What particular advantages do grammar schools offer over larger, well streamed comprehensives?
My comp, for example, had seven different math sets.
As a parent currently going through this, my motivations are: 1) Grammar schools weed out most of the kids who make your kids' lives a misery. 2) Comprehensives have a lot of more challenging kidd, and a lot of kids who will need a bit more effort to get them over 5 grade Cs territory. This will leave fewer resources and focus for my kids. 3) Locally, but I don't thi k this is uncommon: the grammar school is just nicer. Better maintained, less graffiti, fewer leaks. All entirely selfish motivations, but show me someone who makes decision their kids' education based on what will be best for other kids?
Those are excellent points: but they equally mean that the 80% of kids left behind at Secondary Moderns suffer more from the problems you identify.
Because, let us be clear, the problem is not grammar schools (which are great), but how you avoid a situation where the people left behind get a worse education.
In a large comprehensive, there will be lots of movement between the second and third deciles: a significant number of kids will drop from first set maths to second... And vice versa. That's really tough to do when the sets are at different schools. Essentially you end up ossifying kids into two groups at a very early age.
And, of course, it's ok for me. If my 10 year old fails the 11+, well I can put him in private education. But what if yours has a bad day? Or is a late developer? It's much much harder for them to climb out of the Secondary Modern into a Grammar.
Finally, there's the issue of kids who are great at one thing, but not another. I was dreadful at languages (bottom in German Tanbridge School 1987!), but excellent at maths. How do you allocate people who are great at one set of subjects, but average (or worse) at another?
Most comprehensives and academies are effectively secondary moderns in all but name, apart from the minority rated Outstanding
That's simply not true.
In my comprehensive, my top set maths was full of exactly the kids who would have been at the local grammar school (had there been grammar schools).
Might have been but the vast majority of the pupils wouldn't have been and the ethos of the school will be mainly directed towards them
I don't really understand your comment.
My comprehensive school, with an upper sixth of perhaps 60 kids, got four kids into Oxbridge in my year. And, by the way, this was a school with a very high proportion of free school meals, and where English wasn't the first language.
But we also had a number of extremely smart, extremely competitive kids (of which I was one). I can see the advantage of putting more smart, competitive kids together.
Would I have really enjoyed a Grammar school?
Yep.
But my school also streamed extremely aggressively. I'm not sure my GCSE maths class would have been any more advanced. Pretty much the entire top set maths did A Level maths. And other than me, pretty much all got As at A Level.
The question is: how much do grammar schools improve the educational outcomes of the top 20%? And do they do so at the expense of the rest?
How many of those who entered the school at 11 though got good GCSE passes? 4 kids into Oxbridge, while better than most comps, is still less than 10% even of the upper sixth. Many top grammars would get more into Oxbridge than that
I was in the same school year as @rcs1000 and went to a top top Kent grammar school. While I don’t remember the exact number, our Oxbridge entrances were comparable to that, and I agree with his observations about late developers. My brother failed the 11 plus but within a couple of years was clearly streets ahead of some of those who’d made it into my school. My parents could afford to send one of us to private school (they’d have struggled with two) but it shouldn’t have been necessary.
Most grammars also have entry at 13 and 16 and they offer more choice in the state sector so fewer parents have to go private
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
You have previously posted that you went to school in Kent and you went private and your sister went to the Grammar school. Did you fail the 11 plus (like me) and if so how would you have felt about being dumped in a secondary modern if your parents could not afford a private school.
No I passed the 11 plus, just my sister wanted to go to the grammar school rather than the girls private school she was offered so went at 11 while I stayed at my prep school as I wanted to go to Tonbridge ultimately and did common entrance at 13. We were both given the choice
And a child with poor parents who fails the 11 plus gets no choice and is dumped at 11
Which is still better than a bright child from a poor area being denied the chance of a top quality state school ie a grammar
No it isn't. You are dumping 75% of the population. You are also screwing with the lives of those who having been tutored for the Grammar and can't cope. Saw lots of them when I transferred to the Grammar. And you aren't catering for kids who are gifted in certain areas but poor in others. And as has been stated over and over again most Grammars are full of tutored middle class kids. Few working class kids get through contrary to your assumption. As mentioned before nobody got into the Grammar from my very large lower class village at 11. Lots did at 16. Doesn't that rather prove the point. We didn't all of a sudden become cleverer. The school was stuffed with kids from the areas with big detached houses.
No you aren't. That 75% are not going to see much change in the jobs they do whether at a comp or secondary modern.
A working class child who gets into a grammar though has more of a chance of a top university and professional job than in a comp, life changing. As I posted more disadvantaged children get into top universities and top jobs in areas with grammar schools than without
What arrogance. I went to a Secondary Modern and did a degree in Mathematics at Manchester University in the early 70s. Many of the kids I went to school with transferred to the Grammar school at 16. Lots who went to the Grammar school at 11 left the Grammar school with only a few O levels. The changes between 11 and 16 are huge and you arrogantly dump them at 11.
I mean just compare the two of us. You passed the 11 plus and went to a private school. I failed the 11 plus and went to a Secondary Modern, yet how do we compare academically? But you would have written me off at 11.
So what, as you say many of your contemporaries transferred to the grammar at 16 as could you most likely if you had been bothered.
The fact you did well at a secondary modern anyway just proves the point, selection at 11 does not consign failures automatically to the scrapheap. However getting into a grammar at 11, 13 or 16 is a huge boost up, especially for those from deprived working class backgrounds
You obviously aren't following my posts. I did transfer to the Grammar and I was fast tracked taking A levels after a year. I was better at maths than those at the Grammar school. Just shows what a crap system the 11 plus is and it damages so many. For instances:
a) many who passed the 11 plus then dropped out
b) many who failed but transferred at 16, missed out on stuff. In the 60s it meant I could not do languages or literature in the school I was in
c) many who did well in their exams at the secondary modern were conditioned to leave and join a local firm rather than carry on with their education. They deserved better,
And you still continue with this tripe of lower class people getting into Grammars. For every one that does tens of middle class kids are tutored through. You have never responded to why nobody got to the Grammar school from the poorish area I lived in at 11 but lots of us did at 16 and in my case I was better than the Grammar school pupils.
So you ended up at a grammar school anyway which helped get you into Manchester University as a result. So even more evidence your claim that the 11 plus consigns those who fail it forever to the scrapheap is rubbish.
You even got into a grammar school yourself at 16 and hence to a top university.
Nowadays high schools in grammar school areas all do languages and literature too and follow the National Curriculum, so that argument is also redundant.
Who cares if Middle Class pupils go to grammars, they help the ethos of the school, it is the working class pupils who get into them who still see their lives transformed, including at 16 like you helping ensure you now have the ego of a self professed Maths genius to match!
I see you completely ignored all the points again. And for the third time failed to address a specific question asked. And because some escape the system it doesn't mean lots are not lost to it as per my examples so that response is illogical and does not prove your point.
Re being a maths genius, sadly I am not and there are several here who I'm sure would run circles around me, although I can appreciate why you might think so having shown daily your complete inability to understand the most basic elements of logic and statistics.
After the drone strike on al-Zawahiri news, I immediately thought we would deny that we had any help from inside his organization. In hopes, of course, of spreading distrust within al-Qaida.
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
Which of course gives the kids at Kensington and Chelsea and Surrey comps a huge inbuilt head start over the kids at Stoke and Barnsley and Grimsby comps by default
No, because another strand of the solution - to Optimal Education System - is a very marked skewing of resource to those latter type areas.
Which is irrelevant without change in intake
What particular advantages do grammar schools offer over larger, well streamed comprehensives?
My comp, for example, had seven different math sets.
As a parent currently going through this, my motivations are: 1) Grammar schools weed out most of the kids who make your kids' lives a misery. 2) Comprehensives have a lot of more challenging kidd, and a lot of kids who will need a bit more effort to get them over 5 grade Cs territory. This will leave fewer resources and focus for my kids. 3) Locally, but I don't thi k this is uncommon: the grammar school is just nicer. Better maintained, less graffiti, fewer leaks. All entirely selfish motivations, but show me someone who makes decision their kids' education based on what will be best for other kids?
Those are excellent points: but they equally mean that the 80% of kids left behind at Secondary Moderns suffer more from the problems you identify.
Because, let us be clear, the problem is not grammar schools (which are great), but how you avoid a situation where the people left behind get a worse education.
In a large comprehensive, there will be lots of movement between the second and third deciles: a significant number of kids will drop from first set maths to second... And vice versa. That's really tough to do when the sets are at different schools. Essentially you end up ossifying kids into two groups at a very early age.
And, of course, it's ok for me. If my 10 year old fails the 11+, well I can put him in private education. But what if yours has a bad day? Or is a late developer? It's much much harder for them to climb out of the Secondary Modern into a Grammar.
Finally, there's the issue of kids who are great at one thing, but not another. I was dreadful at languages (bottom in German Tanbridge School 1987!), but excellent at maths. How do you allocate people who are great at one set of subjects, but average (or worse) at another?
Most comprehensives and academies are effectively secondary moderns in all but name, apart from the minority rated Outstanding
That's simply not true.
In my comprehensive, my top set maths was full of exactly the kids who would have been at the local grammar school (had there been grammar schools).
Might have been but the vast majority of the pupils wouldn't have been and the ethos of the school will be mainly directed towards them
I don't really understand your comment.
My comprehensive school, with an upper sixth of perhaps 60 kids, got four kids into Oxbridge in my year. And, by the way, this was a school with a very high proportion of free school meals, and where English wasn't the first language.
But we also had a number of extremely smart, extremely competitive kids (of which I was one). I can see the advantage of putting more smart, competitive kids together.
Would I have really enjoyed a Grammar school?
Yep.
But my school also streamed extremely aggressively. I'm not sure my GCSE maths class would have been any more advanced. Pretty much the entire top set maths did A Level maths. And other than me, pretty much all got As at A Level.
The question is: how much do grammar schools improve the educational outcomes of the top 20%? And do they do so at the expense of the rest?
How many of those who entered the school at 11 though got good GCSE passes? 4 kids into Oxbridge, while better than most comps, is still less than 10% even of the upper sixth. Many top grammars would get more into Oxbridge than that
I was in the same school year as @rcs1000 and went to a top top Kent grammar school. While I don’t remember the exact number, our Oxbridge entrances were comparable to that, and I agree with his observations about late developers. My brother failed the 11 plus but within a couple of years was clearly streets ahead of some of those who’d made it into my school. My parents could afford to send one of us to private school (they’d have struggled with two) but it shouldn’t have been necessary.
Most grammars also have entry at 13 and 16 and they offer more choice in the state sector so fewer parents have to go private
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
You have previously posted that you went to school in Kent and you went private and your sister went to the Grammar school. Did you fail the 11 plus (like me) and if so how would you have felt about being dumped in a secondary modern if your parents could not afford a private school.
No I passed the 11 plus, just my sister wanted to go to the grammar school rather than the girls private school she was offered so went at 11 while I stayed at my prep school as I wanted to go to Tonbridge ultimately and did common entrance at 13. We were both given the choice
And a child with poor parents who fails the 11 plus gets no choice and is dumped at 11
Which is still better than a bright child from a poor area being denied the chance of a top quality state school ie a grammar
No it isn't. You are dumping 75% of the population. You are also screwing with the lives of those who having been tutored for the Grammar and can't cope. Saw lots of them when I transferred to the Grammar. And you aren't catering for kids who are gifted in certain areas but poor in others. And as has been stated over and over again most Grammars are full of tutored middle class kids. Few working class kids get through contrary to your assumption. As mentioned before nobody got into the Grammar from my very large lower class village at 11. Lots did at 16. Doesn't that rather prove the point. We didn't all of a sudden become cleverer. The school was stuffed with kids from the areas with big detached houses.
No you aren't. That 75% are not going to see much change in the jobs they do whether at a comp or secondary modern.
A working class child who gets into a grammar though has more of a chance of a top university and professional job than in a comp, life changing. As I posted more disadvantaged children get into top universities and top jobs in areas with grammar schools than without
What arrogance. I went to a Secondary Modern and did a degree in Mathematics at Manchester University in the early 70s. Many of the kids I went to school with transferred to the Grammar school at 16. Lots who went to the Grammar school at 11 left the Grammar school with only a few O levels. The changes between 11 and 16 are huge and you arrogantly dump them at 11.
I mean just compare the two of us. You passed the 11 plus and went to a private school. I failed the 11 plus and went to a Secondary Modern, yet how do we compare academically? But you would have written me off at 11.
So what, as you say many of your contemporaries transferred to the grammar at 16 as could you most likely if you had been bothered.
The fact you did well at a secondary modern anyway just proves the point, selection at 11 does not consign failures automatically to the scrapheap. However getting into a grammar at 11, 13 or 16 is a huge boost up, especially for those from deprived working class backgrounds
You obviously aren't following my posts. I did transfer to the Grammar and I was fast tracked taking A levels after a year. I was better at maths than those at the Grammar school. Just shows what a crap system the 11 plus is and it damages so many. For instances:
a) many who passed the 11 plus then dropped out
b) many who failed but transferred at 16, missed out on stuff. In the 60s it meant I could not do languages or literature in the school I was in
c) many who did well in their exams at the secondary modern were conditioned to leave and join a local firm rather than carry on with their education. They deserved better,
And you still continue with this tripe of lower class people getting into Grammars. For every one that does tens of middle class kids are tutored through. You have never responded to why nobody got to the Grammar school from the poorish area I lived in at 11 but lots of us did at 16 and in my case I was better than the Grammar school pupils.
So you ended up at a grammar school anyway which helped get you into Manchester University as a result. So even more evidence your claim that the 11 plus consigns those who fail it forever to the scrapheap is rubbish.
You even got into a grammar school yourself at 16 and hence to a top university.
Nowadays high schools in grammar school areas all do languages and literature too and follow the National Curriculum, so that argument is also redundant.
Who cares if Middle Class pupils go to grammars, they help the ethos of the school, it is the working class pupils who get into them who still see their lives transformed, including at 16 like you helping ensure you now have the ego of a self professed Maths genius to match!
I see you completely ignored all the points again. And for the third time failed to address a specific question asked. And because some escape the system it doesn't mean lots are not lost to it as per my examples so that response is illogical and does not prove your point.
Re being a maths genius, sadly I am not and there are several here who I'm sure would run circles around me, although I can appreciate why you might think so having shown daily your complete inability to understand the most basic elements of logic and statistics.
And a patronising final paragraph to match from the grammar school educated kjh, who got to Manchester University from that grammar school
In September, I shall host the first (and probably last) great PB wine tasting.
We shall have five rounds:
Cabernet Sauvignon, where we shall pit the US vs France and Italy
Merlot, where it will be the US vs France and Australia
Syrah/Shiraz, where it will be France vs Australia
Chardonnay, where it will be France vs the US (and I might slip an English wine in there)
and
Bubbly, where it will be France vs the UK and the US (and maybe Spain and Italy)
Good man. Count me in. And, yes, fuck the spittoons
However I am not sure of your way of breaking down the wines by grape varietal is the most interesting way of doing it. Wine is so much more than the plodding Old World procession of Merlot, Shiraz, Cab Sauv
Do it by latitude or continent. Chuck in some Moldovan and Georgian wines, some Greek, Austrian and Israeli, some Saffer and Argie (Argentinian reds are the best value in the world right now, methinks)
I don't think that I have ever had a South African or Argentinian wine that I actually liked, and I am by inclination very pro African. I had a decent Brazilian Chardonnay once, and Chilean wines are generally OK.
Well, the South Africans will insist on growing Pinotage, which is not wine. Some South African Chenin Blanc can be excellent, but modest Vouvray is cheap anyway, so it's not really a singular advantage.
South Africa is now making excellent blends. This is one with delicious popular appeal
Jane Austen said that Constantia pudding wine - a species of Muscat - was a sovereign cure for heartbreak. It is that old
As with travel, I get the feeling that PB connoisseurs who claim to know a lot about drink and travel, actually know fuck all, because they don't really drink and they don't really travel.
"I am scared of driving on the right" will always go down as my favourite phrase from a PB er who was actually opining on travel
I've managed over the last decade to finally have drunk enough beer to know what beers I like and what beers I don't. I feel quite confident when I'm choosing beers now.
I freely admit to being completely clueless about wine, though. I will enjoy drinking it from time to time, but when I'm trying to choose one I am lost. I just haven't put the time in to get good at it.
I know enough about yarn to know that I still have a lot to learn about yarn, and I've been knitting for a solid 14 years now. You really do need to spend a lot of time with something to be properly knowledgeable about it. I can accept that wine will never be one of those things for me, but some people feel the need to pretend.
I’m happy to admit I never had a great palate, and since having Covid at the end of last year, it’s utterly fncked. I know the few things I still enjoy, and anything more is, sadly, a waste of effort.
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
I do not see the justification. Liz T is right
Supply and demand.
Loads of people want to be PM- partly for the cash, but mostly for all the other perks, fame and opportunities to snub women footballers.
Not enough people want to do some other jobs in the public sector, and some of them require actual knowledge and competence.
Parkinson's Law suggests that if you get the pay, conditions and wording of the advert right, excatly one person will apply for any given vacancy, and they should be appointed forthwith. On that basis, we're clearly paying Prime Ministers far too much.
On that basis, we are paying all politicians way too much.
How many prospective Parliamentary candidates are then when a winnable seat (for whatever party) becomes vacant?
The salary needs reducing to a minimum wage job (commensurate with a typical MP's ability). And there will still be plenty of people applying to become MPs.
Mainly super rich Rees Mogg clones on the Tory side and militant socialist, union backed Dave Nellist clones on the Labour side
My recollection is that Dave Nellist did take an average worker's wage when he was an MP for Coventry SE.
An honest man -- no place for him in the HoC.
Yes but he is the type who would put his socialist principles above a significant wage, most wouldn't. You can also admire his principle without wanting him to have any say in running the country.
If MPs were only paid minimum wage as I said you would get hard left socialist MPs like Nellist and super rich diehard Thatcherite MPs like Rees Mogg as the norm for whom ideology is all
Now that Ayman Al Zawahiri, Al Qaeda top brass, has reportedly been killed by a US strike in Kabul is there a betting market on who is next boss? Stories have it Saif Al Adel is your man. Proper military figure and possibly also in Afghanistan at this point.
The more significant point is that Zawahiri was there at all partaking of Taliban hospitality. He was, after the heady days of Bin Laden, rather less of an action hero. Adel, if he isnt dead along with him, is liable to be rather more on it if he takes over.
gabyhinsliff @gabyhinsliff · 8h if i was the Labour party i'd be enjoying the Tory leadership contest a bit less, & worrying a bit more about falling into the same trap as Sunak, ie becoming the 'actually it's a bit more complicated than that' candidate up against Liz Truss.
Does anyone know what was the most liked comment post in PB history?
Oh, that might have been one of mine. I posted the following passage from Nineteen Eighty Four, but spoofed it to be about some hapless ministerial underling whose career Boris had that day obliterated. Apparently the likes it received were unprecedented.
Syme had vanished. A morning came, and he was missing from work: a few thoughtless people commented on his absence. On the next day nobody mentioned him. On the third day Winston went into the vestibule of the Records Department to look at the notice-board. One of the notices carried a printed list of the members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had been one. It looked almost exactly as it had looked before—nothing had been crossed out—but it was one name shorter. It was enough. Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed.
I'm starting to think Truss could beat a wooden, directionless Starmer in 2024.
Just might.
The economy is probably going to be so bad that it seems very unlikely but...
Lots of press over last few days mentioning "don't underestimate her". I am wondering whether I have fallen into that trap as I posted on here loads of time that Truss would be a disaster.
More seriously, we know that people differ physically, in their responses to different tastes and smells. (And our different experiences add another layer of differences.) So I am not sure to what extent we can compare our individual reactions to different wines.
But have fun trying, anyway.
This is like saying we can't compare works of art, in fact it comes close to denying any common ground as humans at all
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
I do not see the justification. Liz T is right
Supply and demand.
Loads of people want to be PM- partly for the cash, but mostly for all the other perks, fame and opportunities to snub women footballers.
Not enough people want to do some other jobs in the public sector, and some of them require actual knowledge and competence.
Parkinson's Law suggests that if you get the pay, conditions and wording of the advert right, excatly one person will apply for any given vacancy, and they should be appointed forthwith. On that basis, we're clearly paying Prime Ministers far too much.
On that basis, we are paying all politicians way too much.
How many prospective Parliamentary candidates are then when a winnable seat (for whatever party) becomes vacant?
The salary needs reducing to a minimum wage job (commensurate with a typical MP's ability). And there will still be plenty of people applying to become MPs.
Mainly super rich Rees Mogg clones on the Tory side and militant socialist, union backed Dave Nellist clones on the Labour side
I think super rich Sunak clones would be more representative on the Tory side anyway.
gabyhinsliff @gabyhinsliff · 8h if i was the Labour party i'd be enjoying the Tory leadership contest a bit less, & worrying a bit more about falling into the same trap as Sunak, ie becoming the 'actually it's a bit more complicated than that' candidate up against Liz Truss.
Fair to say I havent been paying too much attention to the leadership contest but I did pick up a bit of the hustings on the TV this evening and, christ, Truss is direct for a politician.
gabyhinsliff @gabyhinsliff · 8h if i was the Labour party i'd be enjoying the Tory leadership contest a bit less, & worrying a bit more about falling into the same trap as Sunak, ie becoming the 'actually it's a bit more complicated than that' candidate up against Liz Truss.
Well yes. Truss is continuity Boris in that regard. The difference is that Boris probably knew it was just a rhetorical device. With Truss I think she genuine believes that the world really is that simple. (Matthew Parris reported that Tory MPs said the same about IDS when he was leader.) Hmm.
I did a damn stupid thing this weekend so really haven't been on PB much but have we covered this?
Liz Truss is now only five points ahead of Rishi Sunak in the race to succeed Boris Johnson, private polling carried out for the foreign secretary’s campaign suggests.
The survey, which concluded early last week, has support for Truss on 48 per cent compared with 43 per cent for the former chancellor, and 9 per cent of members who were questioned undecided.
The poll is in contrast to the last YouGov survey carried out at the end of the knockout stages that suggested Truss had a 24-point lead over Sunak.
Sources in the Sunak campaign claimed the shift reflected the feedback they had been getting on the ground suggesting that the race was much closer than had previously been thought.
“It really hasn’t felt to us like Liz was doing as well as the polls have been suggesting. Wherever he goes he is getting really good feedback and an awful lot of people are still making up their minds.
“This doesn’t feel like a re-run of 2019 [when Boris Johnson was convincingly ahead of Jeremy Hunt]. Liz’s support feels very soft.”
The polling was carried out by the Italian data and public affairs firm Techne and asked Tory members their views on both candidates as well as their policy plans.
Sources in the Truss camp said it had not been commissioned by them but confirmed it had been shared with the campaign.
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
I do not see the justification. Liz T is right
Why does anyone in the private sector?
A private company can be as wasteful as it wants.
Why?
because its only wasting the money of people who CHOSE to invest. Public sector wastes money of people who have no choice. Private sector companies have to make a living or they go bust....public sector doesn't need to make money as it can just ask for more tax payer funding.
imo there are fundamental flaws in both the public and private sector in terms of optimum societal gain. I have worked in both and recognise fully the flaws already stated about both. i have also worked in mutual/membership /cooperatives and find these (whilst not perfect ) have less flaws than pure private or public in getting the babalnce right between incentive, customer service ,staff welfare and the wider society consideration.
There should be more cooperatives - consumer ones in natural monopolies and worker ones in more competitive sectors
Never worked with a cooperative so cant make an assessment. Have worked with the public sector and private sector and won't work where the public sector is pulling the strings again as they really don't have a clue largely.....which is unfair there are people who have a clue its merely they generally aren't listened to as a higher up has an empire building objective and there sub optimal desires override the advice of those that actually know what they are talking about in the public sector.
Give you an example in a public sector I worked for....we at the back end devised routes using the ordinance survey data we had foisted on us. The front end team from another company were using data from a completely different source which they had had foisted on them. Result often the routes we sent back were using roads that didnt actually exist on the map data so it appeared we were sending people through fields with no roads.
The biggest problem with cooperatives is that they are fine on a small scale, but are much more problematic (or lose most of their cooperative elements) as they get larger. They are fine for a farm employing five people where everybody knows and trusts each other. But as larger businesses tend to be more efficient in most industries, they are quite unsuitable for most parts of a modern economy.
I did a damn stupid thing this weekend so really haven't been on PB much but have we covered this?
Liz Truss is now only five points ahead of Rishi Sunak in the race to succeed Boris Johnson, private polling carried out for the foreign secretary’s campaign suggests.
The survey, which concluded early last week, has support for Truss on 48 per cent compared with 43 per cent for the former chancellor, and 9 per cent of members who were questioned undecided.
The poll is in contrast to the last YouGov survey carried out at the end of the knockout stages that suggested Truss had a 24-point lead over Sunak.
Sources in the Sunak campaign claimed the shift reflected the feedback they had been getting on the ground suggesting that the race was much closer than had previously been thought.
“It really hasn’t felt to us like Liz was doing as well as the polls have been suggesting. Wherever he goes he is getting really good feedback and an awful lot of people are still making up their minds.
“This doesn’t feel like a re-run of 2019 [when Boris Johnson was convincingly ahead of Jeremy Hunt]. Liz’s support feels very soft.”
The polling was carried out by the Italian data and public affairs firm Techne and asked Tory members their views on both candidates as well as their policy plans.
Sources in the Truss camp said it had not been commissioned by them but confirmed it had been shared with the campaign.
EPG - Please note my qualifier: ". . . to what extent . . .".
As far as comparing works of art, we know that, for example, color blind people will see them differently than people with normal vision. (In WW II the US exploited that, using color blind people to identify camouflaged sites in aerial photos. (The Navy wouldn't take them, because they couldn't see signal flags properly; the Army, outside that specialized group, didn't care.)
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
Which of course gives the kids at Kensington and Chelsea and Surrey comps a huge inbuilt head start over the kids at Stoke and Barnsley and Grimsby comps by default
No, because another strand of the solution - to Optimal Education System - is a very marked skewing of resource to those latter type areas.
Which is irrelevant without change in intake
What particular advantages do grammar schools offer over larger, well streamed comprehensives?
My comp, for example, had seven different math sets.
As a parent currently going through this, my motivations are: 1) Grammar schools weed out most of the kids who make your kids' lives a misery. 2) Comprehensives have a lot of more challenging kidd, and a lot of kids who will need a bit more effort to get them over 5 grade Cs territory. This will leave fewer resources and focus for my kids. 3) Locally, but I don't thi k this is uncommon: the grammar school is just nicer. Better maintained, less graffiti, fewer leaks. All entirely selfish motivations, but show me someone who makes decision their kids' education based on what will be best for other kids?
Those are excellent points: but they equally mean that the 80% of kids left behind at Secondary Moderns suffer more from the problems you identify.
Because, let us be clear, the problem is not grammar schools (which are great), but how you avoid a situation where the people left behind get a worse education.
In a large comprehensive, there will be lots of movement between the second and third deciles: a significant number of kids will drop from first set maths to second... And vice versa. That's really tough to do when the sets are at different schools. Essentially you end up ossifying kids into two groups at a very early age.
And, of course, it's ok for me. If my 10 year old fails the 11+, well I can put him in private education. But what if yours has a bad day? Or is a late developer? It's much much harder for them to climb out of the Secondary Modern into a Grammar.
Finally, there's the issue of kids who are great at one thing, but not another. I was dreadful at languages (bottom in German Tanbridge School 1987!), but excellent at maths. How do you allocate people who are great at one set of subjects, but average (or worse) at another?
Most comprehensives and academies are effectively secondary moderns in all but name, apart from the minority rated Outstanding
That's simply not true.
In my comprehensive, my top set maths was full of exactly the kids who would have been at the local grammar school (had there been grammar schools).
Might have been but the vast majority of the pupils wouldn't have been and the ethos of the school will be mainly directed towards them
I don't really understand your comment.
My comprehensive school, with an upper sixth of perhaps 60 kids, got four kids into Oxbridge in my year. And, by the way, this was a school with a very high proportion of free school meals, and where English wasn't the first language.
But we also had a number of extremely smart, extremely competitive kids (of which I was one). I can see the advantage of putting more smart, competitive kids together.
Would I have really enjoyed a Grammar school?
Yep.
But my school also streamed extremely aggressively. I'm not sure my GCSE maths class would have been any more advanced. Pretty much the entire top set maths did A Level maths. And other than me, pretty much all got As at A Level.
The question is: how much do grammar schools improve the educational outcomes of the top 20%? And do they do so at the expense of the rest?
How many of those who entered the school at 11 though got good GCSE passes? 4 kids into Oxbridge, while better than most comps, is still less than 10% even of the upper sixth. Many top grammars would get more into Oxbridge than that
I was in the same school year as @rcs1000 and went to a top top Kent grammar school. While I don’t remember the exact number, our Oxbridge entrances were comparable to that, and I agree with his observations about late developers. My brother failed the 11 plus but within a couple of years was clearly streets ahead of some of those who’d made it into my school. My parents could afford to send one of us to private school (they’d have struggled with two) but it shouldn’t have been necessary.
Most grammars also have entry at 13 and 16 and they offer more choice in the state sector so fewer parents have to go private
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
You have previously posted that you went to school in Kent and you went private and your sister went to the Grammar school. Did you fail the 11 plus (like me) and if so how would you have felt about being dumped in a secondary modern if your parents could not afford a private school.
No I passed the 11 plus, just my sister wanted to go to the grammar school rather than the girls private school she was offered so went at 11 while I stayed at my prep school as I wanted to go to Tonbridge ultimately and did common entrance at 13. We were both given the choice
And a child with poor parents who fails the 11 plus gets no choice and is dumped at 11
Which is still better than a bright child from a poor area being denied the chance of a top quality state school ie a grammar
No it isn't. You are dumping 75% of the population. You are also screwing with the lives of those who having been tutored for the Grammar and can't cope. Saw lots of them when I transferred to the Grammar. And you aren't catering for kids who are gifted in certain areas but poor in others. And as has been stated over and over again most Grammars are full of tutored middle class kids. Few working class kids get through contrary to your assumption. As mentioned before nobody got into the Grammar from my very large lower class village at 11. Lots did at 16. Doesn't that rather prove the point. We didn't all of a sudden become cleverer. The school was stuffed with kids from the areas with big detached houses.
No you aren't. That 75% are not going to see much change in the jobs they do whether at a comp or secondary modern.
A working class child who gets into a grammar though has more of a chance of a top university and professional job than in a comp, life changing. As I posted more disadvantaged children get into top universities and top jobs in areas with grammar schools than without
What arrogance. I went to a Secondary Modern and did a degree in Mathematics at Manchester University in the early 70s. Many of the kids I went to school with transferred to the Grammar school at 16. Lots who went to the Grammar school at 11 left the Grammar school with only a few O levels. The changes between 11 and 16 are huge and you arrogantly dump them at 11.
I mean just compare the two of us. You passed the 11 plus and went to a private school. I failed the 11 plus and went to a Secondary Modern, yet how do we compare academically? But you would have written me off at 11.
So what, as you say many of your contemporaries transferred to the grammar at 16 as could you most likely if you had been bothered.
The fact you did well at a secondary modern anyway just proves the point, selection at 11 does not consign failures automatically to the scrapheap. However getting into a grammar at 11, 13 or 16 is a huge boost up, especially for those from deprived working class backgrounds
You obviously aren't following my posts. I did transfer to the Grammar and I was fast tracked taking A levels after a year. I was better at maths than those at the Grammar school. Just shows what a crap system the 11 plus is and it damages so many. For instances:
a) many who passed the 11 plus then dropped out
b) many who failed but transferred at 16, missed out on stuff. In the 60s it meant I could not do languages or literature in the school I was in
c) many who did well in their exams at the secondary modern were conditioned to leave and join a local firm rather than carry on with their education. They deserved better,
And you still continue with this tripe of lower class people getting into Grammars. For every one that does tens of middle class kids are tutored through. You have never responded to why nobody got to the Grammar school from the poorish area I lived in at 11 but lots of us did at 16 and in my case I was better than the Grammar school pupils.
So you ended up at a grammar school anyway which helped get you into Manchester University as a result. So even more evidence your claim that the 11 plus consigns those who fail it forever to the scrapheap is rubbish.
You even got into a grammar school yourself at 16 and hence to a top university.
Nowadays high schools in grammar school areas all do languages and literature too and follow the National Curriculum, so that argument is also redundant.
Who cares if Middle Class pupils go to grammars, they help the ethos of the school, it is the working class pupils who get into them who still see their lives transformed, including at 16 like you helping ensure you now have the ego of a self professed Maths genius to match!
Your last paragraph is not my experience. Nonetheless, let's assume you are right and I am wrong and a handful of council house kids hit the jackpot. Robert has made the excellent point that the 80% who fail the 11 plus could be subsequently lumbered with a sub standard education. That doesn't seem like value for money on anyone's metric.
gabyhinsliff @gabyhinsliff · 8h if i was the Labour party i'd be enjoying the Tory leadership contest a bit less, & worrying a bit more about falling into the same trap as Sunak, ie becoming the 'actually it's a bit more complicated than that' candidate up against Liz Truss.
Well yes. Truss is continuity Boris in that regard. The difference is that Boris probably knew it was just a rhetorical device. With Truss I think she genuine believes that the world really is that simple. (Matthew Parris reported that Tory MPs said the same about IDS when he was leader.) Hmm.
Does she? Or does she know that appearing to believe the world is simply appeals to the grey haired tory members.
Don't forget the electorate is 160K ageing, sounthern-based leaver wealthy pensioners in the main.
These people believe bringing back grammar schools will solve all education issues despite the reality that the last time they were in a classroom is at least fifty years ago.
"A federal judge on Monday sentenced Guy Wesley Reffitt, the first defendant to go on trial in the Justice Department’s sprawling criminal inquiry into the Jan. 6 attack, to more than seven years in prison, the longest sentence to date in a case stemming from the Capitol riot."
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector...
Why does ANYONE in the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister? ie about £130k?
I do not see the justification. Liz T is right
Why does anyone in the private sector?
A private company can be as wasteful as it wants.
Why?
because its only wasting the money of people who CHOSE to invest. Public sector wastes money of people who have no choice. Private sector companies have to make a living or they go bust....public sector doesn't need to make money as it can just ask for more tax payer funding.
imo there are fundamental flaws in both the public and private sector in terms of optimum societal gain. I have worked in both and recognise fully the flaws already stated about both. i have also worked in mutual/membership /cooperatives and find these (whilst not perfect ) have less flaws than pure private or public in getting the babalnce right between incentive, customer service ,staff welfare and the wider society consideration.
There should be more cooperatives - consumer ones in natural monopolies and worker ones in more competitive sectors
Never worked with a cooperative so cant make an assessment. Have worked with the public sector and private sector and won't work where the public sector is pulling the strings again as they really don't have a clue largely.....which is unfair there are people who have a clue its merely they generally aren't listened to as a higher up has an empire building objective and there sub optimal desires override the advice of those that actually know what they are talking about in the public sector.
Give you an example in a public sector I worked for....we at the back end devised routes using the ordinance survey data we had foisted on us. The front end team from another company were using data from a completely different source which they had had foisted on them. Result often the routes we sent back were using roads that didnt actually exist on the map data so it appeared we were sending people through fields with no roads.
The biggest problem with cooperatives is that they are fine on a small scale, but are much more problematic (or lose most of their cooperative elements) as they get larger. They are fine for a farm employing five people where everybody knows and trusts each other. But as larger businesses tend to be more efficient in most industries, they are quite unsuitable for most parts of a modern economy.
The most successful cooperatives tend to be run like traditional corporations, even if (almost) all the workers are also owners.
I did a damn stupid thing this weekend so really haven't been on PB much but have we covered this?
Liz Truss is now only five points ahead of Rishi Sunak in the race to succeed Boris Johnson, private polling carried out for the foreign secretary’s campaign suggests.
The survey, which concluded early last week, has support for Truss on 48 per cent compared with 43 per cent for the former chancellor, and 9 per cent of members who were questioned undecided.
The poll is in contrast to the last YouGov survey carried out at the end of the knockout stages that suggested Truss had a 24-point lead over Sunak.
Sources in the Sunak campaign claimed the shift reflected the feedback they had been getting on the ground suggesting that the race was much closer than had previously been thought.
“It really hasn’t felt to us like Liz was doing as well as the polls have been suggesting. Wherever he goes he is getting really good feedback and an awful lot of people are still making up their minds.
“This doesn’t feel like a re-run of 2019 [when Boris Johnson was convincingly ahead of Jeremy Hunt]. Liz’s support feels very soft.”
The polling was carried out by the Italian data and public affairs firm Techne and asked Tory members their views on both candidates as well as their policy plans.
Sources in the Truss camp said it had not been commissioned by them but confirmed it had been shared with the campaign.
Is this the misreported poll which turns out to be of voters not members?
I think it's a different & new one.
The origin of the poll seems very mysterious. The article initially claims that it was conducted for the Truss camp, but then mentions that they have denied that they commissioned it.
Anyway, I guess if someone is bullish on Sunak's chances, then the results do roughly match the results of the poll of Conservative councillors & suggests Truss' winning margin might be below 55%.
The Times also referring to John Curtice mentioning the poll of Conservative Councillors a few days ago which was:
Truss 31, Sunak 29
Obviously there's a difference between members and councillors - but there are many thousands of councillors so they represent a decent subset of members and it provides further evidence that the race may be at least reasonably close.
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector... Nurses, doctors, teachers, social workers. Jobs already hugely over subscribed that folk are absolutely gagging to do. With a huge pool of unemployed qualified job ready candidates.
It depends upon how the numbers are added up. Is it £11B of savings per annum, or £11B over an economic cycle, or £11B over a Parliament? Or some other time interval. It certainly could be viable over a cycle.
There's a tendency in politics to aggregate sums you want to sound impressive over multi-year periods, while minimising sums you want to sound weak by measuring them in "per person per day" or similar. All your regular lies, damned lies and statistics.
I'd want to see a reliable quote of what was actually said before delving further, since these things have a tendency to be misreported.
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector... Nurses, doctors, teachers, social workers. Jobs already hugely over subscribed that folk are absolutely gagging to do. With a huge pool of unemployed qualified job ready candidates.
It depends upon how the numbers are added up. Is it £11B of savings per annum, or £11B over an economic cycle, or £11B over a Parliament? Or some other time interval. It certainly could be viable over a cycle.
There's a tendency in politics to aggregate sums you want to sound impressive over multi-year periods, while minimising sums you want to sound weak by measuring them in "per person per day" or similar. All your regular lies, damned lies and statistics.
I'd want to see a reliable quote of what was actually said before delving further, since these things have a tendency to be misreported.
Long answer: economic growth, which will be higher if taxes are lower
Imagine if Labour was offering this rubbish
If Labour were credibly offering lower taxes than the Tories, I'd be voting for them.
Economic growth is higher if taxes are lower.
It depends on the tax. Cutting corporate and payroll taxes stimulates economic growth the most, income taxes a little less and land, excise and sales taxes least of all. That's why Sunak's rises have been so damaging - as well as breaking manifesto commitments, he has focused on exactly those that most damage economic activity. For that alone he should never become Prime Minister.
"The trouble started, Johnny C Taylor Jr believes, when employers started encouraging people to bring their whole selves to work.
Taylor is not some crusty hangover from a conformist age where staff were expected to keep their personal views to themselves: the former head of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund for historically black US colleges and universities runs the Society for Human Resource Management, which represents HR professionals around the world.
As that inclusive management mantra took hold, he says, employees took it literally, bringing the language, the clothing and the political biases they once left at home to offices and factories each morning.
It is the last of those imports that is causing SHRM’s members more trouble than they ever imagined. As voters become more polarised, the people managing them are “struggling mightily”, says Taylor, to contain their passionate political disagreements." [via G search]
One of the most disturbing articles about climate change in recent years was in the Times only the other day. Describing daily life in Iraq and Kuwait
Unfortunately, it is paywall, but it is powerful
"Outside, in Basra and Kuwait, the heat is everywhere, like soup in your mouth or stinging fire in your throat — depending on the humidity. At its worst, you hold your tongue to the back of your front teeth because it hurts to breathe in the air directly. Your eyes prickle, their surfaces drying.
"It didn’t used to be like this. This part of southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf, was once so fertile that scholars have suggested it could have been the location of the biblical Garden of Eden."
I don't see how the Middle East can remain habitable
The same article pointed out that the massive difference between the two was that Kuwait had air con everywhere. So I guess the middle east remains habitable if they generate enough power for everyone to have air con?
But who wants to spend their entire life breathing in fake, filtered air? Indoors?
Not me. I love England and its seasons.
I guess @Sandpit can tell us more about the reality in the deserts.
It really isn’t that bad, perfectly liveable in a city if you’re a white-collar desk jockey. Building sites work split shifts or night shifts in the summer, to avoid the worst of the heat. Winter is lovely though.
Is The Line going to happen or is it just a concept to sell shares in Neom?
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector... Nurses, doctors, teachers, social workers. Jobs already hugely over subscribed that folk are absolutely gagging to do. With a huge pool of unemployed qualified job ready candidates.
It depends upon how the numbers are added up. Is it £11B of savings per annum, or £11B over an economic cycle, or £11B over a Parliament? Or some other time interval. It certainly could be viable over a cycle.
There's a tendency in politics to aggregate sums you want to sound impressive over multi-year periods, while minimising sums you want to sound weak by measuring them in "per person per day" or similar. All your regular lies, damned lies and statistics.
I'd want to see a reliable quote of what was actually said before delving further, since these things have a tendency to be misreported.
The idea that there could be £11 billion of savings from public sector pay is laughable. The need for more public servants is a consequence of government expanding the state. If you look at something like law enforcement, they keep on creating more crimes and longer jail sentences. But a similar process is going on across almost everything the government does. Truss is not going to stop doing any of this. It is austerity without any of the difficult decisions, ie an incoherant fantasy.
Long answer: economic growth, which will be higher if taxes are lower
Imagine if Labour was offering this rubbish
If Labour were credibly offering lower taxes than the Tories, I'd be voting for them.
Economic growth is higher if taxes are lower.
All else being equal being the key proviso: for example, if you can't pay the police or doctors, because the taxes are too low, then things might not work out too well.
The key point here is Liz has identified £11bn of savings from Civil Service pay. But the CS total pay bill is £9bn. Unless she means pay cuts across the board for the entire Public Sector... Nurses, doctors, teachers, social workers. Jobs already hugely over subscribed that folk are absolutely gagging to do. With a huge pool of unemployed qualified job ready candidates.
It depends upon how the numbers are added up. Is it £11B of savings per annum, or £11B over an economic cycle, or £11B over a Parliament? Or some other time interval. It certainly could be viable over a cycle.
There's a tendency in politics to aggregate sums you want to sound impressive over multi-year periods, while minimising sums you want to sound weak by measuring them in "per person per day" or similar. All your regular lies, damned lies and statistics.
I'd want to see a reliable quote of what was actually said before delving further, since these things have a tendency to be misreported.
Right. So.... £8.8BN of savings by reducing civil service pay for new entrants, and reducing holiday allowance from 27 to 25 days, plus slashing 300 'woke' diversity officer jobs. If you look in to it, the pay is bad in the civil service anyway. The type of poster who may celebrate this on here would never do a civil service job in any event, given that the pay is so poor. Its absolutely derisory. For instance, Natural England try and recruit senior economists and policy advisors for £20-£30k. This is one example of many I could roll off. I worked in the civil service for several years and quit because I worked out it was a rabbit hole; I could almost immediately double my wage after leaving. If you go and read linkedin, people just sneer at the terms and conditions offered by the civil service. There are some pockets of great extravagance in the civil service but this is not the experience of the vast majority of people who work in it. It is an example of extreme incomprehension and dysfunction on the part of those who govern us that they would contemplate reducing pay in this way. It suggests that they are driven by prejudice and have no understanding of reality.
If anyone is reading this is unemployed and wants to do something useful with their life, whilst making a good living... I suggest they get a job in the civil service, understand a complex system, become an expert in it; then quit and set themselves up as a consultant selling services back to the public sector. This is the type of farce the government incentivises by its ridiculous approach to public sector pay.
So if the UN cannot broker a ceasefire, he thinks the African Union should ...
Also note he calls on us to stop providing arms to Ukraine. He specifically does not call for countries to stop providing troops to Russia, or for the Russians to lay down their arms. He does not call Russia the aggressors. In that interview, he makes *us* out to be the bad guys because we are prolonging the war by providing arms.
So if the UN cannot broker a ceasefire, he thinks the African Union should ...
Also note he calls on us to stop providing arms to Ukraine. He specifically does not call for countries to stop providing troops to Russia, or for the Russians to lay down their arms. He does not call Russia the aggressors. In that interview, he makes *us* out to be the bad guys because we are prolonging the war by providing arms.
Has there ever been a modern war, on which Corbyn took the ‘right’ side? Wrong every single time.
So if the UN cannot broker a ceasefire, he thinks the African Union should ...
Also note he calls on us to stop providing arms to Ukraine. He specifically does not call for countries to stop providing troops to Russia, or for the Russians to lay down their arms. He does not call Russia the aggressors. In that interview, he makes *us* out to be the bad guys because we are prolonging the war by providing arms.
It would be interesting to apply his thinking on the Russia Ukraine conflict to that of crime in the UK:
.... so actually, we just need to make peace with murderers and other violent criminals. And, rather than giving more resources to the police, we should actually be looking at bringing in mediators from places like Africa.
So if the UN cannot broker a ceasefire, he thinks the African Union should ...
Also note he calls on us to stop providing arms to Ukraine. He specifically does not call for countries to stop providing troops to Russia, or for the Russians to lay down their arms. He does not call Russia the aggressors. In that interview, he makes *us* out to be the bad guys because we are prolonging the war by providing arms.
Has there ever been a modern war, on which Corbyn took the ‘right’ side? Wrong every single time.
Iraq 2003, probably?
The guy has a mantra, but no real answers. He does not have the intelligence to see that his 'solutions' both reward war (therefore making war more likely in other regions), and give succour to the evil doers. In his mind, *we* are automatically in the wrong; a thinking that pollutes the minds of his followers and friends.
Liz T, La Truss, The Lady of the Moment, reminds me of Mrs Thatcher re privatisation
She kinda blundered into privatisation, it wasn't in her original plan (IIRC) but then she thought: Hold on, why can't we do this? Sell off all the publicly owned companies?
Of course she got outraged pushback. NOOO! This is what we do, everyone does this, the state owns half the economy, are you mad, etc etc
Yet Thatch persisted, these companies were privatised, the sky did not fall to pieces, and Britain prospered. And everyone copied us
We need that original thinking again: because otherwise we are fucked. Say Truss abolishes the whole Diversity Industry and saves us several billion quid. Wokesters will squeal, yet nothing will collapse, the state will be leaner, taxpayers will be richer. Proceed from there. Tackle all the sacred cows, and kill half of them
Sacred cows?
Let's start with public schools, the monarchy and "competition" - turn them into burgers and see what happens.
Or do we mean hackneyed daily express fantasies rather than original?
Liz T, La Truss, The Lady of the Moment, reminds me of Mrs Thatcher re privatisation
She kinda blundered into privatisation, it wasn't in her original plan (IIRC) but then she thought: Hold on, why can't we do this? Sell off all the publicly owned companies?
Of course she got outraged pushback. NOOO! This is what we do, everyone does this, the state owns half the economy, are you mad, etc etc
Yet Thatch persisted, these companies were privatised, the sky did not fall to pieces, and Britain prospered. And everyone copied us
We need that original thinking again: because otherwise we are fucked. Say Truss abolishes the whole Diversity Industry and saves us several billion quid. Wokesters will squeal, yet nothing will collapse, the state will be leaner, taxpayers will be richer. Proceed from there. Tackle all the sacred cows, and kill half of them
Sacred cows?
Let's start with public schools, the monarchy and "competition" - turn them into burgers and see what happens.
Or do we mean hackneyed daily express fantasies rather than original?
If you want a party to abolish private schools, the monarchy and get rid of competition (i.e. nationalise everything), then start a party to do so. I think you'll find some of the various Communist splinters already have such policies. Good luck in getting elected!
So if the UN cannot broker a ceasefire, he thinks the African Union should ...
Also note he calls on us to stop providing arms to Ukraine. He specifically does not call for countries to stop providing troops to Russia, or for the Russians to lay down their arms. He does not call Russia the aggressors. In that interview, he makes *us* out to be the bad guys because we are prolonging the war by providing arms.
In Corbyn's simple world view (and he is a simple man) everything is the fault of the West.
Liz Truss is only five percentage points ahead of Rishi Sunak in the race to succeed Boris Johnson, private polling suggests.
The survey, which concluded early last week, has support for Truss on 48 per cent compared with 43 per cent for the former chancellor, with 9 per cent of those questioned undecided.
The poll is in contrast to the last YouGov survey carried out at the end of the knockout stages which suggested that Truss had a 24-point lead over Sunak.
Sources in the Sunak campaign claimed the shift reflected feedback they had been getting, suggesting the race was much closer than had been thought.
“It really hasn’t felt to us like Liz was doing as well as the polls have been suggesting. Wherever he goes he is getting really good feedback and an awful lot of people are still making up their minds,” one said. “Liz’s support feels very soft.”
The polling was carried out by the Italian data and public affairs company Techne and asked Conservative Party members their views on the candidates and their policy plans.
Sources in the Truss camp said the poll had not been commissioned by them but confirmed that it had been shared with the campaign. It found that on most issues Truss was well ahead of Sunak — among party members and voters who supported the Tories in 2019.
Relying on your smartphone rather than your brain to store crucial information does not rot your memory skills, scientists have found. It can boost your ability to remember little things that you would forget otherwise.
The ubiquity of smartphones means that most people now carry around billions of web pages, a calendar, notepad, calculator and address book in their pockets. Phones can be set to provide alarms and reminders for tasks, events or appointments.
Experts said this has raised fears that regular users may suffer from “digital dementia” and find that their brain’s ability to retain information worsens as they rely on their devices.
A study has found that the opposite can be true. Storing important information on our smartphones can free up our memory to store a larger amount of less crucial information, allowing us to retain more information across our internal and electronic memory banks.
Relying on your smartphone rather than your brain to store crucial information does not rot your memory skills, scientists have found. It can boost your ability to remember little things that you would forget otherwise.
The ubiquity of smartphones means that most people now carry around billions of web pages, a calendar, notepad, calculator and address book in their pockets. Phones can be set to provide alarms and reminders for tasks, events or appointments.
Experts said this has raised fears that regular users may suffer from “digital dementia” and find that their brain’s ability to retain information worsens as they rely on their devices.
A study has found that the opposite can be true. Storing important information on our smartphones can free up our memory to store a larger amount of less crucial information, allowing us to retain more information across our internal and electronic memory banks.
When I'm walking, I speak notes into a dictaphone for later transcribing onto my website. I find the act of recording them into a dictaphone *increases* my recall of the facts, as if the use of another part of my brain forms new connections with the facts. I wonder if entering data onto *any* computer system acts in a similar way?
So if the UN cannot broker a ceasefire, he thinks the African Union should ...
Also note he calls on us to stop providing arms to Ukraine. He specifically does not call for countries to stop providing troops to Russia, or for the Russians to lay down their arms. He does not call Russia the aggressors. In that interview, he makes *us* out to be the bad guys because we are prolonging the war by providing arms.
In Corbyn's simple world view (and he is a simple man) everything is the fault of the West.
Also, Corbyn's desire is for the liberal West to be weakened as much as possible, so that left-wing extremists have an opportunity to seize power.
A stronger illiberal Russia means a weaker liberal West. Corbyn would want to see institutions such as the EU & NATO which underlie the liberal Western order to be demolished, and he probably sees Russia & Putin as a potential instrument of this destruction.
This is that period of the election when things suddenly feel close again but they’re not really. Canny bettors should ignore the Times poll and instead note that TSE and JohnO are expressing doubt about Sunak and tempering their aversion to Truss. Doesn’t matter if both end up voting for Sunak in the end, what matters is both were pretty far from floating voters but now plausibly could be
Ok, I just broke my promise but I had a good reason.
You can back Sunak at 7, with boost, to be next Con leader at Ladbrokes, and lay him at 5.9 on Betfair to be next PM.
Yes, it looks like several of the books are trying to get Sunak, presumably to balance their books after one-way support for Truss over the past few days.
The Government wants us to become a high pay country where industry invests in staff. It will lead the way on this by cutting pay and positions in the public sector.
How is regional pay going to be received by those who voted for levelling up?
So the idea of regional pay is presumably to reduce wages outside of London until housing is equally unaffordable outside of London as in London. Very popular.
Relying on your smartphone rather than your brain to store crucial information does not rot your memory skills, scientists have found. It can boost your ability to remember little things that you would forget otherwise.
The ubiquity of smartphones means that most people now carry around billions of web pages, a calendar, notepad, calculator and address book in their pockets. Phones can be set to provide alarms and reminders for tasks, events or appointments.
Experts said this has raised fears that regular users may suffer from “digital dementia” and find that their brain’s ability to retain information worsens as they rely on their devices.
A study has found that the opposite can be true. Storing important information on our smartphones can free up our memory to store a larger amount of less crucial information, allowing us to retain more information across our internal and electronic memory banks.
When I'm walking, I speak notes into a dictaphone for later transcribing onto my website. I find the act of recording them into a dictaphone *increases* my recall of the facts, as if the use of another part of my brain forms new connections with the facts. I wonder if entering data onto *any* computer system acts in a similar way?
Yes, to the extent that repetition does so, and the act recording your thoughts, in any way, involves repeating them.
The main thing about wine is that everything, apart from drinking what you like, is nonsense.
Try stuff.
Absolutely. In my view, wine became obsolescent once Coca-Cola was invented. But I'm aware this isn't a universal view.
I wanted to like that comment because it made me smile, but I couldn't bring myself to like such an outrageous statement. You might also have one, just one thing, in common with Trump.
Plenty of Conservative party members won't like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won't be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don't work.
Good on him - brave, for a Tory MP. Essential reading for HYUFD; grammar schools aid the wealthy not the poor, and do not benefit social mobility. Nor is their achievement anything special given their intake.
Utter rubbish. Working class pupils in grammar schools get better results than those of equal intelligence in state schools. Grammar schools are also generally the only state schools that really challenge private schools.
Hence I have always and will always back grammars. I mean you can't even ballot to open new grammars now only to close existing ones. Hardly parental choice!
Ability/aptitude streaming in comps achieves the same goals as grammars, without the social stigmas for those who don't get in. And without the enormous pressure on 11-year old kids. Also, you learn to look after yourself...!
YOU making decent points - what gives?
Comps that are streamed for ability are better than grammars in my view. Learn with people of your ability, mix with everybody. And no stigma. Everybody wears the same uniform.
They can be a bit rough, but as long as the staff sit on the bullies and protect those who want to learn, they work very well.
Yes, I think big diverse Comprehensive Schools, all kids going to their nearest one, whilst not the solution in itself to "Optimal Education System" is the platform on which to construct it.
Which of course gives the kids at Kensington and Chelsea and Surrey comps a huge inbuilt head start over the kids at Stoke and Barnsley and Grimsby comps by default
No, because another strand of the solution - to Optimal Education System - is a very marked skewing of resource to those latter type areas.
Which is irrelevant without change in intake
What particular advantages do grammar schools offer over larger, well streamed comprehensives?
My comp, for example, had seven different math sets.
As a parent currently going through this, my motivations are: 1) Grammar schools weed out most of the kids who make your kids' lives a misery. 2) Comprehensives have a lot of more challenging kidd, and a lot of kids who will need a bit more effort to get them over 5 grade Cs territory. This will leave fewer resources and focus for my kids. 3) Locally, but I don't thi k this is uncommon: the grammar school is just nicer. Better maintained, less graffiti, fewer leaks. All entirely selfish motivations, but show me someone who makes decision their kids' education based on what will be best for other kids?
Those are excellent points: but they equally mean that the 80% of kids left behind at Secondary Moderns suffer more from the problems you identify.
Because, let us be clear, the problem is not grammar schools (which are great), but how you avoid a situation where the people left behind get a worse education.
In a large comprehensive, there will be lots of movement between the second and third deciles: a significant number of kids will drop from first set maths to second... And vice versa. That's really tough to do when the sets are at different schools. Essentially you end up ossifying kids into two groups at a very early age.
And, of course, it's ok for me. If my 10 year old fails the 11+, well I can put him in private education. But what if yours has a bad day? Or is a late developer? It's much much harder for them to climb out of the Secondary Modern into a Grammar.
Finally, there's the issue of kids who are great at one thing, but not another. I was dreadful at languages (bottom in German Tanbridge School 1987!), but excellent at maths. How do you allocate people who are great at one set of subjects, but average (or worse) at another?
Most comprehensives and academies are effectively secondary moderns in all but name, apart from the minority rated Outstanding
That's simply not true.
In my comprehensive, my top set maths was full of exactly the kids who would have been at the local grammar school (had there been grammar schools).
Might have been but the vast majority of the pupils wouldn't have been and the ethos of the school will be mainly directed towards them
I don't really understand your comment.
My comprehensive school, with an upper sixth of perhaps 60 kids, got four kids into Oxbridge in my year. And, by the way, this was a school with a very high proportion of free school meals, and where English wasn't the first language.
But we also had a number of extremely smart, extremely competitive kids (of which I was one). I can see the advantage of putting more smart, competitive kids together.
Would I have really enjoyed a Grammar school?
Yep.
But my school also streamed extremely aggressively. I'm not sure my GCSE maths class would have been any more advanced. Pretty much the entire top set maths did A Level maths. And other than me, pretty much all got As at A Level.
The question is: how much do grammar schools improve the educational outcomes of the top 20%? And do they do so at the expense of the rest?
How many of those who entered the school at 11 though got good GCSE passes? 4 kids into Oxbridge, while better than most comps, is still less than 10% even of the upper sixth. Many top grammars would get more into Oxbridge than that
I was in the same school year as @rcs1000 and went to a top top Kent grammar school. While I don’t remember the exact number, our Oxbridge entrances were comparable to that, and I agree with his observations about late developers. My brother failed the 11 plus but within a couple of years was clearly streets ahead of some of those who’d made it into my school. My parents could afford to send one of us to private school (they’d have struggled with two) but it shouldn’t have been necessary.
Most grammars also have entry at 13 and 16 and they offer more choice in the state sector so fewer parents have to go private
His parents only had to send his brother to private school because the blunt tool selection of the eleven plus had consigned him to a substandard school. If they had lived in an area with only comprehensive schools like I did growing up then they could have both attended their local school and his brother would have been streamed into a top set before his GCSEs. My two siblings and I all attended local comps and got into the three oldest universities in the UK. With good quality well resourced local schools for everyone nobody has to go private.
No they couldn't, there are almost no comprehensive schools which get as good results as most private schools.
The only state schools which normally match private schools for results are grammar schools, so if you have the money to go private and no grammar schools in the area then you would almost always go private to get your children into the best school possible. Whereas if you lived in a selective area if your children got into a grammar you could save money and send them there, only sending them private if they did not pass the entrance test.
You have previously posted that you went to school in Kent and you went private and your sister went to the Grammar school. Did you fail the 11 plus (like me) and if so how would you have felt about being dumped in a secondary modern if your parents could not afford a private school.
No I passed the 11 plus, just my sister wanted to go to the grammar school rather than the girls private school she was offered so went at 11 while I stayed at my prep school as I wanted to go to Tonbridge ultimately and did common entrance at 13. We were both given the choice
And a child with poor parents who fails the 11 plus gets no choice and is dumped at 11
Which is still better than a bright child from a poor area being denied the chance of a top quality state school ie a grammar
No it isn't. You are dumping 75% of the population. You are also screwing with the lives of those who having been tutored for the Grammar and can't cope. Saw lots of them when I transferred to the Grammar. And you aren't catering for kids who are gifted in certain areas but poor in others. And as has been stated over and over again most Grammars are full of tutored middle class kids. Few working class kids get through contrary to your assumption. As mentioned before nobody got into the Grammar from my very large lower class village at 11. Lots did at 16. Doesn't that rather prove the point. We didn't all of a sudden become cleverer. The school was stuffed with kids from the areas with big detached houses.
No you aren't. That 75% are not going to see much change in the jobs they do whether at a comp or secondary modern.
A working class child who gets into a grammar though has more of a chance of a top university and professional job than in a comp, life changing. As I posted more disadvantaged children get into top universities and top jobs in areas with grammar schools than without
What arrogance. I went to a Secondary Modern and did a degree in Mathematics at Manchester University in the early 70s. Many of the kids I went to school with transferred to the Grammar school at 16. Lots who went to the Grammar school at 11 left the Grammar school with only a few O levels. The changes between 11 and 16 are huge and you arrogantly dump them at 11.
I mean just compare the two of us. You passed the 11 plus and went to a private school. I failed the 11 plus and went to a Secondary Modern, yet how do we compare academically? But you would have written me off at 11.
So what, as you say many of your contemporaries transferred to the grammar at 16 as could you most likely if you had been bothered.
The fact you did well at a secondary modern anyway just proves the point, selection at 11 does not consign failures automatically to the scrapheap. However getting into a grammar at 11, 13 or 16 is a huge boost up, especially for those from deprived working class backgrounds
You obviously aren't following my posts. I did transfer to the Grammar and I was fast tracked taking A levels after a year. I was better at maths than those at the Grammar school. Just shows what a crap system the 11 plus is and it damages so many. For instances:
a) many who passed the 11 plus then dropped out
b) many who failed but transferred at 16, missed out on stuff. In the 60s it meant I could not do languages or literature in the school I was in
c) many who did well in their exams at the secondary modern were conditioned to leave and join a local firm rather than carry on with their education. They deserved better,
And you still continue with this tripe of lower class people getting into Grammars. For every one that does tens of middle class kids are tutored through. You have never responded to why nobody got to the Grammar school from the poorish area I lived in at 11 but lots of us did at 16 and in my case I was better than the Grammar school pupils.
So you ended up at a grammar school anyway which helped get you into Manchester University as a result. So even more evidence your claim that the 11 plus consigns those who fail it forever to the scrapheap is rubbish.
You even got into a grammar school yourself at 16 and hence to a top university.
Nowadays high schools in grammar school areas all do languages and literature too and follow the National Curriculum, so that argument is also redundant.
Who cares if Middle Class pupils go to grammars, they help the ethos of the school, it is the working class pupils who get into them who still see their lives transformed, including at 16 like you helping ensure you now have the ego of a self professed Maths genius to match!
Your last paragraph is not my experience. Nonetheless, let's assume you are right and I am wrong and a handful of council house kids hit the jackpot. Robert has made the excellent point that the 80% who fail the 11 plus could be subsequently lumbered with a sub standard education. That doesn't seem like value for money on anyone's metric.
I made the same point in an earlier post and @hyufd's reply was that he didn't care.
He also doesn't understand that some held back might succeed despite being disadvantaged by the Grammar school system not because of it. He takes my success as proof that Secondary school work. It doesn't.
Also note the snide comments at the end. 'ego of self professed maths genius to match'. Completely uncalled for in a civilised debate and so much for him never being rude. He seems to object to me being successful having failed the 11 plus. Odd
Comments
She kinda blundered into privatisation, it wasn't in her original plan (IIRC) but then she thought: Hold on, why can't we do this? Sell off all the publicly owned companies?
Of course she got outraged pushback. NOOO! This is what we do, everyone does this, the state owns half the economy, are you mad, etc etc
Yet Thatch persisted, these companies were privatised, the sky did not fall to pieces, and Britain prospered. And everyone copied us
We need that original thinking again: because otherwise we are fucked. Say Truss abolishes the whole Diversity Industry and saves us several billion quid. Wokesters will squeal, yet nothing will collapse, the state will be leaner, taxpayers will be richer. Proceed from there. Tackle all the sacred cows, and kill half of them
If it weren't so serious, there'd be amusement value in how the biggest figure to point out that Liz Truss is a nutter is Dominic Cummings, himself such a nutter. That said, Cummings was right to cite Truss's comments on Crimea as prime evidence of her being off her rocker.
I freely admit to being completely clueless about wine, though. I will enjoy drinking it from time to time, but when I'm trying to choose one I am lost. I just haven't put the time in to get good at it.
I know enough about yarn to know that I still have a lot to learn about yarn, and I've been knitting for a solid 14 years now. You really do need to spend a lot of time with something to be properly knowledgeable about it. I can accept that wine will never be one of those things for me, but some people feel the need to pretend.
I want to go to Primark!
You even got into a grammar school yourself at 16 and hence to a top university.
Nowadays high schools in grammar school areas all do languages and literature too and follow the National Curriculum, so that argument is also redundant.
Who cares if Middle Class pupils go to grammars, they help the ethos of the school, it is the working class pupils who get into them who still see their lives transformed, including at 16 like you helping ensure you now have the ego of a self professed Maths genius to match!
https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/FABEA1F4BFA64CB398DFA20D8B8B6C98.pdf
Also it was policy under Thatcher's hero Pinochet in Chile, as similarly set out in a plan before he took over, called "El Ladrillo":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_ladrillo
I freely admit however I know nothing about yarn.
For her next scapegoat perhaps she could bring back public humiliation of those on benefits , these will be portrayed as horrible fraudulent scroungers. I think it’s pretty clear what a Truss premiership will look like .
Just a constant war against something or someone , horrible divisive politics in an effort to deflect from a litany of broken pledges made during this leadership campaign .
But if it keeps you happy and allows you to avoid having the big problems then it's priceless I suppose.
Try stuff.
How many prospective Parliamentary candidates are then when a winnable seat (for whatever party) becomes vacant?
The salary needs reducing to a minimum wage job (commensurate with a typical MP's ability). And there will still be plenty of people applying to become MPs.
Is something stirring?
Just saying...
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/its-a-naive-domestic-burgundy-without-any-breeding-but-james-thurber.html
More seriously, we know that people differ physically, in their responses to different tastes and smells. (And our different experiences add another layer of differences.) So I am not sure to what extent we can compare our individual reactions to different wines.
But have fun trying, anyway.
Does anyone know what was the most liked comment post in PB history?
An honest man -- no place for him in the HoC.
Re being a maths genius, sadly I am not and there are several here who I'm sure would run circles around me, although I can appreciate why you might think so having shown daily your complete inability to understand the most basic elements of logic and statistics.
Half what he was earlier.
The game is a foot, Watson...
If MPs were only paid minimum wage as I said you would get hard left socialist MPs like Nellist and super rich diehard Thatcherite MPs like Rees Mogg as the norm for whom ideology is all
Now that Ayman Al Zawahiri, Al Qaeda top brass, has reportedly been killed by a US strike in Kabul is there a betting market on who is next boss? Stories have it Saif Al Adel is your man. Proper military figure and possibly also in Afghanistan at this point.
The more significant point is that Zawahiri was there at all partaking of Taliban hospitality. He was, after the heady days of Bin Laden, rather less of an action hero. Adel, if he isnt dead along with him, is liable to be rather more on it if he takes over.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/3582761-more-than-half-of-voters-think-trump-should-face-indictment-over-jan-6-poll/
gabyhinsliff
@gabyhinsliff
·
8h
if i was the Labour party i'd be enjoying the Tory leadership contest a bit less, & worrying a bit more about falling into the same trap as Sunak, ie becoming the 'actually it's a bit more complicated than that' candidate up against Liz Truss.
Betfair next prime minister
1.24 Liz Truss 81%
5.1 Rishi Sunak 20%
Next Conservative leader
1.21 Liz Truss 83%
5.5 Rishi Sunak 18%
Syme had vanished. A morning came, and he was missing from work: a few thoughtless people commented on his absence. On the next day nobody mentioned him. On the third day Winston went into the vestibule of the Records Department to look at the notice-board. One of the notices carried a printed list of the members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had been one. It looked almost exactly as it had looked before—nothing had been crossed out—but it was one name shorter. It was enough. Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed.
Just might.
The economy is probably going to be so bad that it seems very unlikely but...
Lots of press over last few days mentioning "don't underestimate her". I am wondering whether I have fallen into that trap as I posted on here loads of time that Truss would be a disaster.
Because if they are going to act their window is rapidly narrowing.
As far as comparing works of art, we know that, for example, color blind people will see them differently than people with normal vision. (In WW II the US exploited that, using color blind people to identify camouflaged sites in aerial photos. (The Navy wouldn't take them, because they couldn't see signal flags properly; the Army, outside that specialized group, didn't care.)
Don't forget the electorate is 160K ageing, sounthern-based leaver wealthy pensioners in the main.
These people believe bringing back grammar schools will solve all education issues despite the reality that the last time they were in a classroom is at least fifty years ago.
"A federal judge on Monday sentenced Guy Wesley Reffitt, the first defendant to go on trial in the Justice Department’s sprawling criminal inquiry into the Jan. 6 attack, to more than seven years in prison, the longest sentence to date in a case stemming from the Capitol riot."
NY Times
Per The Times: Techne poll:
Con MEMBERS: Truss 48, Sunak 43
Con VOTERS (Voted Con in 2019): Truss 47, Sunak 41
All voters: Truss 36, Sunak 33
The origin of the poll seems very mysterious. The article initially claims that it was conducted for the Truss camp, but then mentions that they have denied that they commissioned it.
Anyway, I guess if someone is bullish on Sunak's chances, then the results do roughly match the results of the poll of Conservative councillors & suggests Truss' winning margin might be below 55%.
Truss 31, Sunak 29
Obviously there's a difference between members and councillors - but there are many thousands of councillors so they represent a decent subset of members and it provides further evidence that the race may be at least reasonably close.
Economic growth is higher if taxes are lower.
There's a tendency in politics to aggregate sums you want to sound impressive over multi-year periods, while minimising sums you want to sound weak by measuring them in "per person per day" or similar. All your regular lies, damned lies and statistics.
I'd want to see a reliable quote of what was actually said before delving further, since these things have a tendency to be misreported.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/liz-truss-vows-to-wage-e2-80-98war-on-waste-e2-80-99-in-whitehall/ar-AA10c5dp
"The trouble started, Johnny C Taylor Jr believes, when employers started encouraging people to bring their whole selves to work.
Taylor is not some crusty hangover from a conformist age where staff were expected to keep their personal views to themselves: the former head of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund for historically black US colleges and universities runs the Society for Human Resource Management, which represents HR professionals around the world.
As that inclusive management mantra took hold, he says, employees took it literally, bringing the language, the clothing and the political biases they once left at home to offices and factories each morning.
It is the last of those imports that is causing SHRM’s members more trouble than they ever imagined. As voters become more polarised, the people managing them are “struggling mightily”, says Taylor, to contain their passionate political disagreements." [via G search]
https://www.ft.com/content/0864d0cb-bab0-4571-9e25-9b6f0ca041ef
Betfair next prime minister
1.21 Liz Truss 83%
5.6 Rishi Sunak 18%
Next Conservative leader
1.2 Liz Truss 83%
5.7 Rishi Sunak 18%
So.... £8.8BN of savings by reducing civil service pay for new entrants, and reducing holiday allowance from 27 to 25 days, plus slashing 300 'woke' diversity officer jobs.
If you look in to it, the pay is bad in the civil service anyway. The type of poster who may celebrate this on here would never do a civil service job in any event, given that the pay is so poor. Its absolutely derisory. For instance, Natural England try and recruit senior economists and policy advisors for £20-£30k. This is one example of many I could roll off.
I worked in the civil service for several years and quit because I worked out it was a rabbit hole; I could almost immediately double my wage after leaving.
If you go and read linkedin, people just sneer at the terms and conditions offered by the civil service.
There are some pockets of great extravagance in the civil service but this is not the experience of the vast majority of people who work in it.
It is an example of extreme incomprehension and dysfunction on the part of those who govern us that they would contemplate reducing pay in this way.
It suggests that they are driven by prejudice and have no understanding of reality.
https://twitter.com/Mendelpol/status/1554229618961698816
So if the UN cannot broker a ceasefire, he thinks the African Union should ...
Also note he calls on us to stop providing arms to Ukraine. He specifically does not call for countries to stop providing troops to Russia, or for the Russians to lay down their arms. He does not call Russia the aggressors. In that interview, he makes *us* out to be the bad guys because we are prolonging the war by providing arms.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/3294787/#Comment_3294787
.... so actually, we just need to make peace with murderers and other violent criminals. And, rather than giving more resources to the police, we should actually be looking at bringing in mediators from places like Africa.
Might not be finished after all.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/3404262/#Comment_3404262
The guy has a mantra, but no real answers. He does not have the intelligence to see that his 'solutions' both reward war (therefore making war more likely in other regions), and give succour to the evil doers. In his mind, *we* are automatically in the wrong; a thinking that pollutes the minds of his followers and friends.
Witness Nick Palmer on here.
Let's start with public schools, the monarchy and "competition" - turn them into burgers and see what happens.
Or do we mean hackneyed daily express fantasies rather than original?
Sunak's down to 5.6. Any reason for this?
The survey, which concluded early last week, has support for Truss on 48 per cent compared with 43 per cent for the former chancellor, with 9 per cent of those questioned undecided.
The poll is in contrast to the last YouGov survey carried out at the end of the knockout stages which suggested that Truss had a 24-point lead over Sunak.
Sources in the Sunak campaign claimed the shift reflected feedback they had been getting, suggesting the race was much closer than had been thought.
“It really hasn’t felt to us like Liz was doing as well as the polls have been suggesting. Wherever he goes he is getting really good feedback and an awful lot of people are still making up their minds,” one said. “Liz’s support feels very soft.”
The polling was carried out by the Italian data and public affairs company Techne and asked Conservative Party members their views on the candidates and their policy plans.
Sources in the Truss camp said the poll had not been commissioned by them but confirmed that it had been shared with the campaign. It found that on most issues Truss was well ahead of Sunak — among party members and voters who supported the Tories in 2019.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rishi-sunak-just-five-points-behind-liz-truss-in-latest-tory-leadership-poll-0p2b8nppv
Cost of diversity officers - £12 million.
Entire civil service pay bill £9bn.
So those saving mean paying teachers and nurses less in the north.
Cheers, Liz.
Relying on your smartphone rather than your brain to store crucial information does not rot your memory skills, scientists have found. It can boost your ability to remember little things that you would forget otherwise.
The ubiquity of smartphones means that most people now carry around billions of web pages, a calendar, notepad, calculator and address book in their pockets. Phones can be set to provide alarms and reminders for tasks, events or appointments.
Experts said this has raised fears that regular users may suffer from “digital dementia” and find that their brain’s ability to retain information worsens as they rely on their devices.
A study has found that the opposite can be true. Storing important information on our smartphones can free up our memory to store a larger amount of less crucial information, allowing us to retain more information across our internal and electronic memory banks.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/relying-smartphone-does-not-rot-memory-skills-scientists-find-6zjh92jzd
Makes me glad I laid Truss a bit at 1.13 or so yesterday. I'll wait for things to shorten more before fiddling again.
A stronger illiberal Russia means a weaker liberal West. Corbyn would want to see institutions such as the EU & NATO which underlie the liberal Western order to be demolished, and he probably sees Russia & Putin as a potential instrument of this destruction.
Betting PostOk, I just broke my promise but I had a good reason.
You can back Sunak at 7, with boost, to be next Con leader at Ladbrokes, and lay him at 5.9 on Betfair to be next PM.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6PxSE29hQU
He also doesn't understand that some held back might succeed despite being disadvantaged by the Grammar school system not because of it. He takes my success as proof that Secondary school work. It doesn't.
Also note the snide comments at the end. 'ego of self professed maths genius to match'. Completely uncalled for in a civilised debate and so much for him never being rude. He seems to object to me being successful having failed the 11 plus. Odd