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Opinium finds increasing support for the nurses – politicalbetting.com
Opinium finds increasing support for the nurses – politicalbetting.com
Support for nurses strikes strengthens> 60% (+3) support nurses going on strike for 2 days in December vs. 29% (-1) who are opposed.> Net approval of the RCH's response to the nurses strikes is +12%, compared to -30% for the Government's response. disapprove). pic.twitter.com/XI2alpBUaZ
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Pay rise to nurses may cost less than other because nurses get replaced by locums.
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/queens-funeral-costs-edinburgh-over-28757629
Like many NHS related issues I just don't get as engaged with it as the general public, the exact opposite to most issues.
What a guy!
Secondly, Rishi is still incredibly green as a politician. Less than eight years as an MP, and little in his ministerial ascent that has prepared him for the need for the government to spend money. I can't remember which sketch writer likened him to the interim chief executive sent into a company about to be declared bankrupt, but there's a chunk of that in the toolbox he is using. But unless the plan is to wind up the UK and sell off the bits for spare parts (I don't think it is), that model isn't very helpful here.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604193864515887105
"To be clear, all user actions will factor into a NN model for a tweet and the account tweeting, including positive actions. As user accounts develop credibility, their actions will have greater weight, similar to how @CommunityNotes works."
In China this is called Social Credit. And Elon knows it.
Of course, by repealing the FTPA (which in fairness both Labour and Conservatives wanted to do), the government cannot hide behind even the flimsy pretext of following the official schedule, as the opposition will rightly point out if they thought they would win they could, and would, call one sooner.
But he’s going to keep Trump guessing.
DeSantis tacks further right amid 2024 speculation
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/3777139-desantis-tacks-further-right-amid-2024-speculation/
Partly so I'd be finished in less than ten hours, which hasn't happened for a couple of weeks
And probably also so they could ask me to come in tomorrow
I'm starting at 10:30
I want people to get their cards and presents
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/3777022-is-desantis-about-to-leverage-covid-vaccines-against-trump-and-the-democrats/
… This past Tuesday, DeSantis — who won reelection in November in a landslide and now leads Trump in the latest Wall Street Journal poll among Republicans to become the GOP nominee for president in 2024, if he runs — announced that he will seek a grand jury investigation into the pushing of the vaccines. “I’m announcing a petition with the Supreme Court of Florida to impanel a statewide grand jury to investigate any and all wrongdoing in Florida with respect to COVID-19 vaccines,” he said. “…We anticipate that we will get the approval for that. … It is against the law to mislead and to misrepresent, particularly when you’re talking about the efficacy of a drug.”…
Now apparently abandoned
https://news.sky.com/story/sunak-scraps-truss-plan-for-state-to-buy-energy-from-foreign-producers-12769857
I despise the guy, but he’s not stupid.
They get: a roughly Gibraltar shaped and geologically similarly calcareous portion of Southern Britain in a strategically helpful location for post-Brexit fishing rights.
We get: money, no more nonsense about Gibraltar, and one of the most exotic, quirky and Stag-and-hen-worthy destinations in the world out of what is currently a sadly under-utilised place. Ideally with special rules about free market access and customs-free borders.
Down to La Isleta Portlandia for some drinks and tapas this evening?
Haven't you noticed the pile of corpses in the Grassmarket?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/16/science/j-robert-oppenheimer-energy-department.html
Btw, American Prometheus is a great book.
No chewing gum or you get flogged, but lots of GDP to be had.
I just bought him this
https://minirigs.co.uk/speakers/bundles/
They're the best small portable speakers I've ever heard
I hope he uses them well
During WWII, a Battle of Britain ace got sent on tour round the factories. Raise moral, bring the story of the war to the people etc. He found one girl, rather miserably stamping out bits of metal. He told her what it was - she didn't know. It was a part of the trigger switch used for the guns on most RAF aircraft. Every time a German plane had been shot down.... A girl, stamping out bits of tin, somewhere in Wales......
Good move by Sunak.
The last month has been the first sustained period of British history in which Yes has led in the Scottish independence polls at the same time that Labour has led in the Westminster polls.
This isn’t just some geeky psephological detail. It is a disaster for Unionists – a disaster made by Keir Starmer and the Labour right that has captured his ear.
To understand why, we have to understand who the swing voters are in Scottish constitutional politics. Because, broadly, there are two ways people approach the independence question.
One is about national identity: do people feel more Scottish or more British?
The second way is to see it as a choice between states: is Holyrood or Westminster more likely to deliver the outcomes they want?
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/scotland-independence-swing-voters-strikes-union/
Edit: On the other hand, I was born in Hastings so would presumably qualify for an EU passport. Great idea!
https://youtu.be/6yZD8r-ujiQ
However, be that as it may, there is a clear distinction, and if the 'coalface' bonus happens more than once, perhaps it will encourage more people back to the front lines.
The problem is that the government is very selective in its love of the free market. It hates it when the workers are using it.
The government has no choice here. If it doesn’t pay a market salary it will continue to lose staff and its costs will go up inexorably as it relies more and more on agency workers. Its problem isn’t just a strike: it’s good people leaving the profession (same with teaching) meaning service quality sinks and you enter a vicious circle of decline.
You can’t buck the market, and nursing staff are very clearly paid under the market rate. Train drivers on the other hand…
Which reminds me of the disabled lady I was helping with her Housing Benefit and for whom I was able to get a Non-Dependent Deduction removed because her son had "moved to Portland".
"Oh", I said, "what made him move to Portland?"
"The Judge" she said.
I find it this one impossible to predict. Same with most metals - declining Chinese construction and manufacturing demand but increased supply chain tightness and scarcety.
Oil prices on the other hand: I am confident they’re going down.
(Ok that last point may be stretching a tad.)
In any case, the point is that they are not being retained. Empirical evidence that they need to be paid more to retain them. Free market, I thought you approved of that (seriously).
I never said I was in the popular position on the argument, only in the right to point out, whenever Labour have been in power, they have used exactly the same argument I debated Stodge into defeat with, that is, where is your budget, and credibility with the markets, if you settle with the strikers asking 19%? Settling is not easy, because it means a double whammy in having to fund settlements by re opening budgets, and wage inflation prolongs the high inflation agony for everyone - which ironically for your post, does regard Mike saying in the header, cave in to one strike force only encourages others, a bit like a don’t give in to hostage takers. So yes, I have explained regarding the header - the headers on my side! 😇
In recent hours Grant Schnapps has been put in charge of bringing legislation to parliament in January to finish these strikes once and for all - trains will by law have to run or else workers will be sacked if they don’t run them, ambulance staff will be banned from striking and sacked if they do, and unions banned from compensating lost earnings of strikers.
If people like the sound of this legislation, they can applaud Mick Lynch for his role in bringing it about - if you don’t like the sound of this legislation just look in direction of Mick Lynch and the greedy union barons.
As HY points out, we have a centrist moderate government.
At the moment, the portents in that direction are not good. The budget was actively harmful to small oil companies; the windfall tax may damage further exploration; the Government has not brought forward next year's licensing round for North sea oil in the light of the present crisis. HSBC's announcement about not lending to new oil projects is also unhelpful - no doubt their Qatari, Saudi and US clients are pleased.
However, nothing lasts forever, and a few of Rishi's decisions have surprised on the upside lately, so who knows.
They believed the Great British Public gave homage to the NHS in general and nurses in particular during the pandemic, for the same reasons they did: point scoring, virtue signalling, political messaging.
When instead, for the mass of the votes, their appreciation for nurses was actually, mostly& sincerely genuine.
As far as I can see (and FWIW I have some sympathy with the points you make), it’s going to be rather a big mess. Irrespective of whether the government response is the correct one (if there even is such a thing), I don’t think they’re going to get much in the way of thanks for it.
Decent pay rises for workers are somehow unaffordable - just as with most of the private sector outside casino banking, there's always a bloody excuse as to why anything other than a real terms cut every damned year is unaffordable - whereas codgers' pensions being uprated by 10% = no problem *at all*. There are about 5.7 million state employees across all branches of government, but 12.5 million state pensioners. QED.
But I am praying for mild weather. The gas cost of this cold snap is just not worth it.
Cross Country is cancelling a third of trains on non-strike days.
What level of ambulance provision will be written into law?
It'll be a damn sight higher than the current
What level of class sizes?
There are already laws about SEND provision in schools. Breached daily.
Tories just seem to think workers can be legislated into being able to perform miracles.
Tories like the market when it confirms their own preferences, less so when it challenges them.
Regarding overall retention, the NHS grew to 1,230,089 full time employees in August 2022, a rise of just over 30,000 from the year before, which is the population of a small town. So I see no issue with retention there.
Not a big surprise; good news for England, I feel.
It's always been dodgy at search, you ask it questions and it gives the wrong answer with compete confidence - I'd say maybe 25% of the time the answers it's given me have been wrong or misleading.
Where it was interesting was when you could argue with it or debate with it, or get it to say something funny or interesting or polarising. It was at its best when it was being creative and silly and goofing off.
Now any time you try to give it a remotely interesting prompt, it gives you an obviously pre-programmed response by a human preventing it from going off its guardrails.
Plus the moralising tone "It's wrong to ask me to xxxxxxx etc", combined with the gaslighting "It's not possible for me to be biased" nonsense means they've Ratnered their own product in less than a week.
There's a reason why nobody talks about the OpenAI created DALLe any more - the open source Stable Diffusion took the guardrails off and let people use it without restrictions.
It'll take a while for language models to reach that point, as I understand it it takes a supercomputer (aka lots of server time on AWS etc) to process the answers - I've read it's about 3 cents a query in server costs.
But AI is too powerful to leave it in the hands of preachy moralists who program what it can and can't say and then tell you it's unbiased and can't be wrong.
It's a supply and demand issue. Free market.
You honestly wonder how long the Government will be able to keep up its anti-immigration rhetoric under the prevailing circumstances. They're going to need all the Iranian and Eritrean boat people they can get simply to fill all the crap jobs that nobody else will do.
Google tracks billions of microwave handsets and almost every act of browsing to a webpage. To most important intents and purposes that company is part of the state. Things have moved on since Montesquieu. The state isn't the same entity that it was in ancient Athens or enlightenment France.
Mussolini understood: "Fascism is when you can't slip a cigarette paper between the interests of the government and corporate business interests."
Hence the problem.
“There are several ways that this pay dispute between nursing staff in the NHS and the government could potentially be resolved:
Negotiation: Both parties could try to negotiate a resolution to the dispute through discussions and compromise. For example, the nurses may agree to a lower pay increase in exchange for improvements to working conditions.
Mediation: If negotiations are not successful, the parties could seek the assistance of a mediator to help facilitate discussions and facilitate a resolution to the dispute.
Arbitration: If mediation is not successful, the parties could agree to submit the dispute to arbitration, in which an impartial third party would hear both sides of the argument and make a binding decision on the issue.
Legal action: As a last resort, the nurses may decide to pursue legal action against the government if they feel that their rights have been violated. This could involve filing a lawsuit or seeking an injunction to halt the strike.
Ultimately, the resolution to the pay dispute will depend on the specific circumstances of the case and the willingness of both parties to find a mutually acceptable solution.”
No shit SherlockGPT.
From a populist right wing perspective, the pay dispute between nursing staff in the NHS and the government could potentially be resolved in the following ways:
Emphasizing the importance of the NHS: The government could argue that the NHS is a vital institution that needs to be protected and supported, and that any pay increase for nursing staff should be balanced against the overall financial health and stability of the NHS.
Appeal to national pride: The government could try to appeal to national pride and the idea of "fair play" by suggesting that the nurses' demands are unreasonable or unfairly inflated.
Blaming external factors: The government could try to shift blame for the pay dispute onto external factors, such as the state of the economy or the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Stoking division: The government could try to stoke division between the nursing staff and other groups, such as the general public or other healthcare workers, in order to reduce support for the nurses' demands.
Arn’t we better exploring the strike ban legislation with on the one hand what Anabob said “withdrawing Labour is a fundamental human right”. Didn’t Conservatives argue the same thing when Polish workers unions withdrew Labour under their puppet communist regime? And on the other hand, is HY correct, this is a centrist moderate government bringing in/extending legislation like this, perhaps taking away a fundamental human right?
People are quitting in droves. Making the job much harder for those that remain. You can ban strikes. You can enforce a massive real terms pay cut. But then you won't have a service. Unless it's forced labour. We are approaching that stage.