Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
I have the most sympathy for Royal Mail employees. Hideous mismanagement over years has made the business uncompetitive, on either price or quality, while a small number of people have made a pile of cash out of it.
And sadly I agree that this is one of the few cases where I think strikes *aren't* going to help them.
Completely off topic, but really struck by this headline from the BBC: ‘Is Taylor Swift our greatest living poet? ‘It’s the clearest QTWTAIN I’ve ever seen.
Rubbish. It is of course Ed Sheeran as any patriotic Brit fule kno.
Nah, it is Tom Odell.
You're just making up names now.
Wait until you hear about George Ezra and Lewis Capaldi.
My favourite current poet is Charlie Puth, a Yank, I love this seminal track, because I sing it a lot, or rather text it a lot.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
Letters are essentially doomed.
Parcels are a growing area, if anything.
A sensible operation would be thinking in terms of pivoting to be a parcel service with a small side of letters.
As Royal Mail management are if they could just get rid of the brain dead Marxist CWU
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
I think the conversation with the homeless man in the shelter has done for Sunak tbh - it wasn't as direct as Romney's 47% or Clinton's 'deplorables' but the wilful blindness in his response was off the charts.
I agree with the Guardian on this. The ridicule is based on the premise that the poor will always be poor, and aspiration is class treason. It's Labour client-group thinking, the mirror image of Tory client-group thinking towards home owning pensioners.
The ridicule was well deserved. He was not having a chat with a homeless person but using the homeless person as an extra in his PR organised film. A film which was extraordinarily poorly judged. His PR company don't seem to understand the perametres of what PR can be expected to achieve.
Ridicule for doing a PR film with homeless people is one thing (because no politician ever did that before?). But the ridicule for what he said is misplaced. The transcript of the conversation was fine.
I suspect that Sunak is comparing his unpopularity now during the strikes with his expected unpopularity later when he has to increase taxes to pay for higher pay.
Cutting public sector pay with below-inflation pay awards, along with fiscal drag on tax thresholds, is the way in which the deficit is being cut. I don't see any other spending cuts that will be less unpopular, or tax rises, likewise.
I can give you a list* of ways in which you can make the numbers add up by cutting spending or increasing taxes, but I'm pretty sure all the alternatives will be a lot less popular than cutting other people's pay.
And we've seen with Truss that we can't simply borrow the money now and work out how to pay it back later.
There simply isn't a way out of this situation where the incumbent PM and Chancellor are popular with the public.
* Something like: - End the pensions triple lock. - Tax housing wealth. - Merge income tax and national insurance so that tax rates rise for pensioners and non-employment income. These might all be sensible changes to make, but without a lot of political leadership invested in explaining to the public why they're sensible, they will be wildly, ruinously, unpopular.
What is this PB-wide obsession with the triple lock? The only part that matters currently is the single lock to inflation (except when suspended by Rishi). Abolishing the other two locks will save no money at all. What Liz Truss was right about is needing to boost economic growth.
The obsession is to do with everyone on benefits being hardcore Ultra Tories. Who luxuriate in their vast piles of cash rather than working for living, through shear indolence.
I think you will find there are quite a few non-Tories who luxuriate in tax-payer paid public sector final salary pension scheme laziness
Um, different point. You have turned over 2 pages at once in the Gospel according to St IDS. State pension is a benefit, public sector pension is a contractual right. I assume, if you own gilts, that you don't see yourself as luxuriating in taxpayer funded laziness by taking the interest? That's exactly what you are doing.
I assume you are a beneficiary of such a scheme? If public sector workers think they should have equivalence with private sector they should first surrender these unaffordable anachronisms. They might have been a "contractual right" to those in the past, but that doesn't mean they should be in the future. The reality is that a large proportion of public sector jobs, particularly in the NHS are jobs for life with levels of security even for the most incompetent that have no equivalence in any private organisation (save some of the large privatised ones).
Nothing will be done about the public sector pension greed because MPs also benefit from it.
No I am not. Never worked in the public sector. But a contract is a contract. Fine to take these provisions out of future contracts, if you think prospective employees will find the offer attractive enough to accept.
I'm not sure that this is true. Sunak has been completely absent from the debate about nurses' pay, and Steve Barclay not much more vocal. He seems to want to have his cake and eat it - get the credit for being strong and not caving in to the demands, but not get any of the flak for being mean to the nurses - blaming it all on the pay review board. What this has actually meant is that his opponents have made all the running, and backbench Tory MPs have been the ones who've been called in to defend/explain the Government's stance in the media. Not difficult to see why the public are siding with the nurses when theirs is the only argument that has been made. Thatcher would never have allowed the NUM all the airtime and just tried to blame all the issues on someone else.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
DPD are fab, it is the one delivery they've mislaid in over a decade.
I suspect that Sunak is comparing his unpopularity now during the strikes with his expected unpopularity later when he has to increase taxes to pay for higher pay.
Cutting public sector pay with below-inflation pay awards, along with fiscal drag on tax thresholds, is the way in which the deficit is being cut. I don't see any other spending cuts that will be less unpopular, or tax rises, likewise.
I can give you a list* of ways in which you can make the numbers add up by cutting spending or increasing taxes, but I'm pretty sure all the alternatives will be a lot less popular than cutting other people's pay.
And we've seen with Truss that we can't simply borrow the money now and work out how to pay it back later.
There simply isn't a way out of this situation where the incumbent PM and Chancellor are popular with the public.
* Something like: - End the pensions triple lock. - Tax housing wealth. - Merge income tax and national insurance so that tax rates rise for pensioners and non-employment income. These might all be sensible changes to make, but without a lot of political leadership invested in explaining to the public why they're sensible, they will be wildly, ruinously, unpopular.
What is this PB-wide obsession with the triple lock? The only part that matters currently is the single lock to inflation (except when suspended by Rishi). Abolishing the other two locks will save no money at all. What Liz Truss was right about is needing to boost economic growth.
The obsession is to do with everyone on benefits being hardcore Ultra Tories. Who luxuriate in their vast piles of cash rather than working for living, through shear indolence.
I think you will find there are quite a few non-Tories who luxuriate in tax-payer paid public sector final salary pension scheme laziness
Um, different point. You have turned over 2 pages at once in the Gospel according to St IDS. State pension is a benefit, public sector pension is a contractual right. I assume, if you own gilts, that you don't see yourself as luxuriating in taxpayer funded laziness by taking the interest? That's exactly what you are doing.
I assume you are a beneficiary of such a scheme? If public sector workers think they should have equivalence with private sector they should first surrender these unaffordable anachronisms. They might have been a "contractual right" to those in the past, but that doesn't mean they should be in the future. The reality is that a large proportion of public sector jobs, particularly in the NHS are jobs for life with levels of security even for the most incompetent that have no equivalence in any private organisation (save some of the large privatised ones).
Nothing will be done about the public sector pension greed because MPs also benefit from it.
My sister works in a well-remunerated public sector position - has worked for the public sector for much of her working life. At times this has meant I've been better paid than her, in other times, her than me. She's very good at her job, very committed, but some stuff I really struggle with. A recent example - my father works for a County Council, and has been very unwell over Christmas. The last time we all spoke, she advised him to see if he could claim the days he was sick (whilst on holiday) back from the council! I have never heard of such a thing - I was outraged.
I can’t keep up with the volume of public sector dysfunction, of which the strikes are but one indicator.
My friend, whose wife is a judge, tells me she’s not busy anymore as the court system has “collapsed” and so trials are not able to be organised.
The crumbling of standards in this country is a bit frightening. GFC, Brexit, Covid, years of shallow self-indulgent Govt, I fear these things have hooked up and are coming to get us now. Starmer has quite the task.
I think the conversation with the homeless man in the shelter has done for Sunak tbh - it wasn't as direct as Romney's 47% or Clinton's 'deplorables' but the wilful blindness in his response was off the charts.
I agree with the Guardian on this. The ridicule is based on the premise that the poor will always be poor, and aspiration is class treason. It's Labour client-group thinking, the mirror image of Tory client-group thinking towards home owning pensioners.
The ridicule was well deserved. He was not having a chat with a homeless person but using the homeless person as an extra in his PR organised film. A film which was extraordinarily poorly judged. His PR company don't seem to understand the perametres of what PR can be expected to achieve.
Ridicule for doing a PR film with homeless people is one thing (because no politician ever did that before?). But the ridicule for what he said is misplaced. The transcript of the conversation was fine.
Fine? Really? I agree that it is not impossible that someone might be homeless and also working, but it shows a gross lack of tact and situational awareness. Notwithstanding anything else, the lack of political spidey-sense was alarming.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
Royal Mail also the only delivery company which has to perform the universal service obligation too
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
I suspect that Sunak is comparing his unpopularity now during the strikes with his expected unpopularity later when he has to increase taxes to pay for higher pay.
Cutting public sector pay with below-inflation pay awards, along with fiscal drag on tax thresholds, is the way in which the deficit is being cut. I don't see any other spending cuts that will be less unpopular, or tax rises, likewise.
I can give you a list* of ways in which you can make the numbers add up by cutting spending or increasing taxes, but I'm pretty sure all the alternatives will be a lot less popular than cutting other people's pay.
And we've seen with Truss that we can't simply borrow the money now and work out how to pay it back later.
There simply isn't a way out of this situation where the incumbent PM and Chancellor are popular with the public.
* Something like: - End the pensions triple lock. - Tax housing wealth. - Merge income tax and national insurance so that tax rates rise for pensioners and non-employment income. These might all be sensible changes to make, but without a lot of political leadership invested in explaining to the public why they're sensible, they will be wildly, ruinously, unpopular.
What is this PB-wide obsession with the triple lock? The only part that matters currently is the single lock to inflation (except when suspended by Rishi). Abolishing the other two locks will save no money at all. What Liz Truss was right about is needing to boost economic growth.
The obsession is to do with everyone on benefits being hardcore Ultra Tories. Who luxuriate in their vast piles of cash rather than working for living, through shear indolence.
I think you will find there are quite a few non-Tories who luxuriate in tax-payer paid public sector final salary pension scheme laziness
Um, different point. You have turned over 2 pages at once in the Gospel according to St IDS. State pension is a benefit, public sector pension is a contractual right. I assume, if you own gilts, that you don't see yourself as luxuriating in taxpayer funded laziness by taking the interest? That's exactly what you are doing.
I assume you are a beneficiary of such a scheme? If public sector workers think they should have equivalence with private sector they should first surrender these unaffordable anachronisms. They might have been a "contractual right" to those in the past, but that doesn't mean they should be in the future. The reality is that a large proportion of public sector jobs, particularly in the NHS are jobs for life with levels of security even for the most incompetent that have no equivalence in any private organisation (save some of the large privatised ones).
Nothing will be done about the public sector pension greed because MPs also benefit from it.
My sister works in a well-remunerated public sector position - has worked for the public sector for much of her working life. At times this has meant I've been better paid than her, in other times, her than me. She's very good at her job, very committed, but some stuff I really struggle with. A recent example - my father works for a County Council, and has been very unwell over Christmas. The last time we all spoke, she advised him to see if he could claim the days he was sick (whilst on holiday) back from the council! I have never heard of such a thing - I was outraged.
Speak to your union rep because that right exists in the private sector.
I suspect that Sunak is comparing his unpopularity now during the strikes with his expected unpopularity later when he has to increase taxes to pay for higher pay.
Cutting public sector pay with below-inflation pay awards, along with fiscal drag on tax thresholds, is the way in which the deficit is being cut. I don't see any other spending cuts that will be less unpopular, or tax rises, likewise.
I can give you a list* of ways in which you can make the numbers add up by cutting spending or increasing taxes, but I'm pretty sure all the alternatives will be a lot less popular than cutting other people's pay.
And we've seen with Truss that we can't simply borrow the money now and work out how to pay it back later.
There simply isn't a way out of this situation where the incumbent PM and Chancellor are popular with the public.
* Something like: - End the pensions triple lock. - Tax housing wealth. - Merge income tax and national insurance so that tax rates rise for pensioners and non-employment income. These might all be sensible changes to make, but without a lot of political leadership invested in explaining to the public why they're sensible, they will be wildly, ruinously, unpopular.
What is this PB-wide obsession with the triple lock? The only part that matters currently is the single lock to inflation (except when suspended by Rishi). Abolishing the other two locks will save no money at all. What Liz Truss was right about is needing to boost economic growth.
The obsession is to do with everyone on benefits being hardcore Ultra Tories. Who luxuriate in their vast piles of cash rather than working for living, through shear indolence.
I think you will find there are quite a few non-Tories who luxuriate in tax-payer paid public sector final salary pension scheme laziness
Um, different point. You have turned over 2 pages at once in the Gospel according to St IDS. State pension is a benefit, public sector pension is a contractual right. I assume, if you own gilts, that you don't see yourself as luxuriating in taxpayer funded laziness by taking the interest? That's exactly what you are doing.
I assume you are a beneficiary of such a scheme? If public sector workers think they should have equivalence with private sector they should first surrender these unaffordable anachronisms. They might have been a "contractual right" to those in the past, but that doesn't mean they should be in the future. The reality is that a large proportion of public sector jobs, particularly in the NHS are jobs for life with levels of security even for the most incompetent that have no equivalence in any private organisation (save some of the large privatised ones).
Nothing will be done about the public sector pension greed because MPs also benefit from it.
My sister works in a well-remunerated public sector position - has worked for the public sector for much of her working life. At times this has meant I've been better paid than her, in other times, her than me. She's very good at her job, very committed, but some stuff I really struggle with. A recent example - my father works for a County Council, and has been very unwell over Christmas. The last time we all spoke, she advised him to see if he could claim the days he was sick (whilst on holiday) back from the council! I have never heard of such a thing - I was outraged.
Speak to your union rep because that right exists in the private sector.
I don't have a union rep, and wouldn't want to exercise the right if I could. It's a complete pisstake; I wouldn't do it to my employer and I certainly wouldn't do it to the taxpayer.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
Perhaps it's linked to the apparent epidemic of drug use.
I suspect that Sunak is comparing his unpopularity now during the strikes with his expected unpopularity later when he has to increase taxes to pay for higher pay.
Cutting public sector pay with below-inflation pay awards, along with fiscal drag on tax thresholds, is the way in which the deficit is being cut. I don't see any other spending cuts that will be less unpopular, or tax rises, likewise.
I can give you a list* of ways in which you can make the numbers add up by cutting spending or increasing taxes, but I'm pretty sure all the alternatives will be a lot less popular than cutting other people's pay.
And we've seen with Truss that we can't simply borrow the money now and work out how to pay it back later.
There simply isn't a way out of this situation where the incumbent PM and Chancellor are popular with the public.
* Something like: - End the pensions triple lock. - Tax housing wealth. - Merge income tax and national insurance so that tax rates rise for pensioners and non-employment income. These might all be sensible changes to make, but without a lot of political leadership invested in explaining to the public why they're sensible, they will be wildly, ruinously, unpopular.
What is this PB-wide obsession with the triple lock? The only part that matters currently is the single lock to inflation (except when suspended by Rishi). Abolishing the other two locks will save no money at all. What Liz Truss was right about is needing to boost economic growth.
The obsession is to do with everyone on benefits being hardcore Ultra Tories. Who luxuriate in their vast piles of cash rather than working for living, through shear indolence.
I think you will find there are quite a few non-Tories who luxuriate in tax-payer paid public sector final salary pension scheme laziness
Um, different point. You have turned over 2 pages at once in the Gospel according to St IDS. State pension is a benefit, public sector pension is a contractual right. I assume, if you own gilts, that you don't see yourself as luxuriating in taxpayer funded laziness by taking the interest? That's exactly what you are doing.
I assume you are a beneficiary of such a scheme? If public sector workers think they should have equivalence with private sector they should first surrender these unaffordable anachronisms. They might have been a "contractual right" to those in the past, but that doesn't mean they should be in the future. The reality is that a large proportion of public sector jobs, particularly in the NHS are jobs for life with levels of security even for the most incompetent that have no equivalence in any private organisation (save some of the large privatised ones).
Nothing will be done about the public sector pension greed because MPs also benefit from it.
My sister works in a well-remunerated public sector position - has worked for the public sector for much of her working life. At times this has meant I've been better paid than her, in other times, her than me. She's very good at her job, very committed, but some stuff I really struggle with. A recent example - my father works for a County Council, and has been very unwell over Christmas. The last time we all spoke, she advised him to see if he could claim the days he was sick (whilst on holiday) back from the council! I have never heard of such a thing - I was outraged.
Speak to your union rep because that right exists in the private sector.
+1 - EU law says that sick leave trumps holidays. So if you are sick during a holiday you are able to claim sick pay and retain the holiday allowance.
I suspect that Sunak is comparing his unpopularity now during the strikes with his expected unpopularity later when he has to increase taxes to pay for higher pay.
Cutting public sector pay with below-inflation pay awards, along with fiscal drag on tax thresholds, is the way in which the deficit is being cut. I don't see any other spending cuts that will be less unpopular, or tax rises, likewise.
I can give you a list* of ways in which you can make the numbers add up by cutting spending or increasing taxes, but I'm pretty sure all the alternatives will be a lot less popular than cutting other people's pay.
And we've seen with Truss that we can't simply borrow the money now and work out how to pay it back later.
There simply isn't a way out of this situation where the incumbent PM and Chancellor are popular with the public.
* Something like: - End the pensions triple lock. - Tax housing wealth. - Merge income tax and national insurance so that tax rates rise for pensioners and non-employment income. These might all be sensible changes to make, but without a lot of political leadership invested in explaining to the public why they're sensible, they will be wildly, ruinously, unpopular.
What is this PB-wide obsession with the triple lock? The only part that matters currently is the single lock to inflation (except when suspended by Rishi). Abolishing the other two locks will save no money at all. What Liz Truss was right about is needing to boost economic growth.
The obsession is to do with everyone on benefits being hardcore Ultra Tories. Who luxuriate in their vast piles of cash rather than working for living, through shear indolence.
I think you will find there are quite a few non-Tories who luxuriate in tax-payer paid public sector final salary pension scheme laziness
Um, different point. You have turned over 2 pages at once in the Gospel according to St IDS. State pension is a benefit, public sector pension is a contractual right. I assume, if you own gilts, that you don't see yourself as luxuriating in taxpayer funded laziness by taking the interest? That's exactly what you are doing.
I assume you are a beneficiary of such a scheme? If public sector workers think they should have equivalence with private sector they should first surrender these unaffordable anachronisms. They might have been a "contractual right" to those in the past, but that doesn't mean they should be in the future. The reality is that a large proportion of public sector jobs, particularly in the NHS are jobs for life with levels of security even for the most incompetent that have no equivalence in any private organisation (save some of the large privatised ones).
Nothing will be done about the public sector pension greed because MPs also benefit from it.
My sister works in a well-remunerated public sector position - has worked for the public sector for much of her working life. At times this has meant I've been better paid than her, in other times, her than me. She's very good at her job, very committed, but some stuff I really struggle with. A recent example - my father works for a County Council, and has been very unwell over Christmas. The last time we all spoke, she advised him to see if he could claim the days he was sick (whilst on holiday) back from the council! I have never heard of such a thing - I was outraged.
That's been normal practice in my private sector jobs.
I suspect that Sunak is comparing his unpopularity now during the strikes with his expected unpopularity later when he has to increase taxes to pay for higher pay.
Cutting public sector pay with below-inflation pay awards, along with fiscal drag on tax thresholds, is the way in which the deficit is being cut. I don't see any other spending cuts that will be less unpopular, or tax rises, likewise.
I can give you a list* of ways in which you can make the numbers add up by cutting spending or increasing taxes, but I'm pretty sure all the alternatives will be a lot less popular than cutting other people's pay.
And we've seen with Truss that we can't simply borrow the money now and work out how to pay it back later.
There simply isn't a way out of this situation where the incumbent PM and Chancellor are popular with the public.
* Something like: - End the pensions triple lock. - Tax housing wealth. - Merge income tax and national insurance so that tax rates rise for pensioners and non-employment income. These might all be sensible changes to make, but without a lot of political leadership invested in explaining to the public why they're sensible, they will be wildly, ruinously, unpopular.
What is this PB-wide obsession with the triple lock? The only part that matters currently is the single lock to inflation (except when suspended by Rishi). Abolishing the other two locks will save no money at all. What Liz Truss was right about is needing to boost economic growth.
The obsession is to do with everyone on benefits being hardcore Ultra Tories. Who luxuriate in their vast piles of cash rather than working for living, through shear indolence.
I think you will find there are quite a few non-Tories who luxuriate in tax-payer paid public sector final salary pension scheme laziness
Um, different point. You have turned over 2 pages at once in the Gospel according to St IDS. State pension is a benefit, public sector pension is a contractual right. I assume, if you own gilts, that you don't see yourself as luxuriating in taxpayer funded laziness by taking the interest? That's exactly what you are doing.
I assume you are a beneficiary of such a scheme? If public sector workers think they should have equivalence with private sector they should first surrender these unaffordable anachronisms. They might have been a "contractual right" to those in the past, but that doesn't mean they should be in the future. The reality is that a large proportion of public sector jobs, particularly in the NHS are jobs for life with levels of security even for the most incompetent that have no equivalence in any private organisation (save some of the large privatised ones).
Nothing will be done about the public sector pension greed because MPs also benefit from it.
My sister works in a well-remunerated public sector position - has worked for the public sector for much of her working life. At times this has meant I've been better paid than her, in other times, her than me. She's very good at her job, very committed, but some stuff I really struggle with. A recent example - my father works for a County Council, and has been very unwell over Christmas. The last time we all spoke, she advised him to see if he could claim the days he was sick (whilst on holiday) back from the council! I have never heard of such a thing - I was outraged.
Speak to your union rep because that right exists in the private sector.
I don't have a union rep, and wouldn't want to exercise the right if I could. It's a complete pisstake; I wouldn't do it to my employer and I certainly wouldn't do it to the taxpayer.
Try a thought experiment. Imagine waking up with the lurgy or a broken leg, and phoning in sick. Would you not be outraged if your boss told you that you could not have time off or sick pay, but that you had to take it out of your holiday entitlement? Of course you would, and from there it is a short step to saying you cannot be off sick and off on holiday leave at the same time.
IANAL but iirc we do have at least one employment lawyer on PB.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
DPD are fab, it is the one delivery they've mislaid in over a decade.
Glad they work for you. Less so for other people - quite a lot of anger out there on social media. Because when it goes wrong there is nobody you can speak to.
It does appear that we have crises on several fronts, with the acute problems in the NHS, which may well get worse, the most urgent.
And yet, unless I've missed it, the Prime Minister seems notably reticent to show his face. He doesn't drink, I believe, so can't still be suffering from an NYE hangover. Where on earth is he?
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
DPD have an 0121 customer service number. The bigger problem with contacting couriers' customer service can be that you as the recipient are not their customer.
I think the conversation with the homeless man in the shelter has done for Sunak tbh - it wasn't as direct as Romney's 47% or Clinton's 'deplorables' but the wilful blindness in his response was off the charts.
I agree with the Guardian on this. The ridicule is based on the premise that the poor will always be poor, and aspiration is class treason. It's Labour client-group thinking, the mirror image of Tory client-group thinking towards home owning pensioners.
I tend to agree too.
Perhaps there was a degree.of non-sequitur about "are you in business?" comment even if business had cropped up. The tense was wrong, and the context odd, it was a bit awkward, but the thinking behind it - not just to treat a homeless person as homeless and nothing else, no past, no future, was just fine.
And so I kept quiet during that particular chorus of criticism.
It does appear that we have crises on several fronts, with the acute problems in the NHS, which may well get worse, the most urgent.
And yet, unless I've missed it, the Prime Minister seems notably reticent to show his face. He doesn't drink, I believe, so can't still be suffering from an NYE hangover. Where on earth is he?
Let's apply the "what if he did the opposite" test: then I imagine you'd criticise him for wasting time being on TV instead of working on the problems.
I suspect that Sunak is comparing his unpopularity now during the strikes with his expected unpopularity later when he has to increase taxes to pay for higher pay.
Cutting public sector pay with below-inflation pay awards, along with fiscal drag on tax thresholds, is the way in which the deficit is being cut. I don't see any other spending cuts that will be less unpopular, or tax rises, likewise.
I can give you a list* of ways in which you can make the numbers add up by cutting spending or increasing taxes, but I'm pretty sure all the alternatives will be a lot less popular than cutting other people's pay.
And we've seen with Truss that we can't simply borrow the money now and work out how to pay it back later.
There simply isn't a way out of this situation where the incumbent PM and Chancellor are popular with the public.
* Something like: - End the pensions triple lock. - Tax housing wealth. - Merge income tax and national insurance so that tax rates rise for pensioners and non-employment income. These might all be sensible changes to make, but without a lot of political leadership invested in explaining to the public why they're sensible, they will be wildly, ruinously, unpopular.
What is this PB-wide obsession with the triple lock? The only part that matters currently is the single lock to inflation (except when suspended by Rishi). Abolishing the other two locks will save no money at all. What Liz Truss was right about is needing to boost economic growth.
The obsession is to do with everyone on benefits being hardcore Ultra Tories. Who luxuriate in their vast piles of cash rather than working for living, through shear indolence.
I think you will find there are quite a few non-Tories who luxuriate in tax-payer paid public sector final salary pension scheme laziness
Um, different point. You have turned over 2 pages at once in the Gospel according to St IDS. State pension is a benefit, public sector pension is a contractual right. I assume, if you own gilts, that you don't see yourself as luxuriating in taxpayer funded laziness by taking the interest? That's exactly what you are doing.
I assume you are a beneficiary of such a scheme? If public sector workers think they should have equivalence with private sector they should first surrender these unaffordable anachronisms. They might have been a "contractual right" to those in the past, but that doesn't mean they should be in the future. The reality is that a large proportion of public sector jobs, particularly in the NHS are jobs for life with levels of security even for the most incompetent that have no equivalence in any private organisation (save some of the large privatised ones).
Nothing will be done about the public sector pension greed because MPs also benefit from it.
My sister works in a well-remunerated public sector position - has worked for the public sector for much of her working life. At times this has meant I've been better paid than her, in other times, her than me. She's very good at her job, very committed, but some stuff I really struggle with. A recent example - my father works for a County Council, and has been very unwell over Christmas. The last time we all spoke, she advised him to see if he could claim the days he was sick (whilst on holiday) back from the council! I have never heard of such a thing - I was outraged.
Speak to your union rep because that right exists in the private sector.
I don't have a union rep, and wouldn't want to exercise the right if I could. It's a complete pisstake; I wouldn't do it to my employer and I certainly wouldn't do it to the taxpayer.
Try a thought experiment. Imagine waking up with the lurgy or a broken leg, and phoning in sick. Would you not be outraged if your boss told you that you could not have time off or sick pay, but that you had to take it out of your holiday entitlement? Of course you would, and from there it is a short step to saying you cannot be off sick and off on holiday leave at the same time.
IANAL but iirc we do have at least one employment lawyer on PB.
PB is heavily biased towards high end white collar employment.
In such companies, HR is using a carefully constructed rule book, based on the law and regulation. There is little need of a Trade Union to get your rights, since they are, nearly always, automatically applied.
I have seen, via family and friends, that lower down the income scale, and job quality, things are very different.
One was in a company that turned out to be running a training scam - you get the training but you are then liable for an excessive cost. The so called "HR function" then proceeded to send emails that included clear, intentional breaches of employment law to the point the lawyer we engaged was giggling. He said that it was not often you saw someone build a gallows from first principles, weave the rope, set themselves up on it *and* kick the stool away...
I think the conversation with the homeless man in the shelter has done for Sunak tbh - it wasn't as direct as Romney's 47% or Clinton's 'deplorables' but the wilful blindness in his response was off the charts.
I agree with the Guardian on this. The ridicule is based on the premise that the poor will always be poor, and aspiration is class treason. It's Labour client-group thinking, the mirror image of Tory client-group thinking towards home owning pensioners.
The ridicule was well deserved. He was not having a chat with a homeless person but using the homeless person as an extra in his PR organised film. A film which was extraordinarily poorly judged. His PR company don't seem to understand the perametres of what PR can be expected to achieve.
Ridicule for doing a PR film with homeless people is one thing (because no politician ever did that before?). But the ridicule for what he said is misplaced. The transcript of the conversation was fine.
Fine? Really? I agree that it is not impossible that someone might be homeless and also working, but it shows a gross lack of tact and situational awareness. Notwithstanding anything else, the lack of political spidey-sense was alarming.
Yes, fine. Here's the transcript:
“Are you sorting the economy out?” Dean asked Sunak.
“Well, that is exactly what I am trying to do,” the PM replied while serving him a very full English breakfast. By now they were on first name terms.
Dean: “Best for business.”
Sunak: “Do you have … do you work in business? Do you want some fruit?”
Dean: “No, I’m homeless. I am actually a homeless person. But I am interested in business.”
Sunak: “Yeah? What kind of business?”
Dean: “I like finance. It’s good for the city. When finance and stuff does well, we all do well in London.”
Sunak: “Yeah, that’s absolutely right. So I used to work in finance actually.”
Dean: “Yeah, I heard. Ex-investment banker.”
Sunak: “Is that something you’d like to get into?”
Dean: “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind. I don’t know. I’d like to get through Christmas first.”
Yes it's a bit awkward, yes it makes for embarrassing headlines and tweets, but....it's fine. There is a refreshing lack of condescension. I would rather a PM spoke to a homeless person in something approximating a peer-to-peer manner than the alternative.
It would have been different if Sunak then followed up with "well young man, put some elbow grease into it and stay off the booze and drugs and who knows, in a few years' time you could be rich like me. Now off you go and mind you leave a clean plate."
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
Write to your msp about it. I would have thought this was an obvious abuse by mainly English companies for the snp to have a go at.
The Wine Society sends my Xmas presents to a friend in IV5 with no surcharge.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
It is the CWU striking, Royal Mail management refusing to give into them and will just make more of them redundant. We still need RM infrastructure, especially in rural areas where even Amazon use them for final mile parcel deliveries
Isn't the key that Royal Mail management are attempting to move (certainly new) posties from a salaried model to the Amazon Contractor/Evri model whereby payment is by drops.
To an old b*stard like me turning the Royal Mail into Hermes (Evri) or Yodel is not progress. @BlancheLivermore explained yesterday that a postie serves a civic/social function as well as just delivering letters.
For a party who are so keen to return us to the 1950s the Conservatives are picking and choosing how they achieve that aim, hangin, 'floggin' ricketts and friction-laced trade with Europe good, picture postcard scenes of the jolly postie cycling down a leafy lane whistling a jolly tune, not so much.
Maybe we have to just accept that the No10 team just aren't any good at politics;
Asked if Rishi Sunak would be happy for his own family to only use the NHS, the Prime Minister's spokesman says that it would not be in the public interest to answer questions about his use of private healthcare.
It does appear that we have crises on several fronts, with the acute problems in the NHS, which may well get worse, the most urgent.
And yet, unless I've missed it, the Prime Minister seems notably reticent to show his face. He doesn't drink, I believe, so can't still be suffering from an NYE hangover. Where on earth is he?
Let's apply the "what if he did the opposite" test: then I imagine you'd criticise him for wasting time being on TV instead of working on the problems.
You imagine wrongly. I'd quite like to hear directly from him what he's doing to sort stuff out. He is our Leader, after all.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
This was all about the EU getting its pound of flesh. Now the Tories look done for, they don't need go be so unnecessarily hardline any more.
But it says a lot they were prepared to hurt Northern Ireland just for vengeance on the UK.
That sound a large over-interpretation of "perhaps a little bit too strict".
And as others have pointed out, it was negotiated by both sides. One of which was led by a grandstanding buffoon.
Why not just admit the EU also got it wrong?
Absolutism is stupid - both sides made mistakes as happens in every negotiation everywhere. But its clear which side came away satisfied and which side didn't.
We can wail and moan about the EU all we like. They had a pre-stated position and red lines. We said they would crumble, they didn't. We negotiated a deal which our own side now say they didn't understand and didn't expect the counterparty to implement.
Set aside the NIP for a second, this is a bigger issue. Both the EU and future counterparty negotiators know for a fact the UK team are ill-informed and stupid - as witnessed by our calamities with the TCP, NIP, AusNZ deal etc. We aren't trusted by the people we want to negotiate with (America) and treated like a joke by the ones who took advantage of us.
Spot on. Then there was the risible grandstanding.
We'll walk away with No Deal rather than a Bad Deal!
We've got a Deal! It's a Great Deal! And we only got it because we were prepared to walk away!
Hang on, it was a Bad Deal! - It's so Bad we can't implement it!
Just really embarrassing and pathetic.
There was no grandstanding, there was brilliant negotiations. The deal is multi-faceted and the arrangements for GB are what matter more than the arrangements for NI and we got what we wanted there.
The Protocol was never something the UK wanted, it was something the EU wanted and they thought they had it in the Backstop they'd compelled May to sign up for. That they negotiated away the backstop to be replaced with the risible Protocol was a negotiating masterclass by the UK and only because we were prepared to walk away, as you quoted.
And then the EU are in no position to make the Protocol be implemented. The one thing they wanted and negotiated hard on, they left us holding all the cards so we could just refuse to implement it. Oh dear, what a shame.
That's a success not a failure on the UK's part. Its a failure on the EU's.
That was a news report from the Planet Zog. Next up on your intergalactic news feed is Deep Thinking with David Frost.
Meanwhile back here on Planet Earth, Brexit is going so well that even Keir Starmer doesn't want to change it. As much as you lot love to be modern day Hiroo Onoda's.
There isn't a single person in Britain who voted for Brexit because they wanted the UK to sign up to a Northern Ireland Protocol. The Protocol is not the deal, the Protocol is the price we paid for the deal and if the price isn't working for the EU, then that's not a problem for us. What we voted for, collectively as a nation (I personally didn't care about 1 of the 3) is control over respectively laws [sovereignty], money and borders/immigration.
If the deal is bad as you and other die-hard fanatics on this site love to claim, then how is it bad for England on the terms debated: ie laws, money and borders. You are disqualified from referencing Northern Ireland, or the Protocol, since that was not the debate.
If it is working on laws, money and borders, then it is working and a good deal on the terms we voted for, and NI is NI's problem, just as it always has been.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
It is the CWU striking, Royal Mail management refusing to give into them and will just make more of them redundant. We still need RM infrastructure, especially in rural areas where even Amazon use them for final mile parcel deliveries
Isn't the key that Royal Mail management are attempting to move (certainly new) posties from a salaried model to the Amazon Contractor/Evri model whereby payment is by drops.
To an old b*stard like me turning the Royal Mail into Hermes (Evri) or Yodel is not progress. @BlancheLivermore explained yesterday that a postie serves a civic/social function as well as just delivering letters.
For a party who are so keen to return us to the 1950s the Conservatives are picking and choosing how they achieve that aim, hangin, 'floggin' ricketts and friction-laced trade with Europe good, picture postcard scenes of the jolly postie cycling down a leafy lane whistling a jolly tune, not so much.
If Royal Mail is to have a viable future it has to compete with the likes of Amazon and Evri on parcel delivery.
Royal Mail is now a private company. This is not the 1950s when Royal Mail was a nationalised company with no competitors and basically a monopoly on delivery of the post which also was pre email and pre social media and text with far more letters
Maybe we have to just accept that the No10 team just aren't any good at politics;
Asked if Rishi Sunak would be happy for his own family to only use the NHS, the Prime Minister's spokesman says that it would not be in the public interest to answer questions about his use of private healthcare.
It just seems like basic common sense that the person in charge of public services should also rely on those services. Imagine if the head of a water company only drank bottled water, it wouldn't exactly inspire confidence. If the NHS (and state schools) aren't good enough for the PM then they're not good enough for anyone.
This was all about the EU getting its pound of flesh. Now the Tories look done for, they don't need go be so unnecessarily hardline any more.
But it says a lot they were prepared to hurt Northern Ireland just for vengeance on the UK.
That sound a large over-interpretation of "perhaps a little bit too strict".
And as others have pointed out, it was negotiated by both sides. One of which was led by a grandstanding buffoon.
Why not just admit the EU also got it wrong?
Absolutism is stupid - both sides made mistakes as happens in every negotiation everywhere. But its clear which side came away satisfied and which side didn't.
We can wail and moan about the EU all we like. They had a pre-stated position and red lines. We said they would crumble, they didn't. We negotiated a deal which our own side now say they didn't understand and didn't expect the counterparty to implement.
Set aside the NIP for a second, this is a bigger issue. Both the EU and future counterparty negotiators know for a fact the UK team are ill-informed and stupid - as witnessed by our calamities with the TCP, NIP, AusNZ deal etc. We aren't trusted by the people we want to negotiate with (America) and treated like a joke by the ones who took advantage of us.
Spot on. Then there was the risible grandstanding.
We'll walk away with No Deal rather than a Bad Deal!
We've got a Deal! It's a Great Deal! And we only got it because we were prepared to walk away!
Hang on, it was a Bad Deal! - It's so Bad we can't implement it!
Just really embarrassing and pathetic.
There was no grandstanding, there was brilliant negotiations. The deal is multi-faceted and the arrangements for GB are what matter more than the arrangements for NI and we got what we wanted there.
The Protocol was never something the UK wanted, it was something the EU wanted and they thought they had it in the Backstop they'd compelled May to sign up for. That they negotiated away the backstop to be replaced with the risible Protocol was a negotiating masterclass by the UK and only because we were prepared to walk away, as you quoted.
And then the EU are in no position to make the Protocol be implemented. The one thing they wanted and negotiated hard on, they left us holding all the cards so we could just refuse to implement it. Oh dear, what a shame.
That's a success not a failure on the UK's part. Its a failure on the EU's.
That was a news report from the Planet Zog. Next up on your intergalactic news feed is Deep Thinking with David Frost.
Meanwhile back here on Planet Earth, Brexit is going so well that even Keir Starmer doesn't want to change it. As much as you lot love to be modern day Hiroo Onoda's.
There isn't a single person in Britain who voted for Brexit because they wanted the UK to sign up to a Northern Ireland Protocol. The Protocol is not the deal, the Protocol is the price we paid for the deal and if the price isn't working for the EU, then that's not a problem for us. What we voted for, collectively as a nation (I personally didn't care about 1 of the 3) is control over respectively laws [sovereignty], money and borders/immigration.
If the deal is bad as you and other die-hard fanatics on this site love to claim, then how is it bad for England on the terms debated: ie laws, money and borders. You are disqualified from referencing Northern Ireland, or the Protocol, since that was not the debate.
If it is working on laws, money and borders, then it is working and a good deal on the terms we voted for, and NI is NI's problem, just as it always has been.
Perhaps I missed its dissolution, but isn't NI's problem also the UK's? If not it seems to have sooked up a disporoportionate amount of bandwidth of the 'English' governments for which you voted.
This was all about the EU getting its pound of flesh. Now the Tories look done for, they don't need go be so unnecessarily hardline any more.
But it says a lot they were prepared to hurt Northern Ireland just for vengeance on the UK.
That sound a large over-interpretation of "perhaps a little bit too strict".
And as others have pointed out, it was negotiated by both sides. One of which was led by a grandstanding buffoon.
Why not just admit the EU also got it wrong?
Absolutism is stupid - both sides made mistakes as happens in every negotiation everywhere. But its clear which side came away satisfied and which side didn't.
We can wail and moan about the EU all we like. They had a pre-stated position and red lines. We said they would crumble, they didn't. We negotiated a deal which our own side now say they didn't understand and didn't expect the counterparty to implement.
Set aside the NIP for a second, this is a bigger issue. Both the EU and future counterparty negotiators know for a fact the UK team are ill-informed and stupid - as witnessed by our calamities with the TCP, NIP, AusNZ deal etc. We aren't trusted by the people we want to negotiate with (America) and treated like a joke by the ones who took advantage of us.
Spot on. Then there was the risible grandstanding.
We'll walk away with No Deal rather than a Bad Deal!
We've got a Deal! It's a Great Deal! And we only got it because we were prepared to walk away!
Hang on, it was a Bad Deal! - It's so Bad we can't implement it!
Just really embarrassing and pathetic.
There was no grandstanding, there was brilliant negotiations. The deal is multi-faceted and the arrangements for GB are what matter more than the arrangements for NI and we got what we wanted there.
The Protocol was never something the UK wanted, it was something the EU wanted and they thought they had it in the Backstop they'd compelled May to sign up for. That they negotiated away the backstop to be replaced with the risible Protocol was a negotiating masterclass by the UK and only because we were prepared to walk away, as you quoted.
And then the EU are in no position to make the Protocol be implemented. The one thing they wanted and negotiated hard on, they left us holding all the cards so we could just refuse to implement it. Oh dear, what a shame.
That's a success not a failure on the UK's part. Its a failure on the EU's.
That was a news report from the Planet Zog. Next up on your intergalactic news feed is Deep Thinking with David Frost.
Meanwhile back here on Planet Earth, Brexit is going so well that even Keir Starmer doesn't want to change it. As much as you lot love to be modern day Hiroo Onoda's.
There isn't a single person in Britain who voted for Brexit because they wanted the UK to sign up to a Northern Ireland Protocol. The Protocol is not the deal, the Protocol is the price we paid for the deal and if the price isn't working for the EU, then that's not a problem for us. What we voted for, collectively as a nation (I personally didn't care about 1 of the 3) is control over respectively laws [sovereignty], money and borders/immigration.
If the deal is bad as you and other die-hard fanatics on this site love to claim, then how is it bad for England on the terms debated: ie laws, money and borders. You are disqualified from referencing Northern Ireland, or the Protocol, since that was not the debate.
If it is working on laws, money and borders, then it is working and a good deal on the terms we voted for, and NI is NI's problem, just as it always has been.
Happy New Year, and behave yourself! "Brexit is going so well that even Keir Starmer doesn't want to change it" is another of your Tory whoppers.
We are lumbered with Brexit, it is s*it, it always was going to be s**t, but here we are, we own it and it is not covered by the Sale of Goods Act.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
Alcohol is part of the taste and of course part of the overall effect.
It depends what you mean by wino and flavourful and plonk. I think the new world had pretty much grabbed its fair share of at least the UK market by 2000, new entrants now being niche operators like Greece and Bulgaria. Lots of Australian and S American wine is very much not plonk.
I suspect that Sunak is comparing his unpopularity now during the strikes with his expected unpopularity later when he has to increase taxes to pay for higher pay.
Cutting public sector pay with below-inflation pay awards, along with fiscal drag on tax thresholds, is the way in which the deficit is being cut. I don't see any other spending cuts that will be less unpopular, or tax rises, likewise.
I can give you a list* of ways in which you can make the numbers add up by cutting spending or increasing taxes, but I'm pretty sure all the alternatives will be a lot less popular than cutting other people's pay.
And we've seen with Truss that we can't simply borrow the money now and work out how to pay it back later.
There simply isn't a way out of this situation where the incumbent PM and Chancellor are popular with the public.
* Something like: - End the pensions triple lock. - Tax housing wealth. - Merge income tax and national insurance so that tax rates rise for pensioners and non-employment income. These might all be sensible changes to make, but without a lot of political leadership invested in explaining to the public why they're sensible, they will be wildly, ruinously, unpopular.
What is this PB-wide obsession with the triple lock? The only part that matters currently is the single lock to inflation (except when suspended by Rishi). Abolishing the other two locks will save no money at all. What Liz Truss was right about is needing to boost economic growth.
The obsession is to do with everyone on benefits being hardcore Ultra Tories. Who luxuriate in their vast piles of cash rather than working for living, through shear indolence.
I think you will find there are quite a few non-Tories who luxuriate in tax-payer paid public sector final salary pension scheme laziness
Um, different point. You have turned over 2 pages at once in the Gospel according to St IDS. State pension is a benefit, public sector pension is a contractual right. I assume, if you own gilts, that you don't see yourself as luxuriating in taxpayer funded laziness by taking the interest? That's exactly what you are doing.
I assume you are a beneficiary of such a scheme? If public sector workers think they should have equivalence with private sector they should first surrender these unaffordable anachronisms. They might have been a "contractual right" to those in the past, but that doesn't mean they should be in the future. The reality is that a large proportion of public sector jobs, particularly in the NHS are jobs for life with levels of security even for the most incompetent that have no equivalence in any private organisation (save some of the large privatised ones).
Nothing will be done about the public sector pension greed because MPs also benefit from it.
My sister works in a well-remunerated public sector position - has worked for the public sector for much of her working life. At times this has meant I've been better paid than her, in other times, her than me. She's very good at her job, very committed, but some stuff I really struggle with. A recent example - my father works for a County Council, and has been very unwell over Christmas. The last time we all spoke, she advised him to see if he could claim the days he was sick (whilst on holiday) back from the council! I have never heard of such a thing - I was outraged.
My dad spent his entire career in the public sector at the FCO. For the last 15 years of his tenure he was based in London. Every year, he would take most of January and February off on 'study leave', withdraw to his dacha in the Yorkshire Dales and work on his model railway layouts. Brilliant!
Maybe we have to just accept that the No10 team just aren't any good at politics;
Asked if Rishi Sunak would be happy for his own family to only use the NHS, the Prime Minister's spokesman says that it would not be in the public interest to answer questions about his use of private healthcare.
It just seems like basic common sense that the person in charge of public services should also rely on those services. Imagine if the head of a water company only drank bottled water, it wouldn't exactly inspire confidence. If the NHS (and state schools) aren't good enough for the PM then they're not good enough for anyone.
The counterargument to that is that it is basic common sense that the person in charge of services seeks the best regardless of source, and should seek to make that best be available to others too.
If our drinking water wasn't good enough, then I'd rather a head of the water company that drank bottled water who said he was going to reform the water supply - than one who insisted the water is good enough as is and did a John Gummer photoshoot getting his daughter to drink water from the tap.
I suspect that Sunak is comparing his unpopularity now during the strikes with his expected unpopularity later when he has to increase taxes to pay for higher pay.
Cutting public sector pay with below-inflation pay awards, along with fiscal drag on tax thresholds, is the way in which the deficit is being cut. I don't see any other spending cuts that will be less unpopular, or tax rises, likewise.
I can give you a list* of ways in which you can make the numbers add up by cutting spending or increasing taxes, but I'm pretty sure all the alternatives will be a lot less popular than cutting other people's pay.
And we've seen with Truss that we can't simply borrow the money now and work out how to pay it back later.
There simply isn't a way out of this situation where the incumbent PM and Chancellor are popular with the public.
* Something like: - End the pensions triple lock. - Tax housing wealth. - Merge income tax and national insurance so that tax rates rise for pensioners and non-employment income. These might all be sensible changes to make, but without a lot of political leadership invested in explaining to the public why they're sensible, they will be wildly, ruinously, unpopular.
What is this PB-wide obsession with the triple lock? The only part that matters currently is the single lock to inflation (except when suspended by Rishi). Abolishing the other two locks will save no money at all. What Liz Truss was right about is needing to boost economic growth.
The state pension is one of the biggest items in the budget and the triple lock ensures that it will always grow more quickly than tax receipts, at the same time as the demographic transition increases the proportion of the population who are paid it.
Maybe it's the right policy to have, but it makes balancing the budget a lot harder, so it would be rather weird if it didn't come up in such discussions.
Imagine if they had invested the money people paid for their meagre state pension rather than using it as a ponzi scheme.
Maybe we have to just accept that the No10 team just aren't any good at politics;
Asked if Rishi Sunak would be happy for his own family to only use the NHS, the Prime Minister's spokesman says that it would not be in the public interest to answer questions about his use of private healthcare.
It just seems like basic common sense that the person in charge of public services should also rely on those services. Imagine if the head of a water company only drank bottled water, it wouldn't exactly inspire confidence. If the NHS (and state schools) aren't good enough for the PM then they're not good enough for anyone.
This is one of these moments where I'm not a lefty. If the Sunaks wish to pay to go private, good luck to them. It's defendable (as Maggie did) if you talk about convenience or security. Heck, make up some balls about not wanting to stress the NHS further. But say something. "Not in the public interest to answer that" is cowardly custard.
I think the conversation with the homeless man in the shelter has done for Sunak tbh - it wasn't as direct as Romney's 47% or Clinton's 'deplorables' but the wilful blindness in his response was off the charts.
I agree with the Guardian on this. The ridicule is based on the premise that the poor will always be poor, and aspiration is class treason. It's Labour client-group thinking, the mirror image of Tory client-group thinking towards home owning pensioners.
The ridicule was well deserved. He was not having a chat with a homeless person but using the homeless person as an extra in his PR organised film. A film which was extraordinarily poorly judged. His PR company don't seem to understand the perametres of what PR can be expected to achieve.
Ridicule for doing a PR film with homeless people is one thing (because no politician ever did that before?). But the ridicule for what he said is misplaced. The transcript of the conversation was fine.
Fine? Really? I agree that it is not impossible that someone might be homeless and also working, but it shows a gross lack of tact and situational awareness. Notwithstanding anything else, the lack of political spidey-sense was alarming.
Yes, fine. Here's the transcript:
“Are you sorting the economy out?” Dean asked Sunak.
“Well, that is exactly what I am trying to do,” the PM replied while serving him a very full English breakfast. By now they were on first name terms.
Dean: “Best for business.”
Sunak: “Do you have … do you work in business? Do you want some fruit?”
Dean: “No, I’m homeless. I am actually a homeless person. But I am interested in business.”
Sunak: “Yeah? What kind of business?”
Dean: “I like finance. It’s good for the city. When finance and stuff does well, we all do well in London.”
Sunak: “Yeah, that’s absolutely right. So I used to work in finance actually.”
Dean: “Yeah, I heard. Ex-investment banker.”
Sunak: “Is that something you’d like to get into?”
Dean: “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind. I don’t know. I’d like to get through Christmas first.”
Yes it's a bit awkward, yes it makes for embarrassing headlines and tweets, but....it's fine. There is a refreshing lack of condescension. I would rather a PM spoke to a homeless person in something approximating a peer-to-peer manner than the alternative.
It would have been different if Sunak then followed up with "well young man, put some elbow grease into it and stay off the booze and drugs and who knows, in a few years' time you could be rich like me. Now off you go and mind you leave a clean plate."
Yes I am no big fan of Sunak but the press reporting of this exchange was unfair and misleading. The whole conversation doesn't reflect that badly on Sunak - he is doing his best to engage with the guy without being patronising - but it is extremely cringy and Sunak looks really uncomfortable.
Have to wonder if some of the NHS pressure is being caused by this rampant cold/cough (Not Covid) that's going round. It's gone from tickly to chesty for me and will probably go back round again. Everyone in my office has it, and so does my daughter. It's an absolute shit of a cold virus - and seems to be way more of it about this winter than previous. It's probably seeing admissions, and certainly doctor/hospital time amongst the very old and very young.
Maybe we have to just accept that the No10 team just aren't any good at politics;
Asked if Rishi Sunak would be happy for his own family to only use the NHS, the Prime Minister's spokesman says that it would not be in the public interest to answer questions about his use of private healthcare.
It just seems like basic common sense that the person in charge of public services should also rely on those services. Imagine if the head of a water company only drank bottled water, it wouldn't exactly inspire confidence. If the NHS (and state schools) aren't good enough for the PM then they're not good enough for anyone.
This is one of these moments where I'm not a lefty. If the Sunaks wish to pay to go private, good luck to them. It's defendable (as Maggie did) if you talk about convenience or security. Heck, make up some balls about not wanting to stress the NHS further. But say something. "Not in the public interest to answer that" is cowardly custard.
and doesn't actual answer the question in any shape or form - it's just an obvious and pointless attempt at deflection
This was all about the EU getting its pound of flesh. Now the Tories look done for, they don't need go be so unnecessarily hardline any more.
But it says a lot they were prepared to hurt Northern Ireland just for vengeance on the UK.
That sound a large over-interpretation of "perhaps a little bit too strict".
And as others have pointed out, it was negotiated by both sides. One of which was led by a grandstanding buffoon.
Why not just admit the EU also got it wrong?
Absolutism is stupid - both sides made mistakes as happens in every negotiation everywhere. But its clear which side came away satisfied and which side didn't.
We can wail and moan about the EU all we like. They had a pre-stated position and red lines. We said they would crumble, they didn't. We negotiated a deal which our own side now say they didn't understand and didn't expect the counterparty to implement.
Set aside the NIP for a second, this is a bigger issue. Both the EU and future counterparty negotiators know for a fact the UK team are ill-informed and stupid - as witnessed by our calamities with the TCP, NIP, AusNZ deal etc. We aren't trusted by the people we want to negotiate with (America) and treated like a joke by the ones who took advantage of us.
Spot on. Then there was the risible grandstanding.
We'll walk away with No Deal rather than a Bad Deal!
We've got a Deal! It's a Great Deal! And we only got it because we were prepared to walk away!
Hang on, it was a Bad Deal! - It's so Bad we can't implement it!
Just really embarrassing and pathetic.
There was no grandstanding, there was brilliant negotiations. The deal is multi-faceted and the arrangements for GB are what matter more than the arrangements for NI and we got what we wanted there.
The Protocol was never something the UK wanted, it was something the EU wanted and they thought they had it in the Backstop they'd compelled May to sign up for. That they negotiated away the backstop to be replaced with the risible Protocol was a negotiating masterclass by the UK and only because we were prepared to walk away, as you quoted.
And then the EU are in no position to make the Protocol be implemented. The one thing they wanted and negotiated hard on, they left us holding all the cards so we could just refuse to implement it. Oh dear, what a shame.
That's a success not a failure on the UK's part. Its a failure on the EU's.
That was a news report from the Planet Zog. Next up on your intergalactic news feed is Deep Thinking with David Frost.
Meanwhile back here on Planet Earth, Brexit is going so well that even Keir Starmer doesn't want to change it. As much as you lot love to be modern day Hiroo Onoda's.
There isn't a single person in Britain who voted for Brexit because they wanted the UK to sign up to a Northern Ireland Protocol. The Protocol is not the deal, the Protocol is the price we paid for the deal and if the price isn't working for the EU, then that's not a problem for us. What we voted for, collectively as a nation (I personally didn't care about 1 of the 3) is control over respectively laws [sovereignty], money and borders/immigration.
If the deal is bad as you and other die-hard fanatics on this site love to claim, then how is it bad for England on the terms debated: ie laws, money and borders. You are disqualified from referencing Northern Ireland, or the Protocol, since that was not the debate.
If it is working on laws, money and borders, then it is working and a good deal on the terms we voted for, and NI is NI's problem, just as it always has been.
Perhaps I missed its dissolution, but isn't NI's problem also the UK's? If not it seems to have sooked up a disporoportionate amount of bandwidth of the 'English' governments for which you voted.
NI is devolved. Its a bit our problem, a bit Stormont's, and a bit Irelands, and a bit the EU's. Hence the negotiations and buckpassing.
NI took up far too much bandwidth under May when she allowed it to shape the deal, rather than getting a deal that worked for Britain and making NI tomorrow's problem.
Laws, money and borders are what the Brexit debate was about, not Northern Ireland. As much as people love to pretend that they give a shit about Northern Ireland, it is an afterthought and is right to deal with accordingly, not let it take the priority here.
Is the deal working for England on laws, money and borders? If yes, deal is working. If no, then why, without mentioning Northern Ireland.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
I suspect that Sunak is comparing his unpopularity now during the strikes with his expected unpopularity later when he has to increase taxes to pay for higher pay.
Cutting public sector pay with below-inflation pay awards, along with fiscal drag on tax thresholds, is the way in which the deficit is being cut. I don't see any other spending cuts that will be less unpopular, or tax rises, likewise.
I can give you a list* of ways in which you can make the numbers add up by cutting spending or increasing taxes, but I'm pretty sure all the alternatives will be a lot less popular than cutting other people's pay.
And we've seen with Truss that we can't simply borrow the money now and work out how to pay it back later.
There simply isn't a way out of this situation where the incumbent PM and Chancellor are popular with the public.
* Something like: - End the pensions triple lock. - Tax housing wealth. - Merge income tax and national insurance so that tax rates rise for pensioners and non-employment income. These might all be sensible changes to make, but without a lot of political leadership invested in explaining to the public why they're sensible, they will be wildly, ruinously, unpopular.
What is this PB-wide obsession with the triple lock? The only part that matters currently is the single lock to inflation (except when suspended by Rishi). Abolishing the other two locks will save no money at all. What Liz Truss was right about is needing to boost economic growth.
The state pension is one of the biggest items in the budget and the triple lock ensures that it will always grow more quickly than tax receipts, at the same time as the demographic transition increases the proportion of the population who are paid it.
Maybe it's the right policy to have, but it makes balancing the budget a lot harder, so it would be rather weird if it didn't come up in such discussions.
Imagine if they had invested the money people paid for their meagre state pension rather than using it as a ponzi scheme.
And if they had, who would have paid for previous generations of pensioners?
The problem is you never had any money to "invest" as you never actually saved for your own pension, you just put your own pension on the never-never to be paid for by future generations.
Maybe we have to just accept that the No10 team just aren't any good at politics;
Asked if Rishi Sunak would be happy for his own family to only use the NHS, the Prime Minister's spokesman says that it would not be in the public interest to answer questions about his use of private healthcare.
It just seems like basic common sense that the person in charge of public services should also rely on those services. Imagine if the head of a water company only drank bottled water, it wouldn't exactly inspire confidence. If the NHS (and state schools) aren't good enough for the PM then they're not good enough for anyone.
This is one of these moments where I'm not a lefty. If the Sunaks wish to pay to go private, good luck to them. It's defendable (as Maggie did) if you talk about convenience or security. Heck, make up some balls about not wanting to stress the NHS further. But say something. "Not in the public interest to answer that" is cowardly custard.
They're welcome to do whatever they want - it's a free country. But he shouldn't be surprised if voters deduce that he's not that invested in public services and thinks that they're second rate and (since he's in charge of fixing them) that second rate is good enough for people who can't afford to opt out. It's dangerously close to Ratner territory imho.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
It is the CWU striking, Royal Mail management refusing to give into them and will just make more of them redundant. We still need RM infrastructure, especially in rural areas where even Amazon use them for final mile parcel deliveries
Isn't the key that Royal Mail management are attempting to move (certainly new) posties from a salaried model to the Amazon Contractor/Evri model whereby payment is by drops.
To an old b*stard like me turning the Royal Mail into Hermes (Evri) or Yodel is not progress. @BlancheLivermore explained yesterday that a postie serves a civic/social function as well as just delivering letters.
For a party who are so keen to return us to the 1950s the Conservatives are picking and choosing how they achieve that aim, hangin, 'floggin' ricketts and friction-laced trade with Europe good, picture postcard scenes of the jolly postie cycling down a leafy lane whistling a jolly tune, not so much.
The problem is that that model doesn't work if you have similar people doing the same work as employees.
Also the whole idea that you can shunt people off in to a "self employed" model may look great now but will fall apart as soon as a Labour Government puts any attention into resolving the mess that is UK employment / self employment law.
Maybe we have to just accept that the No10 team just aren't any good at politics;
Asked if Rishi Sunak would be happy for his own family to only use the NHS, the Prime Minister's spokesman says that it would not be in the public interest to answer questions about his use of private healthcare.
It just seems like basic common sense that the person in charge of public services should also rely on those services. Imagine if the head of a water company only drank bottled water, it wouldn't exactly inspire confidence. If the NHS (and state schools) aren't good enough for the PM then they're not good enough for anyone.
I think we get too hung up on these questions of implied personal hypocrisy - see also Labour MPs sending children to private school.
If we live in a free society where it is legal to choose private healthcare, then that choice should extend to those in charge of public healthcare.
What you really seem to be unhappy about is that inequality is so stark that there's a class of people who don't have to play by the same rules as everyone else. Well, then your issue is with income and wealth inequality, not which hospital the boss of the NHS takes their kids to.
Great, laudable aim, the public will I am sure support this.
BUT - how will this be achieved in practice? Expanding current medical schools? New schools? Who will provide the training?
Like many a popular opposition facing a very unpopular government I suspect detail will be very, very light, and promises will not have any details.
I want a labour government, and as soon as possible, but I want more detail.
(And I know this is a tweet, but does anyone truly expect Reeves would have the answers to my questions?)
There have been five new medical schools opened already this century so opening some more is surely not beyond imagination.
My complaints would be that not enough is done to address poor retention but that would take more than a tweet, and I suspect the numbers are being fudged so that 7,500 new medical students should be divided by the four, five or six years they will be in training.
Five new medical schools? Not sure of the intake, but generously 200 each? That’s a thousand.
Reeves is suggesting 6,500 more than that. If she is aggregating the training years then that’s as bad a lie as the 40 hospitals. And if it’s not, how the actual F is that to happen? Medical training happens a lot in clinic, not just in uni lecture theatres. Training places will be needed.
Fudged or aggregated counting of medical students is not a lie, so should not be compared with the 40 new hospitals, which will certainly not be 40 new hospitals. It might be misleading to those who read it as 7,500 more newly-qualified doctors a year.
So you're saying "training 7500 more doctors" doesn't mean 7500 more doctors qualifying? I wouldn't expect very many to fail, so if "training 7500 more doctors" means "training 1500 more doctors in each of the five years so only 1500 more qualify each year (less a few failures)" then calling it "not a lie" is generous, to say the least.
I'm saying "We’ll train 7,500 more doctors ... a year" probably means there will be 7,500 more medical students being trained to be doctors. But since medicine is (usually) a five-year course, that only requires admitting 1,500 more students to year one. After a time, there will be 1,500 more first years, 1,500 more second years, ... and 1,500 more fifth years, making 7,500 additional medical students. At least, that is how I read it.
And I do not think this should be controversial. If it were announced that your daughter's school were to double in size, surely you would expect there to be twice as many pupils at the school, not twice as many in each year which would mean the school being seven times as big.
I'm saying that if people hear "we'll train 7500 more doctors a year" most people will interpret that as "7500 more doctors a year will qualify", and that Reeves knows this.
@DecrepiterJohnL - basic maths failure I'm afraid. If there are twice as many in each year of a school, there will be twice as many in total, not seven times as many. If, say, there are 30 in each year, there are 210 pupils in total. Double that and there will be 420 pupils - 60 in each year. I think you meant that, if it were announced that there would be 210 more pupils at the school, you would expect 420 pupils in total, not 240 in each year.
Maybe we have to just accept that the No10 team just aren't any good at politics;
Asked if Rishi Sunak would be happy for his own family to only use the NHS, the Prime Minister's spokesman says that it would not be in the public interest to answer questions about his use of private healthcare.
It just seems like basic common sense that the person in charge of public services should also rely on those services. Imagine if the head of a water company only drank bottled water, it wouldn't exactly inspire confidence. If the NHS (and state schools) aren't good enough for the PM then they're not good enough for anyone.
The counterargument to that is that it is basic common sense that the person in charge of services seeks the best regardless of source, and should seek to make that best be available to others too.
If our drinking water wasn't good enough, then I'd rather a head of the water company that drank bottled water who said he was going to reform the water supply - than one who insisted the water is good enough as is and did a John Gummer photoshoot getting his daughter to drink water from the tap.
I would have more faith that the water company head was serious about improving the water supply if his daughter was drinking the water every day.
Have to wonder if some of the NHS pressure is being caused by this rampant cold/cough (Not Covid) that's going round. It's gone from tickly to chesty for me and will probably go back round again. Everyone in my office has it, and so does my daughter. It's an absolute shit of a cold virus - and seems to be way more of it about this winter than previous. It's probably seeing admissions, and certainly doctor/hospital time amongst the very old and very young.
There's been a not-covid-cold-flu-thing rampant round here. Flooring people for a week then leaving them with a persistent bad cough - sometimes for weeks on end. I imagine it must be causing a lot of sick days for NHS staff too, which just compounds the problems.
Maybe we have to just accept that the No10 team just aren't any good at politics;
Asked if Rishi Sunak would be happy for his own family to only use the NHS, the Prime Minister's spokesman says that it would not be in the public interest to answer questions about his use of private healthcare.
It just seems like basic common sense that the person in charge of public services should also rely on those services. Imagine if the head of a water company only drank bottled water, it wouldn't exactly inspire confidence. If the NHS (and state schools) aren't good enough for the PM then they're not good enough for anyone.
This is one of these moments where I'm not a lefty. If the Sunaks wish to pay to go private, good luck to them. It's defendable (as Maggie did) if you talk about convenience or security. Heck, make up some balls about not wanting to stress the NHS further. But say something. "Not in the public interest to answer that" is cowardly custard.
They're welcome to do whatever they want - it's a free country. But he shouldn't be surprised if voters deduce that he's not that invested in public services and thinks that they're second rate and (since he's in charge of fixing them) that second rate is good enough for people who can't afford to opt out. It's dangerously close to Ratner territory imho.
It's also more damaging than a minister sending children to private school, mainly because the spectre of a US-style healthcare system lurks in the back of everyone's minds.
I suspect that Sunak is comparing his unpopularity now during the strikes with his expected unpopularity later when he has to increase taxes to pay for higher pay.
Cutting public sector pay with below-inflation pay awards, along with fiscal drag on tax thresholds, is the way in which the deficit is being cut. I don't see any other spending cuts that will be less unpopular, or tax rises, likewise.
I can give you a list* of ways in which you can make the numbers add up by cutting spending or increasing taxes, but I'm pretty sure all the alternatives will be a lot less popular than cutting other people's pay.
And we've seen with Truss that we can't simply borrow the money now and work out how to pay it back later.
There simply isn't a way out of this situation where the incumbent PM and Chancellor are popular with the public.
* Something like: - End the pensions triple lock. - Tax housing wealth. - Merge income tax and national insurance so that tax rates rise for pensioners and non-employment income. These might all be sensible changes to make, but without a lot of political leadership invested in explaining to the public why they're sensible, they will be wildly, ruinously, unpopular.
What is this PB-wide obsession with the triple lock? The only part that matters currently is the single lock to inflation (except when suspended by Rishi). Abolishing the other two locks will save no money at all. What Liz Truss was right about is needing to boost economic growth.
The state pension is one of the biggest items in the budget and the triple lock ensures that it will always grow more quickly than tax receipts, at the same time as the demographic transition increases the proportion of the population who are paid it.
Maybe it's the right policy to have, but it makes balancing the budget a lot harder, so it would be rather weird if it didn't come up in such discussions.
Imagine if they had invested the money people paid for their meagre state pension rather than using it as a ponzi scheme.
Been at least a couple of centuries since you could accuse a British government of planning for the future, alas. Tory cynics might date the start of the rot at 1832, but I couldn't possibly comment.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
It is the CWU striking, Royal Mail management refusing to give into them and will just make more of them redundant. We still need RM infrastructure, especially in rural areas where even Amazon use them for final mile parcel deliveries
Isn't the key that Royal Mail management are attempting to move (certainly new) posties from a salaried model to the Amazon Contractor/Evri model whereby payment is by drops.
To an old b*stard like me turning the Royal Mail into Hermes (Evri) or Yodel is not progress. @BlancheLivermore explained yesterday that a postie serves a civic/social function as well as just delivering letters.
For a party who are so keen to return us to the 1950s the Conservatives are picking and choosing how they achieve that aim, hangin, 'floggin' ricketts and friction-laced trade with Europe good, picture postcard scenes of the jolly postie cycling down a leafy lane whistling a jolly tune, not so much.
If Royal Mail is to have a viable future it has to compete with the likes of Amazon and Evri on parcel delivery.
Royal Mail is now a private company. This is not the 1950s when Royal Mail was a nationalised company with no competitors and basically a monopoly on delivery of the post which also was pre email and pre social media and text with far more letters
Yeah, and who privatised it?
You completely missed my old man point of view outlined in my post.
What is the point of Royal Mail surviving by decimating its service provision to function as a competitor to utterly dreadful service providers like Evri and Yodel etc. When does the point arrive where Royal Mail decides it is financially unviable to deliver mail off the beaten track to @RochdalePioneers ? Because in your model, at some point that is a necessary cut it makes.
Great, laudable aim, the public will I am sure support this.
BUT - how will this be achieved in practice? Expanding current medical schools? New schools? Who will provide the training?
Like many a popular opposition facing a very unpopular government I suspect detail will be very, very light, and promises will not have any details.
I want a labour government, and as soon as possible, but I want more detail.
(And I know this is a tweet, but does anyone truly expect Reeves would have the answers to my questions?)
There have been five new medical schools opened already this century so opening some more is surely not beyond imagination.
My complaints would be that not enough is done to address poor retention but that would take more than a tweet, and I suspect the numbers are being fudged so that 7,500 new medical students should be divided by the four, five or six years they will be in training.
Five new medical schools? Not sure of the intake, but generously 200 each? That’s a thousand.
Reeves is suggesting 6,500 more than that. If she is aggregating the training years then that’s as bad a lie as the 40 hospitals. And if it’s not, how the actual F is that to happen? Medical training happens a lot in clinic, not just in uni lecture theatres. Training places will be needed.
Fudged or aggregated counting of medical students is not a lie, so should not be compared with the 40 new hospitals, which will certainly not be 40 new hospitals. It might be misleading to those who read it as 7,500 more newly-qualified doctors a year.
So you're saying "training 7500 more doctors" doesn't mean 7500 more doctors qualifying? I wouldn't expect very many to fail, so if "training 7500 more doctors" means "training 1500 more doctors in each of the five years so only 1500 more qualify each year (less a few failures)" then calling it "not a lie" is generous, to say the least.
I'm saying "We’ll train 7,500 more doctors ... a year" probably means there will be 7,500 more medical students being trained to be doctors. But since medicine is (usually) a five-year course, that only requires admitting 1,500 more students to year one. After a time, there will be 1,500 more first years, 1,500 more second years, ... and 1,500 more fifth years, making 7,500 additional medical students. At least, that is how I read it.
And I do not think this should be controversial. If it were announced that your daughter's school were to double in size, surely you would expect there to be twice as many pupils at the school, not twice as many in each year which would mean the school being seven times as big.
I'm saying that if people hear "we'll train 7500 more doctors a year" most people will interpret that as "7500 more doctors a year will qualify", and that Reeves knows this.
@DecrepiterJohnL - basic maths failure I'm afraid. If there are twice as many in each year of a school, there will be twice as many in total, not seven times as many. If, say, there are 30 in each year, there are 210 pupils in total. Double that and there will be 420 pupils - 60 in each year. I think you meant that, if it were announced that there would be 210 more pupils at the school, you would expect 420 pupils in total, not 240 in each year.
Maybe we have to just accept that the No10 team just aren't any good at politics;
Asked if Rishi Sunak would be happy for his own family to only use the NHS, the Prime Minister's spokesman says that it would not be in the public interest to answer questions about his use of private healthcare.
It just seems like basic common sense that the person in charge of public services should also rely on those services. Imagine if the head of a water company only drank bottled water, it wouldn't exactly inspire confidence. If the NHS (and state schools) aren't good enough for the PM then they're not good enough for anyone.
The counterargument to that is that it is basic common sense that the person in charge of services seeks the best regardless of source, and should seek to make that best be available to others too.
If our drinking water wasn't good enough, then I'd rather a head of the water company that drank bottled water who said he was going to reform the water supply - than one who insisted the water is good enough as is and did a John Gummer photoshoot getting his daughter to drink water from the tap.
I would have more faith that the water company head was serious about improving the water supply if his daughter was drinking the water every day.
Because everyone had faith in John Gummer, right? That's the model you want to hold up as to what our politicians should be like?
There's a Catch-22 here, if you're not prepared to say our current services are not good enough, then how can you be prepared to improve them?
Have to wonder if some of the NHS pressure is being caused by this rampant cold/cough (Not Covid) that's going round. It's gone from tickly to chesty for me and will probably go back round again. Everyone in my office has it, and so does my daughter. It's an absolute shit of a cold virus - and seems to be way more of it about this winter than previous. It's probably seeing admissions, and certainly doctor/hospital time amongst the very old and very young.
I had it. So bad I thought I'd got Covid again. Was very surprised when I tested negative. Lasted over a week.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
A 'biodynamic' wine merchant opened up here during one of the lockdowns and thankfully seems to have thrived. I don't really buy into all the hocus-pocus around it - but it's really good for finding small and unusual vineyards and wines.
My sister works in a well-remunerated public sector position - has worked for the public sector for much of her working life. At times this has meant I've been better paid than her, in other times, her than me. She's very good at her job, very committed, but some stuff I really struggle with. A recent example - my father works for a County Council, and has been very unwell over Christmas. The last time we all spoke, she advised him to see if he could claim the days he was sick (whilst on holiday) back from the council! I have never heard of such a thing - I was outraged.
Speak to your union rep because that right exists in the private sector.
Yes - I know several people in private and public sector who say this is normal practice. Basically the employer argues that they need healthy, satisfied staff, including a reasonable holiday, and it's not in the company interest to have a period of sickness count as annual leave, even if it was unexpected.
On the NHS, if Sunak was doing anything to sort out the NHS problems, he'd be welcome as far as I'm concerned to let his family have treatment wherever they like (in the last resort they've not been elected just because he is). Conversely, demonstratively going to his NHS GP and queuing up in the surgery, while doing nothing for the service, wouldn't impress me.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
Maybe we have to just accept that the No10 team just aren't any good at politics;
Asked if Rishi Sunak would be happy for his own family to only use the NHS, the Prime Minister's spokesman says that it would not be in the public interest to answer questions about his use of private healthcare.
It just seems like basic common sense that the person in charge of public services should also rely on those services. Imagine if the head of a water company only drank bottled water, it wouldn't exactly inspire confidence. If the NHS (and state schools) aren't good enough for the PM then they're not good enough for anyone.
I think we get too hung up on these questions of implied personal hypocrisy - see also Labour MPs sending children to private school.
If we live in a free society where it is legal to choose private healthcare, then that choice should extend to those in charge of public healthcare.
What you really seem to be unhappy about is that inequality is so stark that there's a class of people who don't have to play by the same rules as everyone else. Well, then your issue is with income and wealth inequality, not which hospital the boss of the NHS takes their kids to.
I am not saying they shouldn't be free to do whatever they want. I am saying that they shouldn't be surprised if voters draw some rather obvious conclusions from those choices. I'm not that concerned about income inequality tbh, but I think that equality of opportunity and equality of dignity is important and in my view private education and healthcare undermine those on a quite fundamental level.
Have to wonder if some of the NHS pressure is being caused by this rampant cold/cough (Not Covid) that's going round. It's gone from tickly to chesty for me and will probably go back round again. Everyone in my office has it, and so does my daughter. It's an absolute shit of a cold virus - and seems to be way more of it about this winter than previous. It's probably seeing admissions, and certainly doctor/hospital time amongst the very old and very young.
There's been a not-covid-cold-flu-thing rampant round here. Flooring people for a week then leaving them with a persistent bad cough - sometimes for weeks on end. I imagine it must be causing a lot of sick days for NHS staff too, which just compounds the problems.
Yep that's the one. Proper lingering cough from it.
I have the opposite problem to everyone else. I have been ordered to attend a wellness review at the GP. Fair enough, but then I get a call to schedule a health check. Already booked I say, but no this is a different thing. WR is a nurse, HC is a GP. Then I ask for a prescription for some really boring motr antimalarials which I have had multiple times before, but Oh no you will have to come and talk to the travel nurse about those. So that is 3 unsolicited face to face appointments in 2 weeks.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
It is the CWU striking, Royal Mail management refusing to give into them and will just make more of them redundant. We still need RM infrastructure, especially in rural areas where even Amazon use them for final mile parcel deliveries
Isn't the key that Royal Mail management are attempting to move (certainly new) posties from a salaried model to the Amazon Contractor/Evri model whereby payment is by drops.
To an old b*stard like me turning the Royal Mail into Hermes (Evri) or Yodel is not progress. @BlancheLivermore explained yesterday that a postie serves a civic/social function as well as just delivering letters.
For a party who are so keen to return us to the 1950s the Conservatives are picking and choosing how they achieve that aim, hangin, 'floggin' ricketts and friction-laced trade with Europe good, picture postcard scenes of the jolly postie cycling down a leafy lane whistling a jolly tune, not so much.
If Royal Mail is to have a viable future it has to compete with the likes of Amazon and Evri on parcel delivery.
Royal Mail is now a private company. This is not the 1950s when Royal Mail was a nationalised company with no competitors and basically a monopoly on delivery of the post which also was pre email and pre social media and text with far more letters
Yeah, and who privatised it?
You completely missed my old man point of view outlined in my post.
What is the point of Royal Mail surviving by decimating its service provision to function as a competitor to utterly dreadful service providers like Evri and Yodel etc. When does the point arrive where Royal Mail decides it is financially unviable to deliver mail off the beaten track to @RochdalePioneers ? Because in your model, at some point that is a necessary cut it makes.
Vince Cable as Business Secretary in the Coalition government of 2010 to 2015.
As Royal Mail is obliged to perform the universal service obligation it has to deliver in remote rural areas at the same price as urban areas unlike Evri and Yodel. However it also needs to cut costs to compete with them and Amazon in the most profitable urban parcels market.
Personally I would have kept a government subsidy to RM for the USO to remote rural areas when Royal Mail was privatised but Sir Vince decided against
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
A 'biodynamic' wine merchant opened up here during one of the lockdowns and thankfully seems to have thrived. I don't really buy into all the hocus-pocus around it - but it's really good for finding small and unusual vineyards and wines.
Not so good for my wallet mind you...
It's a dilemma for a newcomer to the market like me. I know if I go biodynamic (or even better, "natural" i.e. low or no sulphur, no filtration, hipster labels and funky bottles of pet nat with metal caps) I can sell at a much higher price point. But I limit my market too and make the actual viticulture much more difficult with lower yields and often more variable quality in the final wine.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
It is the CWU striking, Royal Mail management refusing to give into them and will just make more of them redundant. We still need RM infrastructure, especially in rural areas where even Amazon use them for final mile parcel deliveries
Isn't the key that Royal Mail management are attempting to move (certainly new) posties from a salaried model to the Amazon Contractor/Evri model whereby payment is by drops.
To an old b*stard like me turning the Royal Mail into Hermes (Evri) or Yodel is not progress. @BlancheLivermore explained yesterday that a postie serves a civic/social function as well as just delivering letters.
For a party who are so keen to return us to the 1950s the Conservatives are picking and choosing how they achieve that aim, hangin, 'floggin' ricketts and friction-laced trade with Europe good, picture postcard scenes of the jolly postie cycling down a leafy lane whistling a jolly tune, not so much.
I used to work for them many years ago. I still remember almost every day being a new revelation of astonishing bad management at every level. So when I hear their current management making bold claims and predictions and wanting to shake things up - I take it with a great big pinch of salt.
I think the conversation with the homeless man in the shelter has done for Sunak tbh - it wasn't as direct as Romney's 47% or Clinton's 'deplorables' but the wilful blindness in his response was off the charts.
I agree with the Guardian on this. The ridicule is based on the premise that the poor will always be poor, and aspiration is class treason. It's Labour client-group thinking, the mirror image of Tory client-group thinking towards home owning pensioners.
The ridicule was well deserved. He was not having a chat with a homeless person but using the homeless person as an extra in his PR organised film. A film which was extraordinarily poorly judged. His PR company don't seem to understand the perametres of what PR can be expected to achieve.
Ridicule for doing a PR film with homeless people is one thing (because no politician ever did that before?). But the ridicule for what he said is misplaced. The transcript of the conversation was fine.
Fine? Really? I agree that it is not impossible that someone might be homeless and also working, but it shows a gross lack of tact and situational awareness. Notwithstanding anything else, the lack of political spidey-sense was alarming.
Yes, fine. Here's the transcript:
“Are you sorting the economy out?” Dean asked Sunak.
“Well, that is exactly what I am trying to do,” the PM replied while serving him a very full English breakfast. By now they were on first name terms.
Dean: “Best for business.”
Sunak: “Do you have … do you work in business? Do you want some fruit?”
Dean: “No, I’m homeless. I am actually a homeless person. But I am interested in business.”
Sunak: “Yeah? What kind of business?”
Dean: “I like finance. It’s good for the city. When finance and stuff does well, we all do well in London.”
Sunak: “Yeah, that’s absolutely right. So I used to work in finance actually.”
Dean: “Yeah, I heard. Ex-investment banker.”
Sunak: “Is that something you’d like to get into?”
Dean: “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind. I don’t know. I’d like to get through Christmas first.”
Yes it's a bit awkward, yes it makes for embarrassing headlines and tweets, but....it's fine. There is a refreshing lack of condescension. I would rather a PM spoke to a homeless person in something approximating a peer-to-peer manner than the alternative.
It would have been different if Sunak then followed up with "well young man, put some elbow grease into it and stay off the booze and drugs and who knows, in a few years' time you could be rich like me. Now off you go and mind you leave a clean plate."
Yes I am no big fan of Sunak but the press reporting of this exchange was unfair and misleading. The whole conversation doesn't reflect that badly on Sunak - he is doing his best to engage with the guy without being patronising - but it is extremely cringy and Sunak looks really uncomfortable.
This is because both main parties' PR teams are the last to find out about leadership changes so lumber new leaders with photo-ops designed for the predecessors. CCHQ stiffed the painfully shy May with Cameron stunts, and Labour undermined Brown by trying to turn him into Blair. Instead of Sunak, imagine Boris with sleeves rolled up piling on the bangers and beans for at least five minutes while cameras rolled.
This was all about the EU getting its pound of flesh. Now the Tories look done for, they don't need go be so unnecessarily hardline any more.
But it says a lot they were prepared to hurt Northern Ireland just for vengeance on the UK.
That sound a large over-interpretation of "perhaps a little bit too strict".
And as others have pointed out, it was negotiated by both sides. One of which was led by a grandstanding buffoon.
Why not just admit the EU also got it wrong?
Absolutism is stupid - both sides made mistakes as happens in every negotiation everywhere. But its clear which side came away satisfied and which side didn't.
We can wail and moan about the EU all we like. They had a pre-stated position and red lines. We said they would crumble, they didn't. We negotiated a deal which our own side now say they didn't understand and didn't expect the counterparty to implement.
Set aside the NIP for a second, this is a bigger issue. Both the EU and future counterparty negotiators know for a fact the UK team are ill-informed and stupid - as witnessed by our calamities with the TCP, NIP, AusNZ deal etc. We aren't trusted by the people we want to negotiate with (America) and treated like a joke by the ones who took advantage of us.
Spot on. Then there was the risible grandstanding.
We'll walk away with No Deal rather than a Bad Deal!
We've got a Deal! It's a Great Deal! And we only got it because we were prepared to walk away!
Hang on, it was a Bad Deal! - It's so Bad we can't implement it!
Just really embarrassing and pathetic.
There was no grandstanding, there was brilliant negotiations. The deal is multi-faceted and the arrangements for GB are what matter more than the arrangements for NI and we got what we wanted there.
The Protocol was never something the UK wanted, it was something the EU wanted and they thought they had it in the Backstop they'd compelled May to sign up for. That they negotiated away the backstop to be replaced with the risible Protocol was a negotiating masterclass by the UK and only because we were prepared to walk away, as you quoted.
And then the EU are in no position to make the Protocol be implemented. The one thing they wanted and negotiated hard on, they left us holding all the cards so we could just refuse to implement it. Oh dear, what a shame.
That's a success not a failure on the UK's part. Its a failure on the EU's.
That was a news report from the Planet Zog. Next up on your intergalactic news feed is Deep Thinking with David Frost.
Meanwhile back here on Planet Earth, Brexit is going so well that even Keir Starmer doesn't want to change it. As much as you lot love to be modern day Hiroo Onoda's.
There isn't a single person in Britain who voted for Brexit because they wanted the UK to sign up to a Northern Ireland Protocol. The Protocol is not the deal, the Protocol is the price we paid for the deal and if the price isn't working for the EU, then that's not a problem for us. What we voted for, collectively as a nation (I personally didn't care about 1 of the 3) is control over respectively laws [sovereignty], money and borders/immigration.
If the deal is bad as you and other die-hard fanatics on this site love to claim, then how is it bad for England on the terms debated: ie laws, money and borders. You are disqualified from referencing Northern Ireland, or the Protocol, since that was not the debate.
If it is working on laws, money and borders, then it is working and a good deal on the terms we voted for, and NI is NI's problem, just as it always has been.
Perhaps I missed its dissolution, but isn't NI's problem also the UK's? If not it seems to have sooked up a disporoportionate amount of bandwidth of the 'English' governments for which you voted.
NI is devolved. Its a bit our problem, a bit Stormont's, and a bit Irelands, and a bit the EU's. Hence the negotiations and buckpassing.
NI took up far too much bandwidth under May when she allowed it to shape the deal, rather than getting a deal that worked for Britain and making NI tomorrow's problem.
Laws, money and borders are what the Brexit debate was about, not Northern Ireland. As much as people love to pretend that they give a shit about Northern Ireland, it is an afterthought and is right to deal with accordingly, not let it take the priority here.
Is the deal working for England on laws, money and borders? If yes, deal is working. If no, then why, without mentioning Northern Ireland.
It's a very clear No. Post Brexit we are less well-governed, poorer, and have more border issues.
Maybe we have to just accept that the No10 team just aren't any good at politics;
Asked if Rishi Sunak would be happy for his own family to only use the NHS, the Prime Minister's spokesman says that it would not be in the public interest to answer questions about his use of private healthcare.
It just seems like basic common sense that the person in charge of public services should also rely on those services. Imagine if the head of a water company only drank bottled water, it wouldn't exactly inspire confidence. If the NHS (and state schools) aren't good enough for the PM then they're not good enough for anyone.
I think we get too hung up on these questions of implied personal hypocrisy - see also Labour MPs sending children to private school.
If we live in a free society where it is legal to choose private healthcare, then that choice should extend to those in charge of public healthcare.
What you really seem to be unhappy about is that inequality is so stark that there's a class of people who don't have to play by the same rules as everyone else. Well, then your issue is with income and wealth inequality, not which hospital the boss of the NHS takes their kids to.
I am not saying they shouldn't be free to do whatever they want. I am saying that they shouldn't be surprised if voters draw some rather obvious conclusions from those choices. I'm not that concerned about income inequality tbh, but I think that equality of opportunity and equality of dignity is important and in my view private education and healthcare undermine those on a quite fundamental level.
Tories don't believe in equality of outcome, if they did they would be Labour
I have the opposite problem to everyone else. I have been ordered to attend a wellness review at the GP. Fair enough, but then I get a call to schedule a health check. Already booked I say, but no this is a different thing. WR is a nurse, HC is a GP. Then I ask for a prescription for some really boring motr antimalarials which I have had multiple times before, but Oh no you will have to come and talk to the travel nurse about those. So that is 3 unsolicited face to face appointments in 2 weeks.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
DPD are fab, it is the one delivery they've mislaid in over a decade.
Glad they work for you. Less so for other people - quite a lot of anger out there on social media. Because when it goes wrong there is nobody you can speak to.
I had entirely good experiences with them until maybe six months ago. Then 'something' seemed to start going wrong with almost every delivery. On top of that - they are now notorious for hogging the public subsidised charging points for their lovely new all-electric vans, which is making them 'a tad' unpopular with locals who want to use them.
I suspect that Sunak is comparing his unpopularity now during the strikes with his expected unpopularity later when he has to increase taxes to pay for higher pay.
Cutting public sector pay with below-inflation pay awards, along with fiscal drag on tax thresholds, is the way in which the deficit is being cut. I don't see any other spending cuts that will be less unpopular, or tax rises, likewise.
I can give you a list* of ways in which you can make the numbers add up by cutting spending or increasing taxes, but I'm pretty sure all the alternatives will be a lot less popular than cutting other people's pay.
And we've seen with Truss that we can't simply borrow the money now and work out how to pay it back later.
There simply isn't a way out of this situation where the incumbent PM and Chancellor are popular with the public.
* Something like: - End the pensions triple lock. - Tax housing wealth. - Merge income tax and national insurance so that tax rates rise for pensioners and non-employment income. These might all be sensible changes to make, but without a lot of political leadership invested in explaining to the public why they're sensible, they will be wildly, ruinously, unpopular.
What is this PB-wide obsession with the triple lock? The only part that matters currently is the single lock to inflation (except when suspended by Rishi). Abolishing the other two locks will save no money at all. What Liz Truss was right about is needing to boost economic growth.
The obsession is to do with everyone on benefits being hardcore Ultra Tories. Who luxuriate in their vast piles of cash rather than working for living, through shear indolence.
I think you will find there are quite a few non-Tories who luxuriate in tax-payer paid public sector final salary pension scheme laziness
Um, different point. You have turned over 2 pages at once in the Gospel according to St IDS. State pension is a benefit, public sector pension is a contractual right. I assume, if you own gilts, that you don't see yourself as luxuriating in taxpayer funded laziness by taking the interest? That's exactly what you are doing.
I assume you are a beneficiary of such a scheme? If public sector workers think they should have equivalence with private sector they should first surrender these unaffordable anachronisms. They might have been a "contractual right" to those in the past, but that doesn't mean they should be in the future. The reality is that a large proportion of public sector jobs, particularly in the NHS are jobs for life with levels of security even for the most incompetent that have no equivalence in any private organisation (save some of the large privatised ones).
Nothing will be done about the public sector pension greed because MPs also benefit from it.
My sister works in a well-remunerated public sector position - has worked for the public sector for much of her working life. At times this has meant I've been better paid than her, in other times, her than me. She's very good at her job, very committed, but some stuff I really struggle with. A recent example - my father works for a County Council, and has been very unwell over Christmas. The last time we all spoke, she advised him to see if he could claim the days he was sick (whilst on holiday) back from the council! I have never heard of such a thing - I was outraged.
That's been normal practice in my private sector jobs.
Mine too. Public sector, education and banking going many years back.
I have the opposite problem to everyone else. I have been ordered to attend a wellness review at the GP. Fair enough, but then I get a call to schedule a health check. Already booked I say, but no this is a different thing. WR is a nurse, HC is a GP. Then I ask for a prescription for some really boring motr antimalarials which I have had multiple times before, but Oh no you will have to come and talk to the travel nurse about those. So that is 3 unsolicited face to face appointments in 2 weeks.
they will be getting paid for each one and so will not want to miss cash by doing them in one visit
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
It is the CWU striking, Royal Mail management refusing to give into them and will just make more of them redundant. We still need RM infrastructure, especially in rural areas where even Amazon use them for final mile parcel deliveries
Isn't the key that Royal Mail management are attempting to move (certainly new) posties from a salaried model to the Amazon Contractor/Evri model whereby payment is by drops.
To an old b*stard like me turning the Royal Mail into Hermes (Evri) or Yodel is not progress. @BlancheLivermore explained yesterday that a postie serves a civic/social function as well as just delivering letters.
For a party who are so keen to return us to the 1950s the Conservatives are picking and choosing how they achieve that aim, hangin, 'floggin' ricketts and friction-laced trade with Europe good, picture postcard scenes of the jolly postie cycling down a leafy lane whistling a jolly tune, not so much.
I used to work for them many years ago. I still remember almost every day being a new revelation of astonishing bad management at every level. So when I hear their current management making bold claims and predictions and wanting to shake things up - I take it with a great big pinch of salt.
I have always found the Royal Mail delivery service to be excellent, and all for the price of a postage stamp.
Wherever I have lived be it town or country I have got on speaking terms with the postie. On one occasion many years ago I was expecting a cheque from a company that I had been tipped off was entering administration later that day. The cheque had been sent first class the night before and I scoured the village for the postie. He let me have the cheque and I banked it that morning. At 4pm the company went into administration but my cheque was in the system and I got my money, a lot of money. Had the postal service been of the private contractor quality I would not have banked the cheque until after the administrator had been appointed and I would have lost thousands. Thank you Royal Mail (2004).
If it ain't broke don't fix it! Charge more for postage stamps by all means.
Off topic (unless they've been crippled by brain dead Marxist unions), has anyone had occasion to contact Sky recently? I'm trying to change our crappily expensive package but their customer service tel. number just has an automated message saying this number is not currently taking calls and their online virtual assistant is very much not the stuff of 'Humans are now redundant!' nightmares.
I think the conversation with the homeless man in the shelter has done for Sunak tbh - it wasn't as direct as Romney's 47% or Clinton's 'deplorables' but the wilful blindness in his response was off the charts.
I agree with the Guardian on this. The ridicule is based on the premise that the poor will always be poor, and aspiration is class treason. It's Labour client-group thinking, the mirror image of Tory client-group thinking towards home owning pensioners.
The ridicule was well deserved. He was not having a chat with a homeless person but using the homeless person as an extra in his PR organised film. A film which was extraordinarily poorly judged. His PR company don't seem to understand the perametres of what PR can be expected to achieve.
Ridicule for doing a PR film with homeless people is one thing (because no politician ever did that before?). But the ridicule for what he said is misplaced. The transcript of the conversation was fine.
Fine? Really? I agree that it is not impossible that someone might be homeless and also working, but it shows a gross lack of tact and situational awareness. Notwithstanding anything else, the lack of political spidey-sense was alarming.
Yes, fine. Here's the transcript:
“Are you sorting the economy out?” Dean asked Sunak.
“Well, that is exactly what I am trying to do,” the PM replied while serving him a very full English breakfast. By now they were on first name terms.
Dean: “Best for business.”
Sunak: “Do you have … do you work in business? Do you want some fruit?”
Dean: “No, I’m homeless. I am actually a homeless person. But I am interested in business.”
Sunak: “Yeah? What kind of business?”
Dean: “I like finance. It’s good for the city. When finance and stuff does well, we all do well in London.”
Sunak: “Yeah, that’s absolutely right. So I used to work in finance actually.”
Dean: “Yeah, I heard. Ex-investment banker.”
Sunak: “Is that something you’d like to get into?”
Dean: “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind. I don’t know. I’d like to get through Christmas first.”
Yes it's a bit awkward, yes it makes for embarrassing headlines and tweets, but....it's fine. There is a refreshing lack of condescension. I would rather a PM spoke to a homeless person in something approximating a peer-to-peer manner than the alternative.
It would have been different if Sunak then followed up with "well young man, put some elbow grease into it and stay off the booze and drugs and who knows, in a few years' time you could be rich like me. Now off you go and mind you leave a clean plate."
Yes I am no big fan of Sunak but the press reporting of this exchange was unfair and misleading. The whole conversation doesn't reflect that badly on Sunak - he is doing his best to engage with the guy without being patronising - but it is extremely cringy and Sunak looks really uncomfortable.
This is because both main parties' PR teams are the last to find out about leadership changes so lumber new leaders with photo-ops designed for the predecessors. CCHQ stiffed the painfully shy May with Cameron stunts, and Labour undermined Brown by trying to turn him into Blair. Instead of Sunak, imagine Boris with sleeves rolled up piling on the bangers and beans for at least five minutes while cameras rolled.
My god, imagine the scene if Liz was still in post....
Off topic (unless they've been crippled by brain dead Marxist unions), has anyone had occasion to contact Sky recently? I'm trying to change our crappily expensive package but their customer service tel. number just has an automated message saying this number is not currently taking calls and their online virtual assistant is very much not the stuff of 'Humans are now redundant!' nightmares.
Cancel it and wait for Sky retentions to call you.
Off topic (unless they've been crippled by brain dead Marxist unions), has anyone had occasion to contact Sky recently? I'm trying to change our crappily expensive package but their customer service tel. number just has an automated message saying this number is not currently taking calls and their online virtual assistant is very much not the stuff of 'Humans are now redundant!' nightmares.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
A 'biodynamic' wine merchant opened up here during one of the lockdowns and thankfully seems to have thrived. I don't really buy into all the hocus-pocus around it - but it's really good for finding small and unusual vineyards and wines.
Not so good for my wallet mind you...
It's a dilemma for a newcomer to the market like me. I know if I go biodynamic (or even better, "natural" i.e. low or no sulphur, no filtration, hipster labels and funky bottles of pet nat with metal caps) I can sell at a much higher price point. But I limit my market too and make the actual viticulture much more difficult with lower yields and often more variable quality in the final wine.
I know next to nothing about the growing side apart from that grapes are involved... But is there really anyone in the UK doing biodynamic/natural wine? Just from a 'first to grab the niche' aspect?
Off topic (unless they've been crippled by brain dead Marxist unions), has anyone had occasion to contact Sky recently? I'm trying to change our crappily expensive package but their customer service tel. number just has an automated message saying this number is not currently taking calls and their online virtual assistant is very much not the stuff of 'Humans are now redundant!' nightmares.
I got through a couple of months ago by reporting a fault. But I did actually have one. Don't know whether you could try that. Ask them to test the line and then when they say it's fine, move on to the package?
(Edit - I did combine it with upgrading to FTTP broadband.)
If it were free of cost to anyone, I'm sure the government would have settled. Of course, it's not free and would in fact be highly inflationary. But the UK is in a mood to blame spivs, etc for an imported energy price shock.
"With the help of DNA evidence, investigators confirmed in December that GW950m, the suspected perpetrator in more than a dozen other killings, was their wolf.
It seems that even before Dolly met her end, GW950m had already been heading for a firing squad."
I have the opposite problem to everyone else. I have been ordered to attend a wellness review at the GP. Fair enough, but then I get a call to schedule a health check. Already booked I say, but no this is a different thing. WR is a nurse, HC is a GP. Then I ask for a prescription for some really boring motr antimalarials which I have had multiple times before, but Oh no you will have to come and talk to the travel nurse about those. So that is 3 unsolicited face to face appointments in 2 weeks.
they will be getting paid for each one and so will not want to miss cash by doing them in one visit
Presumably these are separate (and uncoordinated) national schemes imposed on GPs in the name of preventive medicine but eating into the time available to see patients who are actually unwell.
"With the help of DNA evidence, investigators confirmed in December that GW950m, the suspected perpetrator in more than a dozen other killings, was their wolf.
It seems that even before Dolly met her end, GW950m had already been heading for a firing squad."
This is why the whole rewilding movement scares me. Dangerous wild animals should be left in zoos and abroad where they belong, and not reintroduced to dear old blighty.
Maybe we have to just accept that the No10 team just aren't any good at politics;
Asked if Rishi Sunak would be happy for his own family to only use the NHS, the Prime Minister's spokesman says that it would not be in the public interest to answer questions about his use of private healthcare.
It just seems like basic common sense that the person in charge of public services should also rely on those services. Imagine if the head of a water company only drank bottled water, it wouldn't exactly inspire confidence. If the NHS (and state schools) aren't good enough for the PM then they're not good enough for anyone.
The counterargument to that is that it is basic common sense that the person in charge of services seeks the best regardless of source, and should seek to make that best be available to others too.
If our drinking water wasn't good enough, then I'd rather a head of the water company that drank bottled water who said he was going to reform the water supply - than one who insisted the water is good enough as is and did a John Gummer photoshoot getting his daughter to drink water from the tap.
I would have more faith that the water company head was serious about improving the water supply if his daughter was drinking the water every day.
Because everyone had faith in John Gummer, right? That's the model you want to hold up as to what our politicians should be like?
There's a Catch-22 here, if you're not prepared to say our current services are not good enough, then how can you be prepared to improve them?
The Gummer thing was a one off stunt though. That would be the equivalent of a one off visit to the local A&E with photographers in tow while using BUPA for everything else.
Meanwhile, in another stunning Brexit triumph flying under the radar, Gibraltar has done a terrific deal with Spain, which maintains free movement and vital trade, and the UK is refusing it and dragging the territory into a catastrophic no-deal exit. ~AA
Have to wonder if some of the NHS pressure is being caused by this rampant cold/cough (Not Covid) that's going round. It's gone from tickly to chesty for me and will probably go back round again. Everyone in my office has it, and so does my daughter. It's an absolute shit of a cold virus - and seems to be way more of it about this winter than previous. It's probably seeing admissions, and certainly doctor/hospital time amongst the very old and very young.
There's been a not-covid-cold-flu-thing rampant round here. Flooring people for a week then leaving them with a persistent bad cough - sometimes for weeks on end. I imagine it must be causing a lot of sick days for NHS staff too, which just compounds the problems.
Yep that's the one. Proper lingering cough from it.
The family had this one over Christmas. Ruined the eldest’s (self-funded by working over the summer) skiing trip.
Somehow it has entirely passed me by, despite living for a week or more in what must have been a constant assault of virus-laden air.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
A 'biodynamic' wine merchant opened up here during one of the lockdowns and thankfully seems to have thrived. I don't really buy into all the hocus-pocus around it - but it's really good for finding small and unusual vineyards and wines.
Not so good for my wallet mind you...
It's a dilemma for a newcomer to the market like me. I know if I go biodynamic (or even better, "natural" i.e. low or no sulphur, no filtration, hipster labels and funky bottles of pet nat with metal caps) I can sell at a much higher price point. But I limit my market too and make the actual viticulture much more difficult with lower yields and often more variable quality in the final wine.
I know next to nothing about the growing side apart from that grapes are involved... But is there really anyone in the UK doing biodynamic/natural wine? Just from a 'first to grab the niche' aspect?
Quite a few. Tillingham probably the most prolific “natural” wine maker although a number of others do naturalish wind styles (Westwell among others) and there are a number of biodynamic vineyards too especially among the newer growers for example Ham Street which is run by a couple of my former colleagues.
Comments
And sadly I agree that this is one of the few cases where I think strikes *aren't* going to help them.
My favourite current poet is Charlie Puth, a Yank, I love this seminal track, because I sing it a lot, or rather text it a lot.
Starts 25 secs in.
'Lets Marvin Gaye and get it on.'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kntxNL8aKFA
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
Country’s top wine body said under-40s are swapping it for beer due to older wine buffs’ inability to pass on their love of a good vintage
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/01/02/french-grandparents-blamed-slump-domestic-wine-consumption/ (£££)
Make its name more accurate
I suggest Built-Up Life-Long Social/Health “Insurance” Tax
https://www.acas.org.uk/checking-sick-pay/sick-pay-and-holiday-pay
You also continue to build up holiday pay (at your average daily rate including any bonuses including attendance allowances) when on long term sick.
IANAL but iirc we do have at least one employment lawyer on PB.
And yet, unless I've missed it, the Prime Minister seems notably reticent to show his face. He doesn't drink, I believe, so can't still be suffering from an NYE hangover. Where on earth is he?
Perhaps there was a degree.of non-sequitur about "are you in business?" comment even if business had cropped up. The tense was wrong, and the context odd, it was a bit awkward, but the thinking behind it - not just to treat a homeless person as homeless and nothing else, no past, no future, was just fine.
And so I kept quiet during that particular chorus of criticism.
In such companies, HR is using a carefully constructed rule book, based on the law and regulation. There is little need of a Trade Union to get your rights, since they are, nearly always, automatically applied.
I have seen, via family and friends, that lower down the income scale, and job quality, things are very different.
One was in a company that turned out to be running a training scam - you get the training but you are then liable for an excessive cost. The so called "HR function" then proceeded to send emails that included clear, intentional breaches of employment law to the point the lawyer we engaged was giggling. He said that it was not often you saw someone build a gallows from first principles, weave the rope, set themselves up on it *and* kick the stool away...
“Are you sorting the economy out?” Dean asked Sunak.
“Well, that is exactly what I am trying to do,” the PM replied while serving him a very full English breakfast. By now they were on first name terms.
Dean: “Best for business.”
Sunak: “Do you have … do you work in business? Do you want some fruit?”
Dean: “No, I’m homeless. I am actually a homeless person. But I am interested in business.”
Sunak: “Yeah? What kind of business?”
Dean: “I like finance. It’s good for the city. When finance and stuff does well, we all do well in London.”
Sunak: “Yeah, that’s absolutely right. So I used to work in finance actually.”
Dean: “Yeah, I heard. Ex-investment banker.”
Sunak: “Is that something you’d like to get into?”
Dean: “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind. I don’t know. I’d like to get through Christmas first.”
Yes it's a bit awkward, yes it makes for embarrassing headlines and tweets, but....it's fine. There is a refreshing lack of condescension. I would rather a PM spoke to a homeless person in something approximating a peer-to-peer manner than the alternative.
It would have been different if Sunak then followed up with "well young man, put some elbow grease into it and stay off the booze and drugs and who knows, in a few years' time you could be rich like me. Now off you go and mind you leave a clean plate."
The Wine Society sends my Xmas presents to a friend in IV5 with no surcharge.
To an old b*stard like me turning the Royal Mail into Hermes (Evri) or Yodel is not progress. @BlancheLivermore explained yesterday that a postie serves a civic/social function as well as just delivering letters.
For a party who are so keen to return us to the 1950s the Conservatives are picking and choosing how they achieve that aim, hangin, 'floggin' ricketts and friction-laced trade with Europe good, picture postcard scenes of the jolly postie cycling down a leafy lane whistling a jolly tune, not so much.
Asked if Rishi Sunak would be happy for his own family to only use the NHS, the Prime Minister's spokesman says that it would not be in the public interest to answer questions about his use of private healthcare.
https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1610250530995011590
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
There isn't a single person in Britain who voted for Brexit because they wanted the UK to sign up to a Northern Ireland Protocol. The Protocol is not the deal, the Protocol is the price we paid for the deal and if the price isn't working for the EU, then that's not a problem for us. What we voted for, collectively as a nation (I personally didn't care about 1 of the 3) is control over respectively laws [sovereignty], money and borders/immigration.
If the deal is bad as you and other die-hard fanatics on this site love to claim, then how is it bad for England on the terms debated: ie laws, money and borders. You are disqualified from referencing Northern Ireland, or the Protocol, since that was not the debate.
If it is working on laws, money and borders, then it is working and a good deal on the terms we voted for, and NI is NI's problem, just as it always has been.
Royal Mail is now a private company. This is not the 1950s when Royal Mail was a nationalised company with no competitors and basically a monopoly on delivery of the post which also was pre email and pre social media and text with far more letters
We are lumbered with Brexit, it is s*it, it always was going to be s**t, but here we are, we own it and it is not covered by the Sale of Goods Act.
It depends what you mean by wino and flavourful and plonk. I think the new world had pretty much grabbed its fair share of at least the UK market by 2000, new entrants now being niche operators like Greece and Bulgaria. Lots of Australian and S American wine is very much not plonk.
If our drinking water wasn't good enough, then I'd rather a head of the water company that drank bottled water who said he was going to reform the water supply - than one who insisted the water is good enough as is and did a John Gummer photoshoot getting his daughter to drink water from the tap.
It's probably seeing admissions, and certainly doctor/hospital time amongst the very old and very young.
NI took up far too much bandwidth under May when she allowed it to shape the deal, rather than getting a deal that worked for Britain and making NI tomorrow's problem.
Laws, money and borders are what the Brexit debate was about, not Northern Ireland. As much as people love to pretend that they give a shit about Northern Ireland, it is an afterthought and is right to deal with accordingly, not let it take the priority here.
Is the deal working for England on laws, money and borders? If yes, deal is working. If no, then why, without mentioning Northern Ireland.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
The problem is you never had any money to "invest" as you never actually saved for your own pension, you just put your own pension on the never-never to be paid for by future generations.
Also the whole idea that you can shunt people off in to a "self employed" model may look great now but will fall apart as soon as a Labour Government puts any attention into resolving the mess that is UK employment / self employment law.
If we live in a free society where it is legal to choose private healthcare, then that choice should extend to those in charge of public healthcare.
What you really seem to be unhappy about is that inequality is so stark that there's a class of people who don't have to play by the same rules as everyone else. Well, then your issue is with income and wealth inequality, not which hospital the boss of the NHS takes their kids to.
You completely missed my old man point of view outlined in my post.
What is the point of Royal Mail surviving by decimating its service provision to function as a competitor to utterly dreadful service providers like Evri and Yodel etc. When does the point arrive where Royal Mail decides it is financially unviable to deliver mail off the beaten track to @RochdalePioneers ? Because in your model, at some point that is a necessary cut it makes.
There's a Catch-22 here, if you're not prepared to say our current services are not good enough, then how can you be prepared to improve them?
Not so good for my wallet mind you...
On the NHS, if Sunak was doing anything to sort out the NHS problems, he'd be welcome as far as I'm concerned to let his family have treatment wherever they like (in the last resort they've not been elected just because he is). Conversely, demonstratively going to his NHS GP and queuing up in the surgery, while doing nothing for the service, wouldn't impress me.
I want action, not tokenism.
I'm not that concerned about income inequality tbh, but I think that equality of opportunity and equality of dignity is important and in my view private education and healthcare undermine those on a quite fundamental level.
As Royal Mail is obliged to perform the universal service obligation it has to deliver in remote rural areas at the same price as urban areas unlike Evri and Yodel. However it also needs to cut costs to compete with them and Amazon in the most profitable urban parcels market.
Personally I would have kept a government subsidy to RM for the USO to remote rural areas when Royal Mail was privatised but Sir Vince decided against
Northern Ireland.
https://www.aol.co.uk/news/tory-mp-wears-stab-jacket-103813110.html
Wherever I have lived be it town or country I have got on speaking terms with the postie. On one occasion many years ago I was expecting a cheque from a company that I had been tipped off was entering administration later that day. The cheque had been sent first class the night before and I scoured the village for the postie. He let me have the cheque and I banked it that morning. At 4pm the company went into administration but my cheque was in the system and I got my money, a lot of money. Had the postal service been of the private contractor quality I would not have banked the cheque until after the administrator had been appointed and I would have lost thousands. Thank you Royal Mail (2004).
If it ain't broke don't fix it! Charge more for postage stamps by all means.
The wolf that ate Dolly, the 30-year-old pony belonging to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, is now on a kill list.
Identified as GW950m, the current bounty on its head expires on January 31.
https://twitter.com/POLITICOEurope/status/1610226295769554946
Got through to them fine earlier on today.
On the upside it is a problem that Ms Crosbie won't personally need to worry about the other side of a GE (even if the Conservatives win that GE).
(Edit - I did combine it with upgrading to FTTP broadband.)
It seems that even before Dolly met her end, GW950m had already been heading for a firing squad."
PM and Health Sec have "no plans at the moment" to "visit any hospitals or answer any questions".
Tone-deaf doesn't quite cover this. Please share! ~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1610264098221981697/video/1
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/02/spain-ready-for-any-scenario-as-gibraltar-talks-with-uk-falter
Somehow it has entirely passed me by, despite living for a week or more in what must have been a constant assault of virus-laden air.