After removing the popup, this is the second thing on my list. If both those can get done in the first two weeks, I think we are on track for great things.
Planned syntax is "liked_by:HANDLE", similar to "from:HANDLE"
"On Wednesday the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill returns to the House of Commons. It contains a set of amendments proposed by Theresa Villiers, a former environment secretary, with the support of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns and others. The effect will be to eviscerate the planning system as we know it by making all housing targets set by Whitehall purely advisory and removing the existing presumption in favour of development — in other words, scrapping the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so."
Contemptible. If that goes through, the Tories deserve a landslide defeat.
Nimbies - disproportionately drawn from amongst, your guessed it, the serried ranks of the selfish old - will love it. Every sop to the grey vote *decreases* the likelihood of the Tories being flushed down the toilet. Expect a whole lot more of this kind of thing.
Nah, its self-defeating. Nimbies still only get 1 vote each, no matter how much they love the Tories. Tories appealling to Tories is like Labour appealling to Corbynites/SJW/Momentum etc
More people getting onto the property ladder gives a bigger pool of Tory voters. More people stuck renting or cohabiting in others homes, gives a bigger pool of Labour voters, even if those already voting Tory "love it".
It is always worth repeating at this juncture that about half of the entire electorate, accounting for age-related differences in turnout, is aged over 55. This cohort consists very largely of affluent homeowning pensioners, soon-to-be pensioners, and expectant heirs to pensioner property fortunes.
Today's Tory MPs realise, of course, that the young despise them, and that the problem will get worse as all those youthful have-nots age, but why should they care about that? They want to save their jobs now, not worry about what might happen in twenty years' time when most of the Boomers are dead.
There are lots of hard-up pensioners out there, and quite a few rich young and middle-aged people.
That's whataboutery. The average pensioner household now has, after housing costs, a higher disposable income than the average working household. Most pensioners are homeowners. QED.
State pension income is guaranteed to rise by inflation or more (depending on circumstances) by the triple lock, whereas most earned incomes are in real terms decline. Earned incomes are taxed to absolute fuck to service the Government's expenses (largely pensions, health and social care for pensioners, and a colossal debt racked up during the Covid lockdowns,) whilst taxation of property and inheritances is kept at rock bottom. Childcare costs are allowed to inflate out of control, whilst ministers persist with plans (even if briefly delayed) to cap social care costs so as to allow estates to be preserved. The supply of new homes is deliberately and systematically deprioritised and choked off, so that prices will be kept buoyant, to the advantage of existing owners (i.e. older people.) Even Brexit was a pure and simple case of the will of the aged trumping that of the young. The list goes on.
Yes, quite a lot of pensioners are hard-up and quite a lot of younger people are very comfortable, but taken as a whole the balance of society is ludicrously tilted in favour of the former and against the latter - and it's at the core of all of our problems as a nation. A country that sinks an ever-greater share of its wealth into servicing the care and interests of unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the retired) is doomed to failure. Britain is doomed to failure. End of story.
Yes the rich pensioners getting £9K maximum after paying in for up to 50 years , bollox
Why do we means test every other benefit except for the State Pension? Why is it the only benefit that goes up by the triple lock?
That 9k would be far better directed at someone disabled, or invested elsewhere.
Perhaps, but how many hundreds of thousands would you plunge into absolute poverty by doing that?
Apparently they are still used quite a lot in the UK for 999 calls. Needless street clutter imo, assume they are retained for the advertising. There is an energetic campaign to remove them round me.
My next adversary is those huge electric billboards that the council keep placing in the middle of the pavement. Apparently have the same carbon footprint as a two bed house.
Blocked from leaving for the third time in week by various minor non-entities in the hospital system despite the lead and senior consultant (who has been her main doctor for ten years) demanding she be discharged.
Today a doctor phoned to say he was literally signing her discharge paperwork, yet she remains there.
I wont go into details now, but if this ever ends and I get her home, I have a humdinger of header on the utterly failing and yet stubbornly sclerotic and massively tickbox and over paper worked NHS.
It is beyond belief how many so-called decision makers many of whom seem to have the intelligence of a clam claim to be involved in a discharge and seem to have blocking powers rather than just advisory.
It is a wonder that anyone ever leaves hospital.
I suspect a lot of the bed blocking that the media talk about is actually completely self-inflicted by the NHS themselves judging by what I have seen in last week or so.
I am emotional and very very tonight.
I think it's time to just walk up and leave, the NHS seems to give no fuck about patients, just their precious boxes that need ticking. Really hope everything works out mate.
Thanks.
I am actively considering forcing a self-discharge on her behalf if you see what I mean.
The problem is they are are all a mixture of a) well meaning b) covering their own arses c) unable to see the whole picture of the person and their life. Item b seems to win out.
I have had similar problems everytime my father has ended up in hospital over the past 10 years. Always taken days extra to get him discharged, there is another "yet one more thing".
"On Wednesday the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill returns to the House of Commons. It contains a set of amendments proposed by Theresa Villiers, a former environment secretary, with the support of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns and others. The effect will be to eviscerate the planning system as we know it by making all housing targets set by Whitehall purely advisory and removing the existing presumption in favour of development — in other words, scrapping the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so."
Contemptible. If that goes through, the Tories deserve a landslide defeat.
Nimbies - disproportionately drawn from amongst, your guessed it, the serried ranks of the selfish old - will love it. Every sop to the grey vote *decreases* the likelihood of the Tories being flushed down the toilet. Expect a whole lot more of this kind of thing.
Nah, its self-defeating. Nimbies still only get 1 vote each, no matter how much they love the Tories. Tories appealling to Tories is like Labour appealling to Corbynites/SJW/Momentum etc
More people getting onto the property ladder gives a bigger pool of Tory voters. More people stuck renting or cohabiting in others homes, gives a bigger pool of Labour voters, even if those already voting Tory "love it".
It is always worth repeating at this juncture that about half of the entire electorate, accounting for age-related differences in turnout, is aged over 55. This cohort consists very largely of affluent homeowning pensioners, soon-to-be pensioners, and expectant heirs to pensioner property fortunes.
Today's Tory MPs realise, of course, that the young despise them, and that the problem will get worse as all those youthful have-nots age, but why should they care about that? They want to save their jobs now, not worry about what might happen in twenty years' time when most of the Boomers are dead.
There are lots of hard-up pensioners out there, and quite a few rich young and middle-aged people.
That's whataboutery. The average pensioner household now has, after housing costs, a higher disposable income than the average working household. Most pensioners are homeowners. QED.
State pension income is guaranteed to rise by inflation or more (depending on circumstances) by the triple lock, whereas most earned incomes are in real terms decline. Earned incomes are taxed to absolute fuck to service the Government's expenses (largely pensions, health and social care for pensioners, and a colossal debt racked up during the Covid lockdowns,) whilst taxation of property and inheritances is kept at rock bottom. Childcare costs are allowed to inflate out of control, whilst ministers persist with plans (even if briefly delayed) to cap social care costs so as to allow estates to be preserved. The supply of new homes is deliberately and systematically deprioritised and choked off, so that prices will be kept buoyant, to the advantage of existing owners (i.e. older people.) Even Brexit was a pure and simple case of the will of the aged trumping that of the young. The list goes on.
Yes, quite a lot of pensioners are hard-up and quite a lot of younger people are very comfortable, but taken as a whole the balance of society is ludicrously tilted in favour of the former and against the latter - and it's at the core of all of our problems as a nation. A country that sinks an ever-greater share of its wealth into servicing the care and interests of unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the retired) is doomed to failure. Britain is doomed to failure. End of story.
Yes the rich pensioners getting £9K maximum after paying in for up to 50 years , bollox
Why do we means test every other benefit except for the State Pension? Why is it the only benefit that goes up by the triple lock?
That 9k would be far better directed at someone disabled, or invested elsewhere.
Because not means testing it encourages saving for retirement. If it's withdrawn 1:1 if your private pension is too big, why bother saving? Even at 0.5:1...
I must be slow. I didn't know these cases were going in front of the ECHR from these individuals and I'm astonished to hear that they are.
Embarrassing.
Yeah, it's hypocritical. If you don't think the ECHR should overrule British judges, why are you trying to get them to overrule British judges?
What's so depressing is to see how many people are comfortable with hypocrisy if they believe it to be in their own self-interest.
Have they no integrity? How do they live with themselves?
You’ve probably answered your own question, there.
These are just a pair of raging ids, who think they are untrammelled by normal moral standards. Given free rein, by someone like Stalin, they’d behave like Beria and Yezhov.
Honestly, I’d love the ECHR to sentence them to death. Then, I’d become a europhile.
Blocked from leaving for the third time in week by various minor non-entities in the hospital system despite the lead and senior consultant (who has been her main doctor for ten years) demanding she be discharged.
Today a doctor phoned to say he was literally signing her discharge paperwork, yet she remains there.
I wont go into details now, but if this ever ends and I get her home, I have a humdinger of header on the utterly failing and yet stubbornly sclerotic and massively tickbox and over paper worked NHS.
It is beyond belief how many so-called decision makers many of whom seem to have the intelligence of a clam claim to be involved in a discharge and seem to have blocking powers rather than just advisory.
It is a wonder that anyone ever leaves hospital.
I suspect a lot of the bed blocking that the media talk about is actually completely self-inflicted by the NHS themselves judging by what I have seen in last week or so.
I am emotional and very very tonight.
I think it's time to just walk up and leave, the NHS seems to give no fuck about patients, just their precious boxes that need ticking. Really hope everything works out mate.
Thanks.
I am actively considering forcing a self-discharge on her behalf if you see what I mean.
The problem is they are are all a mixture of a) well meaning b) covering their own arses c) unable to see the whole picture of the person and their life. Item b seems to win out.
I cannot advise in this case, but in my personal experience, unless there is a machine that someone must be on, or a surgical procedure they need regularly, they are better off out of hospital and at home.
"On Wednesday the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill returns to the House of Commons. It contains a set of amendments proposed by Theresa Villiers, a former environment secretary, with the support of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns and others. The effect will be to eviscerate the planning system as we know it by making all housing targets set by Whitehall purely advisory and removing the existing presumption in favour of development — in other words, scrapping the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so."
Contemptible. If that goes through, the Tories deserve a landslide defeat.
Nimbies - disproportionately drawn from amongst, your guessed it, the serried ranks of the selfish old - will love it. Every sop to the grey vote *decreases* the likelihood of the Tories being flushed down the toilet. Expect a whole lot more of this kind of thing.
Nah, its self-defeating. Nimbies still only get 1 vote each, no matter how much they love the Tories. Tories appealling to Tories is like Labour appealling to Corbynites/SJW/Momentum etc
More people getting onto the property ladder gives a bigger pool of Tory voters. More people stuck renting or cohabiting in others homes, gives a bigger pool of Labour voters, even if those already voting Tory "love it".
It is always worth repeating at this juncture that about half of the entire electorate, accounting for age-related differences in turnout, is aged over 55. This cohort consists very largely of affluent homeowning pensioners, soon-to-be pensioners, and expectant heirs to pensioner property fortunes.
Today's Tory MPs realise, of course, that the young despise them, and that the problem will get worse as all those youthful have-nots age, but why should they care about that? They want to save their jobs now, not worry about what might happen in twenty years' time when most of the Boomers are dead.
There are lots of hard-up pensioners out there, and quite a few rich young and middle-aged people.
That's whataboutery. The average pensioner household now has, after housing costs, a higher disposable income than the average working household. Most pensioners are homeowners. QED.
State pension income is guaranteed to rise by inflation or more (depending on circumstances) by the triple lock, whereas most earned incomes are in real terms decline. Earned incomes are taxed to absolute fuck to service the Government's expenses (largely pensions, health and social care for pensioners, and a colossal debt racked up during the Covid lockdowns,) whilst taxation of property and inheritances is kept at rock bottom. Childcare costs are allowed to inflate out of control, whilst ministers persist with plans (even if briefly delayed) to cap social care costs so as to allow estates to be preserved. The supply of new homes is deliberately and systematically deprioritised and choked off, so that prices will be kept buoyant, to the advantage of existing owners (i.e. older people.) Even Brexit was a pure and simple case of the will of the aged trumping that of the young. The list goes on.
Yes, quite a lot of pensioners are hard-up and quite a lot of younger people are very comfortable, but taken as a whole the balance of society is ludicrously tilted in favour of the former and against the latter - and it's at the core of all of our problems as a nation. A country that sinks an ever-greater share of its wealth into servicing the care and interests of unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the retired) is doomed to failure. Britain is doomed to failure. End of story.
Yes the rich pensioners getting £9K maximum after paying in for up to 50 years , bollox
Why do we means test every other benefit except for the State Pension? Why is it the only benefit that goes up by the triple lock?
That 9k would be far better directed at someone disabled, or invested elsewhere.
Because not means testing it encourages saving for retirement. If it's withdrawn 1:1 if your private pension is too big, why bother saving? Even at 0.5:1...
How is that any different to work?
If people are unemployed and get a job their benefits are withdrawn, and they're taxed, and they pay National Insurance too.
You're right that means testing is problematic, and my preference would be to keep pensions universal but to standardise income tax so pensioners pay the same rate as working young graduates do (ie match NI and "Tuition Fees" which are really just a tax too).
But its odd is it not how panicky people get about the signals it gives if one benefit is withdrawn, while wanting every other benefit in the country withdrawn as fast as possible it seems.
Blocked from leaving for the third time in week by various minor non-entities in the hospital system despite the lead and senior consultant (who has been her main doctor for ten years) demanding she be discharged.
Today a doctor phoned to say he was literally signing her discharge paperwork, yet she remains there.
I wont go into details now, but if this ever ends and I get her home, I have a humdinger of header on the utterly failing and yet stubbornly sclerotic and massively tickbox and over paper worked NHS.
It is beyond belief how many so-called decision makers many of whom seem to have the intelligence of a clam claim to be involved in a discharge and seem to have blocking powers rather than just advisory.
It is a wonder that anyone ever leaves hospital.
I suspect a lot of the bed blocking that the media talk about is actually completely self-inflicted by the NHS themselves judging by what I have seen in last week or so.
I am emotional and very very tonight.
Would give that a like. But won't. The last 12 years seem to have been an Amazon of paperwork. Whilst promising a bonfire of red tape.
When @Foxy is next around he might be able to comment but seems to me that a load of totally semi-medical non-entities are allowed to sit in discharge meetings and literally block the lead consultant's decisions based on their own minor bollocks e.g concerned about her diet.
Good luck with all this. I will be very interested to read your header when you are through the struggle.
As an aside, one thing to consider is that there does appear to be a considerable range between appallingly managed and well managed hospitals. I’m no expert, but that became very clear early in the pandemic when we were discussing discharge of infected patients into care homes.
In 2001, my then-gf worked in a call centre for a company in Cambridge who were doing in-car navigation. You would call them up; they would get your position from your phone via the celltowers, and give you directions to where you wanted to go. Apparently it worked quite well (and was more precise than I would have expected), but with hindsight, or even foresight, was rather obviously a dead-end technology.
"On Wednesday the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill returns to the House of Commons. It contains a set of amendments proposed by Theresa Villiers, a former environment secretary, with the support of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns and others. The effect will be to eviscerate the planning system as we know it by making all housing targets set by Whitehall purely advisory and removing the existing presumption in favour of development — in other words, scrapping the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so."
Contemptible. If that goes through, the Tories deserve a landslide defeat.
Nimbies - disproportionately drawn from amongst, your guessed it, the serried ranks of the selfish old - will love it. Every sop to the grey vote *decreases* the likelihood of the Tories being flushed down the toilet. Expect a whole lot more of this kind of thing.
Nah, its self-defeating. Nimbies still only get 1 vote each, no matter how much they love the Tories. Tories appealling to Tories is like Labour appealling to Corbynites/SJW/Momentum etc
More people getting onto the property ladder gives a bigger pool of Tory voters. More people stuck renting or cohabiting in others homes, gives a bigger pool of Labour voters, even if those already voting Tory "love it".
It is always worth repeating at this juncture that about half of the entire electorate, accounting for age-related differences in turnout, is aged over 55. This cohort consists very largely of affluent homeowning pensioners, soon-to-be pensioners, and expectant heirs to pensioner property fortunes.
Today's Tory MPs realise, of course, that the young despise them, and that the problem will get worse as all those youthful have-nots age, but why should they care about that? They want to save their jobs now, not worry about what might happen in twenty years' time when most of the Boomers are dead.
There are lots of hard-up pensioners out there, and quite a few rich young and middle-aged people.
That's whataboutery. The average pensioner household now has, after housing costs, a higher disposable income than the average working household. Most pensioners are homeowners. QED.
State pension income is guaranteed to rise by inflation or more (depending on circumstances) by the triple lock, whereas most earned incomes are in real terms decline. Earned incomes are taxed to absolute fuck to service the Government's expenses (largely pensions, health and social care for pensioners, and a colossal debt racked up during the Covid lockdowns,) whilst taxation of property and inheritances is kept at rock bottom. Childcare costs are allowed to inflate out of control, whilst ministers persist with plans (even if briefly delayed) to cap social care costs so as to allow estates to be preserved. The supply of new homes is deliberately and systematically deprioritised and choked off, so that prices will be kept buoyant, to the advantage of existing owners (i.e. older people.) Even Brexit was a pure and simple case of the will of the aged trumping that of the young. The list goes on.
Yes, quite a lot of pensioners are hard-up and quite a lot of younger people are very comfortable, but taken as a whole the balance of society is ludicrously tilted in favour of the former and against the latter - and it's at the core of all of our problems as a nation. A country that sinks an ever-greater share of its wealth into servicing the care and interests of unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the retired) is doomed to failure. Britain is doomed to failure. End of story.
I think a big part of the problem is that a) a lot of wealthy pensioners slow down in their old age and cannot see the problem. Last week I needed to see a doctor and it took over an hour to make an appointment. I had to go and register with a different surgery. A big problem is that older people with their unlimited time and medical problems are crowding out access to the universal health system. And because they don't pay NI, which as we know is just a form of tax, they pay far lower marginal rates of income tax. As a group they are beneficiaries of an unequal structure.
The other part of the problem is that young people don't see the problem. They fall for the same myths that 'old people have done their shift and deserve what they get as they have paid in to the system for their whole lives'. But everyone should still be paying the same amount of tax. A while back I looked at the situation and concluded that I was being mugged and concluded that I need to structure my economic affairs in such a way that I pay as little tax as possible as PAYE employment was never going to make me wealthy however much I earn. But actually everyone should just be paying a similar amount of tax and this starts with pensioners paying something like NI when their combined income exceeds the national living wage.
In comparison, in WW2 the UK defence spending reached 50% of GDP; the USA 41%.
The spending devastated the UK's economy post-war; in contrast, it emboldened the USA's economy. I guess Russia's experience post-war will be much more like the UK's than America's - especially if sanctions are not quickly lifted.
A Democratic State Senator says: ‘I will not rest until we find the solutions to end this gun violence epidemic in our country.’
She’d better prepare to die of exhaustion then, as the problem is the Second Amendment and their antediluvian Constitution means there is no way to get rid of it.
"On Wednesday the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill returns to the House of Commons. It contains a set of amendments proposed by Theresa Villiers, a former environment secretary, with the support of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns and others. The effect will be to eviscerate the planning system as we know it by making all housing targets set by Whitehall purely advisory and removing the existing presumption in favour of development — in other words, scrapping the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so."
Contemptible. If that goes through, the Tories deserve a landslide defeat.
Nimbies - disproportionately drawn from amongst, your guessed it, the serried ranks of the selfish old - will love it. Every sop to the grey vote *decreases* the likelihood of the Tories being flushed down the toilet. Expect a whole lot more of this kind of thing.
Nah, its self-defeating. Nimbies still only get 1 vote each, no matter how much they love the Tories. Tories appealling to Tories is like Labour appealling to Corbynites/SJW/Momentum etc
More people getting onto the property ladder gives a bigger pool of Tory voters. More people stuck renting or cohabiting in others homes, gives a bigger pool of Labour voters, even if those already voting Tory "love it".
It is always worth repeating at this juncture that about half of the entire electorate, accounting for age-related differences in turnout, is aged over 55. This cohort consists very largely of affluent homeowning pensioners, soon-to-be pensioners, and expectant heirs to pensioner property fortunes.
Today's Tory MPs realise, of course, that the young despise them, and that the problem will get worse as all those youthful have-nots age, but why should they care about that? They want to save their jobs now, not worry about what might happen in twenty years' time when most of the Boomers are dead.
There are lots of hard-up pensioners out there, and quite a few rich young and middle-aged people.
That's whataboutery. The average pensioner household now has, after housing costs, a higher disposable income than the average working household. Most pensioners are homeowners. QED.
State pension income is guaranteed to rise by inflation or more (depending on circumstances) by the triple lock, whereas most earned incomes are in real terms decline. Earned incomes are taxed to absolute fuck to service the Government's expenses (largely pensions, health and social care for pensioners, and a colossal debt racked up during the Covid lockdowns,) whilst taxation of property and inheritances is kept at rock bottom. Childcare costs are allowed to inflate out of control, whilst ministers persist with plans (even if briefly delayed) to cap social care costs so as to allow estates to be preserved. The supply of new homes is deliberately and systematically deprioritised and choked off, so that prices will be kept buoyant, to the advantage of existing owners (i.e. older people.) Even Brexit was a pure and simple case of the will of the aged trumping that of the young. The list goes on.
Yes, quite a lot of pensioners are hard-up and quite a lot of younger people are very comfortable, but taken as a whole the balance of society is ludicrously tilted in favour of the former and against the latter - and it's at the core of all of our problems as a nation. A country that sinks an ever-greater share of its wealth into servicing the care and interests of unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the retired) is doomed to failure. Britain is doomed to failure. End of story.
No, it isn't whataboutery. Rich vs poor is not the same as young vs old. The software developer on £80,000 a year is better off than the pensioner on £10,000 a year, and is also better off than the shelf stacker on £20,000.
Rich isn't just about income which is the problem, we tax income far too much.
A young software developer with high taxes, tuition fees, exorbitantly high rent and childcare costs might be quite worse off than a pensioner with a moderate pension income that isn't taxed significantly and has no housing or childcare costs.
Rent can cost many tens of thousands nowadays of pretax income. Living rent-free doesn't change tax rates, but does change living expenses more than anything else imagineable.
At risk of going off-topic, especially while watching the soccerball, in the old days, when pensioners were young, childcare was free for most people. Mum stayed at home and took care of the children. The corollaries of this are that most households were single income, and most older women do not have generous private pensions.
You're completely missing the point. Deliberately or not.
On average 1 generous and 1 not-generous income with a mortgage-free home leaves more disposable income than 2 average worked for incomes subject to all taxes, plus tuition fees, plus rent, plus childcare etc
That's before we factor in the fact that the workers rent is on average going again to those who are living rent-free in their own home and that rent isn't taxed as heavily as going to work and paying National Insurance and Tuition Fees etc
And before we question how come 1 income was sufficient to buy a home in the past, but 2 incomes isn't today.
If the comparison is between those who hold assets or not, then that comparison can be made directly rather than going via a partially correlated factor like age. What is the average age for paying off mortgages, and how far below the state pension age is that? Sure, there are lots of well-off pensioners, but there are also a great many at the other end of the scale choosing whether to heat or eat, as the saying goes.
Yes some pensioners might be struggling, but as a class pensioners are not.
But the benefits we're giving to pensioners - the triple locked pension, and repeated "cost of living" grants and the rest of it are going to all pensioners, the well off and the struggling alike.
If you want to argue for more redistribution to those who are struggling, then there's a case to be argued for that. I'm normally against that, except as a safety net, but I respect it.
But simply pandering to pensioners as a whole because they have voting strength, that's not redistributing to those who need it. Its redistributing in general from those who need it, to those who don't, on average. Its Sheriff of Nottingham, not Robin Hood.
If you want argue for redistribution to struggling pensioners, then lets hear some ideas about how that can be funded from other pensioners who have the wealth, live rent-free, childcare free and have incomes not subject to the full rates of tax including National Insurance and tuition fees rather than being funded by people who actually work for a living for a change.
As I understand it the cost of living grants are only given to those on pension credit
As pensioners my wife and I are receiving the £400 energy rebate plus an increased winter fuel allowance of £600 (usually £300)
I have long since opposed the triple lock, but frankly it is no use labour, lib dem, and SNP supporters complaining about it as they are all champions of the triple lock
£600 of winter fuel allowance is a cost of living grant.
One of them is going to those on pension credit, but as you yourself say, the winter fuel allowance which ought to be abolished has instead been doubled and who is paying for that? Not the untaxed (relatively) incomes of those who are well off pensioners, that's for sure.
No it isn't - it is separate and paid to those on pension credit
The winter fuel allowance for my wife and I as she is over 80 is £300 which this year has been increased to £600 to assist with energy bills
I did not say the winter fuel allowance should be abolished but the triple lock should
I have said previously my wife's pension is £4,896 pa and it is only because I paid my taxes and in addition invested into my private pension which is nowhere near the figure you quoted that we are able to manage
You have a very aggressive attitude to pensioners who in the main do not have second homes income and private £30,000 pensions
Bart is a greedy envious little oick who would throw his granny under a bus to get her meagre savings.
"On Wednesday the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill returns to the House of Commons. It contains a set of amendments proposed by Theresa Villiers, a former environment secretary, with the support of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns and others. The effect will be to eviscerate the planning system as we know it by making all housing targets set by Whitehall purely advisory and removing the existing presumption in favour of development — in other words, scrapping the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so."
Contemptible. If that goes through, the Tories deserve a landslide defeat.
Nimbies - disproportionately drawn from amongst, your guessed it, the serried ranks of the selfish old - will love it. Every sop to the grey vote *decreases* the likelihood of the Tories being flushed down the toilet. Expect a whole lot more of this kind of thing.
Nah, its self-defeating. Nimbies still only get 1 vote each, no matter how much they love the Tories. Tories appealling to Tories is like Labour appealling to Corbynites/SJW/Momentum etc
More people getting onto the property ladder gives a bigger pool of Tory voters. More people stuck renting or cohabiting in others homes, gives a bigger pool of Labour voters, even if those already voting Tory "love it".
It is always worth repeating at this juncture that about half of the entire electorate, accounting for age-related differences in turnout, is aged over 55. This cohort consists very largely of affluent homeowning pensioners, soon-to-be pensioners, and expectant heirs to pensioner property fortunes.
Today's Tory MPs realise, of course, that the young despise them, and that the problem will get worse as all those youthful have-nots age, but why should they care about that? They want to save their jobs now, not worry about what might happen in twenty years' time when most of the Boomers are dead.
There are lots of hard-up pensioners out there, and quite a few rich young and middle-aged people.
That's whataboutery. The average pensioner household now has, after housing costs, a higher disposable income than the average working household. Most pensioners are homeowners. QED.
State pension income is guaranteed to rise by inflation or more (depending on circumstances) by the triple lock, whereas most earned incomes are in real terms decline. Earned incomes are taxed to absolute fuck to service the Government's expenses (largely pensions, health and social care for pensioners, and a colossal debt racked up during the Covid lockdowns,) whilst taxation of property and inheritances is kept at rock bottom. Childcare costs are allowed to inflate out of control, whilst ministers persist with plans (even if briefly delayed) to cap social care costs so as to allow estates to be preserved. The supply of new homes is deliberately and systematically deprioritised and choked off, so that prices will be kept buoyant, to the advantage of existing owners (i.e. older people.) Even Brexit was a pure and simple case of the will of the aged trumping that of the young. The list goes on.
Yes, quite a lot of pensioners are hard-up and quite a lot of younger people are very comfortable, but taken as a whole the balance of society is ludicrously tilted in favour of the former and against the latter - and it's at the core of all of our problems as a nation. A country that sinks an ever-greater share of its wealth into servicing the care and interests of unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the retired) is doomed to failure. Britain is doomed to failure. End of story.
Yes the rich pensioners getting £9K maximum after paying in for up to 50 years , bollox
Why do we means test every other benefit except for the State Pension? Why is it the only benefit that goes up by the triple lock?
That 9k would be far better directed at someone disabled, or invested elsewhere.
Away you half witted cretin. People have paid for 50 years for that pittance and if lucky enough to have any other income get taxed as well. Just hope you never have to live on it, hard to believe how low this country has fallen when lazy , greedy young people grudge poor sods who have worked 50 years their meagre pension.
"On Wednesday the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill returns to the House of Commons. It contains a set of amendments proposed by Theresa Villiers, a former environment secretary, with the support of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns and others. The effect will be to eviscerate the planning system as we know it by making all housing targets set by Whitehall purely advisory and removing the existing presumption in favour of development — in other words, scrapping the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so."
Contemptible. If that goes through, the Tories deserve a landslide defeat.
Nimbies - disproportionately drawn from amongst, your guessed it, the serried ranks of the selfish old - will love it. Every sop to the grey vote *decreases* the likelihood of the Tories being flushed down the toilet. Expect a whole lot more of this kind of thing.
Nah, its self-defeating. Nimbies still only get 1 vote each, no matter how much they love the Tories. Tories appealling to Tories is like Labour appealling to Corbynites/SJW/Momentum etc
More people getting onto the property ladder gives a bigger pool of Tory voters. More people stuck renting or cohabiting in others homes, gives a bigger pool of Labour voters, even if those already voting Tory "love it".
It is always worth repeating at this juncture that about half of the entire electorate, accounting for age-related differences in turnout, is aged over 55. This cohort consists very largely of affluent homeowning pensioners, soon-to-be pensioners, and expectant heirs to pensioner property fortunes.
Today's Tory MPs realise, of course, that the young despise them, and that the problem will get worse as all those youthful have-nots age, but why should they care about that? They want to save their jobs now, not worry about what might happen in twenty years' time when most of the Boomers are dead.
There are lots of hard-up pensioners out there, and quite a few rich young and middle-aged people.
That's whataboutery. The average pensioner household now has, after housing costs, a higher disposable income than the average working household. Most pensioners are homeowners. QED.
State pension income is guaranteed to rise by inflation or more (depending on circumstances) by the triple lock, whereas most earned incomes are in real terms decline. Earned incomes are taxed to absolute fuck to service the Government's expenses (largely pensions, health and social care for pensioners, and a colossal debt racked up during the Covid lockdowns,) whilst taxation of property and inheritances is kept at rock bottom. Childcare costs are allowed to inflate out of control, whilst ministers persist with plans (even if briefly delayed) to cap social care costs so as to allow estates to be preserved. The supply of new homes is deliberately and systematically deprioritised and choked off, so that prices will be kept buoyant, to the advantage of existing owners (i.e. older people.) Even Brexit was a pure and simple case of the will of the aged trumping that of the young. The list goes on.
Yes, quite a lot of pensioners are hard-up and quite a lot of younger people are very comfortable, but taken as a whole the balance of society is ludicrously tilted in favour of the former and against the latter - and it's at the core of all of our problems as a nation. A country that sinks an ever-greater share of its wealth into servicing the care and interests of unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the retired) is doomed to failure. Britain is doomed to failure. End of story.
Yes the rich pensioners getting £9K maximum after paying in for up to 50 years , bollox
Why do we means test every other benefit except for the State Pension? Why is it the only benefit that goes up by the triple lock?
That 9k would be far better directed at someone disabled, or invested elsewhere.
Because not means testing it encourages saving for retirement. If it's withdrawn 1:1 if your private pension is too big, why bother saving? Even at 0.5:1...
How is that any different to work?
If people are unemployed and get a job their benefits are withdrawn, and they're taxed, and they pay National Insurance too.
You're right that means testing is problematic, and my preference would be to keep pensions universal but to standardise income tax so pensioners pay the same rate as working young graduates do (ie match NI and "Tuition Fees" which are really just a tax too).
But its odd is it not how panicky people get about the signals it gives if one benefit is withdrawn, while wanting every other benefit in the country withdrawn as fast as possible it seems.
"The Germans thought it would be better if Ukraine fell" - Boris Johnson declassified the attitude of the EU countries towards Ukraine at the beginning of the war
"On Wednesday the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill returns to the House of Commons. It contains a set of amendments proposed by Theresa Villiers, a former environment secretary, with the support of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns and others. The effect will be to eviscerate the planning system as we know it by making all housing targets set by Whitehall purely advisory and removing the existing presumption in favour of development — in other words, scrapping the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so."
Contemptible. If that goes through, the Tories deserve a landslide defeat.
Nimbies - disproportionately drawn from amongst, your guessed it, the serried ranks of the selfish old - will love it. Every sop to the grey vote *decreases* the likelihood of the Tories being flushed down the toilet. Expect a whole lot more of this kind of thing.
Nah, its self-defeating. Nimbies still only get 1 vote each, no matter how much they love the Tories. Tories appealling to Tories is like Labour appealling to Corbynites/SJW/Momentum etc
More people getting onto the property ladder gives a bigger pool of Tory voters. More people stuck renting or cohabiting in others homes, gives a bigger pool of Labour voters, even if those already voting Tory "love it".
It is always worth repeating at this juncture that about half of the entire electorate, accounting for age-related differences in turnout, is aged over 55. This cohort consists very largely of affluent homeowning pensioners, soon-to-be pensioners, and expectant heirs to pensioner property fortunes.
Today's Tory MPs realise, of course, that the young despise them, and that the problem will get worse as all those youthful have-nots age, but why should they care about that? They want to save their jobs now, not worry about what might happen in twenty years' time when most of the Boomers are dead.
There are lots of hard-up pensioners out there, and quite a few rich young and middle-aged people.
That's whataboutery. The average pensioner household now has, after housing costs, a higher disposable income than the average working household. Most pensioners are homeowners. QED.
State pension income is guaranteed to rise by inflation or more (depending on circumstances) by the triple lock, whereas most earned incomes are in real terms decline. Earned incomes are taxed to absolute fuck to service the Government's expenses (largely pensions, health and social care for pensioners, and a colossal debt racked up during the Covid lockdowns,) whilst taxation of property and inheritances is kept at rock bottom. Childcare costs are allowed to inflate out of control, whilst ministers persist with plans (even if briefly delayed) to cap social care costs so as to allow estates to be preserved. The supply of new homes is deliberately and systematically deprioritised and choked off, so that prices will be kept buoyant, to the advantage of existing owners (i.e. older people.) Even Brexit was a pure and simple case of the will of the aged trumping that of the young. The list goes on.
Yes, quite a lot of pensioners are hard-up and quite a lot of younger people are very comfortable, but taken as a whole the balance of society is ludicrously tilted in favour of the former and against the latter - and it's at the core of all of our problems as a nation. A country that sinks an ever-greater share of its wealth into servicing the care and interests of unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the retired) is doomed to failure. Britain is doomed to failure. End of story.
I think a big part of the problem is that a) a lot of wealthy pensioners slow down in their old age and cannot see the problem. Last week I needed to see a doctor and it took over an hour to make an appointment. I had to go and register with a different surgery. A big problem is that older people with their unlimited time and medical problems are crowding out access to the universal health system. And because they don't pay NI, which as we know is just a form of tax, they pay far lower marginal rates of income tax. As a group they are beneficiaries of an unequal structure.
The other part of the problem is that young people don't see the problem. They fall for the same myths that 'old people have done their shift and deserve what they get as they have paid in to the system for their whole lives'. But everyone should still be paying the same amount of tax. A while back I looked at the situation and concluded that I was being mugged and concluded that I need to structure my economic affairs in such a way that I pay as little tax as possible as PAYE employment was never going to make me wealthy however much I earn. But actually everyone should just be paying a similar amount of tax and this starts with pensioners paying something like NI when their combined income exceeds the national living wage.
"The Germans thought it would be better if Ukraine fell" - Boris Johnson declassified the attitude of the EU countries towards Ukraine at the beginning of the war
"The Germans thought it would be better if Ukraine fell" - Boris Johnson declassified the attitude of the EU countries towards Ukraine at the beginning of the war
Blocked from leaving for the third time in week by various minor non-entities in the hospital system despite the lead and senior consultant (who has been her main doctor for ten years) demanding she be discharged.
Today a doctor phoned to say he was literally signing her discharge paperwork, yet she remains there.
I wont go into details now, but if this ever ends and I get her home, I have a humdinger of header on the utterly failing and yet stubbornly sclerotic and massively tickbox and over paper worked NHS.
It is beyond belief how many so-called decision makers many of whom seem to have the intelligence of a clam claim to be involved in a discharge and seem to have blocking powers rather than just advisory.
It is a wonder that anyone ever leaves hospital.
I suspect a lot of the bed blocking that the media talk about is actually completely self-inflicted by the NHS themselves judging by what I have seen in last week or so.
I am emotional and very very tonight.
Sorry to hear this - but entirely consistent with my hospital stay. Broke elbow & hip on a Friday evening. Spent 24h in A&E before admission to ward. As it was weekend not seen by consultant until Monday. Then the well organised (and most important) bit - operated on Tuesday & Thursday. Then it went downhill again - with weekend intervening again to delay physio. Told I would be discharged on the Tuesday - didn’t happen until the Thursday and only after I got a lot more assertive with the different departments that had to sign off on my discharge. Trouble was each of them thought “If Physio hasn’t signed off yet, I can delay signing off until tomorrow” and so the merry go round dragged on. Saw this on multiple occasions on my ward. Now very much on the mend - and the most important part of my stay - the surgery - went very well. If I was to give it a rating it would average at 3/5 - but that’s 2/5 5/5 2/5.
Two suspected spies arrested in Stockholm after helicopter raid.
Been spying for Russia since 2013 apparently.
Talking about lifetime sentences.
Apparently the Nordic countries are absolutely riddled with enemy agents. Scotland? Ditto. Lifetime sentences? Goodness no. They get cushy jobs at Pacific Quay.
The punishment is to live in Scotland…
You should give it a go. It’s no half bad.
Says a man who has chosen to live elsewhere...
When did anti-immigrant sentiment become de rigueur ?
A Democratic State Senator says: ‘I will not rest until we find the solutions to end this gun violence epidemic in our country.’
She’d better prepare to die of exhaustion then, as the problem is the Second Amendment and their antediluvian Constitution means there is no way to get rid of it.
While I agree the constitution needs to be updated, and is really badly written,
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
is open to all kinds of interpretation. Presumably even the nuttiest gun nut doesn't think it means people have the "right" to go around the supermarket carrying chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
"On Wednesday the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill returns to the House of Commons. It contains a set of amendments proposed by Theresa Villiers, a former environment secretary, with the support of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns and others. The effect will be to eviscerate the planning system as we know it by making all housing targets set by Whitehall purely advisory and removing the existing presumption in favour of development — in other words, scrapping the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so."
Contemptible. If that goes through, the Tories deserve a landslide defeat.
Nimbies - disproportionately drawn from amongst, your guessed it, the serried ranks of the selfish old - will love it. Every sop to the grey vote *decreases* the likelihood of the Tories being flushed down the toilet. Expect a whole lot more of this kind of thing.
Nah, its self-defeating. Nimbies still only get 1 vote each, no matter how much they love the Tories. Tories appealling to Tories is like Labour appealling to Corbynites/SJW/Momentum etc
More people getting onto the property ladder gives a bigger pool of Tory voters. More people stuck renting or cohabiting in others homes, gives a bigger pool of Labour voters, even if those already voting Tory "love it".
It is always worth repeating at this juncture that about half of the entire electorate, accounting for age-related differences in turnout, is aged over 55. This cohort consists very largely of affluent homeowning pensioners, soon-to-be pensioners, and expectant heirs to pensioner property fortunes.
Today's Tory MPs realise, of course, that the young despise them, and that the problem will get worse as all those youthful have-nots age, but why should they care about that? They want to save their jobs now, not worry about what might happen in twenty years' time when most of the Boomers are dead.
There are lots of hard-up pensioners out there, and quite a few rich young and middle-aged people.
That's whataboutery. The average pensioner household now has, after housing costs, a higher disposable income than the average working household. Most pensioners are homeowners. QED.
State pension income is guaranteed to rise by inflation or more (depending on circumstances) by the triple lock, whereas most earned incomes are in real terms decline. Earned incomes are taxed to absolute fuck to service the Government's expenses (largely pensions, health and social care for pensioners, and a colossal debt racked up during the Covid lockdowns,) whilst taxation of property and inheritances is kept at rock bottom. Childcare costs are allowed to inflate out of control, whilst ministers persist with plans (even if briefly delayed) to cap social care costs so as to allow estates to be preserved. The supply of new homes is deliberately and systematically deprioritised and choked off, so that prices will be kept buoyant, to the advantage of existing owners (i.e. older people.) Even Brexit was a pure and simple case of the will of the aged trumping that of the young. The list goes on.
Yes, quite a lot of pensioners are hard-up and quite a lot of younger people are very comfortable, but taken as a whole the balance of society is ludicrously tilted in favour of the former and against the latter - and it's at the core of all of our problems as a nation. A country that sinks an ever-greater share of its wealth into servicing the care and interests of unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the retired) is doomed to failure. Britain is doomed to failure. End of story.
I think a big part of the problem is that a) a lot of wealthy pensioners slow down in their old age and cannot see the problem. Last week I needed to see a doctor and it took over an hour to make an appointment. I had to go and register with a different surgery. A big problem is that older people with their unlimited time and medical problems are crowding out access to the universal health system. And because they don't pay NI, which as we know is just a form of tax, they pay far lower marginal rates of income tax. As a group they are beneficiaries of an unequal structure.
The other part of the problem is that young people don't see the problem. They fall for the same myths that 'old people have done their shift and deserve what they get as they have paid in to the system for their whole lives'. But everyone should still be paying the same amount of tax. A while back I looked at the situation and concluded that I was being mugged and concluded that I need to structure my economic affairs in such a way that I pay as little tax as possible as PAYE employment was never going to make me wealthy however much I earn. But actually everyone should just be paying a similar amount of tax and this starts with pensioners paying something like NI when their combined income exceeds the national living wage.
Holy crap their are some evil gits on here
I know you are just winding people up but you sound like an example of what I am describing; a wealthy pensioner who can't see the problem.
A Democratic State Senator says: ‘I will not rest until we find the solutions to end this gun violence epidemic in our country.’
She’d better prepare to die of exhaustion then, as the problem is the Second Amendment and their antediluvian Constitution means there is no way to get rid of it.
A manager shooting his own staff; how sick is that.
A Democratic State Senator says: ‘I will not rest until we find the solutions to end this gun violence epidemic in our country.’
She’d better prepare to die of exhaustion then, as the problem is the Second Amendment and their antediluvian Constitution means there is no way to get rid of it.
While I agree the constitution needs to be updated, and is really badly written,
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
is open to all kinds of interpretation. Presumably even the nuttiest gun nut doesn't think it means people have the "right" to go around the supermarket carrying chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
Them other option is rewriting the Supreme Court, then. Which isn't all that much easier.
So this morning its the old moaning about the young moaning about the old moaning about the young.
The question for our elders and betters is have you raised your children and grandchildren to be ungrateful and angry? If not, perhaps they may have a point.....
"On Wednesday the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill returns to the House of Commons. It contains a set of amendments proposed by Theresa Villiers, a former environment secretary, with the support of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns and others. The effect will be to eviscerate the planning system as we know it by making all housing targets set by Whitehall purely advisory and removing the existing presumption in favour of development — in other words, scrapping the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so."
Contemptible. If that goes through, the Tories deserve a landslide defeat.
Nimbies - disproportionately drawn from amongst, your guessed it, the serried ranks of the selfish old - will love it. Every sop to the grey vote *decreases* the likelihood of the Tories being flushed down the toilet. Expect a whole lot more of this kind of thing.
Nah, its self-defeating. Nimbies still only get 1 vote each, no matter how much they love the Tories. Tories appealling to Tories is like Labour appealling to Corbynites/SJW/Momentum etc
More people getting onto the property ladder gives a bigger pool of Tory voters. More people stuck renting or cohabiting in others homes, gives a bigger pool of Labour voters, even if those already voting Tory "love it".
It is always worth repeating at this juncture that about half of the entire electorate, accounting for age-related differences in turnout, is aged over 55. This cohort consists very largely of affluent homeowning pensioners, soon-to-be pensioners, and expectant heirs to pensioner property fortunes.
Today's Tory MPs realise, of course, that the young despise them, and that the problem will get worse as all those youthful have-nots age, but why should they care about that? They want to save their jobs now, not worry about what might happen in twenty years' time when most of the Boomers are dead.
There are lots of hard-up pensioners out there, and quite a few rich young and middle-aged people.
That's whataboutery. The average pensioner household now has, after housing costs, a higher disposable income than the average working household. Most pensioners are homeowners. QED.
State pension income is guaranteed to rise by inflation or more (depending on circumstances) by the triple lock, whereas most earned incomes are in real terms decline. Earned incomes are taxed to absolute fuck to service the Government's expenses (largely pensions, health and social care for pensioners, and a colossal debt racked up during the Covid lockdowns,) whilst taxation of property and inheritances is kept at rock bottom. Childcare costs are allowed to inflate out of control, whilst ministers persist with plans (even if briefly delayed) to cap social care costs so as to allow estates to be preserved. The supply of new homes is deliberately and systematically deprioritised and choked off, so that prices will be kept buoyant, to the advantage of existing owners (i.e. older people.) Even Brexit was a pure and simple case of the will of the aged trumping that of the young. The list goes on.
Yes, quite a lot of pensioners are hard-up and quite a lot of younger people are very comfortable, but taken as a whole the balance of society is ludicrously tilted in favour of the former and against the latter - and it's at the core of all of our problems as a nation. A country that sinks an ever-greater share of its wealth into servicing the care and interests of unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the retired) is doomed to failure. Britain is doomed to failure. End of story.
I think a big part of the problem is that a) a lot of wealthy pensioners slow down in their old age and cannot see the problem. Last week I needed to see a doctor and it took over an hour to make an appointment. I had to go and register with a different surgery. A big problem is that older people with their unlimited time and medical problems are crowding out access to the universal health system. And because they don't pay NI, which as we know is just a form of tax, they pay far lower marginal rates of income tax. As a group they are beneficiaries of an unequal structure.
The other part of the problem is that young people don't see the problem. They fall for the same myths that 'old people have done their shift and deserve what they get as they have paid in to the system for their whole lives'. But everyone should still be paying the same amount of tax. A while back I looked at the situation and concluded that I was being mugged and concluded that I need to structure my economic affairs in such a way that I pay as little tax as possible as PAYE employment was never going to make me wealthy however much I earn. But actually everyone should just be paying a similar amount of tax and this starts with pensioners paying something like NI when their combined income exceeds the national living wage.
What you describe as a myth is exactly the system as it has been for the last hundred years. Workers pay National Insurance in order to qualify for the state pension.
And if you want to fix that, then abolishing NI and increasing income tax would seem the most obvious step, except that Chancellors are terrified of increasing headline income tax rates since the 1980s when Mrs Thatcher convinced the nation this was the only tax that matters, although very recently there has been attention paid to the overall tax take. The other difficulty is you'd need a new criterion for paying the state pension. It is not impossible, and may well be desirable, but it is not quite straightforward.
I would happily be second in line to @rottenborough to write an article about how rubbish so much of the NHS is but it would be like writing an article on the sun rising each day.
The only people who might vaguely dissent would be those with no experience of the NHS.
On the discharge issue, not so many years ago my mother and I forced her discharge from a hospital which had no plans to let her go for no good reason.
"The Germans thought it would be better if Ukraine fell" - Boris Johnson declassified the attitude of the EU countries towards Ukraine at the beginning of the war
I don't know what all the fuss is about. It is perfectly sensible to observe that Walmart staff need to come to work armed to protect themselves against being shot to death by their boss.
Only libruls and other degenerates would argue anything else, God Bless America.
A Democratic State Senator says: ‘I will not rest until we find the solutions to end this gun violence epidemic in our country.’
She’d better prepare to die of exhaustion then, as the problem is the Second Amendment and their antediluvian Constitution means there is no way to get rid of it.
A manager shooting his own staff; how sick is that.
At risk of being tasteless, because it is true, I have worked with managers who would undoubtedly have shot members of their staff if they had access to firearms.
There is a good reason why they don't have such access.
"On Wednesday the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill returns to the House of Commons. It contains a set of amendments proposed by Theresa Villiers, a former environment secretary, with the support of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns and others. The effect will be to eviscerate the planning system as we know it by making all housing targets set by Whitehall purely advisory and removing the existing presumption in favour of development — in other words, scrapping the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so."
Contemptible. If that goes through, the Tories deserve a landslide defeat.
Nimbies - disproportionately drawn from amongst, your guessed it, the serried ranks of the selfish old - will love it. Every sop to the grey vote *decreases* the likelihood of the Tories being flushed down the toilet. Expect a whole lot more of this kind of thing.
Nah, its self-defeating. Nimbies still only get 1 vote each, no matter how much they love the Tories. Tories appealling to Tories is like Labour appealling to Corbynites/SJW/Momentum etc
More people getting onto the property ladder gives a bigger pool of Tory voters. More people stuck renting or cohabiting in others homes, gives a bigger pool of Labour voters, even if those already voting Tory "love it".
It is always worth repeating at this juncture that about half of the entire electorate, accounting for age-related differences in turnout, is aged over 55. This cohort consists very largely of affluent homeowning pensioners, soon-to-be pensioners, and expectant heirs to pensioner property fortunes.
Today's Tory MPs realise, of course, that the young despise them, and that the problem will get worse as all those youthful have-nots age, but why should they care about that? They want to save their jobs now, not worry about what might happen in twenty years' time when most of the Boomers are dead.
There are lots of hard-up pensioners out there, and quite a few rich young and middle-aged people.
That's whataboutery. The average pensioner household now has, after housing costs, a higher disposable income than the average working household. Most pensioners are homeowners. QED.
State pension income is guaranteed to rise by inflation or more (depending on circumstances) by the triple lock, whereas most earned incomes are in real terms decline. Earned incomes are taxed to absolute fuck to service the Government's expenses (largely pensions, health and social care for pensioners, and a colossal debt racked up during the Covid lockdowns,) whilst taxation of property and inheritances is kept at rock bottom. Childcare costs are allowed to inflate out of control, whilst ministers persist with plans (even if briefly delayed) to cap social care costs so as to allow estates to be preserved. The supply of new homes is deliberately and systematically deprioritised and choked off, so that prices will be kept buoyant, to the advantage of existing owners (i.e. older people.) Even Brexit was a pure and simple case of the will of the aged trumping that of the young. The list goes on.
Yes, quite a lot of pensioners are hard-up and quite a lot of younger people are very comfortable, but taken as a whole the balance of society is ludicrously tilted in favour of the former and against the latter - and it's at the core of all of our problems as a nation. A country that sinks an ever-greater share of its wealth into servicing the care and interests of unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the retired) is doomed to failure. Britain is doomed to failure. End of story.
Yes the rich pensioners getting £9K maximum after paying in for up to 50 years , bollox
Why do we means test every other benefit except for the State Pension? Why is it the only benefit that goes up by the triple lock?
That 9k would be far better directed at someone disabled, or invested elsewhere.
Away you half witted cretin. People have paid for 50 years for that pittance and if lucky enough to have any other income get taxed as well. Just hope you never have to live on it, hard to believe how low this country has fallen when lazy , greedy young people grudge poor sods who have worked 50 years their meagre pension.
Being "taxed" by less than half the rate of tax that others on the exact same income are taxed is not being taxed the same you stupid nimwit.
But then you're so thick you think NI isn't a tax. Greedy is people like you thinking taxes are for others and not for them.
Saying that everyone on the same income should pay the same rate of tax is basic fairness and reasonableness, not evil or greedy.
I would happily be second in line to @rottenborough to write an article about how rubbish so much of the NHS is but it would be like writing an article on the sun rising each day.
The only people who might vaguely dissent would be those with no experience of the NHS.
On the discharge issue, not so many years ago my mother and I forced her discharge from a hospital which had no plans to let her go for no good reason.
The NHS is so incredibly patchy. Our GP service is awful, but my few major experiences with A&E over the last ten years (three events; two for our family and one for a friend) were all excellent. Others will obviously have had very different experiences.
Some people complain about the NHS becoming a postcode lottery; it already is, and has been for decades.
I would happily be second in line to @rottenborough to write an article about how rubbish so much of the NHS is but it would be like writing an article on the sun rising each day.
The only people who might vaguely dissent would be those with no experience of the NHS.
On the discharge issue, not so many years ago my mother and I forced her discharge from a hospital which had no plans to let her go for no good reason.
The NHS is so incredibly patchy. Our GP service is awful, but my few major experiences with A&E over the last ten years (three events; two for our family and one for a friend) were all excellent. Others will obviously have had very different experiences.
Some people complain about the NHS becoming a postcode lottery; it already is, and has been for decades.
It remains the case that if you are wheeled into A&E with a broken leg or somesuch the NHS is fantastic.
Anything more complicated, or less obvious, or needing MDTs or departmental liaison is hopeless.
I don't know what all the fuss is about. It is perfectly sensible to observe that Walmart staff need to come to work armed to protect themselves against being shot to death by their boss.
Only libruls and other degenerates would argue anything else, God Bless America.
Plenty of guns within easy reach of any Walmart employee anyways I would reckon.
Blocked from leaving for the third time in week by various minor non-entities in the hospital system despite the lead and senior consultant (who has been her main doctor for ten years) demanding she be discharged.
Today a doctor phoned to say he was literally signing her discharge paperwork, yet she remains there.
I wont go into details now, but if this ever ends and I get her home, I have a humdinger of header on the utterly failing and yet stubbornly sclerotic and massively tickbox and over paper worked NHS.
It is beyond belief how many so-called decision makers many of whom seem to have the intelligence of a clam claim to be involved in a discharge and seem to have blocking powers rather than just advisory.
It is a wonder that anyone ever leaves hospital.
I suspect a lot of the bed blocking that the media talk about is actually completely self-inflicted by the NHS themselves judging by what I have seen in last week or so.
I am emotional and very very tonight.
Would give that a like. But won't. The last 12 years seem to have been an Amazon of paperwork. Whilst promising a bonfire of red tape.
When @Foxy is next around he might be able to comment but seems to me that a load of totally semi-medical non-entities are allowed to sit in discharge meetings and literally block the lead consultant's decisions based on their own minor bollocks e.g concerned about her diet.
The National Healthcare Prevention Service at work.
Where medical staff battle all day long to fight the system and abuse their positions. By providing healthcare.
The management system you describe is literally from the 1950s. Horror stories/jokes are told in books and articles about this kind of crap, back then.
The classic was the meeting to decide the position of a single switch in the cockpit of the TSR.2
So many people turned up for the meeting that they couldn’t fit in the room. So the chap running the meeting told everyone to leave and only the most essential to return. There were more people in the room the second time….
I would happily be second in line to @rottenborough to write an article about how rubbish so much of the NHS is but it would be like writing an article on the sun rising each day.
The only people who might vaguely dissent would be those with no experience of the NHS.
On the discharge issue, not so many years ago my mother and I forced her discharge from a hospital which had no plans to let her go for no good reason.
The NHS is so incredibly patchy. Our GP service is awful, but my few major experiences with A&E over the last ten years (three events; two for our family and one for a friend) were all excellent. Others will obviously have had very different experiences.
Some people complain about the NHS becoming a postcode lottery; it already is, and has been for decades.
Most people are strongly in favour of devolving power as locally as possible, but against post code lotteries......
Blocked from leaving for the third time in week by various minor non-entities in the hospital system despite the lead and senior consultant (who has been her main doctor for ten years) demanding she be discharged.
Today a doctor phoned to say he was literally signing her discharge paperwork, yet she remains there.
I wont go into details now, but if this ever ends and I get her home, I have a humdinger of header on the utterly failing and yet stubbornly sclerotic and massively tickbox and over paper worked NHS.
It is beyond belief how many so-called decision makers many of whom seem to have the intelligence of a clam claim to be involved in a discharge and seem to have blocking powers rather than just advisory.
It is a wonder that anyone ever leaves hospital.
I suspect a lot of the bed blocking that the media talk about is actually completely self-inflicted by the NHS themselves judging by what I have seen in last week or so.
I am emotional and very very tonight.
Would give that a like. But won't. The last 12 years seem to have been an Amazon of paperwork. Whilst promising a bonfire of red tape.
When @Foxy is next around he might be able to comment but seems to me that a load of totally semi-medical non-entities are allowed to sit in discharge meetings and literally block the lead consultant's decisions based on their own minor bollocks e.g concerned about her diet.
The National Healthcare Prevention Service at work.
Where medical staff battle all day long to fight the system and abuse their positions. By providing healthcare.
The management system you describe is literally from the 1950s. Horror stories/jokes are told in books and articles about this kind of crap, back then.
The classic was the meeting to decide the position of a single switch in the cockpit of the TSR.2
So many people turned up for the meeting that they couldn’t fit in the room. So the chap running the meeting told everyone to leave and only the most essential to return. There were more people in the room the second time….
I don't know what all the fuss is about. It is perfectly sensible to observe that Walmart staff need to come to work armed to protect themselves against being shot to death by their boss.
Only libruls and other degenerates would argue anything else, God Bless America.
Plenty of guns within easy reach of any Walmart employee anyways I would reckon.
You get what you vote for, and they keep voting for guns having more value than lives. I could obverse that a society where people think employees need to be armed to defend their lives at work is deeply fucked up. But its not my society.
What I can do is that every time we get compared to America I point to all the ways we are nothing like them. We have problems in this country, bad problems. Nothing as fundamental as their problems.
I don't know what all the fuss is about. It is perfectly sensible to observe that Walmart staff need to come to work armed to protect themselves against being shot to death by their boss.
Only libruls and other degenerates would argue anything else, God Bless America.
Plenty of guns within easy reach of any Walmart employee anyways I would reckon.
You get what you vote for, and they keep voting for guns having more value than lives. I could obverse that a society where people think employees need to be armed to defend their lives at work is deeply fucked up. But its not my society.
What I can do is that every time we get compared to America I point to all the ways we are nothing like them. We have problems in this country, bad problems. Nothing as fundamental as their problems.
My recent, personal experience of the NHS was fantastic. I went over on my foot, and it was swollen and very painful. After a few days, I rocked up without notice, at the walk-in (gingerly hobble in in my case). Was x-rayed, diagnosed with a severe sprain, got 10 minutes one-on-one advice on how to mitigate it and was out in a little over an hour. Modern, clean facility, lovely caring staff. That doesn't make it all good of course. But it isn't all bad either. And, of course, it was no charge.
I would happily be second in line to @rottenborough to write an article about how rubbish so much of the NHS is but it would be like writing an article on the sun rising each day.
The only people who might vaguely dissent would be those with no experience of the NHS.
On the discharge issue, not so many years ago my mother and I forced her discharge from a hospital which had no plans to let her go for no good reason.
The NHS is so incredibly patchy. Our GP service is awful, but my few major experiences with A&E over the last ten years (three events; two for our family and one for a friend) were all excellent. Others will obviously have had very different experiences.
Some people complain about the NHS becoming a postcode lottery; it already is, and has been for decades.
It remains the case that if you are wheeled into A&E with a broken leg or somesuch the NHS is fantastic.
Anything more complicated, or less obvious, or needing MDTs or departmental liaison is hopeless.
Because if you are wheeled in with an emergency, it is “Fuck-the-stupid-rules-let’s-do-medicine” time. No one holds a committee meeting to decide whether you get a blood transfusion while you are pouring claret on the lino…
I don't know what all the fuss is about. It is perfectly sensible to observe that Walmart staff need to come to work armed to protect themselves against being shot to death by their boss.
Only libruls and other degenerates would argue anything else, God Bless America.
Plenty of guns within easy reach of any Walmart employee anyways I would reckon.
Blocked from leaving for the third time in week by various minor non-entities in the hospital system despite the lead and senior consultant (who has been her main doctor for ten years) demanding she be discharged.
Today a doctor phoned to say he was literally signing her discharge paperwork, yet she remains there.
I wont go into details now, but if this ever ends and I get her home, I have a humdinger of header on the utterly failing and yet stubbornly sclerotic and massively tickbox and over paper worked NHS.
It is beyond belief how many so-called decision makers many of whom seem to have the intelligence of a clam claim to be involved in a discharge and seem to have blocking powers rather than just advisory.
It is a wonder that anyone ever leaves hospital.
I suspect a lot of the bed blocking that the media talk about is actually completely self-inflicted by the NHS themselves judging by what I have seen in last week or so.
I am emotional and very very tonight.
I think it's time to just walk up and leave, the NHS seems to give no fuck about patients, just their precious boxes that need ticking. Really hope everything works out mate.
Thanks.
I am actively considering forcing a self-discharge on her behalf if you see what I mean.
The problem is they are are all a mixture of a) well meaning b) covering their own arses c) unable to see the whole picture of the person and their life. Item b seems to win out.
Many years ago I got a call from my wife who was in a NHS hospital with a severely infected leg. She asked me to come in a taxi as they were planning to amputate her leg. She hopped out with my help. I took her to a private doctor who nursed her back to health. She recovered without even a limp.
Incidentally, I met another ex-teacher yesterday, now working in admin. She quit teaching (primary) last January.
Reasons given:
Excessive workload Appalling conditions The arrogance of the high ups.
Much nicer to work a steady 9-5 then go home and relax.
As long as we keep treating teaching staff this way we're going to have a problem. Especially now the DfE in their boundless complacency have now totally screwed up teacher training so the supply of new teachers is going to be savagely cut from September 2024.
I suspect 1971's drabness is an artefact of the film and low light. Roger would know more; Marquee Mark might. What struck me was Rodd talking about a "cassette of tape".
No clue what strategy Russia is following with this. I imagine this will make Ukraine fight even more. Absolutely awful.
A newborn baby was killed overnight in a Russian missile attack on the maternity ward of Vilnyansk hospital in Ukraine's southern Zaporizhzhia oblast and others likely remain trapped under debris, President Zelensky says. 📸 via Ze Telegram https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1595326529906556929
Blocked from leaving for the third time in week by various minor non-entities in the hospital system despite the lead and senior consultant (who has been her main doctor for ten years) demanding she be discharged.
Today a doctor phoned to say he was literally signing her discharge paperwork, yet she remains there.
I wont go into details now, but if this ever ends and I get her home, I have a humdinger of header on the utterly failing and yet stubbornly sclerotic and massively tickbox and over paper worked NHS.
It is beyond belief how many so-called decision makers many of whom seem to have the intelligence of a clam claim to be involved in a discharge and seem to have blocking powers rather than just advisory.
It is a wonder that anyone ever leaves hospital.
I suspect a lot of the bed blocking that the media talk about is actually completely self-inflicted by the NHS themselves judging by what I have seen in last week or so.
I am emotional and very very tonight.
I think it's time to just walk up and leave, the NHS seems to give no fuck about patients, just their precious boxes that need ticking. Really hope everything works out mate.
Thanks.
I am actively considering forcing a self-discharge on her behalf if you see what I mean.
The problem is they are are all a mixture of a) well meaning b) covering their own arses c) unable to see the whole picture of the person and their life. Item b seems to win out.
You have the right to discharge yourself from hospital at any time during your stay in hospital.
No clue what strategy Russia is following with this. I imagine this will make Ukraine fight even more. Absolutely awful.
A newborn baby was killed overnight in a Russian missile attack on the maternity ward of Vilnyansk hospital in Ukraine's southern Zaporizhzhia oblast and others likely remain trapped under debris, President Zelensky says. 📸 via Ze Telegram https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1595326529906556929
They're just following their standard operating practice we've seen so far in Ukraine, and also in Syria.
It's really hard to understand how anyone can actually support the Russians in this, or even be sympathetic towards them.
Just looking up William Wragg who's standing down and saw that there was a by-election in Stretford and Urmston. Wiki lists Dorries and the other "Boris peers" as standing down. Have they actually said they will or is that just based on the press stories?
I would happily be second in line to @rottenborough to write an article about how rubbish so much of the NHS is but it would be like writing an article on the sun rising each day.
The only people who might vaguely dissent would be those with no experience of the NHS.
On the discharge issue, not so many years ago my mother and I forced her discharge from a hospital which had no plans to let her go for no good reason.
The NHS is so incredibly patchy. Our GP service is awful, but my few major experiences with A&E over the last ten years (three events; two for our family and one for a friend) were all excellent. Others will obviously have had very different experiences.
Some people complain about the NHS becoming a postcode lottery; it already is, and has been for decades.
It remains the case that if you are wheeled into A&E with a broken leg or somesuch the NHS is fantastic.
Anything more complicated, or less obvious, or needing MDTs or departmental liaison is hopeless.
The quality of medical care, once you're actually being seen, is fine - and I'm not sure many would dispute that.
It's the pre care and after care - the customer care - that's the issue; it's difficult to get through a GP gatekeeper, and then to wait so long on a list, which occurs in a shorter form for A&E, and this just aggravates the medical problems and makes life a misery - as do delays in discharge.
Incidentally, I met another ex-teacher yesterday, now working in admin. She quit teaching (primary) last January.
Reasons given:
Excessive workload Appalling conditions The arrogance of the high ups.
Much nicer to work a steady 9-5 then go home and relax.
As long as we keep treating teaching staff this way we're going to have a problem. Especially now the DfE in their boundless complacency have now totally screwed up teacher training so the supply of new teachers is going to be savagely cut from September 2024.
Mrs RP is a Pupil Support Assistant specialising in more challenging kids. Unfortunately her school appears to be the place where all the most challenging kids get swept, and its essentially become unmanageable. Her and several colleagues including teachers now openly debating what the point is if they can't actually teach due to small monsters (encouraged by their horrendous parents) are only there to create havoc.
I remember my (grant maintained) high school which managed such reprobates by essentially internally excluding the monsters and treating them in a way the LEA would have been horrified by. But you can't do that now even if this school had the physical or staff resources which it doesn't.
"On Wednesday the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill returns to the House of Commons. It contains a set of amendments proposed by Theresa Villiers, a former environment secretary, with the support of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns and others. The effect will be to eviscerate the planning system as we know it by making all housing targets set by Whitehall purely advisory and removing the existing presumption in favour of development — in other words, scrapping the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so."
Contemptible. If that goes through, the Tories deserve a landslide defeat.
Nimbies - disproportionately drawn from amongst, your guessed it, the serried ranks of the selfish old - will love it. Every sop to the grey vote *decreases* the likelihood of the Tories being flushed down the toilet. Expect a whole lot more of this kind of thing.
Nah, its self-defeating. Nimbies still only get 1 vote each, no matter how much they love the Tories. Tories appealling to Tories is like Labour appealling to Corbynites/SJW/Momentum etc
More people getting onto the property ladder gives a bigger pool of Tory voters. More people stuck renting or cohabiting in others homes, gives a bigger pool of Labour voters, even if those already voting Tory "love it".
It is always worth repeating at this juncture that about half of the entire electorate, accounting for age-related differences in turnout, is aged over 55. This cohort consists very largely of affluent homeowning pensioners, soon-to-be pensioners, and expectant heirs to pensioner property fortunes.
Today's Tory MPs realise, of course, that the young despise them, and that the problem will get worse as all those youthful have-nots age, but why should they care about that? They want to save their jobs now, not worry about what might happen in twenty years' time when most of the Boomers are dead.
There are lots of hard-up pensioners out there, and quite a few rich young and middle-aged people.
That's whataboutery. The average pensioner household now has, after housing costs, a higher disposable income than the average working household. Most pensioners are homeowners. QED.
State pension income is guaranteed to rise by inflation or more (depending on circumstances) by the triple lock, whereas most earned incomes are in real terms decline. Earned incomes are taxed to absolute fuck to service the Government's expenses (largely pensions, health and social care for pensioners, and a colossal debt racked up during the Covid lockdowns,) whilst taxation of property and inheritances is kept at rock bottom. Childcare costs are allowed to inflate out of control, whilst ministers persist with plans (even if briefly delayed) to cap social care costs so as to allow estates to be preserved. The supply of new homes is deliberately and systematically deprioritised and choked off, so that prices will be kept buoyant, to the advantage of existing owners (i.e. older people.) Even Brexit was a pure and simple case of the will of the aged trumping that of the young. The list goes on.
Yes, quite a lot of pensioners are hard-up and quite a lot of younger people are very comfortable, but taken as a whole the balance of society is ludicrously tilted in favour of the former and against the latter - and it's at the core of all of our problems as a nation. A country that sinks an ever-greater share of its wealth into servicing the care and interests of unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the retired) is doomed to failure. Britain is doomed to failure. End of story.
Yes the rich pensioners getting £9K maximum after paying in for up to 50 years , bollox
Why do we means test every other benefit except for the State Pension? Why is it the only benefit that goes up by the triple lock?
That 9k would be far better directed at someone disabled, or invested elsewhere.
Away you half witted cretin. People have paid for 50 years for that pittance and if lucky enough to have any other income get taxed as well. Just hope you never have to live on it, hard to believe how low this country has fallen when lazy , greedy young people grudge poor sods who have worked 50 years their meagre pension.
Being "taxed" by less than half the rate of tax that others on the exact same income are taxed is not being taxed the same you stupid nimwit.
But then you're so thick you think NI isn't a tax. Greedy is people like you thinking taxes are for others and not for them.
Saying that everyone on the same income should pay the same rate of tax is basic fairness and reasonableness, not evil or greedy.
Fundamentally, the State cannot afford to pay for 20+ years of retirement on a pension that's guaranteed to go up each year by a decent amount, whatever happens, without choking the productive economy with tax.
It's a small version of the defined benefit (final salary) pension that most private sector companies struggled with when they became unsustainable.
FYI, New Zealand's central bank (#RBNZ) has hiked its its key interest rate by 75 basis points to 4.25%, citing high core #inflation and labour shortages (but no mention of #Brexit... 😉)
"On Wednesday the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill returns to the House of Commons. It contains a set of amendments proposed by Theresa Villiers, a former environment secretary, with the support of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns and others. The effect will be to eviscerate the planning system as we know it by making all housing targets set by Whitehall purely advisory and removing the existing presumption in favour of development — in other words, scrapping the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so."
Contemptible. If that goes through, the Tories deserve a landslide defeat.
Nimbies - disproportionately drawn from amongst, your guessed it, the serried ranks of the selfish old - will love it. Every sop to the grey vote *decreases* the likelihood of the Tories being flushed down the toilet. Expect a whole lot more of this kind of thing.
Nah, its self-defeating. Nimbies still only get 1 vote each, no matter how much they love the Tories. Tories appealling to Tories is like Labour appealling to Corbynites/SJW/Momentum etc
More people getting onto the property ladder gives a bigger pool of Tory voters. More people stuck renting or cohabiting in others homes, gives a bigger pool of Labour voters, even if those already voting Tory "love it".
It is always worth repeating at this juncture that about half of the entire electorate, accounting for age-related differences in turnout, is aged over 55. This cohort consists very largely of affluent homeowning pensioners, soon-to-be pensioners, and expectant heirs to pensioner property fortunes.
Today's Tory MPs realise, of course, that the young despise them, and that the problem will get worse as all those youthful have-nots age, but why should they care about that? They want to save their jobs now, not worry about what might happen in twenty years' time when most of the Boomers are dead.
There are lots of hard-up pensioners out there, and quite a few rich young and middle-aged people.
That's whataboutery. The average pensioner household now has, after housing costs, a higher disposable income than the average working household. Most pensioners are homeowners. QED.
State pension income is guaranteed to rise by inflation or more (depending on circumstances) by the triple lock, whereas most earned incomes are in real terms decline. Earned incomes are taxed to absolute fuck to service the Government's expenses (largely pensions, health and social care for pensioners, and a colossal debt racked up during the Covid lockdowns,) whilst taxation of property and inheritances is kept at rock bottom. Childcare costs are allowed to inflate out of control, whilst ministers persist with plans (even if briefly delayed) to cap social care costs so as to allow estates to be preserved. The supply of new homes is deliberately and systematically deprioritised and choked off, so that prices will be kept buoyant, to the advantage of existing owners (i.e. older people.) Even Brexit was a pure and simple case of the will of the aged trumping that of the young. The list goes on.
Yes, quite a lot of pensioners are hard-up and quite a lot of younger people are very comfortable, but taken as a whole the balance of society is ludicrously tilted in favour of the former and against the latter - and it's at the core of all of our problems as a nation. A country that sinks an ever-greater share of its wealth into servicing the care and interests of unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the retired) is doomed to failure. Britain is doomed to failure. End of story.
Yes the rich pensioners getting £9K maximum after paying in for up to 50 years , bollox
Why do we means test every other benefit except for the State Pension? Why is it the only benefit that goes up by the triple lock?
That 9k would be far better directed at someone disabled, or invested elsewhere.
Away you half witted cretin. People have paid for 50 years for that pittance and if lucky enough to have any other income get taxed as well. Just hope you never have to live on it, hard to believe how low this country has fallen when lazy , greedy young people grudge poor sods who have worked 50 years their meagre pension.
Being "taxed" by less than half the rate of tax that others on the exact same income are taxed is not being taxed the same you stupid nimwit.
But then you're so thick you think NI isn't a tax. Greedy is people like you thinking taxes are for others and not for them.
Saying that everyone on the same income should pay the same rate of tax is basic fairness and reasonableness, not evil or greedy.
Fundamentally, the State cannot afford to pay for 20+ years of retirement on a pension that's guaranteed to go up each year by a decent amount, whatever happens, without choking the productive economy with tax.
It's a small version of the defined benefit (final salary) pension that most private sector companies struggled with when they became unsustainable.
The liabilities are huge.
It probably just about can, but not alongside favourable tax rates for the same people and a load of extra freebies on top.
FYI, New Zealand's central bank (#RBNZ) has hiked its its key interest rate by 75 basis points to 4.25%, citing high core #inflation and labour shortages (but no mention of #Brexit... 😉)
"On Wednesday the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill returns to the House of Commons. It contains a set of amendments proposed by Theresa Villiers, a former environment secretary, with the support of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns and others. The effect will be to eviscerate the planning system as we know it by making all housing targets set by Whitehall purely advisory and removing the existing presumption in favour of development — in other words, scrapping the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so."
Contemptible. If that goes through, the Tories deserve a landslide defeat.
Nimbies - disproportionately drawn from amongst, your guessed it, the serried ranks of the selfish old - will love it. Every sop to the grey vote *decreases* the likelihood of the Tories being flushed down the toilet. Expect a whole lot more of this kind of thing.
Nah, its self-defeating. Nimbies still only get 1 vote each, no matter how much they love the Tories. Tories appealling to Tories is like Labour appealling to Corbynites/SJW/Momentum etc
More people getting onto the property ladder gives a bigger pool of Tory voters. More people stuck renting or cohabiting in others homes, gives a bigger pool of Labour voters, even if those already voting Tory "love it".
It is always worth repeating at this juncture that about half of the entire electorate, accounting for age-related differences in turnout, is aged over 55. This cohort consists very largely of affluent homeowning pensioners, soon-to-be pensioners, and expectant heirs to pensioner property fortunes.
Today's Tory MPs realise, of course, that the young despise them, and that the problem will get worse as all those youthful have-nots age, but why should they care about that? They want to save their jobs now, not worry about what might happen in twenty years' time when most of the Boomers are dead.
There are lots of hard-up pensioners out there, and quite a few rich young and middle-aged people.
That's whataboutery. The average pensioner household now has, after housing costs, a higher disposable income than the average working household. Most pensioners are homeowners. QED.
State pension income is guaranteed to rise by inflation or more (depending on circumstances) by the triple lock, whereas most earned incomes are in real terms decline. Earned incomes are taxed to absolute fuck to service the Government's expenses (largely pensions, health and social care for pensioners, and a colossal debt racked up during the Covid lockdowns,) whilst taxation of property and inheritances is kept at rock bottom. Childcare costs are allowed to inflate out of control, whilst ministers persist with plans (even if briefly delayed) to cap social care costs so as to allow estates to be preserved. The supply of new homes is deliberately and systematically deprioritised and choked off, so that prices will be kept buoyant, to the advantage of existing owners (i.e. older people.) Even Brexit was a pure and simple case of the will of the aged trumping that of the young. The list goes on.
Yes, quite a lot of pensioners are hard-up and quite a lot of younger people are very comfortable, but taken as a whole the balance of society is ludicrously tilted in favour of the former and against the latter - and it's at the core of all of our problems as a nation. A country that sinks an ever-greater share of its wealth into servicing the care and interests of unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the retired) is doomed to failure. Britain is doomed to failure. End of story.
Yes the rich pensioners getting £9K maximum after paying in for up to 50 years , bollox
Why do we means test every other benefit except for the State Pension? Why is it the only benefit that goes up by the triple lock?
That 9k would be far better directed at someone disabled, or invested elsewhere.
Away you half witted cretin. People have paid for 50 years for that pittance and if lucky enough to have any other income get taxed as well. Just hope you never have to live on it, hard to believe how low this country has fallen when lazy , greedy young people grudge poor sods who have worked 50 years their meagre pension.
Nah, there is no pot. You paid for your parents and grandparents state pension; now I'm paying for yours. It's just a benefit.
I'm aware of the many people who rely on the state pension to survive. I'd even suggest increasing the value of it, if we means test and direct it towards it to those in real need rather than rich people like you.
The only awkward bit is that it works like UBI at the moment; people change their retirement planning around the value of it and when the SPA kicks in. So either we go full UBI for everyone, or we slowly phase out universal state pension.
My recent, personal experience of the NHS was fantastic. I went over on my foot, and it was swollen and very painful. After a few days, I rocked up without notice, at the walk-in (gingerly hobble in in my case). Was x-rayed, diagnosed with a severe sprain, got 10 minutes one-on-one advice on how to mitigate it and was out in a little over an hour. Modern, clean facility, lovely caring staff. That doesn't make it all good of course. But it isn't all bad either. And, of course, it was no charge.
The quality of care in the NHS is generally very good. The standard of customer srrvice is awful. It is certainly cheap though.
My recent, personal experience of the NHS was fantastic. I went over on my foot, and it was swollen and very painful. After a few days, I rocked up without notice, at the walk-in (gingerly hobble in in my case). Was x-rayed, diagnosed with a severe sprain, got 10 minutes one-on-one advice on how to mitigate it and was out in a little over an hour. Modern, clean facility, lovely caring staff. That doesn't make it all good of course. But it isn't all bad either. And, of course, it was no charge.
Walk in centres (minor injury) are brilliant. Take the pressure of A&E, which sadly is full of people who either cannot get to see the GP or don't realise where they should be going. Personally I think on of the best fixes we can do relatively easily is to make sure any medium to large town (and upwards) has walk in minor injury/GP available. Many many minor things just need 15 min consultation to check and resolve, but frustration at not being able to get to your GP is huge. My colleague spent 4 weeks trying to make an appointment for a scheduled blood test. Absolute rubbish.
I still think there is a chance they allow a ref on a narrow legal interpretation, but make it clear it carries no more weight (legally) than an opinion poll. And then Sturgeon goes for one next year.
O/T I was channel hopping last night and came across a political discussion panel which featured Ken Clarke (it might have been GB News). I was shocked by how much he has aged and how rough he looked. He was scruffy, even by the standards of Jeremy Corbyn or Michael Foot. One of his eyes was completely bloodshot.
On a different theme, last night posters were bemoaning how thick students are these days and one one told of a student who tried to fry dry pasta in a frying pan. But there was a chef on Stanley Tucci's programme about Puglia last week who did just that. He fried the spaghetti until it was crispy and then added the sauce.
"On Wednesday the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill returns to the House of Commons. It contains a set of amendments proposed by Theresa Villiers, a former environment secretary, with the support of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns and others. The effect will be to eviscerate the planning system as we know it by making all housing targets set by Whitehall purely advisory and removing the existing presumption in favour of development — in other words, scrapping the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so."
Contemptible. If that goes through, the Tories deserve a landslide defeat.
Nimbies - disproportionately drawn from amongst, your guessed it, the serried ranks of the selfish old - will love it. Every sop to the grey vote *decreases* the likelihood of the Tories being flushed down the toilet. Expect a whole lot more of this kind of thing.
Nah, its self-defeating. Nimbies still only get 1 vote each, no matter how much they love the Tories. Tories appealling to Tories is like Labour appealling to Corbynites/SJW/Momentum etc
More people getting onto the property ladder gives a bigger pool of Tory voters. More people stuck renting or cohabiting in others homes, gives a bigger pool of Labour voters, even if those already voting Tory "love it".
It is always worth repeating at this juncture that about half of the entire electorate, accounting for age-related differences in turnout, is aged over 55. This cohort consists very largely of affluent homeowning pensioners, soon-to-be pensioners, and expectant heirs to pensioner property fortunes.
Today's Tory MPs realise, of course, that the young despise them, and that the problem will get worse as all those youthful have-nots age, but why should they care about that? They want to save their jobs now, not worry about what might happen in twenty years' time when most of the Boomers are dead.
There are lots of hard-up pensioners out there, and quite a few rich young and middle-aged people.
That's whataboutery. The average pensioner household now has, after housing costs, a higher disposable income than the average working household. Most pensioners are homeowners. QED.
State pension income is guaranteed to rise by inflation or more (depending on circumstances) by the triple lock, whereas most earned incomes are in real terms decline. Earned incomes are taxed to absolute fuck to service the Government's expenses (largely pensions, health and social care for pensioners, and a colossal debt racked up during the Covid lockdowns,) whilst taxation of property and inheritances is kept at rock bottom. Childcare costs are allowed to inflate out of control, whilst ministers persist with plans (even if briefly delayed) to cap social care costs so as to allow estates to be preserved. The supply of new homes is deliberately and systematically deprioritised and choked off, so that prices will be kept buoyant, to the advantage of existing owners (i.e. older people.) Even Brexit was a pure and simple case of the will of the aged trumping that of the young. The list goes on.
Yes, quite a lot of pensioners are hard-up and quite a lot of younger people are very comfortable, but taken as a whole the balance of society is ludicrously tilted in favour of the former and against the latter - and it's at the core of all of our problems as a nation. A country that sinks an ever-greater share of its wealth into servicing the care and interests of unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the retired) is doomed to failure. Britain is doomed to failure. End of story.
Yes the rich pensioners getting £9K maximum after paying in for up to 50 years , bollox
Why do we means test every other benefit except for the State Pension? Why is it the only benefit that goes up by the triple lock?
That 9k would be far better directed at someone disabled, or invested elsewhere.
Away you half witted cretin. People have paid for 50 years for that pittance and if lucky enough to have any other income get taxed as well. Just hope you never have to live on it, hard to believe how low this country has fallen when lazy , greedy young people grudge poor sods who have worked 50 years their meagre pension.
Being "taxed" by less than half the rate of tax that others on the exact same income are taxed is not being taxed the same you stupid nimwit.
But then you're so thick you think NI isn't a tax. Greedy is people like you thinking taxes are for others and not for them.
Saying that everyone on the same income should pay the same rate of tax is basic fairness and reasonableness, not evil or greedy.
Fundamentally, the State cannot afford to pay for 20+ years of retirement on a pension that's guaranteed to go up each year by a decent amount, whatever happens, without choking the productive economy with tax.
It's a small version of the defined benefit (final salary) pension that most private sector companies struggled with when they became unsustainable.
The liabilities are huge.
It probably just about can, but not alongside favourable tax rates for the same people and a load of extra freebies on top.
Choices need to be made.
You can reduce the time liability, by increasing the qualification age, and remove the triple lock, to moderate the compound effect.
Otherwise it, together with health costs, will take an ever larger proportion of out national income and our taxes will go up accordingly to pay for it.
My recent, personal experience of the NHS was fantastic. I went over on my foot, and it was swollen and very painful. After a few days, I rocked up without notice, at the walk-in (gingerly hobble in in my case). Was x-rayed, diagnosed with a severe sprain, got 10 minutes one-on-one advice on how to mitigate it and was out in a little over an hour. Modern, clean facility, lovely caring staff. That doesn't make it all good of course. But it isn't all bad either. And, of course, it was no charge.
The quality of care in the NHS is generally very good. The standard of customer srrvice is awful. It is certainly cheap though.
I'm not sure it's that cheap.
Last time I checked the % of GDP we spend on health wasn't far off the European average.
My recent, personal experience of the NHS was fantastic. I went over on my foot, and it was swollen and very painful. After a few days, I rocked up without notice, at the walk-in (gingerly hobble in in my case). Was x-rayed, diagnosed with a severe sprain, got 10 minutes one-on-one advice on how to mitigate it and was out in a little over an hour. Modern, clean facility, lovely caring staff. That doesn't make it all good of course. But it isn't all bad either. And, of course, it was no charge.
The quality of care in the NHS is generally very good. The standard of customer srrvice is awful. It is certainly cheap though.
My dad was discharged from the care of NHS Grampian yesterday after nearly 2 weeks and the care he received in 3 phases of issues was superb at both hospitals he was in.
I think many of the issues in the NHS are simply due to resources. Front line medicine doesn't receive the £ needed due to the high cost of modern medicines and the vast cost of running the machinery. So we have too few beds and too few medics and too few outside hospital support resources to deal with the patients.
"On Wednesday the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill returns to the House of Commons. It contains a set of amendments proposed by Theresa Villiers, a former environment secretary, with the support of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns and others. The effect will be to eviscerate the planning system as we know it by making all housing targets set by Whitehall purely advisory and removing the existing presumption in favour of development — in other words, scrapping the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so."
Contemptible. If that goes through, the Tories deserve a landslide defeat.
Nimbies - disproportionately drawn from amongst, your guessed it, the serried ranks of the selfish old - will love it. Every sop to the grey vote *decreases* the likelihood of the Tories being flushed down the toilet. Expect a whole lot more of this kind of thing.
Nah, its self-defeating. Nimbies still only get 1 vote each, no matter how much they love the Tories. Tories appealling to Tories is like Labour appealling to Corbynites/SJW/Momentum etc
More people getting onto the property ladder gives a bigger pool of Tory voters. More people stuck renting or cohabiting in others homes, gives a bigger pool of Labour voters, even if those already voting Tory "love it".
It is always worth repeating at this juncture that about half of the entire electorate, accounting for age-related differences in turnout, is aged over 55. This cohort consists very largely of affluent homeowning pensioners, soon-to-be pensioners, and expectant heirs to pensioner property fortunes.
Today's Tory MPs realise, of course, that the young despise them, and that the problem will get worse as all those youthful have-nots age, but why should they care about that? They want to save their jobs now, not worry about what might happen in twenty years' time when most of the Boomers are dead.
There are lots of hard-up pensioners out there, and quite a few rich young and middle-aged people.
That's whataboutery. The average pensioner household now has, after housing costs, a higher disposable income than the average working household. Most pensioners are homeowners. QED.
State pension income is guaranteed to rise by inflation or more (depending on circumstances) by the triple lock, whereas most earned incomes are in real terms decline. Earned incomes are taxed to absolute fuck to service the Government's expenses (largely pensions, health and social care for pensioners, and a colossal debt racked up during the Covid lockdowns,) whilst taxation of property and inheritances is kept at rock bottom. Childcare costs are allowed to inflate out of control, whilst ministers persist with plans (even if briefly delayed) to cap social care costs so as to allow estates to be preserved. The supply of new homes is deliberately and systematically deprioritised and choked off, so that prices will be kept buoyant, to the advantage of existing owners (i.e. older people.) Even Brexit was a pure and simple case of the will of the aged trumping that of the young. The list goes on.
Yes, quite a lot of pensioners are hard-up and quite a lot of younger people are very comfortable, but taken as a whole the balance of society is ludicrously tilted in favour of the former and against the latter - and it's at the core of all of our problems as a nation. A country that sinks an ever-greater share of its wealth into servicing the care and interests of unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the retired) is doomed to failure. Britain is doomed to failure. End of story.
Yes the rich pensioners getting £9K maximum after paying in for up to 50 years , bollox
Why do we means test every other benefit except for the State Pension? Why is it the only benefit that goes up by the triple lock?
That 9k would be far better directed at someone disabled, or invested elsewhere.
Away you half witted cretin. People have paid for 50 years for that pittance and if lucky enough to have any other income get taxed as well. Just hope you never have to live on it, hard to believe how low this country has fallen when lazy , greedy young people grudge poor sods who have worked 50 years their meagre pension.
Being "taxed" by less than half the rate of tax that others on the exact same income are taxed is not being taxed the same you stupid nimwit.
But then you're so thick you think NI isn't a tax. Greedy is people like you thinking taxes are for others and not for them.
Saying that everyone on the same income should pay the same rate of tax is basic fairness and reasonableness, not evil or greedy.
A bit rude, surely? NI is a form of insurance; clue in name.
FYI, New Zealand's central bank (#RBNZ) has hiked its its key interest rate by 75 basis points to 4.25%, citing high core #inflation and labour shortages (but no mention of #Brexit... 😉)
Bothered me for a while (I need better things to worry about) but why are all these measures in 'basis points'? Isn't it easier to say 0.75%? Or is that misleading because going from say 1% interest to 2% is both described as a 1% increase, but is also a 100% increase?
"On Wednesday the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill returns to the House of Commons. It contains a set of amendments proposed by Theresa Villiers, a former environment secretary, with the support of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns and others. The effect will be to eviscerate the planning system as we know it by making all housing targets set by Whitehall purely advisory and removing the existing presumption in favour of development — in other words, scrapping the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so."
Contemptible. If that goes through, the Tories deserve a landslide defeat.
Nimbies - disproportionately drawn from amongst, your guessed it, the serried ranks of the selfish old - will love it. Every sop to the grey vote *decreases* the likelihood of the Tories being flushed down the toilet. Expect a whole lot more of this kind of thing.
Nah, its self-defeating. Nimbies still only get 1 vote each, no matter how much they love the Tories. Tories appealling to Tories is like Labour appealling to Corbynites/SJW/Momentum etc
More people getting onto the property ladder gives a bigger pool of Tory voters. More people stuck renting or cohabiting in others homes, gives a bigger pool of Labour voters, even if those already voting Tory "love it".
It is always worth repeating at this juncture that about half of the entire electorate, accounting for age-related differences in turnout, is aged over 55. This cohort consists very largely of affluent homeowning pensioners, soon-to-be pensioners, and expectant heirs to pensioner property fortunes.
Today's Tory MPs realise, of course, that the young despise them, and that the problem will get worse as all those youthful have-nots age, but why should they care about that? They want to save their jobs now, not worry about what might happen in twenty years' time when most of the Boomers are dead.
There are lots of hard-up pensioners out there, and quite a few rich young and middle-aged people.
That's whataboutery. The average pensioner household now has, after housing costs, a higher disposable income than the average working household. Most pensioners are homeowners. QED.
State pension income is guaranteed to rise by inflation or more (depending on circumstances) by the triple lock, whereas most earned incomes are in real terms decline. Earned incomes are taxed to absolute fuck to service the Government's expenses (largely pensions, health and social care for pensioners, and a colossal debt racked up during the Covid lockdowns,) whilst taxation of property and inheritances is kept at rock bottom. Childcare costs are allowed to inflate out of control, whilst ministers persist with plans (even if briefly delayed) to cap social care costs so as to allow estates to be preserved. The supply of new homes is deliberately and systematically deprioritised and choked off, so that prices will be kept buoyant, to the advantage of existing owners (i.e. older people.) Even Brexit was a pure and simple case of the will of the aged trumping that of the young. The list goes on.
Yes, quite a lot of pensioners are hard-up and quite a lot of younger people are very comfortable, but taken as a whole the balance of society is ludicrously tilted in favour of the former and against the latter - and it's at the core of all of our problems as a nation. A country that sinks an ever-greater share of its wealth into servicing the care and interests of unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the retired) is doomed to failure. Britain is doomed to failure. End of story.
Yes the rich pensioners getting £9K maximum after paying in for up to 50 years , bollox
Why do we means test every other benefit except for the State Pension? Why is it the only benefit that goes up by the triple lock?
That 9k would be far better directed at someone disabled, or invested elsewhere.
Away you half witted cretin. People have paid for 50 years for that pittance and if lucky enough to have any other income get taxed as well. Just hope you never have to live on it, hard to believe how low this country has fallen when lazy , greedy young people grudge poor sods who have worked 50 years their meagre pension.
Being "taxed" by less than half the rate of tax that others on the exact same income are taxed is not being taxed the same you stupid nimwit.
But then you're so thick you think NI isn't a tax. Greedy is people like you thinking taxes are for others and not for them.
Saying that everyone on the same income should pay the same rate of tax is basic fairness and reasonableness, not evil or greedy.
A bit rude, surely? NI is a form of insurance; clue in name.
That's the brand.
It's effectively just a tax these days on people of working age, and is no longer hypothecated to justpay for the collective costs of unemployment or sickness benefits, or pension in old age, as it was intended to do.
I still think there is a chance they allow a ref on a narrow legal interpretation, but make it clear it carries no more weight (legally) than an opinion poll. And then Sturgeon goes for one next year.
Hmmm. Like a certain recent referendum, I seem to recollect?
I still think there is a chance they allow a ref on a narrow legal interpretation, but make it clear it carries no more weight (legally) than an opinion poll. And then Sturgeon goes for one next year.
My recent, personal experience of the NHS was fantastic. I went over on my foot, and it was swollen and very painful. After a few days, I rocked up without notice, at the walk-in (gingerly hobble in in my case). Was x-rayed, diagnosed with a severe sprain, got 10 minutes one-on-one advice on how to mitigate it and was out in a little over an hour. Modern, clean facility, lovely caring staff. That doesn't make it all good of course. But it isn't all bad either. And, of course, it was no charge.
Walk in centres (minor injury) are brilliant. Take the pressure of A&E, which sadly is full of people who either cannot get to see the GP or don't realise where they should be going. Personally I think on of the best fixes we can do relatively easily is to make sure any medium to large town (and upwards) has walk in minor injury/GP available. Many many minor things just need 15 min consultation to check and resolve, but frustration at not being able to get to your GP is huge. My colleague spent 4 weeks trying to make an appointment for a scheduled blood test. Absolute rubbish.
Why should you need to go to the GP for that - the tests won't be being run at the surgery they will be being sent to the hospital.
That's something that could be far better done at a pharmacy.
I suspect 1971's drabness is an artefact of the film and low light. Roger would know more; Marquee Mark might. What struck me was Rodd talking about a "cassette of tape".
Nice old tomorrows world feature!
You can clearly see the film quality has degraded and giving it a fogy effect. That has made all the colours look faded. The seventies were anything but drab, colours were by today's standards totally overdone.
O/T I was channel hopping last night and came across a political discussion panel which featured Ken Clarke (it might have been GB News). I was shocked by how much he has aged and how rough he looked. He was scruffy, even by the standards of Jeremy Corbyn or Michael Foot. One of his eyes was completely bloodshot.
On a different theme, last night posters were bemoaning how thick students are these days and one one told of a student who tried to fry dry pasta in a frying pan. But there was a chef on Stanley Tucci's programme about Puglia last week who did just that. He fried the spaghetti until it was crispy and then added the sauce.
Ken Clarke is in his 80s, to be fair, so he has already beaten the system.
"On Wednesday the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill returns to the House of Commons. It contains a set of amendments proposed by Theresa Villiers, a former environment secretary, with the support of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns and others. The effect will be to eviscerate the planning system as we know it by making all housing targets set by Whitehall purely advisory and removing the existing presumption in favour of development — in other words, scrapping the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so."
Contemptible. If that goes through, the Tories deserve a landslide defeat.
Nimbies - disproportionately drawn from amongst, your guessed it, the serried ranks of the selfish old - will love it. Every sop to the grey vote *decreases* the likelihood of the Tories being flushed down the toilet. Expect a whole lot more of this kind of thing.
Nah, its self-defeating. Nimbies still only get 1 vote each, no matter how much they love the Tories. Tories appealling to Tories is like Labour appealling to Corbynites/SJW/Momentum etc
More people getting onto the property ladder gives a bigger pool of Tory voters. More people stuck renting or cohabiting in others homes, gives a bigger pool of Labour voters, even if those already voting Tory "love it".
It is always worth repeating at this juncture that about half of the entire electorate, accounting for age-related differences in turnout, is aged over 55. This cohort consists very largely of affluent homeowning pensioners, soon-to-be pensioners, and expectant heirs to pensioner property fortunes.
Today's Tory MPs realise, of course, that the young despise them, and that the problem will get worse as all those youthful have-nots age, but why should they care about that? They want to save their jobs now, not worry about what might happen in twenty years' time when most of the Boomers are dead.
There are lots of hard-up pensioners out there, and quite a few rich young and middle-aged people.
That's whataboutery. The average pensioner household now has, after housing costs, a higher disposable income than the average working household. Most pensioners are homeowners. QED.
State pension income is guaranteed to rise by inflation or more (depending on circumstances) by the triple lock, whereas most earned incomes are in real terms decline. Earned incomes are taxed to absolute fuck to service the Government's expenses (largely pensions, health and social care for pensioners, and a colossal debt racked up during the Covid lockdowns,) whilst taxation of property and inheritances is kept at rock bottom. Childcare costs are allowed to inflate out of control, whilst ministers persist with plans (even if briefly delayed) to cap social care costs so as to allow estates to be preserved. The supply of new homes is deliberately and systematically deprioritised and choked off, so that prices will be kept buoyant, to the advantage of existing owners (i.e. older people.) Even Brexit was a pure and simple case of the will of the aged trumping that of the young. The list goes on.
Yes, quite a lot of pensioners are hard-up and quite a lot of younger people are very comfortable, but taken as a whole the balance of society is ludicrously tilted in favour of the former and against the latter - and it's at the core of all of our problems as a nation. A country that sinks an ever-greater share of its wealth into servicing the care and interests of unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the retired) is doomed to failure. Britain is doomed to failure. End of story.
Yes the rich pensioners getting £9K maximum after paying in for up to 50 years , bollox
Why do we means test every other benefit except for the State Pension? Why is it the only benefit that goes up by the triple lock?
That 9k would be far better directed at someone disabled, or invested elsewhere.
Away you half witted cretin. People have paid for 50 years for that pittance and if lucky enough to have any other income get taxed as well. Just hope you never have to live on it, hard to believe how low this country has fallen when lazy , greedy young people grudge poor sods who have worked 50 years their meagre pension.
Being "taxed" by less than half the rate of tax that others on the exact same income are taxed is not being taxed the same you stupid nimwit.
But then you're so thick you think NI isn't a tax. Greedy is people like you thinking taxes are for others and not for them.
Saying that everyone on the same income should pay the same rate of tax is basic fairness and reasonableness, not evil or greedy.
A bit rude, surely? NI is a form of insurance; clue in name.
That's the brand.
It's effectively just a tax these days on people of working age, and is no longer hypothecated to justpay for the collective costs of unemployment or sickness benefits, or pension in old age, as it was intended to do.
The granny=haters on PB love to claim that, but it's not true. If you look at HMG website and statements passim, it's all about you paying X, you get Y. The key point is the existence of a mechanism for topping up each year to the trigger level, if the compulosyr contributions happen to be too low. That's not a tax, but a compulsory levy, whicvh you can top up voluntarily to make up contributions.
FYI, New Zealand's central bank (#RBNZ) has hiked its its key interest rate by 75 basis points to 4.25%, citing high core #inflation and labour shortages (but no mention of #Brexit... 😉)
Bothered me for a while (I need better things to worry about) but why are all these measures in 'basis points'? Isn't it easier to say 0.75%? Or is that misleading because going from say 1% interest to 2% is both described as a 1% increase, but is also a 100% increase?
I'd say it's a 0.75 percentage points increase, but I guess the finance people prefer basis points as it saves saying the "naught point" bit.
Children are dressed in beige to match their homes, on which note, Peter Crouch (in How to be a Footballer) wrote:-
You can walk into another player’s house these days and get a slight sense of déjà vu. Don’t I recognise those curtains? Haven’t I seen that wallpaper before? Then you realise it’s because the same interior designers tend to do everyone’s houses.
FYI, New Zealand's central bank (#RBNZ) has hiked its its key interest rate by 75 basis points to 4.25%, citing high core #inflation and labour shortages (but no mention of #Brexit... 😉)
And our Covid lockdowns were great because other countries also had Covid deaths, so our government could not possibly have been wrong.
Do people actually say that? You have to look at the context of the lockdowns and consider what could have happened. In March 2020 we were seeing TV reports from Italy of overwhelmed hospitals - the system not being able to cope. The danger was that it would happen here, and thousands or tens of thousands would die, who would have lived if given suitable treatment.
Lockdown wasn't great - it was a necessary evil until we reached the point we have now - virtually everyone in the UK has antibodies of some type against Covid and the IFR is vastly reduced c.f. to 2020. We are now paying for lockdown and the support government provided - inflation and the CoL crisis. There is a strong argument that after not being cautious enough in Dec 2020 the government went the other way with into 2021 and kept measures in place too long. But ultimately, in 2020, we had no other options, at least if you didn't want 40 year olds dying at home because the hospitals were full.
Blocked from leaving for the third time in week by various minor non-entities in the hospital system despite the lead and senior consultant (who has been her main doctor for ten years) demanding she be discharged.
Today a doctor phoned to say he was literally signing her discharge paperwork, yet she remains there.
I wont go into details now, but if this ever ends and I get her home, I have a humdinger of header on the utterly failing and yet stubbornly sclerotic and massively tickbox and over paper worked NHS.
It is beyond belief how many so-called decision makers many of whom seem to have the intelligence of a clam claim to be involved in a discharge and seem to have blocking powers rather than just advisory.
It is a wonder that anyone ever leaves hospital.
I suspect a lot of the bed blocking that the media talk about is actually completely self-inflicted by the NHS themselves judging by what I have seen in last week or so.
I am emotional and very very tonight.
I think it's time to just walk up and leave, the NHS seems to give no fuck about patients, just their precious boxes that need ticking. Really hope everything works out mate.
Thanks.
I am actively considering forcing a self-discharge on her behalf if you see what I mean.
The problem is they are are all a mixture of a) well meaning b) covering their own arses c) unable to see the whole picture of the person and their life. Item b seems to win out.
Many years ago I got a call from my wife who was in a NHS hospital with a severely infected leg. She asked me to come in a taxi as they were planning to amputate her leg. She hopped out with my help. I took her to a private doctor who nursed her back to health. She recovered without even a limp.
A few years ago I was admitted with what turned out to be a bust disc in my back.
Severely allergic to NSAIDs was all over my notes, and repeatedly told to the nurses. They gave me something which turned out to be an NSAID and so I had a very strong and swift reaction. To be fair they coped with this very well. I then spent a night on a ward for observations.
The next day I signed up for BUPA. Such was my negative experience.
My recent, personal experience of the NHS was fantastic. I went over on my foot, and it was swollen and very painful. After a few days, I rocked up without notice, at the walk-in (gingerly hobble in in my case). Was x-rayed, diagnosed with a severe sprain, got 10 minutes one-on-one advice on how to mitigate it and was out in a little over an hour. Modern, clean facility, lovely caring staff. That doesn't make it all good of course. But it isn't all bad either. And, of course, it was no charge.
The quality of care in the NHS is generally very good. The standard of customer srrvice is awful. It is certainly cheap though.
I'm not sure it's that cheap.
Last time I checked the % of GDP we spend on health wasn't far off the European average.
17th in GDP per capita according to this (2019 figures but I shouldn't think it's changed much - you can click on the 2019 column to sort).
Broadly I agree with Cookie - clinical care generally great, everything around booking etc. bad. It's very noticeable that the service has responded to the financial squeeze by maintaining front-line staff and cutting back on support staff. I had an excellent, detailed, careful half-hour checkup for a minor bone injury yesterday and was asked for a follow-up in a few weeks - I asked if they can send confirmation and the hospital doctor said "I can ask, but sadly doesn't mean it will necessarily happen".
Comments
After removing the popup, this is the second thing on my list. If both those can get done in the first two weeks, I think we are on track for great things.
Planned syntax is "liked_by:HANDLE", similar to "from:HANDLE"
https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/1595179131431309312
These are just a pair of raging ids, who think they are untrammelled by normal moral standards. Given free rein, by someone like Stalin, they’d behave like Beria and Yezhov.
Honestly, I’d love the ECHR to sentence them to death. Then, I’d become a europhile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_League_play-offs#Current_Play-Off_System
If people are unemployed and get a job their benefits are withdrawn, and they're taxed, and they pay National Insurance too.
You're right that means testing is problematic, and my preference would be to keep pensions universal but to standardise income tax so pensioners pay the same rate as working young graduates do (ie match NI and "Tuition Fees" which are really just a tax too).
But its odd is it not how panicky people get about the signals it gives if one benefit is withdrawn, while wanting every other benefit in the country withdrawn as fast as possible it seems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qqnHtH1RAs
I will be very interested to read your header when you are through the struggle.
As an aside, one thing to consider is that there does appear to be a considerable range between appallingly managed and well managed hospitals. I’m no expert, but that became very clear early in the pandemic when we were discussing discharge of infected patients into care homes.
Surge in Russia's defence and security spending means cuts for schools and hospitals in 2023
https://www.reuters.com/article/ukraine-crisis-russia-spending-analysis/analysis-surge-in-russias-defence-and-security-spending-means-cuts-for-schools-and-hospitals-in-2023-idUSKBN2SC1AT
The other part of the problem is that young people don't see the problem. They fall for the same myths that 'old people have done their shift and deserve what they get as they have paid in to the system for their whole lives'. But everyone should still be paying the same amount of tax. A while back I looked at the situation and concluded that I was being mugged and concluded that I need to structure my economic affairs in such a way that I pay as little tax as possible as PAYE employment was never going to make me wealthy however much I earn. But actually everyone should just be paying a similar amount of tax and this starts with pensioners paying something like NI when their combined income exceeds the national living wage.
The spending devastated the UK's economy post-war; in contrast, it emboldened the USA's economy. I guess Russia's experience post-war will be much more like the UK's than America's - especially if sanctions are not quickly lifted.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-63724716
A Democratic State Senator says: ‘I will not rest until we find the solutions to end this gun violence epidemic in our country.’
She’d better prepare to die of exhaustion then, as the problem is the Second Amendment and their antediluvian Constitution means there is no way to get rid of it.
"The Germans thought it would be better if Ukraine fell" - Boris Johnson declassified the attitude of the EU countries towards Ukraine at the beginning of the war
https://twitter.com/tpyxanews/status/1595310263334576129
Better left for the memoirs after the war is over…
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/17/brexit-uk-treasury-leave-eu-referendum
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
is open to all kinds of interpretation. Presumably even the nuttiest gun nut doesn't think it means people have the "right" to go around the supermarket carrying chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
Which isn't all that much easier.
The question for our elders and betters is have you raised your children and grandchildren to be ungrateful and angry? If not, perhaps they may have a point.....
And if you want to fix that, then abolishing NI and increasing income tax would seem the most obvious step, except that Chancellors are terrified of increasing headline income tax rates since the 1980s when Mrs Thatcher convinced the nation this was the only tax that matters, although very recently there has been attention paid to the overall tax take. The other difficulty is you'd need a new criterion for paying the state pension. It is not impossible, and may well be desirable, but it is not quite straightforward.
The only people who might vaguely dissent would be those with no experience of the NHS.
On the discharge issue, not so many years ago my mother and I forced her discharge from a hospital which had no plans to let her go for no good reason.
Is There a Science of Musical Transformation in Human Life?
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/is-there-a-science-of-musical-transformation?
Only libruls and other degenerates would argue anything else, God Bless America.
"We didn't do it, but they deserved it."
A Russian occupier wrote this formula on a shelf in a debased home in Ukraine.
"To all the questions about Ukraine, there are two answer, both correct. It didn't happen, and they deserved it."
https://mobile.twitter.com/vasilina_orlova/status/1595275744644562944
There is a good reason why they don't have such access.
But then you're so thick you think NI isn't a tax. Greedy is people like you thinking taxes are for others and not for them.
Saying that everyone on the same income should pay the same rate of tax is basic fairness and reasonableness, not evil or greedy.
Some people complain about the NHS becoming a postcode lottery; it already is, and has been for decades.
How drab everything seems, looking back?
Anything more complicated, or less obvious, or needing MDTs or departmental liaison is hopeless.
Where medical staff battle all day long to fight the system and abuse their positions. By providing healthcare.
The management system you describe is literally from the 1950s. Horror stories/jokes are told in books and articles about this kind of crap, back then.
The classic was the meeting to decide the position of a single switch in the cockpit of the TSR.2
So many people turned up for the meeting that they couldn’t fit in the room. So the chap running the meeting told everyone to leave and only the most essential to return. There were more people in the room the second time….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShPPjxlmp4U
(I wish my satnav would give clear, precise instructions. It's really pissing me off at the moment by picking turnings more or less at random.)
What I can do is that every time we get compared to America I point to all the ways we are nothing like them. We have problems in this country, bad problems. Nothing as fundamental as their problems.
https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this-r-1819576527
Was x-rayed, diagnosed with a severe sprain, got 10 minutes one-on-one advice on how to mitigate it and was out in a little over an hour. Modern, clean facility, lovely caring staff.
That doesn't make it all good of course. But it isn't all bad either. And, of course, it was no charge.
https://twitter.com/corg_e/status/1595287073547862018
Too soon?
🟢 Green light for the Scottish Parliament
⛔️Outwith powers
❗️Won’t rule at this stage
‼️Won’t rule definitively but gives a steer
https://twitter.com/paulhutcheon/status/1595325732565450753
Reasons given:
Excessive workload
Appalling conditions
The arrogance of the high ups.
Much nicer to work a steady 9-5 then go home and relax.
As long as we keep treating teaching staff this way we're going to have a problem. Especially now the DfE in their boundless complacency have now totally screwed up teacher training so the supply of new teachers is going to be savagely cut from September 2024.
A newborn baby was killed overnight in a Russian missile attack on the maternity ward of Vilnyansk hospital in Ukraine's southern Zaporizhzhia oblast and others likely remain trapped under debris, President Zelensky says. 📸 via Ze Telegram
https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1595326529906556929
It's the sign of a bureaucratic system where the money doesn't follow the patient.
It's really hard to understand how anyone can actually support the Russians in this, or even be sympathetic towards them.
Right, I’m done.
3 months ago, I was tasked with writing an article detailing “20 Transphobic JK Rowling Quotes We’re Done With”
After 12 weeks of reading her books, tweets, full essay & finding the context of these “quotes”, I’ve not found a single truly transphobic message🧵….
Already ignoring frantic phone calls from my agent demanding I take it down.
NO
https://twitter.com/ejrosetta/status/1595071714790150146
Wiki lists Dorries and the other "Boris peers" as standing down. Have they actually said they will or is that just based on the press stories?
It's the pre care and after care - the customer care - that's the issue; it's difficult to get through a GP gatekeeper, and then to wait so long on a list, which occurs in a shorter form for A&E, and this just aggravates the medical problems and makes life a misery - as do delays in discharge.
I remember my (grant maintained) high school which managed such reprobates by essentially internally excluding the monsters and treating them in a way the LEA would have been horrified by. But you can't do that now even if this school had the physical or staff resources which it doesn't.
It's a small version of the defined benefit (final salary) pension that most private sector companies struggled with when they became unsustainable.
The liabilities are huge.
https://rbnz.govt.nz/hub/news/2022/11/higher-interest-rates-necessary
https://twitter.com/julianHjessop/status/1595330867420872705
https://twitter.com/alistairkgrant/status/1595328629550063618
Breaking! Oh er it's a bit complicated, two minutes - what does that even mean? - so are they - eh - no send it to legal
https://twitter.com/BBCPhilipSim/status/1595329922498789381
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/nov/22/the-rise-of-sad-beige-parenting-how-primary-colours-shiny-surfaces-and-fun-got-banished
I'm aware of the many people who rely on the state pension to survive. I'd even suggest increasing the value of it, if we means test and direct it towards it to those in real need rather than rich people like you.
The only awkward bit is that it works like UBI at the moment; people change their retirement planning around the value of it and when the SPA kicks in. So either we go full UBI for everyone, or we slowly phase out universal state pension.
I'd rather the former.
It is certainly cheap though.
On a different theme, last night posters were bemoaning how thick students are these days and one one told of a student who tried to fry dry pasta in a frying pan. But there was a chef on Stanley Tucci's programme about Puglia last week who did just that. He fried the spaghetti until it was crispy and then added the sauce.
You can reduce the time liability, by increasing the qualification age, and remove the triple lock, to moderate the compound effect.
Otherwise it, together with health costs, will take an ever larger proportion of out national income and our taxes will go up accordingly to pay for it.
Last time I checked the % of GDP we spend on health wasn't far off the European average.
I think many of the issues in the NHS are simply due to resources. Front line medicine doesn't receive the £ needed due to the high cost of modern medicines and the vast cost of running the machinery. So we have too few beds and too few medics and too few outside hospital support resources to deal with the patients.
It's effectively just a tax these days on people of working age, and is no longer hypothecated to justpay for the collective costs of unemployment or sickness benefits, or pension in old age, as it was intended to do.
I expect much of it would get sucked up by higher staff wages and inflation in the prices of drugs and equipment, as the NHS sought to buy more.
It's ecosystem is so huge it operates according to its own rules of microeconomics.
That's something that could be far better done at a pharmacy.
You can clearly see the film quality has degraded and giving it a fogy effect. That has made all the colours look faded. The seventies were anything but drab, colours were by today's standards totally overdone.
You can walk into another player’s house these days and get a slight sense of déjà vu. Don’t I recognise those curtains? Haven’t I seen that wallpaper before? Then you realise it’s because the same interior designers tend to do everyone’s houses.
Lockdown wasn't great - it was a necessary evil until we reached the point we have now - virtually everyone in the UK has antibodies of some type against Covid and the IFR is vastly reduced c.f. to 2020. We are now paying for lockdown and the support government provided - inflation and the CoL crisis. There is a strong argument that after not being cautious enough in Dec 2020 the government went the other way with into 2021 and kept measures in place too long. But ultimately, in 2020, we had no other options, at least if you didn't want 40 year olds dying at home because the hospitals were full.
Severely allergic to NSAIDs was all over my notes, and repeatedly told to the nurses. They gave me something which turned out to be an NSAID and so I had a very strong and swift reaction. To be fair they coped with this very well. I then spent a night on a ward for observations.
The next day I signed up for BUPA. Such was my negative experience.
Broadly I agree with Cookie - clinical care generally great, everything around booking etc. bad. It's very noticeable that the service has responded to the financial squeeze by maintaining front-line staff and cutting back on support staff. I had an excellent, detailed, careful half-hour checkup for a minor bone injury yesterday and was asked for a follow-up in a few weeks - I asked if they can send confirmation and the hospital doctor said "I can ask, but sadly doesn't mean it will necessarily happen".