Insufficient belief from that hotbed of bitter Remoanerism, the Telegraph:
"Nick Trend" seems to be a rather appropriate name, all he does is nick trends off Twitter without understanding them.
If the last decade has taught us anything, it's that, in politics, vibes and feels matter a lot more than is ideal and objective reality matters a lot less.
Going back to that Telegraph article- changing the colour of the passport ought to matter a lot less than its ability to allow you to pass smoothly through portes. (Yes, I have just come back from France, and very nice it was too.) But for some people, the switch from blue to burgundy and stiff to floppy were significant. Maybe that's irrational, but it's true, and rationalists should perhaps have respected that better. (Though I'd happy bet that many of those who moaned about floppy pink passports would have moaned about floppy blue ones too.)
So what matters about this article is not whether the facts in it are accurate or not. It's that the journal of choice of retired colonels percieves there's a problem. There's no point trying to argue them out of that perception with facts. As 1990-2016 showed, it doesn't really work.
The article hints that this is part of the drive to combat TikTok, and that the NYC and SF offices will be downgraded as a result
Intriguingly, another reason given is the personal desire of the boss to “live in London”
I’ve wondered recently if this might become a thing. Prolonged instability and rising crime in big American cities will drive rich Americans (and their companies) to other cities. It’s always presumed these will be Miami and Austin etc
But if you want an enormous world city that speaks English and has lots of culture you wouldn’t choose Miami or Austin. You’d choose london. And you’re an hour or two from anywhere in Europe
The digital economy is one area in which London can definitely prosper outside of the EU - as long as we ensure the UK retains data adequacy and has a good supply of IT talent on tap.
FWIW, we just opened an office in Austin having acquired a business there. A lot of tech companies are opening up in and around the city, and the university is very well thought of. We can learn a lot of lessons from the US about how to create tech hubs around universities. They can be a major tool for levelling up in the UK given that we have very good ones in just about every region of the country. But it will take concerted, long-term investment - and far better infrastructure than we have now.
You might well have done - but I'm hearing a lot of stories where US firms are switching future expansion plans away from Texas / Florida as people are no longer willing to relocate there..
The point is that there is little requirement for people to relocate as there is a strong local talent pool.
I wasn't talking about the talent pool - I'm talking about the management.
You try and convince a 30 year old wife to move to Texas or a 40 year old mother with girls...
As that FT article point out, talented staff in London are also an awful lot cheaper than in the USA, if you can find them
On the same theme, London is quietly building a super impressive IT hub in King’s Cross. I knew that Google were opening a huge new HQ there, but I didn’t realise Meta have just unveiled their own quite dazzling King’s X HQ (their biggest outside the USA)
King’s X will soon be an amazing place to be. Google, Meta, St Martin’s College, UCL, the Wellcome, the Francis Crick Institute, the British library, the Guardian, Deepmind, Expedia, Samsung, the Alan Turing Institute, and dozens of others. A glorious collision of talents and skills. I rather envy young people who get to work and play there
The second to last paragraph of this thread header is very misleading and OGH should know better than to promote such myths. Democratic legitimacy has always derived from the election of MPs not from who they choose to be Prime Minister. If they are not happy with her then they can vote her down and choose someone else. No General Election is necessary.
By the letter you are right; in spirit you are wrong.
One weird anomaly of the Henley ranking is the way they treat equals. So Japan and Singapore are #1, Germany and SK are #2, the next three are all #3 etc.
Counting all countries as equal is very simplistic anyway. Weight it according to size and proximity.
I would rather have visa free access to France than the Marshall Islands.
Bored, I've just created my own "levelling up" metric using data from the Treasury.
London does extraordinarily well, whichever way you look at it. Then Scotland (which is something Unionists need to shout more about). The North-east, East Midlands and Yorkshire get a pretty tough deal. It's even worse if you look at it from a capital only perspective.
The second to last paragraph of this thread header is very misleading and OGH should know better than to promote such myths. Democratic legitimacy has always derived from the election of MPs not from who they choose to be Prime Minister. If they are not happy with her then they can vote her down and choose someone else. No General Election is necessary.
By the letter you are right; in spirit you are wrong.
Still, at least I'm interested in more than just whatever SpaceX is doing.
Incidentally, the SLS may well fly later this month - perhaps as early as the 29th. That will be amazing to see, especially if it launches before SpaceX's SS/SH combo.
I know it's not cool any more but https://www.spacex.com/launches/ 171 total launches, 133 landings & 109 reflights. Noone else has even landed or reflown a rocket once*.
I'm shocked NASA are going to be launching anything. Mind you James Webb is up at it's lagrange point now and that felt like it was never going to happen.
The problem for NASA is that the coalition of politicians that give them their budget are very very keen on the following things
1) Big projects going to the right companies 2) These big companies, in turn, give the actual work to to a pyramid of smaller companies below them. 3) Under the FAR contracts, various special interest groups get preferential treatment in awarding contracts. So the politicians get to reward their favourite constituents. 4) National prestige ... 1021) Spaceflight
Under FAR contracting rules, profits are capped. Per level of outsourcing. So, if you can only make 20% on the contract, you make it as big as possible. So if the guy below you in the food chain of out sourcing makes his bit more expensive, you can make more profit - since the overall size of the project has gone up. For extra points, you have a web of ownership, where you own companies (or part own them) at various levels in the pyramid..
So the perfect contract never ends, gets bigger and bigger and doesn't actually produce any of the dangerous, difficult spaceflight stuff.
Pork barrel politics isn't confined to NASA projects in Congress - or even to the US.
But NASA projects are the undoubted Gold Standard of Pork Barrel politics.
The SLS (Senate Launch System) was designed and produced across every single one of the 48 contiguous States, and not by accident.
It is not just pork barrel politics, there is also protectionism. Any "strategic" American company that runs into trouble can be bailed out by a research contract (so nothing much need be delivered) from Nasa or the Pentagon.
'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. Those 75% of kids whether they go to a Comp or Secondary will end up in the same (presumably dead end) jobs. Very harsh. I also agree with you that it is not my experience that under-privileged kids get through to Grammars in any numbers anyway.
He also takes my success of getting to Uni as proof that Secondary schools work. He doesn't understand that I succeeded despite of it not because of it and there will always be these cases.
Also note the snide comments at the end of his comment to me. 'ego of self professed maths genius to match'. Completely uncalled for in a civilised discussion because I was showing how the 11 plus failed people. I had not been rude to him. It is as if he does not like the fact that someone from a status below him has been successful. @Richard_Tyndall made a comment sometime ago along the lines of him being in awe of power and dismissive of those without it. This certainly rings true. Knock back Catalans and Scots but give way to the IRA; admiration for dictators; admiration for the landed gentry, lawyers and doctors and Oxbridge and Russell Group Unis; dismissive of Secondary school kids and Comprehensives, but admire Grammar schools. The list goes on.
I guess we shouldn't try and aspire to get above our station. Does he really care for those poor kids who he says get into Grammar schools or is it just a cover to keep the plebs down.
Whatevs
You really do set yourself up sometimes @Leon don't you? Remember what you said to me the other day when I replied to a post you made to @kinabalu - You said I'm not talking to you. Well actually you said a lot more than that. Pot and kettle? Of course being an open forum I welcome all responses but a few more words might be useful..
Sometimes it is best to let previous threads die. Otherwise we end up with ongoing feuds, and it is not as if there is much more to say about grammar schools, and even if there is, the subject will recur organically in due course.
Point taken. Please note my subsequent comment was made before I saw your post. My anger was not so much about the Grammar school debate, but hyufd's completely unnecessary rudeness on the last thread which made me respond.
One thing from that thread that I did think was interesting was that when I asserted that people should be judged by what they said and did not how they talked or who they knew, HYUFD said that that was typical leftist sentiment. I was kind of surprised by that response, because I thought I had expressed a fairly uncontroversial view that would be shared by most people across the political spectrum. Can PB Tories and rightists weigh in on this - is meritocracy an inherently left wing idea?
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
The second to last paragraph of this thread header is very misleading and OGH should know better than to promote such myths. Democratic legitimacy has always derived from the election of MPs not from who they choose to be Prime Minister. If they are not happy with her then they can vote her down and choose someone else. No General Election is necessary.
By the letter you are right; in spirit you are wrong.
'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. Those 75% of kids whether they go to a Comp or Secondary will end up in the same (presumably dead end) jobs. Very harsh. I also agree with you that it is not my experience that under-privileged kids get through to Grammars in any numbers anyway.
He also takes my success of getting to Uni as proof that Secondary schools work. He doesn't understand that I succeeded despite of it not because of it and there will always be these cases.
Also note the snide comments at the end of his comment to me. 'ego of self professed maths genius to match'. Completely uncalled for in a civilised discussion because I was showing how the 11 plus failed people. I had not been rude to him. It is as if he does not like the fact that someone from a status below him has been successful. @Richard_Tyndall made a comment sometime ago along the lines of him being in awe of power and dismissive of those without it. This certainly rings true. Knock back Catalans and Scots but give way to the IRA; admiration for dictators; admiration for the landed gentry, lawyers and doctors and Oxbridge and Russell Group Unis; dismissive of Secondary school kids and Comprehensives, but admire Grammar schools. The list goes on.
I guess we shouldn't try and aspire to get above our station. Does he really care for those poor kids who he says get into Grammar schools or is it just a cover to keep the plebs down.
@HYUFD assertion that good comprehensives are de facto Secondary Modern schools illustrates his woeful ignorance of the education system… one hopes that he has no responsibility for children's services in his council role…
Comprehensives that are not outstanding are little different to Secondary moderns yes
What does that make a Grammar school that isn't outstanding?
Oh I just noticed @hyufd posted this on the last thread in reply to me:
kjh said:
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
OK
a) It might be patronising, but you started it by being very rude to me which was uncalled for. I was not rude to you. You deserved it. So much for you always being polite. I have no idea what got into you to make such an uncalled for rude comment.
b) I got to University on my own merits, not the schools. I changed schools because I had to. The Secondary Modern did not do A levels. I was already at the standard required, hence being fast streamed and taking A levels after 1 year of 6th form. So you final statement was, as usual, completely inaccurate.
You say 'I was not rude to you' having just quoted in your second paragraph where you were rude to me.
While yet again continuing your tedious trend of rehashing the previous thread when most of us have moved on.
Your also by your own admission got into university via a grammar school
The second to last paragraph of this thread header is very misleading and OGH should know better than to promote such myths. Democratic legitimacy has always derived from the election of MPs not from who they choose to be Prime Minister. If they are not happy with her then they can vote her down and choose someone else. No General Election is necessary.
By the letter you are right; in spirit you are wrong.
'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. Those 75% of kids whether they go to a Comp or Secondary will end up in the same (presumably dead end) jobs. Very harsh. I also agree with you that it is not my experience that under-privileged kids get through to Grammars in any numbers anyway.
He also takes my success of getting to Uni as proof that Secondary schools work. He doesn't understand that I succeeded despite of it not because of it and there will always be these cases.
Also note the snide comments at the end of his comment to me. 'ego of self professed maths genius to match'. Completely uncalled for in a civilised discussion because I was showing how the 11 plus failed people. I had not been rude to him. It is as if he does not like the fact that someone from a status below him has been successful. @Richard_Tyndall made a comment sometime ago along the lines of him being in awe of power and dismissive of those without it. This certainly rings true. Knock back Catalans and Scots but give way to the IRA; admiration for dictators; admiration for the landed gentry, lawyers and doctors and Oxbridge and Russell Group Unis; dismissive of Secondary school kids and Comprehensives, but admire Grammar schools. The list goes on.
I guess we shouldn't try and aspire to get above our station. Does he really care for those poor kids who he says get into Grammar schools or is it just a cover to keep the plebs down.
You lack his "social cachet". You should be grateful that he deigns to grace you with his condescension.
That made me laugh and for those not on the thread yesterday that was the term @hyufd used re the benefit of his private education.
I do wonder if there is more to it. By making himself known on PB he can be looked up on the council web site as an elected councillor. Is there an element of envy from a privileged public school boy of 40 living in a one bedroom flat, doing an average job, waiting for his rightly deserved inheritance, being outdone by an upstart from a Secondary School.
No, as I also said I passed the 11+ and you didn't even if you got into a grammar at 16.
However I generally don't play personal games as I come here for the politics not personal issues. I couldn't care less if you are a billionaire or on universal credit as far as discussing politics goes. In say case I have sold my flat and my wife and I are buying a house together not that it makes the slightest difference to anyone on here
Sorry @DecrepiterJohnL I can't let that go, although I think we have moved on from Grammar Schools so maybe ok:
a) Your first sentence does then rather show the uselessness of the 11 plus then doesn't it?
b) You said you don't play personal games, then why were you so rude to me on the last thread for no reason whatsoever?
c) You do care. You might not care about money, but you certainly care about position and social hierarchy, because you bang on and on about it all the time.
COVID deaths up to 745, which is the highest they've been since April. Non-COVID deaths in excess of the five-year average also up to 935, which may suggest a bit of an impact from the hot weather on 18 and 19 July.
Week-ending | 5-year average | COVID deaths | non-COVID deaths | non-COVID deaths in excess of the 5-year average
Sadly, we're likely to see higher excess deaths for the foreseeable future (I would love to be wrong), although the number of directly-caused-by-covid deaths should drop quite quickly (again) as infection prevalence looks to have peaked on 9th July and been dropping steadily since.
However, the aftereffects of covid and the state of the health service will mean we'll expect to see considerable knock-on deaths.
By "the aftereffects of covid," I don't specifically mean the condition known as Long Covid, but the organ damage, which means heart conditions, diabetes, strokes, and the like are several times more likely in those who had and recovered from covid (but on an individual level, remember that this goes from "Very low" to "two to six times "very low" which is still low" personally - we're still talking about measurements using the "per thousand per year" scale)
Healthcare-wise, we're running at well beyond the worst winter crisis level in the middle of summer, so, sadly, there will be quite a few tales of people waiting several hours for ambulances for emergencies, or dying while waiting on trolleys for days.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Yes - it is utterly absurd and cruel, given the cost of living crisis. If Sunak had any political antennae he'd be onto this like a shot.
Truss is either stupid or hubristic or a bit of both.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Is it a Leadsom moment? It really is bonkers, even by the standards of Bluekip fantasies.
It goes against the red wall. It goes against levelling up. We are failing to fill roles in public services with current rates of pay. There is massive inflation so pay rises are needed, not pay cuts. Too many of the young gravitate to London and the SE anyway so making public sector workers richer in poorer areas of the country balances that out effectively.
The second to last paragraph of this thread header is very misleading and OGH should know better than to promote such myths. Democratic legitimacy has always derived from the election of MPs not from who they choose to be Prime Minister. If they are not happy with her then they can vote her down and choose someone else. No General Election is necessary.
True. It does tend to follow though that the MPs should directly choose the PM and not get the membership involved, rather than have to go through the process of - if they really want Sunak - forcing Truss out if the membership choose her. And possibly doing that multiple times with different candidates until the membership give up and go with the MPs' choice.
I've no problem at all with the MPs choosing a new PM without an election, but I do wish the Conservative members didn't get to do it.
(Interesting constitutional point, of course - the members are only voting for the Conservative party leader and the MPs could band together and demand a different PM, without consulting the membership, I guess, but in reality the new Con leader will be the new PM. Choosing leaders is of course an internal party matter, but the de facto duality of party leader and PM causes some friction between who should be choosing the PM - MPs - and who should be choosing party leader - members).
'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. Those 75% of kids whether they go to a Comp or Secondary will end up in the same (presumably dead end) jobs. Very harsh. I also agree with you that it is not my experience that under-privileged kids get through to Grammars in any numbers anyway.
He also takes my success of getting to Uni as proof that Secondary schools work. He doesn't understand that I succeeded despite of it not because of it and there will always be these cases.
Also note the snide comments at the end of his comment to me. 'ego of self professed maths genius to match'. Completely uncalled for in a civilised discussion because I was showing how the 11 plus failed people. I had not been rude to him. It is as if he does not like the fact that someone from a status below him has been successful. @Richard_Tyndall made a comment sometime ago along the lines of him being in awe of power and dismissive of those without it. This certainly rings true. Knock back Catalans and Scots but give way to the IRA; admiration for dictators; admiration for the landed gentry, lawyers and doctors and Oxbridge and Russell Group Unis; dismissive of Secondary school kids and Comprehensives, but admire Grammar schools. The list goes on.
I guess we shouldn't try and aspire to get above our station. Does he really care for those poor kids who he says get into Grammar schools or is it just a cover to keep the plebs down.
As I already showed last year disadvantaged pupils are more likely to get into top universities in grammar school than comprehensive areas.
COVID deaths up to 745, which is the highest they've been since April. Non-COVID deaths in excess of the five-year average also up to 935, which may suggest a bit of an impact from the hot weather on 18 and 19 July.
Week-ending | 5-year average | COVID deaths | non-COVID deaths | non-COVID deaths in excess of the 5-year average
Let us not forget the recent post highlighting the alarmist article about deaths caused by excess heat which on closer reading was based on the output of a model. LOL.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Yes - it is utterly absurd and cruel, given the cost of living crisis. If Sunak had any political antennae he'd be onto this like a shot.
Truss is either stupid or hubristic or a bit of both.
I don't think Sunak can - most Tory members want costs savings by any means possible (all the more for them)..
So he has to be careful how he plays it - meanwhile the damage sits there waiting for the next election (because even if it's not implemented it's possibly that it will be implemented post the next election).
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Yes - it is utterly absurd and cruel, given the cost of living crisis. If Sunak had any political antennae he'd be onto this like a shot.
Truss is either stupid or hubristic or a bit of both.
Truss has said she’s not giving anyone a pay cut. She’s looking to regionalise pay structures for new staff.
Ben Houchen is on Team Sunak, hence the smears. His team are acting like they’re fighting Labour, rather than having a genuine discussion within their own party. Most unedifying, unless you’re Labour collecting attack lines for the next election.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Yes - it is utterly absurd and cruel, given the cost of living crisis. If Sunak had any political antennae he'd be onto this like a shot.
Truss is either stupid or hubristic or a bit of both.
Probably a bit of both.
On the face of it, the state outcompeting the private sector for workers in some regions by paying a national scale might be a problem - but this proposal is so obviously solving the wrong problem.
The second to last paragraph of this thread header is very misleading and OGH should know better than to promote such myths. Democratic legitimacy has always derived from the election of MPs not from who they choose to be Prime Minister. If they are not happy with her then they can vote her down and choose someone else. No General Election is necessary.
No, he has a point. There's a difference between constitutional and democratic legitimacy.
If elected by the members, it will be on the basis of having presented to them a significantly different prospectus to that which Tory MPs were elected on.
The other 99% of the electorate have every right to feel irked at having a new PM imposed on them in this manner, irrespective of constitutional proprieties. Mike's point was, I think, a political rather than constitutional one.
Truss is not, of course, going to take the risk of a snap election, but she has no automatic right to being absolved by the rest of us of blame for not doing so.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Yes - it is utterly absurd and cruel, given the cost of living crisis. If Sunak had any political antennae he'd be onto this like a shot.
Truss is either stupid or hubristic or a bit of both.
Truss has said she’s not giving anyone a pay cut. She’s looking to regionalise pay structures for new staff.
Ben Houchen is on Team Sunak, hence the smears. His team are acting like they’re fighting Labour, rather than having a genuine discussion within their own party. Most unedifying, unless you’re Labour collecting attack lines for the next election.
So she wants to transfer wealth from the North and Midlands to London? OK, but that is the complete opposite of how they got elected.
'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. Those 75% of kids whether they go to a Comp or Secondary will end up in the same (presumably dead end) jobs. Very harsh. I also agree with you that it is not my experience that under-privileged kids get through to Grammars in any numbers anyway.
He also takes my success of getting to Uni as proof that Secondary schools work. He doesn't understand that I succeeded despite of it not because of it and there will always be these cases.
Also note the snide comments at the end of his comment to me. 'ego of self professed maths genius to match'. Completely uncalled for in a civilised discussion because I was showing how the 11 plus failed people. I had not been rude to him. It is as if he does not like the fact that someone from a status below him has been successful. @Richard_Tyndall made a comment sometime ago along the lines of him being in awe of power and dismissive of those without it. This certainly rings true. Knock back Catalans and Scots but give way to the IRA; admiration for dictators; admiration for the landed gentry, lawyers and doctors and Oxbridge and Russell Group Unis; dismissive of Secondary school kids and Comprehensives, but admire Grammar schools. The list goes on.
I guess we shouldn't try and aspire to get above our station. Does he really care for those poor kids who he says get into Grammar schools or is it just a cover to keep the plebs down.
Whatevs
You really do set yourself up sometimes @Leon don't you? Remember what you said to me the other day when I replied to a post you made to @kinabalu - You said I'm not talking to you. Well actually you said a lot more than that. Pot and kettle? Of course being an open forum I welcome all responses but a few more words might be useful..
Sometimes it is best to let previous threads die. Otherwise we end up with ongoing feuds, and it is not as if there is much more to say about grammar schools, and even if there is, the subject will recur organically in due course.
Point taken. Please note my subsequent comment was made before I saw your post. My anger was not so much about the Grammar school debate, but hyufd's completely unnecessary rudeness on the last thread which made me respond.
One thing from that thread that I did think was interesting was that when I asserted that people should be judged by what they said and did not how they talked or who they knew, HYUFD said that that was typical leftist sentiment. I was kind of surprised by that response, because I thought I had expressed a fairly uncontroversial view that would be shared by most people across the political spectrum. Can PB Tories and rightists weigh in on this - is meritocracy an inherently left wing idea?
Yes I noted that and responded at the time asking whether he agreed or disagreed with what you had said because ||I thought in uncontroversial.
Insufficient belief from that hotbed of bitter Remoanerism, the Telegraph:
"Nick Trend" seems to be a rather appropriate name, all he does is nick trends off Twitter without understanding them.
If the last decade has taught us anything, it's that, in politics, vibes and feels matter a lot more than is ideal and objective reality matters a lot less.
Going back to that Telegraph article- changing the colour of the passport ought to matter a lot less than its ability to allow you to pass smoothly through portes. (Yes, I have just come back from France, and very nice it was too.) But for some people, the switch from blue to burgundy and stiff to floppy were significant. Maybe that's irrational, but it's true, and rationalists should perhaps have respected that better. (Though I'd happy bet that many of those who moaned about floppy pink passports would have moaned about floppy blue ones too.)
So what matters about this article is not whether the facts in it are accurate or not. It's that the journal of choice of retired colonels percieves there's a problem. There's no point trying to argue them out of that perception with facts. As 1990-2016 showed, it doesn't really work.
As some are fond of telling us, "if you're explaining, you're losing".
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Is it a Leadsom moment? It really is bonkers, even by the standards of Bluekip fantasies.
It goes against the red wall. It goes against levelling up. We are failing to fill roles in public services with current rates of pay. There is massive inflation so pay rises are needed, not pay cuts. Too many of the young gravitate to London and the SE anyway so making public sector workers richer in poorer areas of the country balances that out effectively.
It's not just pay that will need to be cut - if her fantasy savings are going to be made - but actual services. Fewer hospitals, GPs, teachers etc - and there is a shortage already.
The second to last paragraph of this thread header is very misleading and OGH should know better than to promote such myths. Democratic legitimacy has always derived from the election of MPs not from who they choose to be Prime Minister. If they are not happy with her then they can vote her down and choose someone else. No General Election is necessary.
True. It does tend to follow though that the MPs should directly choose the PM and not get the membership involved, rather than have to go through the process of - if they really want Sunak - forcing Truss out if the membership choose her. And possibly doing that multiple times with different candidates until the membership give up and go with the MPs' choice.
I've no problem at all with the MPs choosing a new PM without an election, but I do wish the Conservative members didn't get to do it.
(Interesting constitutional point, of course - the members are only voting for the Conservative party leader and the MPs could band together and demand a different PM, without consulting the membership, I guess, but in reality the new Con leader will be the new PM. Choosing leaders is of course an internal party matter, but the de facto duality of party leader and PM causes some friction between who should be choosing the PM - MPs - and who should be choosing party leader - members).
I raised this point several weeks ago at the start of the leadership "battle" - that they where all vying for who would be PM, not who would be Leader of the Party
You are correct that, at present, the two positions are combined, but I took the view that it spoke to the mindset of the candidates. They were, IMO, in this for purely personal reasons and not because they wanted to lead their Party
The second to last paragraph of this thread header is very misleading and OGH should know better than to promote such myths. Democratic legitimacy has always derived from the election of MPs not from who they choose to be Prime Minister. If they are not happy with her then they can vote her down and choose someone else. No General Election is necessary.
By the letter you are right; in spirit you are wrong.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Yes - it is utterly absurd and cruel, given the cost of living crisis. If Sunak had any political antennae he'd be onto this like a shot.
Truss is either stupid or hubristic or a bit of both.
Probably a bit of both.
On the face of it, the state outcompeting the private sector for workers in some regions by paying a national scale might be a problem - but this proposal is so obviously solving the wrong problem.
I'm uncomfortable defending Truss but what people are doing is taking their prediction of the worst/most unpopular outcome from a vague policy statement and making that the policy. The ending of national pay scales in the public sector is a perennial debate. If London allowances still exist then in effect there is already a mild version in place.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Yes - it is utterly absurd and cruel, given the cost of living crisis. If Sunak had any political antennae he'd be onto this like a shot.
Truss is either stupid or hubristic or a bit of both.
I don't think Sunak can - most Tory members want costs savings by any means possible (all the more for them)..
So he has to be careful how he plays it - meanwhile the damage sits there waiting for the next election (because even if it's not implemented it's possibly that it will be implemented post the next election).
There won't be more for them because any tax cuts they might get will need to be spent on paying for private GPs and the rest, assuming you can find them and hoping that you don't need an A&E department or ambulance or fireman or social care etc.
'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. Those 75% of kids whether they go to a Comp or Secondary will end up in the same (presumably dead end) jobs. Very harsh. I also agree with you that it is not my experience that under-privileged kids get through to Grammars in any numbers anyway.
He also takes my success of getting to Uni as proof that Secondary schools work. He doesn't understand that I succeeded despite of it not because of it and there will always be these cases.
Also note the snide comments at the end of his comment to me. 'ego of self professed maths genius to match'. Completely uncalled for in a civilised discussion because I was showing how the 11 plus failed people. I had not been rude to him. It is as if he does not like the fact that someone from a status below him has been successful. @Richard_Tyndall made a comment sometime ago along the lines of him being in awe of power and dismissive of those without it. This certainly rings true. Knock back Catalans and Scots but give way to the IRA; admiration for dictators; admiration for the landed gentry, lawyers and doctors and Oxbridge and Russell Group Unis; dismissive of Secondary school kids and Comprehensives, but admire Grammar schools. The list goes on.
I guess we shouldn't try and aspire to get above our station. Does he really care for those poor kids who he says get into Grammar schools or is it just a cover to keep the plebs down.
Whatevs
You really do set yourself up sometimes @Leon don't you? Remember what you said to me the other day when I replied to a post you made to @kinabalu - You said I'm not talking to you. Well actually you said a lot more than that. Pot and kettle? Of course being an open forum I welcome all responses but a few more words might be useful..
Sometimes it is best to let previous threads die. Otherwise we end up with ongoing feuds, and it is not as if there is much more to say about grammar schools, and even if there is, the subject will recur organically in due course.
Point taken. Please note my subsequent comment was made before I saw your post. My anger was not so much about the Grammar school debate, but hyufd's completely unnecessary rudeness on the last thread which made me respond.
One thing from that thread that I did think was interesting was that when I asserted that people should be judged by what they said and did not how they talked or who they knew, HYUFD said that that was typical leftist sentiment. I was kind of surprised by that response, because I thought I had expressed a fairly uncontroversial view that would be shared by most people across the political spectrum. Can PB Tories and rightists weigh in on this - is meritocracy an inherently left wing idea?
I think adherence to and practical support for meritocracy decreases significantly when people become parents and further as they become grandparents!
Which with our age driven politics does create a gap but not specifically driven by left v right.
I commented on my twitter account a few days ago that what I was most looking forward to when Liz Truss became PM was how rapidly she would become less popular in Scotland than Boris Johnson. I should not have to wait too long now.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Yes - it is utterly absurd and cruel, given the cost of living crisis. If Sunak had any political antennae he'd be onto this like a shot.
Truss is either stupid or hubristic or a bit of both.
Probably a bit of both.
On the face of it, the state outcompeting the private sector for workers in some regions by paying a national scale might be a problem - but this proposal is so obviously solving the wrong problem.
I'm uncomfortable defending Truss but what people are doing is taking their prediction of the worst/most unpopular outcome from a vague policy statement and making that the policy. The ending of national pay scales in the public sector is a perennial debate. If London allowances still exist then in effect there is already a mild version in place.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Is it a Leadsom moment? It really is bonkers, even by the standards of Bluekip fantasies.
It goes against the red wall. It goes against levelling up. We are failing to fill roles in public services with current rates of pay. There is massive inflation so pay rises are needed, not pay cuts. Too many of the young gravitate to London and the SE anyway so making public sector workers richer in poorer areas of the country balances that out effectively.
Truss was one of the authors of Britannia Unchained. That she's pushing bonkers ideas shouldn't be news.
Oh I just noticed @hyufd posted this on the last thread in reply to me:
kjh said:
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
OK
a) It might be patronising, but you started it by being very rude to me which was uncalled for. I was not rude to you. You deserved it. So much for you always being polite. I have no idea what got into you to make such an uncalled for rude comment.
b) I got to University on my own merits, not the schools. I changed schools because I had to. The Secondary Modern did not do A levels. I was already at the standard required, hence being fast streamed and taking A levels after 1 year of 6th form. So you final statement was, as usual, completely inaccurate.
You say 'I was not rude to you' having just quoted in your second paragraph where you were rude to me.
While yet again continuing your tedious trend of rehashing the previous thread when most of us have moved on.
Your also by your own admission got into university via a grammar school
OK I am going to stop as @DecrepiterJohnL and others will blow a gasket, but just to show how irrational you are you quote me being rude to you. Yes I was, because you absolute twit, you were rude to me first. I responded. I mean how stupid are you? How did you pass the 11 plus?
Re getting into the Uni via a Grammar School. How else was I going to do so? I have already told you the Sec Mod did not do A levels. I had to use the system in place. I couldn't make up my own. You really are an idiot.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Is it a Leadsom moment? It really is bonkers, even by the standards of Bluekip fantasies.
It goes against the red wall. It goes against levelling up. We are failing to fill roles in public services with current rates of pay. There is massive inflation so pay rises are needed, not pay cuts. Too many of the young gravitate to London and the SE anyway so making public sector workers richer in poorer areas of the country balances that out effectively.
It's not just pay that will need to be cut - if her fantasy savings are going to be made - but actual services. Fewer hospitals, GPs, teachers etc - and there is a shortage already.
It is utterly cretinous.
We can’t afford this stuff. Not any more. It’s not just pay and services that need to be cut - it’s people. We can’t afford all these people and their pies. We need 4-5m fewer people in the crappy parts of the country. Close down Rotherham and “Stockport” and the like. They have no purpose
Truss is right. It’s time to get real. We need a leaner meaner UK to take on Jonny Asia
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Yes - it is utterly absurd and cruel, given the cost of living crisis. If Sunak had any political antennae he'd be onto this like a shot.
Truss is either stupid or hubristic or a bit of both.
Truss has said she’s not giving anyone a pay cut. She’s looking to regionalise pay structures for new staff.
Ben Houchen is on Team Sunak, hence the smears. His team are acting like they’re fighting Labour, rather than having a genuine discussion within their own party. Most unedifying, unless you’re Labour collecting attack lines for the next election.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Yes - it is utterly absurd and cruel, given the cost of living crisis. If Sunak had any political antennae he'd be onto this like a shot.
Truss is either stupid or hubristic or a bit of both.
Probably a bit of both.
On the face of it, the state outcompeting the private sector for workers in some regions by paying a national scale might be a problem - but this proposal is so obviously solving the wrong problem.
I'm uncomfortable defending Truss but what people are doing is taking their prediction of the worst/most unpopular outcome from a vague policy statement and making that the policy. The ending of national pay scales in the public sector is a perennial debate. If London allowances still exist then in effect there is already a mild version in place.
You cannot make £8 billion of savings from the civil service by cutting diversity officers and paying new people less. The only way to do that is by axing public services and sacking staff.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Is it a Leadsom moment? It really is bonkers, even by the standards of Bluekip fantasies.
It goes against the red wall. It goes against levelling up. We are failing to fill roles in public services with current rates of pay. There is massive inflation so pay rises are needed, not pay cuts. Too many of the young gravitate to London and the SE anyway so making public sector workers richer in poorer areas of the country balances that out effectively.
If it only applies to new staff and merely civil servants as opposed to all public sector workers, then the numbers saved are completely absurd as well. I wonder if 'people's journalist' Dan Hodges will have anything to say on that. He appears to be batting very well for team Liz.
The second to last paragraph of this thread header is very misleading and OGH should know better than to promote such myths. Democratic legitimacy has always derived from the election of MPs not from who they choose to be Prime Minister. If they are not happy with her then they can vote her down and choose someone else. No General Election is necessary.
By the letter you are right; in spirit you are wrong.
The thing is voters, who are the people who matter, generally disagree. When May called an early election, for no reason than to convert her large opinion poll lead into a large Commons majority, the voters were not impressed and sent her away with a telling off.
Johnson received an 80-seat majority because he went to the country early to get their help to resolve the deadlock in Parliament. The voters agreed that the election was necessary to get Brexit done.
Truss already has a majority. The voters will not agree that she requires a personal mandate. They will think that the Tories have a large enough majority to do the things that need doing, so they ought to get on and do them.
Of course the media love election speculation. And the Opposition will always push for an election. The question is how many Tories will be daft enough to feed the speculation?
'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. Those 75% of kids whether they go to a Comp or Secondary will end up in the same (presumably dead end) jobs. Very harsh. I also agree with you that it is not my experience that under-privileged kids get through to Grammars in any numbers anyway.
He also takes my success of getting to Uni as proof that Secondary schools work. He doesn't understand that I succeeded despite of it not because of it and there will always be these cases.
Also note the snide comments at the end of his comment to me. 'ego of self professed maths genius to match'. Completely uncalled for in a civilised discussion because I was showing how the 11 plus failed people. I had not been rude to him. It is as if he does not like the fact that someone from a status below him has been successful. @Richard_Tyndall made a comment sometime ago along the lines of him being in awe of power and dismissive of those without it. This certainly rings true. Knock back Catalans and Scots but give way to the IRA; admiration for dictators; admiration for the landed gentry, lawyers and doctors and Oxbridge and Russell Group Unis; dismissive of Secondary school kids and Comprehensives, but admire Grammar schools. The list goes on.
I guess we shouldn't try and aspire to get above our station. Does he really care for those poor kids who he says get into Grammar schools or is it just a cover to keep the plebs down.
Whatevs
You really do set yourself up sometimes @Leon don't you? Remember what you said to me the other day when I replied to a post you made to @kinabalu - You said I'm not talking to you. Well actually you said a lot more than that. Pot and kettle? Of course being an open forum I welcome all responses but a few more words might be useful..
Sometimes it is best to let previous threads die. Otherwise we end up with ongoing feuds, and it is not as if there is much more to say about grammar schools, and even if there is, the subject will recur organically in due course.
Point taken. Please note my subsequent comment was made before I saw your post. My anger was not so much about the Grammar school debate, but hyufd's completely unnecessary rudeness on the last thread which made me respond.
One thing from that thread that I did think was interesting was that when I asserted that people should be judged by what they said and did not how they talked or who they knew, HYUFD said that that was typical leftist sentiment. I was kind of surprised by that response, because I thought I had expressed a fairly uncontroversial view that would be shared by most people across the political spectrum. Can PB Tories and rightists weigh in on this - is meritocracy an inherently left wing idea?
I think adherence to and practical support for meritocracy decreases significantly when people become parents and further as they become grandparents!
Which with our age driven politics does create a gap but not specifically driven by left v right.
Only if you think your offspring are useless, presumably. My kids are all pretty smart and so I would welcome a level playing field.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Yes - it is utterly absurd and cruel, given the cost of living crisis. If Sunak had any political antennae he'd be onto this like a shot.
Truss is either stupid or hubristic or a bit of both.
Probably a bit of both.
On the face of it, the state outcompeting the private sector for workers in some regions by paying a national scale might be a problem - but this proposal is so obviously solving the wrong problem.
I'm uncomfortable defending Truss but what people are doing is taking their prediction of the worst/most unpopular outcome from a vague policy statement and making that the policy. The ending of national pay scales in the public sector is a perennial debate. If London allowances still exist then in effect there is already a mild version in place.
She put a figure on it. So it wasn't vague. No surprise folk then try to calculate the implications of that figure.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Is it a Leadsom moment? It really is bonkers, even by the standards of Bluekip fantasies.
It goes against the red wall. It goes against levelling up. We are failing to fill roles in public services with current rates of pay. There is massive inflation so pay rises are needed, not pay cuts. Too many of the young gravitate to London and the SE anyway so making public sector workers richer in poorer areas of the country balances that out effectively.
It's not just pay that will need to be cut - if her fantasy savings are going to be made - but actual services. Fewer hospitals, GPs, teachers etc - and there is a shortage already.
It is utterly cretinous.
We can’t afford this stuff. Not any more. It’s not just pay and services that need to be cut - it’s people. We can’t afford all these people and their pies. We need 4-5m fewer people in the crappy parts of the country. Close down Rotherham and “Stockport” and the like. They have no purpose
Truss is right. It’s time to get real. We need a leaner meaner UK to take on Jonny Asia
To reduce the headcount, I would start by restricting the number of identities per person to one.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Yes - it is utterly absurd and cruel, given the cost of living crisis. If Sunak had any political antennae he'd be onto this like a shot.
Truss is either stupid or hubristic or a bit of both.
Truss has said she’s not giving anyone a pay cut. She’s looking to regionalise pay structures for new staff.
Ben Houchen is on Team Sunak, hence the smears. His team are acting like they’re fighting Labour, rather than having a genuine discussion within their own party. Most unedifying, unless you’re Labour collecting attack lines for the next election.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Yes - it is utterly absurd and cruel, given the cost of living crisis. If Sunak had any political antennae he'd be onto this like a shot.
Truss is either stupid or hubristic or a bit of both.
Probably a bit of both.
On the face of it, the state outcompeting the private sector for workers in some regions by paying a national scale might be a problem - but this proposal is so obviously solving the wrong problem.
I'm uncomfortable defending Truss but what people are doing is taking their prediction of the worst/most unpopular outcome from a vague policy statement and making that the policy. The ending of national pay scales in the public sector is a perennial debate. If London allowances still exist then in effect there is already a mild version in place.
You cannot make £8 billion of savings from the civil service by cutting diversity officers and paying new people less. The only way to do that is by axing public services and sacking staff.
Fair point. The problem with cutting or reforming the civil service is like the famous quote "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”.
'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. Those 75% of kids whether they go to a Comp or Secondary will end up in the same (presumably dead end) jobs. Very harsh. I also agree with you that it is not my experience that under-privileged kids get through to Grammars in any numbers anyway.
He also takes my success of getting to Uni as proof that Secondary schools work. He doesn't understand that I succeeded despite of it not because of it and there will always be these cases.
Also note the snide comments at the end of his comment to me. 'ego of self professed maths genius to match'. Completely uncalled for in a civilised discussion because I was showing how the 11 plus failed people. I had not been rude to him. It is as if he does not like the fact that someone from a status below him has been successful. @Richard_Tyndall made a comment sometime ago along the lines of him being in awe of power and dismissive of those without it. This certainly rings true. Knock back Catalans and Scots but give way to the IRA; admiration for dictators; admiration for the landed gentry, lawyers and doctors and Oxbridge and Russell Group Unis; dismissive of Secondary school kids and Comprehensives, but admire Grammar schools. The list goes on.
I guess we shouldn't try and aspire to get above our station. Does he really care for those poor kids who he says get into Grammar schools or is it just a cover to keep the plebs down.
As I already showed last year disadvantaged pupils are more likely to get into top universities in grammar school than comprehensive areas.
Note that was a single study, and the statistical validity of the conclusion is questionable. ...She also said it was “disingenuous” to compare university entry from “selective” authorities when grammar schools import vast numbers of high-attaining pupils from non-selective areas.
She said: “Trafford grammar schools import nearly 30 per cent of pupils from outside the authority, while in Southend it is over 50 per cent. This is bound to skew university entry figures simply because higher proportions of the highest attaining pupils are educated in selective areas.”...
"I already showed" is really not the same thing as "I quoted a study".
'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. Those 75% of kids whether they go to a Comp or Secondary will end up in the same (presumably dead end) jobs. Very harsh. I also agree with you that it is not my experience that under-privileged kids get through to Grammars in any numbers anyway.
He also takes my success of getting to Uni as proof that Secondary schools work. He doesn't understand that I succeeded despite of it not because of it and there will always be these cases.
Also note the snide comments at the end of his comment to me. 'ego of self professed maths genius to match'. Completely uncalled for in a civilised discussion because I was showing how the 11 plus failed people. I had not been rude to him. It is as if he does not like the fact that someone from a status below him has been successful. @Richard_Tyndall made a comment sometime ago along the lines of him being in awe of power and dismissive of those without it. This certainly rings true. Knock back Catalans and Scots but give way to the IRA; admiration for dictators; admiration for the landed gentry, lawyers and doctors and Oxbridge and Russell Group Unis; dismissive of Secondary school kids and Comprehensives, but admire Grammar schools. The list goes on.
I guess we shouldn't try and aspire to get above our station. Does he really care for those poor kids who he says get into Grammar schools or is it just a cover to keep the plebs down.
Whatevs
You really do set yourself up sometimes @Leon don't you? Remember what you said to me the other day when I replied to a post you made to @kinabalu - You said I'm not talking to you. Well actually you said a lot more than that. Pot and kettle? Of course being an open forum I welcome all responses but a few more words might be useful..
Sometimes it is best to let previous threads die. Otherwise we end up with ongoing feuds, and it is not as if there is much more to say about grammar schools, and even if there is, the subject will recur organically in due course.
Point taken. Please note my subsequent comment was made before I saw your post. My anger was not so much about the Grammar school debate, but hyufd's completely unnecessary rudeness on the last thread which made me respond.
One thing from that thread that I did think was interesting was that when I asserted that people should be judged by what they said and did not how they talked or who they knew, HYUFD said that that was typical leftist sentiment. I was kind of surprised by that response, because I thought I had expressed a fairly uncontroversial view that would be shared by most people across the political spectrum. Can PB Tories and rightists weigh in on this - is meritocracy an inherently left wing idea?
I think adherence to and practical support for meritocracy decreases significantly when people become parents and further as they become grandparents!
Which with our age driven politics does create a gap but not specifically driven by left v right.
Only if you think your offspring are useless, presumably. My kids are all pretty smart and so I would welcome a level playing field.
You don't think your background and wealth gives them any advantages?
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Is it a Leadsom moment? It really is bonkers, even by the standards of Bluekip fantasies.
It goes against the red wall. It goes against levelling up. We are failing to fill roles in public services with current rates of pay. There is massive inflation so pay rises are needed, not pay cuts. Too many of the young gravitate to London and the SE anyway so making public sector workers richer in poorer areas of the country balances that out effectively.
Truss was one of the authors of Britannia Unchained. That she's pushing bonkers ideas shouldn't be news.
I thought we'd established she is in favour of chains ?
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Yes - it is utterly absurd and cruel, given the cost of living crisis. If Sunak had any political antennae he'd be onto this like a shot.
Truss is either stupid or hubristic or a bit of both.
Probably a bit of both.
On the face of it, the state outcompeting the private sector for workers in some regions by paying a national scale might be a problem - but this proposal is so obviously solving the wrong problem.
I'm uncomfortable defending Truss but what people are doing is taking their prediction of the worst/most unpopular outcome from a vague policy statement and making that the policy. The ending of national pay scales in the public sector is a perennial debate. If London allowances still exist then in effect there is already a mild version in place.
It doesn't matter - that one vague policy statement opened up the door on which "Don't be that f***ing stupid" has was carved into it many years ago.
In one statement it's transformed Levelling Up into Levelling Down and if Ben Houchen is screaming about it in an election he was trying to keep (publicly) out of you know there is a problem.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Is it a Leadsom moment? It really is bonkers, even by the standards of Bluekip fantasies.
It goes against the red wall. It goes against levelling up. We are failing to fill roles in public services with current rates of pay. There is massive inflation so pay rises are needed, not pay cuts. Too many of the young gravitate to London and the SE anyway so making public sector workers richer in poorer areas of the country balances that out effectively.
It's not just pay that will need to be cut - if her fantasy savings are going to be made - but actual services. Fewer hospitals, GPs, teachers etc - and there is a shortage already.
It is utterly cretinous.
We can’t afford this stuff. Not any more. It’s not just pay and services that need to be cut - it’s people. We can’t afford all these people and their pies. We need 4-5m fewer people in the crappy parts of the country. Close down Rotherham and “Stockport” and the like. They have no purpose
Truss is right. It’s time to get real. We need a leaner meaner UK to take on Jonny Asia
We could displace the populations of Rotherham and Stockport to Camden... that would work!
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Yes - it is utterly absurd and cruel, given the cost of living crisis. If Sunak had any political antennae he'd be onto this like a shot.
Truss is either stupid or hubristic or a bit of both.
Truss has said she’s not giving anyone a pay cut. She’s looking to regionalise pay structures for new staff.
Ben Houchen is on Team Sunak, hence the smears. His team are acting like they’re fighting Labour, rather than having a genuine discussion within their own party. Most unedifying, unless you’re Labour collecting attack lines for the next election.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Yes - it is utterly absurd and cruel, given the cost of living crisis. If Sunak had any political antennae he'd be onto this like a shot.
Truss is either stupid or hubristic or a bit of both.
Probably a bit of both.
On the face of it, the state outcompeting the private sector for workers in some regions by paying a national scale might be a problem - but this proposal is so obviously solving the wrong problem.
I'm uncomfortable defending Truss but what people are doing is taking their prediction of the worst/most unpopular outcome from a vague policy statement and making that the policy. The ending of national pay scales in the public sector is a perennial debate. If London allowances still exist then in effect there is already a mild version in place.
You cannot make £8 billion of savings from the civil service by cutting diversity officers and paying new people less. The only way to do that is by axing public services and sacking staff.
To save £8bn from the civil service tax bill 90% of civil servants will need to go - so it's not going to happen.
However the figure is out there now so it's going to fun watching how she achieves it and even more fun pointing out that she couldn't....
'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. Those 75% of kids whether they go to a Comp or Secondary will end up in the same (presumably dead end) jobs. Very harsh. I also agree with you that it is not my experience that under-privileged kids get through to Grammars in any numbers anyway.
He also takes my success of getting to Uni as proof that Secondary schools work. He doesn't understand that I succeeded despite of it not because of it and there will always be these cases.
Also note the snide comments at the end of his comment to me. 'ego of self professed maths genius to match'. Completely uncalled for in a civilised discussion because I was showing how the 11 plus failed people. I had not been rude to him. It is as if he does not like the fact that someone from a status below him has been successful. @Richard_Tyndall made a comment sometime ago along the lines of him being in awe of power and dismissive of those without it. This certainly rings true. Knock back Catalans and Scots but give way to the IRA; admiration for dictators; admiration for the landed gentry, lawyers and doctors and Oxbridge and Russell Group Unis; dismissive of Secondary school kids and Comprehensives, but admire Grammar schools. The list goes on.
I guess we shouldn't try and aspire to get above our station. Does he really care for those poor kids who he says get into Grammar schools or is it just a cover to keep the plebs down.
Whatevs
You really do set yourself up sometimes @Leon don't you? Remember what you said to me the other day when I replied to a post you made to @kinabalu - You said I'm not talking to you. Well actually you said a lot more than that. Pot and kettle? Of course being an open forum I welcome all responses but a few more words might be useful..
Sometimes it is best to let previous threads die. Otherwise we end up with ongoing feuds, and it is not as if there is much more to say about grammar schools, and even if there is, the subject will recur organically in due course.
Point taken. Please note my subsequent comment was made before I saw your post. My anger was not so much about the Grammar school debate, but hyufd's completely unnecessary rudeness on the last thread which made me respond.
One thing from that thread that I did think was interesting was that when I asserted that people should be judged by what they said and did not how they talked or who they knew, HYUFD said that that was typical leftist sentiment. I was kind of surprised by that response, because I thought I had expressed a fairly uncontroversial view that would be shared by most people across the political spectrum. Can PB Tories and rightists weigh in on this - is meritocracy an inherently left wing idea?
I think adherence to and practical support for meritocracy decreases significantly when people become parents and further as they become grandparents!
Which with our age driven politics does create a gap but not specifically driven by left v right.
Only if you think your offspring are useless, presumably. My kids are all pretty smart and so I would welcome a level playing field.
I think both of you make a good point. Presumably there is an element of keeping the plebs down as otherwise it reduces the opportunities with whom they will compete, however I think that most Conservatives like Thatcher (whether right or wrong in their chosen methods) are looking to increase the opportunities of those with less social opportunities. I was surprised by @hyufd's response to your question as it was not consistent with the giving more opportunities to the less well of (whether we agree with his methods or not his words imply his heart is in the right place).
£8b of savings looks to me like £350m on the side of a bus. The ingenuous focus their ire on the numbers, implicitly conceding the point about cutting diversity officers etc.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Yes - it is utterly absurd and cruel, given the cost of living crisis. If Sunak had any political antennae he'd be onto this like a shot.
Truss is either stupid or hubristic or a bit of both.
Truss has said she’s not giving anyone a pay cut. She’s looking to regionalise pay structures for new staff.
Ben Houchen is on Team Sunak, hence the smears. His team are acting like they’re fighting Labour, rather than having a genuine discussion within their own party. Most unedifying, unless you’re Labour collecting attack lines for the next election.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Yes - it is utterly absurd and cruel, given the cost of living crisis. If Sunak had any political antennae he'd be onto this like a shot.
Truss is either stupid or hubristic or a bit of both.
Probably a bit of both.
On the face of it, the state outcompeting the private sector for workers in some regions by paying a national scale might be a problem - but this proposal is so obviously solving the wrong problem.
I'm uncomfortable defending Truss but what people are doing is taking their prediction of the worst/most unpopular outcome from a vague policy statement and making that the policy. The ending of national pay scales in the public sector is a perennial debate. If London allowances still exist then in effect there is already a mild version in place.
You cannot make £8 billion of savings from the civil service by cutting diversity officers and paying new people less. The only way to do that is by axing public services and sacking staff.
To save £8bn from the civil service tax bill 90% of civil servants will need to go - so it's not going to happen.
However the figure is out there now so it's going to fun watching how she achieves it and even more fun pointing out that she couldn't....
£8b of savings looks to me like £350m on the side of a bus. The ingenuous focus their ire on the numbers, implicitly conceding the point about cutting diversity officers etc.
On the contrary, the narrative will be levelling down. 'Diversity officers' is so transparently negligible in financial terms that it's a joke.
£8bn of 'savings' will look to voters like cuts in my pay.
I started with "I was in the most beautiful place on Earth"
And it returned
"I was in the most beautiful place on Earth this weekend. It was a beachfront hotel in Tulum, Mexico, on the Yucatan Peninsula. About two hours south of Cancun, the nearest major city, Tulum is surrounded by the Caribbean Sea and has a long, dark, white-sand beach.
Tulum itself is an archaeological site, though now mostly forgotten. It’s on the west coast of the peninsula, and it’s only about 3.5 miles north of the Caribbean. This weekend it was nearly deserted, as thousands of people flocked to the beaches of Cancun and beyond, to spend their winter holidays. And so, with Tulum a quiet, beautiful destination just for me, I went."
I've never heard of Tulum. This is it. Looks pretty nice. Has anyone been?
£8b of savings looks to me like £350m on the side of a bus. The ingenuous focus their ire on the numbers, implicitly conceding the point about cutting diversity officers etc.
On the contrary, the narrative will be levelling down. 'Diversity officers' is so transparently negligible in financial terms that it's a joke.
£8bn of 'savings' will look to voters like cuts in my pay.
Don't the people likely to be affected tend to vote Labour ?
18 may be value for a 2022 GE but it isn't going to happen. Why risk 2 years to have a chance of gaining 3 afterwards? Nor is it foregone that Truss will even become PM. As the economy and standards of living tank, I can see why the Tory leadership might like to wave a "We're so popular - look at how big a majority we just won" banner, but that kind of politics just matters less and less to many people.
'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. Those 75% of kids whether they go to a Comp or Secondary will end up in the same (presumably dead end) jobs. Very harsh. I also agree with you that it is not my experience that under-privileged kids get through to Grammars in any numbers anyway.
He also takes my success of getting to Uni as proof that Secondary schools work. He doesn't understand that I succeeded despite of it not because of it and there will always be these cases.
Also note the snide comments at the end of his comment to me. 'ego of self professed maths genius to match'. Completely uncalled for in a civilised discussion because I was showing how the 11 plus failed people. I had not been rude to him. It is as if he does not like the fact that someone from a status below him has been successful. @Richard_Tyndall made a comment sometime ago along the lines of him being in awe of power and dismissive of those without it. This certainly rings true. Knock back Catalans and Scots but give way to the IRA; admiration for dictators; admiration for the landed gentry, lawyers and doctors and Oxbridge and Russell Group Unis; dismissive of Secondary school kids and Comprehensives, but admire Grammar schools. The list goes on.
I guess we shouldn't try and aspire to get above our station. Does he really care for those poor kids who he says get into Grammar schools or is it just a cover to keep the plebs down.
Whatevs
You really do set yourself up sometimes @Leon don't you? Remember what you said to me the other day when I replied to a post you made to @kinabalu - You said I'm not talking to you. Well actually you said a lot more than that. Pot and kettle? Of course being an open forum I welcome all responses but a few more words might be useful..
Sometimes it is best to let previous threads die. Otherwise we end up with ongoing feuds, and it is not as if there is much more to say about grammar schools, and even if there is, the subject will recur organically in due course.
Point taken. Please note my subsequent comment was made before I saw your post. My anger was not so much about the Grammar school debate, but hyufd's completely unnecessary rudeness on the last thread which made me respond.
One thing from that thread that I did think was interesting was that when I asserted that people should be judged by what they said and did not how they talked or who they knew, HYUFD said that that was typical leftist sentiment. I was kind of surprised by that response, because I thought I had expressed a fairly uncontroversial view that would be shared by most people across the political spectrum. Can PB Tories and rightists weigh in on this - is meritocracy an inherently left wing idea?
I think adherence to and practical support for meritocracy decreases significantly when people become parents and further as they become grandparents!
Which with our age driven politics does create a gap but not specifically driven by left v right.
Only if you think your offspring are useless, presumably. My kids are all pretty smart and so I would welcome a level playing field.
You don't think your background and wealth gives them any advantages?
For sure, but I think this is a bad thing not a good thing.
£8b of savings looks to me like £350m on the side of a bus. The ingenuous focus their ire on the numbers, implicitly conceding the point about cutting diversity officers etc.
On the contrary, the narrative will be levelling down. 'Diversity officers' is so transparently negligible in financial terms that it's a joke.
£8bn of 'savings' will look to voters like cuts in my pay.
Don't the people likely to be affected tend to vote Labour ?
£8b of savings looks to me like £350m on the side of a bus. The ingenuous focus their ire on the numbers, implicitly conceding the point about cutting diversity officers etc.
On the contrary, the narrative will be levelling down. 'Diversity officers' is so transparently negligible in financial terms that it's a joke.
£8bn of 'savings' will look to voters like cuts in my pay.
Public sector voters may see that. Others might see a lower tax burden in the offing (compared to what it otherwise might have been).
£8b of savings looks to me like £350m on the side of a bus. The ingenuous focus their ire on the numbers, implicitly conceding the point about cutting diversity officers etc.
It'll be GPs, nurses, care workers, dustmen, street cleaners, policemen, firemen, ambulance workers, paramedics, teachers, teaching assistants etc which will need to go if those sort of savings are to be made. It is absurd.
There are shortages of all such people at the moment. We need to pay more to attract and retain them.
Those who these sorts of cuts will hurt most are Tory voters - the old. Good luck trying to use the money saved in a tax cut to pay for an ambulance to take you to an overcrowded hospital tens of miles away.
£8b of savings looks to me like £350m on the side of a bus. The ingenuous focus their ire on the numbers, implicitly conceding the point about cutting diversity officers etc.
I think there's some truth in that. The public are very willing to believe that there is a lot of money wasted in the public sector. No politician has ever suffered by promising to spend money or cut taxes by cutting waste in the public sector.
And it's a less scary way for most voters to find the money that her previous idea, of simply borrowing it, was.
£8b of savings looks to me like £350m on the side of a bus. The ingenuous focus their ire on the numbers, implicitly conceding the point about cutting diversity officers etc.
Good point. I didn't think of that and yet it is obvious. Do you think it is deliberate? Do you think the £350m was a deliberate ploy or just an exaggeration that ended up with the unintended consequences of working very well for other reasons?
'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. Those 75% of kids whether they go to a Comp or Secondary will end up in the same (presumably dead end) jobs. Very harsh. I also agree with you that it is not my experience that under-privileged kids get through to Grammars in any numbers anyway.
He also takes my success of getting to Uni as proof that Secondary schools work. He doesn't understand that I succeeded despite of it not because of it and there will always be these cases.
Also note the snide comments at the end of his comment to me. 'ego of self professed maths genius to match'. Completely uncalled for in a civilised discussion because I was showing how the 11 plus failed people. I had not been rude to him. It is as if he does not like the fact that someone from a status below him has been successful. @Richard_Tyndall made a comment sometime ago along the lines of him being in awe of power and dismissive of those without it. This certainly rings true. Knock back Catalans and Scots but give way to the IRA; admiration for dictators; admiration for the landed gentry, lawyers and doctors and Oxbridge and Russell Group Unis; dismissive of Secondary school kids and Comprehensives, but admire Grammar schools. The list goes on.
I guess we shouldn't try and aspire to get above our station. Does he really care for those poor kids who he says get into Grammar schools or is it just a cover to keep the plebs down.
Whatevs
You really do set yourself up sometimes @Leon don't you? Remember what you said to me the other day when I replied to a post you made to @kinabalu - You said I'm not talking to you. Well actually you said a lot more than that. Pot and kettle? Of course being an open forum I welcome all responses but a few more words might be useful..
Sometimes it is best to let previous threads die. Otherwise we end up with ongoing feuds, and it is not as if there is much more to say about grammar schools, and even if there is, the subject will recur organically in due course.
Point taken. Please note my subsequent comment was made before I saw your post. My anger was not so much about the Grammar school debate, but hyufd's completely unnecessary rudeness on the last thread which made me respond.
One thing from that thread that I did think was interesting was that when I asserted that people should be judged by what they said and did not how they talked or who they knew, HYUFD said that that was typical leftist sentiment. I was kind of surprised by that response, because I thought I had expressed a fairly uncontroversial view that would be shared by most people across the political spectrum. Can PB Tories and rightists weigh in on this - is meritocracy an inherently left wing idea?
I think adherence to and practical support for meritocracy decreases significantly when people become parents and further as they become grandparents!
Which with our age driven politics does create a gap but not specifically driven by left v right.
Only if you think your offspring are useless, presumably. My kids are all pretty smart and so I would welcome a level playing field.
As a parent and grandparent I can assure you that one wishes to be proud of one's children's and grandchildren's achievements. And I am proud to say that I am, but fortunately in this context my children and grandchildren have so far sought academic excellence, although none of our children did so initially; they had experience of life and decided later to become more academic. Of course academic excellence is not the sole criterion for parental pride; our daughter spent a significant amount of her professional time on pro bono work.
I started with "I was in the most beautiful place on Earth"
And it returned
"I was in the most beautiful place on Earth this weekend. It was a beachfront hotel in Tulum, Mexico, on the Yucatan Peninsula. About two hours south of Cancun, the nearest major city, Tulum is surrounded by the Caribbean Sea and has a long, dark, white-sand beach.
Tulum itself is an archaeological site, though now mostly forgotten. It’s on the west coast of the peninsula, and it’s only about 3.5 miles north of the Caribbean. This weekend it was nearly deserted, as thousands of people flocked to the beaches of Cancun and beyond, to spend their winter holidays. And so, with Tulum a quiet, beautiful destination just for me, I went."
I've never heard of Tulum. This is it. Looks pretty nice. Has anyone been?
It's safe to say that having put a few tries into that text generator I'm not going to be worried about the rise of the machines just yet!
£8b of savings looks to me like £350m on the side of a bus. The ingenuous focus their ire on the numbers, implicitly conceding the point about cutting diversity officers etc.
On the contrary, the narrative will be levelling down. 'Diversity officers' is so transparently negligible in financial terms that it's a joke.
£8bn of 'savings' will look to voters like cuts in my pay.
Winning a war on woke might have been the intention. But the cackhanded way that the numbers were done made it obvious that the savings couldn't come from Diversity Officers, or even Civil Servants alone. And once you have a policy that means cutting pay for nurses, teachers and police officers in the provinces, you have a dead policy,
Truss's problem isn't just that she's a Boris Johnson tribute act. It's that she is a mediocre Boris Johnson tribute act.
On pay, people earn plenty more in the private sector for the same job in the smoke. I mean my better half has been approached by some London banks with I think ~ 40% over and above what she's earning at the moment but it's not worth moving with the lack of 100% wfh with the little one, and our life in general. What's the pay difference like atm for the public sector - there must be SOME London weighting ?
'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. Those 75% of kids whether they go to a Comp or Secondary will end up in the same (presumably dead end) jobs. Very harsh. I also agree with you that it is not my experience that under-privileged kids get through to Grammars in any numbers anyway.
He also takes my success of getting to Uni as proof that Secondary schools work. He doesn't understand that I succeeded despite of it not because of it and there will always be these cases.
Also note the snide comments at the end of his comment to me. 'ego of self professed maths genius to match'. Completely uncalled for in a civilised discussion because I was showing how the 11 plus failed people. I had not been rude to him. It is as if he does not like the fact that someone from a status below him has been successful. @Richard_Tyndall made a comment sometime ago along the lines of him being in awe of power and dismissive of those without it. This certainly rings true. Knock back Catalans and Scots but give way to the IRA; admiration for dictators; admiration for the landed gentry, lawyers and doctors and Oxbridge and Russell Group Unis; dismissive of Secondary school kids and Comprehensives, but admire Grammar schools. The list goes on.
I guess we shouldn't try and aspire to get above our station. Does he really care for those poor kids who he says get into Grammar schools or is it just a cover to keep the plebs down.
Whatevs
You really do set yourself up sometimes @Leon don't you? Remember what you said to me the other day when I replied to a post you made to @kinabalu - You said I'm not talking to you. Well actually you said a lot more than that. Pot and kettle? Of course being an open forum I welcome all responses but a few more words might be useful..
Sometimes it is best to let previous threads die. Otherwise we end up with ongoing feuds, and it is not as if there is much more to say about grammar schools, and even if there is, the subject will recur organically in due course.
Point taken. Please note my subsequent comment was made before I saw your post. My anger was not so much about the Grammar school debate, but hyufd's completely unnecessary rudeness on the last thread which made me respond.
One thing from that thread that I did think was interesting was that when I asserted that people should be judged by what they said and did not how they talked or who they knew, HYUFD said that that was typical leftist sentiment. I was kind of surprised by that response, because I thought I had expressed a fairly uncontroversial view that would be shared by most people across the political spectrum. Can PB Tories and rightists weigh in on this - is meritocracy an inherently left wing idea?
I think adherence to and practical support for meritocracy decreases significantly when people become parents and further as they become grandparents!
Which with our age driven politics does create a gap but not specifically driven by left v right.
Only if you think your offspring are useless, presumably. My kids are all pretty smart and so I would welcome a level playing field.
As a parent and grandparent I can assure you that one wishes to be proud of one's children's and grandchildren's achievements. And I am proud to say that I am, but fortunately in this context my children and grandchildren have so far sought academic excellence, although none of our children did so initially; they had experience of life and decided later to become more academic. Of course academic excellence is not the sole criterion for parental pride; our daughter spent a significant amount of her professional time on pro bono work.
Without external validation I find it very difficult to tell whether my children are clever or not. My 11 year old seems like a reasonably stupid human while all external feedback suggests he's a very bright 11 year old human.
£8b of savings looks to me like £350m on the side of a bus. The ingenuous focus their ire on the numbers, implicitly conceding the point about cutting diversity officers etc.
Good point. I didn't think of that and yet it is obvious. Do you think it is deliberate? Do you think the £350m was a deliberate ploy or just an exaggeration that ended up with the unintended consequences of working very well for other reasons?
Deliberate genius campaign by Cummings of course. This is generally accepted no?
£8b of savings looks to me like £350m on the side of a bus. The ingenuous focus their ire on the numbers, implicitly conceding the point about cutting diversity officers etc.
It'll be GPs, nurses, care workers, dustmen, street cleaners, policemen, firemen, ambulance workers, paramedics, teachers, teaching assistants etc which will need to go if those sort of savings are to be made. It is absurd.
There are shortages of all such people at the moment. We need to pay more to attract and retain them.
Those who these sorts of cuts will hurt most are Tory voters - the old. Good luck trying to use the money saved in a tax cut to pay for an ambulance to take you to an overcrowded hospital tens of miles away.
Parents of school age children are a swing vote demographic, mind.
Also - do people worry that their Amazon delivery driver or Uber might not be making ends meet when they order goods or get a McDs delivery in a cab ? Revealed preference shows that people absolubtely want THE cheapest options for their life and don't particularly worry about the workers....
shots fired... “LESS UNDER LIZ” FOR NURSES, POLICE AND ARMED FORCES OUTSIDE LONDON Ben Houchen, Mayor of Tees Valley, said: “There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.”
“Liz Truss’s campaign is explicit that their savings target is only possible ‘if the system were to be adopted for all public sector workers’. This is a ticking time bomb set by team Truss that will explode ahead of the next general election.
£8b of savings looks to me like £350m on the side of a bus. The ingenuous focus their ire on the numbers, implicitly conceding the point about cutting diversity officers etc.
Good point. I didn't think of that and yet it is obvious. Do you think it is deliberate? Do you think the £350m was a deliberate ploy or just an exaggeration that ended up with the unintended consequences of working very well for other reasons?
Deliberate genius campaign by Cummings of course. This is generally accepted no?
Yep. Pick the highest plausibly correct number, without making a straight lie, and get your opponents talking about the number itself, rather than what it represents.
£8b of savings looks to me like £350m on the side of a bus. The ingenuous focus their ire on the numbers, implicitly conceding the point about cutting diversity officers etc.
I think there's some truth in that. The public are very willing to believe that there is a lot of money wasted in the public sector. No politician has ever suffered by promising to spend money or cut taxes by cutting waste in the public sector.
And it's a less scary way for most voters to find the money that her previous idea, of simply borrowing it, was.
I'm not sure that's true - the general public don't really understand public debt or how countries borrow money (or who from), and they often don't really understand why we can't just print more money. They're not really scared of debt at all.
But a lot of British people work for the state, or have partners who work for the state, or have the state as a customer of their business. Big cuts in spending feel like they might affect people.
On pay, people earn plenty more in the private sector for the same job in the smoke. I mean my better half has been approached by some London banks with I think ~ 40% over and above what she's earning at the moment but it's not worth moving with the lack of 100% wfh with the little one, and our life in general. What's the pay difference like atm for the public sector - there must be SOME London weighting ?
Taking teachers at the top of the main classroom scale-
£8b of savings looks to me like £350m on the side of a bus. The ingenuous focus their ire on the numbers, implicitly conceding the point about cutting diversity officers etc.
Good point. I didn't think of that and yet it is obvious. Do you think it is deliberate? Do you think the £350m was a deliberate ploy or just an exaggeration that ended up with the unintended consequences of working very well for other reasons?
Deliberate genius campaign by Cummings of course. This is generally accepted no?
Yep. Pick the highest plausibly correct number, without making a straight lie, and get your opponents talking about the number itself, rather than what it represents.
That technique is used in the media almost every day, for a huge range of different types of story.
On pay, people earn plenty more in the private sector for the same job in the smoke. I mean my better half has been approached by some London banks with I think ~ 40% over and above what she's earning at the moment but it's not worth moving with the lack of 100% wfh with the little one, and our life in general. What's the pay difference like atm for the public sector - there must be SOME London weighting ?
Taking teachers at the top of the main classroom scale-
Re; the header, a 2022 election loss for Truss could see Mordaunt and Sunak returning into contention surprisigly quickly.
Actually there might be an argument that losing now is better than losing in 2024. Let Labour deal with all the problems, come back in 2028 when the cycle has turned. But Truss would have to be convinced that the Party would give her another chance after an early loss (that she blames on Boris).
£8b of savings looks to me like £350m on the side of a bus. The ingenuous focus their ire on the numbers, implicitly conceding the point about cutting diversity officers etc.
I think there's some truth in that. The public are very willing to believe that there is a lot of money wasted in the public sector. No politician has ever suffered by promising to spend money or cut taxes by cutting waste in the public sector.
And it's a less scary way for most voters to find the money that her previous idea, of simply borrowing it, was.
I'm not sure that's true - the general public don't really understand public debt or how countries borrow money (or who from), and they often don't really understand why we can't just print more money. They're not really scared of debt at all.
But a lot of British people work for the state, or have partners who work for the state, or have the state as a customer of their business. Big cuts in spending feel like they might affect people.
More importantly, even larger numbers use State services. There's already a feeling they are getting worse. Cutting them seems counter intuitive. Particularly when folk don't, as you say, understand finance at all.
Still, at least I'm interested in more than just whatever SpaceX is doing.
Incidentally, the SLS may well fly later this month - perhaps as early as the 29th. That will be amazing to see, especially if it launches before SpaceX's SS/SH combo.
I know it's not cool any more but https://www.spacex.com/launches/ 171 total launches, 133 landings & 109 reflights. Noone else has even landed or reflown a rocket once*.
I'm shocked NASA are going to be launching anything. Mind you James Webb is up at it's lagrange point now and that felt like it was never going to happen.
The problem for NASA is that the coalition of politicians that give them their budget are very very keen on the following things
1) Big projects going to the right companies 2) These big companies, in turn, give the actual work to to a pyramid of smaller companies below them. 3) Under the FAR contracts, various special interest groups get preferential treatment in awarding contracts. So the politicians get to reward their favourite constituents. 4) National prestige ... 1021) Spaceflight
Under FAR contracting rules, profits are capped. Per level of outsourcing. So, if you can only make 20% on the contract, you make it as big as possible. So if the guy below you in the food chain of out sourcing makes his bit more expensive, you can make more profit - since the overall size of the project has gone up. For extra points, you have a web of ownership, where you own companies (or part own them) at various levels in the pyramid..
So the perfect contract never ends, gets bigger and bigger and doesn't actually produce any of the dangerous, difficult spaceflight stuff.
Pork barrel politics isn't confined to NASA projects in Congress - or even to the US.
Comments
Going back to that Telegraph article- changing the colour of the passport ought to matter a lot less than its ability to allow you to pass smoothly through portes. (Yes, I have just come back from France, and very nice it was too.) But for some people, the switch from blue to burgundy and stiff to floppy were significant. Maybe that's irrational, but it's true, and rationalists should perhaps have respected that better. (Though I'd happy bet that many of those who moaned about floppy pink passports would have moaned about floppy blue ones too.)
So what matters about this article is not whether the facts in it are accurate or not. It's that the journal of choice of retired colonels percieves there's a problem. There's no point trying to argue them out of that perception with facts. As 1990-2016 showed, it doesn't really work.
It was ever thus:
"UK Conservative leader urges Brown to call election"
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL03105596
I would rather have visa free access to France than the Marshall Islands.
London does extraordinarily well, whichever way you look at it. Then Scotland (which is something Unionists need to shout more about). The North-east, East Midlands and Yorkshire get a pretty tough deal. It's even worse if you look at it from a capital only perspective.
https://twitter.com/BenHouchen/status/1554392347693252614
Ben Houchen
@BenHouchen
Actually speechless.
There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.
So much that we’ve worked for in places like Teesside, would be undone
Thereby painting himself into the Bottler Brown corner.
While yet again continuing your tedious trend of rehashing the previous thread when most of us have moved on.
Your also by your own admission got into university via a grammar school
a) Your first sentence does then rather show the uselessness of the 11 plus then doesn't it?
b) You said you don't play personal games, then why were you so rude to me on the last thread for no reason whatsoever?
c) You do care. You might not care about money, but you certainly care about position and social hierarchy, because you bang on and on about it all the time.
However, the aftereffects of covid and the state of the health service will mean we'll expect to see considerable knock-on deaths.
By "the aftereffects of covid," I don't specifically mean the condition known as Long Covid, but the organ damage, which means heart conditions, diabetes, strokes, and the like are several times more likely in those who had and recovered from covid (but on an individual level, remember that this goes from "Very low" to "two to six times "very low" which is still low" personally - we're still talking about measurements using the "per thousand per year" scale)
Healthcare-wise, we're running at well beyond the worst winter crisis level in the middle of summer, so, sadly, there will be quite a few tales of people waiting several hours for ambulances for emergencies, or dying while waiting on trolleys for days.
Truss is either stupid or hubristic or a bit of both.
It goes against the red wall.
It goes against levelling up.
We are failing to fill roles in public services with current rates of pay.
There is massive inflation so pay rises are needed, not pay cuts.
Too many of the young gravitate to London and the SE anyway so making public sector workers richer in poorer areas of the country balances that out effectively.
I've no problem at all with the MPs choosing a new PM without an election, but I do wish the Conservative members didn't get to do it.
(Interesting constitutional point, of course - the members are only voting for the Conservative party leader and the MPs could band together and demand a different PM, without consulting the membership, I guess, but in reality the new Con leader will be the new PM. Choosing leaders is of course an internal party matter, but the de facto duality of party leader and PM causes some friction between who should be choosing the PM - MPs - and who should be choosing party leader - members).
https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/grammars-boost-poorer-pupils-chances-getting-top-universities
Though continue your usual rant. I really couldn't care less what you do or what you did on this blog you are still the same haughty LD!
So he has to be careful how he plays it - meanwhile the damage sits there waiting for the next election (because even if it's not implemented it's possibly that it will be implemented post the next election).
Ben Houchen is on Team Sunak, hence the smears. His team are acting like they’re fighting Labour, rather than having a genuine discussion within their own party. Most unedifying, unless you’re Labour collecting attack lines for the next election.
On the face of it, the state outcompeting the private sector for workers in some regions by paying a national scale might be a problem - but this proposal is so obviously solving the wrong problem.
There's a difference between constitutional and democratic legitimacy.
If elected by the members, it will be on the basis of having presented to them a significantly different prospectus to that which Tory MPs were elected on.
The other 99% of the electorate have every right to feel irked at having a new PM imposed on them in this manner, irrespective of constitutional proprieties. Mike's point was, I think, a political rather than constitutional one.
Truss is not, of course, going to take the risk of a snap election, but she has no automatic right to being absolved by the rest of us of blame for not doing so.
It is utterly cretinous.
You are correct that, at present, the two positions are combined, but I took the view that it spoke to the mindset of the candidates. They were, IMO, in this for purely personal reasons and not because they wanted to lead their Party
In fact, I'm pleased to see that I am already on a 2022 GE at 24/1 which I took out a couple of months ago and then forgot.
Which with our age driven politics does create a gap but not specifically driven by left v right.
Re getting into the Uni via a Grammar School. How else was I going to do so? I have already told you the Sec Mod did not do A levels. I had to use the system in place. I couldn't make up my own. You really are an idiot.
Truss is right. It’s time to get real. We need a leaner meaner UK to take on Jonny Asia
Johnson received an 80-seat majority because he went to the country early to get their help to resolve the deadlock in Parliament. The voters agreed that the election was necessary to get Brexit done.
Truss already has a majority. The voters will not agree that she requires a personal mandate. They will think that the Tories have a large enough majority to do the things that need doing, so they ought to get on and do them.
Of course the media love election speculation. And the Opposition will always push for an election. The question is how many Tories will be daft enough to feed the speculation?
No surprise folk then try to calculate the implications of that figure.
...She also said it was “disingenuous” to compare university entry from “selective” authorities when grammar schools import vast numbers of high-attaining pupils from non-selective areas.
She said: “Trafford grammar schools import nearly 30 per cent of pupils from outside the authority, while in Southend it is over 50 per cent. This is bound to skew university entry figures simply because higher proportions of the highest attaining pupils are educated in selective areas.”...
"I already showed" is really not the same thing as "I quoted a study".
In one statement it's transformed Levelling Up into Levelling Down and if Ben Houchen is screaming about it in an election he was trying to keep (publicly) out of you know there is a problem.
However the figure is out there now so it's going to fun watching how she achieves it and even more fun pointing out that she couldn't....
There's sound historical precedent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrying_of_the_North
'Diversity officers' is so transparently negligible in financial terms that it's a joke.
£8bn of 'savings' will look to voters like cuts in my pay.
On https://textsynth.com/playground.html
I started with "I was in the most beautiful place on Earth"
And it returned
"I was in the most beautiful place on Earth this weekend. It was a beachfront hotel in Tulum, Mexico, on the Yucatan Peninsula. About two hours south of Cancun, the nearest major city, Tulum is surrounded by the Caribbean Sea and has a long, dark, white-sand beach.
Tulum itself is an archaeological site, though now mostly forgotten. It’s on the west coast of the peninsula, and it’s only about 3.5 miles north of the Caribbean. This weekend it was nearly deserted, as thousands of people flocked to the beaches of Cancun and beyond, to spend their winter holidays. And so, with Tulum a quiet, beautiful destination just for me, I went."
I've never heard of Tulum. This is it. Looks pretty nice. Has anyone been?
There are shortages of all such people at the moment. We need to pay more to attract and retain them.
Those who these sorts of cuts will hurt most are Tory voters - the old. Good luck trying to use the money saved in a tax cut to pay for an ambulance to take you to an overcrowded hospital tens of miles away.
And it's a less scary way for most voters to find the money that her previous idea, of simply borrowing it, was.
Of course academic excellence is not the sole criterion for parental pride; our daughter spent a significant amount of her professional time on pro bono work.
And I'm not going to Tulum
Truss's problem isn't just that she's a Boris Johnson tribute act. It's that she is a mediocre Boris Johnson tribute act.
What's the pay difference like atm for the public sector - there must be SOME London weighting ?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/08/01/britain-helps-ukraine-hunt-russian-spies-eyeing-western-military/
Meanwhile Pelosi is in seat 23B of a Scoot Airlines flight to Taipei considering if she really wants to pay $15 for a Coca-Cola and a packet of chips.
https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1554396044514975749
Revealed preference shows that people absolubtely want THE cheapest options for their life and don't particularly worry about the workers....
“LESS UNDER LIZ” FOR NURSES, POLICE AND ARMED FORCES OUTSIDE LONDON
Ben Houchen, Mayor of Tees Valley, said:
“There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5m people including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London.”
“Liz Truss’s campaign is explicit that their savings target is only possible ‘if the system were to be adopted for all public sector workers’. This is a ticking time bomb set by team Truss that will explode ahead of the next general election.
https://twitter.com/janemerrick23/status/1554404993746313217
But a lot of British people work for the state, or have partners who work for the state, or have the state as a customer of their business. Big cuts in spending feel like they might affect people.
Sticks: £ 36961
London fringe: £ 38174
Outer London: £ 41136
Inner London: £ 42624
The Truss plan comes from the idea that 37k is far too much to pay a graduate with quite a bit of experience in most of the country.
https://www.pmi.spglobal.com/Public/Home/PressRelease/16df0a6f77e54d0c94bfa08048c65fdc