🔥from the Nikkei - UK has proven with 5 years of "straying off course" that you don't get rich from "expelling the foreigners" - using a word "joui" which refers to the "son-nou joui" "revere the emperor expel the barbarians" slogan of 1850s Japan 1/
Nikkei points out trade openness of UK has dropped 6 % points after Brexit + foreign companies' willingness to invest in UK has waned, with inward direct investment falling 76%. UK govt estimate that Brexit will reduce UK GDP by 4%. 2/
Nikkei points out UK stock market capitalization almost overtaken by France. Goldman Sachs has moved part of London trading to Milan. Govt bonds still carrying a moron premium compared to Germany + France. 3/
Nikkei looks back to when UK was flag bearer of globalization - abolition of 1846 Corn Law. Says Europe generally becoming less open - how no German car manufacturer came to Paris motor show in protest at French protectionism. 4/
Nikkei concludes that cannot have cake and eat it. Not possible to leave EU and have free trade, trust in nation was damaged. "Britain's self conceited going it alone has lessons for everyone." 5/5
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.
I would say that often the French wines are less accessible - that New World low end wine is often designed to appeal to those who have little knowledge or experience of wine.
This isn't a bad thing, any more than designing small, low performance hatchbacks to be easy driven by lower skilled drivers is.
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.
That number is automated. And then they redirect you to their app. Where you have done everything you have been asked to yet your wazzock local driver still tries to deliver parcels to the wrong village.
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.
Is there much apart from your own honesty and ethics to practically stop you labelling the wine as natural regardless ?
"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."
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.
Is there much apart from your own honesty and ethics to practically stop you labelling the wine as natural regardless ?
No and that’s the problem with the natural label. Organic and biodynamic are regulated, even if a lot of people would challenge some of the practices (eg both permit use of copper which is toxic to the soil and organisms) but natural is a term of art so the only risk is reputational.
It’s the wine equivalent of “craft beer” (or boutique hotel)
EXCL: Yet another sign of the pressure in the NHS, as leaked email says from today London Ambulance Service crews will only wait 45 mins at hospitals before handing over patients.
Email has been cascaded down by the NHS to London hospitals. It does make clear that critical patients will still be looked after until a nurse is available, but this is a clear departure from the policy of ambulance crews essentially having to wait as long as it takes.
All relates of course to the crisis in the ambulance service, with crews stuck waiting to hand over patients because hospitals are full. Means they can’t then answer further 999 calls, leading to long wait times for an ambulance, as we exposed in July.
As a complete layman that sounds very sensible. Not sure how routinely stacking ambulances and paramedics outside for 10 hours plus a visit can make any sense?
it comes back to a comment from an earlier thread.
A queue only works when you can remove people from the front of it.
The current situation is that ambulances bring patients and wait until they can be seen by the hospital. This suggests they will now bring even more patients meaning the queue will grow even longer
The patients exist whether they are at the hospital or not so the queue is only growing longer in the sense they are now being counted but not in a real sense
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.
Ah - I had no idea. Thanks - I'll have to keep an eye out for them. The local merchant is fairly focussed on French wines (co-owner is French, so understandable) but I'll see if I can persuade then to get some in.
And good luck with your venture - whether "natural" or not. Cheers!
"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."
So we have scientific proof that apex predators eat other animals. When's the Nobel awarded?
One impressive thing is the ability to deny history. Despite the evidence that wolves used to eat quite a lot of stuff, there is a whole pile of people saying that they won't touch livestock. They will. The only question is, how much.
Some years ago, a guide chap in Africa told me of the time he took some scientists from the US around Tsavo. They told him that all the stories about lions (and the Tsavo lions especially) were nonsense. They rather ridiculed his building fires etc around their camp site, the first night. None of them had been to Africa before.
In the morning, he showed them the spoor from the lions having walked around the perimeter of the camp.
That is a truly terrible state of affairs. It should not be how MPs have to manage their work.
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).
Don't count on it. Anglesey last unseated a sitting MP in 1950.
Yeah, but the previous sitting lady MP was unseated (and against the run of play).
Hardly. She was one of four, almost half, of Liberal MPs who were defeated in 1951 (my mistake on the year). In fact, the swing against her was considerably less than the swing that unseated her neighbour in Merioneth.
(Had there been a Tory candidate in Carmarthen they might well have lost that too. It was a terrible year for the Liberals.)
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 PM is reliant on a functioning A&E service like the rest of us. I wonder what would actually happen if he had a heart attack today. Would A&E staff permit him to jump the queue, or leave him to work his way up from the back?
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.
Thought of ToryBoy having a union rep, let alone speaking to them, brightened up a rather drab afternoon.
"China criticises other countries for ‘excessive’ Covid travel rules
Beijing has criticised recently imposed testing requirements on passengers from China and threatened countermeasures against countries involved.
“We believe that the entry restrictions adopted by some countries targeting China lack scientific basis, and some excessive practices are even more unacceptable,” foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a briefing."
I really hope that's being said with some sense of self awareness and irony.
EXCL: Yet another sign of the pressure in the NHS, as leaked email says from today London Ambulance Service crews will only wait 45 mins at hospitals before handing over patients.
Email has been cascaded down by the NHS to London hospitals. It does make clear that critical patients will still be looked after until a nurse is available, but this is a clear departure from the policy of ambulance crews essentially having to wait as long as it takes.
All relates of course to the crisis in the ambulance service, with crews stuck waiting to hand over patients because hospitals are full. Means they can’t then answer further 999 calls, leading to long wait times for an ambulance, as we exposed in July.
As a complete layman that sounds very sensible. Not sure how routinely stacking ambulances and paramedics outside for 10 hours plus a visit can make any sense?
it comes back to a comment from an earlier thread.
A queue only works when you can remove people from the front of it.
The current situation is that ambulances bring patients and wait until they can be seen by the hospital. This suggests they will now bring even more patients meaning the queue will grow even longer
The patients exist whether they are at the hospital or not so the queue is only growing longer in the sense they are now being counted but not in a real sense
The queue only exists because the queue is for access to A&E which is full because hospital beds are full of patients who could be released if Social care was able to provide the support they needed on release from hospital.
So we have a relatively inexpensive resource (social care) forcing hospitals to keep releasable patients in more epensive hospital beds which a knock of effect firstly to A&E (again more expensive than a hospital bed) and then to ambulances (even more expensive than A&E).
And the end result of all that is we have 12,000 releasable patients blocking 12, 000 hospital beds resulting in 1,000s waiting hours sat in ambulances resulting in 3-500 people every week dying due to ambulances being unable to answer new calls.
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 PM is reliant on a functioning A&E service like the rest of us. I wonder what would actually happen if he had a heart attack today. Would A&E staff permit him to jump the queue, or leave him to work his way up from the back?
It would be a difficult dilemma: “you have a choice prime minister: your physical health or your political survival”
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.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
"China criticises other countries for ‘excessive’ Covid travel rules
Beijing has criticised recently imposed testing requirements on passengers from China and threatened countermeasures against countries involved.
“We believe that the entry restrictions adopted by some countries targeting China lack scientific basis, and some excessive practices are even more unacceptable,” foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a briefing."
I really hope that's being said with some sense of self awareness and irony.
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.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Unless you are buying a couple of rather unique lego sets - other toy retailers are available and may use different firms.
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 had that. Assumed it was Covid as it was so bad. Cough lasted a full month.
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.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Unless you are buying a couple of rather unique lego sets - other toy retailers are available and may use different firms.
Sure - but you can't choose which courier they dispatch with. Which is the point - as recipients we are not the customer. Which is why the likes of DPD don't give a fuck.
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.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
One problem with demanding that all delivery companies cover the entire country is that there are quite a few companies that are small or local.
Saying that above metric X, you have to deliver nationally won't work either. Companies just below size X will have an advantage and national carriers would die out.....
EXCL: Yet another sign of the pressure in the NHS, as leaked email says from today London Ambulance Service crews will only wait 45 mins at hospitals before handing over patients.
Email has been cascaded down by the NHS to London hospitals. It does make clear that critical patients will still be looked after until a nurse is available, but this is a clear departure from the policy of ambulance crews essentially having to wait as long as it takes.
All relates of course to the crisis in the ambulance service, with crews stuck waiting to hand over patients because hospitals are full. Means they can’t then answer further 999 calls, leading to long wait times for an ambulance, as we exposed in July.
As a complete layman that sounds very sensible. Not sure how routinely stacking ambulances and paramedics outside for 10 hours plus a visit can make any sense?
it comes back to a comment from an earlier thread.
A queue only works when you can remove people from the front of it.
The current situation is that ambulances bring patients and wait until they can be seen by the hospital. This suggests they will now bring even more patients meaning the queue will grow even longer
The patients exist whether they are at the hospital or not so the queue is only growing longer in the sense they are now being counted but not in a real sense
The queue only exists because the queue is for access to A&E which is full because hospital beds are full of patients who could be released if Social care was able to provide the support they needed on release from hospital.
So we have a relatively inexpensive resource (social care) forcing hospitals to keep releasable patients in more epensive hospital beds which a knock of effect firstly to A&E (again more expensive than a hospital bed) and then to ambulances (even more expensive than A&E).
And the end result of all that is we have 12,000 releasable patients blocking 12, 000 hospital beds resulting in 1,000s waiting hours sat in ambulances resulting in 3-500 people every week dying due to ambulances being unable to answer new calls.
As an aside which might affect things at the margins but not the large scale, it can be unexpectedly difficult to escape from hospital. I've been earbashed with several accounts of patients being told they can go home in the morning (or afternoon) but having to wait hours and occasionally a day before the (low priority but very important) paperwork is done.
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.
You can do that in the private sector as well with a doctors note
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.
I’d love to see a focus group of the public on who thinks it’s 7,500 new doctors qualifying each year vs 7,500 spread across all training years. I’d expect the former to win by some margin.
It’s classic politics. It’s not a lie, but is phrased to sound far more than it actually is.
"China criticises other countries for ‘excessive’ Covid travel rules
Beijing has criticised recently imposed testing requirements on passengers from China and threatened countermeasures against countries involved.
“We believe that the entry restrictions adopted by some countries targeting China lack scientific basis, and some excessive practices are even more unacceptable,” foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a briefing."
I really hope that's being said with some sense of self awareness and irony.
Oceania had always been at war with eastasia
more
Captain Darling: So you see, Blackadder, Field Marshall Haig is most anxious to eliminate all these German spies.
General Melchett: Filthy hun weasels, fighting their dirty underhand war!
Captain Darling: And fortunately, one of our spies...
General Melchett: Splendid fellows, brave heroes risking life and limb for Blighty!
"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."
So we have scientific proof that apex predators eat other animals. When's the Nobel awarded?
One impressive thing is the ability to deny history. Despite the evidence that wolves used to eat quite a lot of stuff, there is a whole pile of people saying that they won't touch livestock. They will. The only question is, how much.
Some years ago, a guide chap in Africa told me of the time he took some scientists from the US around Tsavo. They told him that all the stories about lions (and the Tsavo lions especially) were nonsense. They rather ridiculed his building fires etc around their camp site, the first night. None of them had been to Africa before.
In the morning, he showed them the spoor from the lions having walked around the perimeter of the camp.
I was really having a pop at Politico's reporting.
Their tweet suggested the wolf was only being targeted because it had the temerity to kill UVdL's pet pony ("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.")
Whereas, the wolf was already on the 'kill list' for previous offences instances of doing what wolves do.
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.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
One problem with demanding that all delivery companies cover the entire country is that there are quite a few companies that are small or local.
Saying that above metric X, you have to deliver nationally won't work either. Companies just below size X will have an advantage and national carriers would die out.....
Regional courier firms are alive and well, mainly operating in the specialist B2B space. Its the big global operators that are the problem.
Incidentally, have spoken to drivers for several of the companies when they drop off. Although the H&I premium for up here is 2-3x standard delivery fees, the drivers aren't paid any more for deliveries here than they are across the border in the "mainland". Like mainland drivers they go to the same depot at the same time and fill up their vehicle for drops. So the extra cash charged is profit.
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.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
I managed to get through to them on the 0121 number twice - both times for the same parcel. First time the guy in the call centre couldn't have been more helpful - got in touch with the local depot and about an hour later the depot manager called me up to arrange a re-delivery. Second time - *about the redelivery not showing up* - the call centre person refused point blank to do anything at all. Said it was impossibly to contact the local depot, even when I explained that's what had happened just days before - nope it was up to me to contact the seller and sort it all out.
Parcel arrived unannounced the next day via DPD - along with a replacement parcel from the seller that came via Evri. Luckily it was something consumable so I didn't need to arrange a return - but it's just hassle all round.
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.
I’d love to see a focus group of the public on who thinks it’s 7,500 new doctors qualifying each year vs 7,500 spread across all training years. I’d expect the former to win by some margin.
It’s classic politics. It’s not a lie, but is phrased to sound far more than it actually is.
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.
I’d love to see a focus group of the public on who thinks it’s 7,500 new doctors qualifying each year vs 7,500 spread across all training years. I’d expect the former to win by some margin.
It’s classic politics. It’s not a lie, but is phrased to sound far more than it actually is.
And the former would be correct. Labour are proposing doubling the number who graduate each year from approx 7.5k to 15k.
"‘More than that: We will implement the biggest expansion of medical school places in British history doubling the number of medical students so our NHS has doctors it needs.’"
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.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That is a truly terrible state of affairs. It should not be how MPs have to manage their work.
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).
Don't count on it. Anglesey last unseated a sitting MP in 1950.
Yeah, but the previous sitting lady MP was unseated (and against the run of play).
Hardly. She was one of four, almost half, of Liberal MPs who were defeated in 1951 (my mistake on the year). In fact, the swing against her was considerably less than the swing that unseated her neighbour in Merioneth.
(Had there been a Tory candidate in Carmarthen they might well have lost that too. It was a terrible year for the Liberals.)
I was thinking more against the run of play in that Cled won for Labour in a year where Labour were eviscerated elsewhere.
My political history tends to focus on the Labour perspective rather than the other runners and riders. That said I am far less Labour-centred than I used to be. Perhaps I am being sucked in to PB posters constant ramping of how bad Labour are in government and opposition and how fantastic the Conservatives in government are. I am not quite there yet, but getting there.
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.
I’d love to see a focus group of the public on who thinks it’s 7,500 new doctors qualifying each year vs 7,500 spread across all training years. I’d expect the former to win by some margin.
It’s classic politics. It’s not a lie, but is phrased to sound far more than it actually is.
And the former would be correct. Labour are proposing doubling the number who graduate each year from approx 7.5k to 15k.
"‘More than that: We will implement the biggest expansion of medical school places in British history doubling the number of medical students so our NHS has doctors it needs.’"
They're going to be required to staff all those new hospitals Boris is building.
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.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
I managed to get through to them on the 0121 number twice - both times for the same parcel. First time the guy in the call centre couldn't have been more helpful - got in touch with the local depot and about an hour later the depot manager called me up to arrange a re-delivery. Second time - *about the redelivery not showing up* - the call centre person refused point blank to do anything at all. Said it was impossibly to contact the local depot, even when I explained that's what had happened just days before - nope it was up to me to contact the seller and sort it all out.
Parcel arrived unannounced the next day via DPD - along with a replacement parcel from the seller that came via Evri. Luckily it was something consumable so I didn't need to arrange a return - but it's just hassle all round.
Have also heard about an actual person answering the 0121 number. For me with an actual delivery in the system it refused to go anywhere at all other than automated messages before hanging itself up.
Have seen online comments that the published 0121 number is now automated only, with the one with actual humans now a hidden number not listed on websites...
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 had that. Assumed it was Covid as it was so bad. Cough lasted a full month.
So many people have it right now. Did you test out of interest? If so why; if not why not? And did you modify your behaviour?
EXCL: Yet another sign of the pressure in the NHS, as leaked email says from today London Ambulance Service crews will only wait 45 mins at hospitals before handing over patients.
Email has been cascaded down by the NHS to London hospitals. It does make clear that critical patients will still be looked after until a nurse is available, but this is a clear departure from the policy of ambulance crews essentially having to wait as long as it takes.
All relates of course to the crisis in the ambulance service, with crews stuck waiting to hand over patients because hospitals are full. Means they can’t then answer further 999 calls, leading to long wait times for an ambulance, as we exposed in July.
As a complete layman that sounds very sensible. Not sure how routinely stacking ambulances and paramedics outside for 10 hours plus a visit can make any sense?
it comes back to a comment from an earlier thread.
A queue only works when you can remove people from the front of it.
The current situation is that ambulances bring patients and wait until they can be seen by the hospital. This suggests they will now bring even more patients meaning the queue will grow even longer
The patients exist whether they are at the hospital or not so the queue is only growing longer in the sense they are now being counted but not in a real sense
The queue only exists because the queue is for access to A&E which is full because hospital beds are full of patients who could be released if Social care was able to provide the support they needed on release from hospital.
So we have a relatively inexpensive resource (social care) forcing hospitals to keep releasable patients in more epensive hospital beds which a knock of effect firstly to A&E (again more expensive than a hospital bed) and then to ambulances (even more expensive than A&E).
And the end result of all that is we have 12,000 releasable patients blocking 12, 000 hospital beds resulting in 1,000s waiting hours sat in ambulances resulting in 3-500 people every week dying due to ambulances being unable to answer new calls.
As an aside which might affect things at the margins but not the large scale, it can be unexpectedly difficult to escape from hospital. I've been earbashed with several accounts of patients being told they can go home in the morning (or afternoon) but having to wait hours and occasionally a day before the (low priority but very important) paperwork is done.
Yep. My wife got the clear to go home at 11 on Christmas Eve, but we were waiting on some medication for a further 3.5 hours. A minor delay, but very frustrating.
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.
Try 03442414141.
Got through to them fine earlier on today.
Thanks for all Sky suggestions, would have ticked them off but TSE's number did the trick, slightly better package for £30 a month less. Seems crazy that a company as big as Sky has a non operational telephone number on their own website.
The NHS crisis obviously isn't affecting any BBC journalists yet. Just looked over on the new homepage and the top stories are:
Teen faced terror charges despite evidence of grooming Four in five trains cancelled in rail strike Pele's funeral British couple killed in Australian helicopter crash Wearing a mask if ill is sensible advice Snow shortage threatens Alps with wet winter season Timings of £900 cost of living payments announced MP wears stab vest 44 migrants reach UK in first 2023 crossing Palestinian rage at Israel minister holy site visit Russia plans prolonged drone attacks - Zelenskyy NFL player in critical condition after cardiac arrest De la Soul catalogue finally available for streaming
So, according to the BBC newsdesk the most important cardiac arrest news today is about someone in the USA who plays American Football, and the crisis that we've all been talking about this morning is not in the 13 most important stories (and I've not been selective, scrolling down right to the bottom there is not a single related story on the entire home page).
Sky News is the same.
It's either an odd omission, or this story has far less salience than we or Twitter think. Or the hive mind of the journo world has decided it's not a Tuesday story and is saving it for later in the week.
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
Only skimmed the article but it seems the dispute is that Spain is insisting it gets to do passport checks at Gibraltar airport while the UK has suggested the EU agency (Frontex) does it.
Given the sensitivity about Spanish involvement in Gibraltar, Frontex doesn’t seem an unreasonable compromise to me
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.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It will soon be cruel to unleash human doctors on humans, because the human doctors will be much WORSE than AI doctors - as well as much more expensive, slow, cumbersome, prone to tiredness etc
It will be like asking a human to carry you 5 miles down a road when there’s a bike or taxi waiting
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.
I’d love to see a focus group of the public on who thinks it’s 7,500 new doctors qualifying each year vs 7,500 spread across all training years. I’d expect the former to win by some margin.
It’s classic politics. It’s not a lie, but is phrased to sound far more than it actually is.
And the former would be correct. Labour are proposing doubling the number who graduate each year from approx 7.5k to 15k.
"‘More than that: We will implement the biggest expansion of medical school places in British history doubling the number of medical students so our NHS has doctors it needs.’"
So those arguing it didn’t mean that are wrong? Classic.
So, back to my original question - who does the training? That’s not going to be easy, but I applaud the ambition. It will have knock on effects on pharmacy recruitment I fear (we often get ‘failed’ medics).
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.
So you're okay with some people having a lot more wealth than others as long as they're not allowed to spend it on anything you deem important?
That seems rather contorted logic.
The thing with the hypocrisy angle is that it suggests you're okay with rampant inequality as long as the rich have a rota system where they put up a few sacrificial lambs to pretend they're normal people for a few years.
It's all appearances and no substance. It's very English - the prostitution laws are constructed on the same basis - but it is always a bit provoking when people seem a bit more concerned with how things look than with how things are.
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.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
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.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
EXCL: Yet another sign of the pressure in the NHS, as leaked email says from today London Ambulance Service crews will only wait 45 mins at hospitals before handing over patients.
Email has been cascaded down by the NHS to London hospitals. It does make clear that critical patients will still be looked after until a nurse is available, but this is a clear departure from the policy of ambulance crews essentially having to wait as long as it takes.
All relates of course to the crisis in the ambulance service, with crews stuck waiting to hand over patients because hospitals are full. Means they can’t then answer further 999 calls, leading to long wait times for an ambulance, as we exposed in July.
As a complete layman that sounds very sensible. Not sure how routinely stacking ambulances and paramedics outside for 10 hours plus a visit can make any sense?
it comes back to a comment from an earlier thread.
A queue only works when you can remove people from the front of it.
The current situation is that ambulances bring patients and wait until they can be seen by the hospital. This suggests they will now bring even more patients meaning the queue will grow even longer
The patients exist whether they are at the hospital or not so the queue is only growing longer in the sense they are now being counted but not in a real sense
The queue only exists because the queue is for access to A&E which is full because hospital beds are full of patients who could be released if Social care was able to provide the support they needed on release from hospital.
So we have a relatively inexpensive resource (social care) forcing hospitals to keep releasable patients in more epensive hospital beds which a knock of effect firstly to A&E (again more expensive than a hospital bed) and then to ambulances (even more expensive than A&E).
And the end result of all that is we have 12,000 releasable patients blocking 12, 000 hospital beds resulting in 1,000s waiting hours sat in ambulances resulting in 3-500 people every week dying due to ambulances being unable to answer new calls.
It’s also to do with the flow in - there would be effective triage plus a functioning out of hours GP service. A&E should be for what it says on the tin.
But I wasn’t really commenting on that, more highlighting that patients suffering before they reach A&E is not a good thing - Scott was ignoring 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.
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 had that. Assumed it was Covid as it was so bad. Cough lasted a full month.
I had that too - three days to shake it off. Nasty cough. A shock to the system for me - first cold for ten years I reckon. No sympathy from Mrs Stocky.
In a sign of the times the restaurant where Sunak worked as a teenager, for a friend of his dad's, has gone bust. Pity as they used to do a great buffet, and handy for the Red Funnel. A bad omen?
EXCL: Yet another sign of the pressure in the NHS, as leaked email says from today London Ambulance Service crews will only wait 45 mins at hospitals before handing over patients.
Email has been cascaded down by the NHS to London hospitals. It does make clear that critical patients will still be looked after until a nurse is available, but this is a clear departure from the policy of ambulance crews essentially having to wait as long as it takes.
All relates of course to the crisis in the ambulance service, with crews stuck waiting to hand over patients because hospitals are full. Means they can’t then answer further 999 calls, leading to long wait times for an ambulance, as we exposed in July.
As a complete layman that sounds very sensible. Not sure how routinely stacking ambulances and paramedics outside for 10 hours plus a visit can make any sense?
it comes back to a comment from an earlier thread.
A queue only works when you can remove people from the front of it.
The current situation is that ambulances bring patients and wait until they can be seen by the hospital. This suggests they will now bring even more patients meaning the queue will grow even longer
The patients exist whether they are at the hospital or not so the queue is only growing longer in the sense they are now being counted but not in a real sense
The queue only exists because the queue is for access to A&E which is full because hospital beds are full of patients who could be released if Social care was able to provide the support they needed on release from hospital.
So we have a relatively inexpensive resource (social care) forcing hospitals to keep releasable patients in more epensive hospital beds which a knock of effect firstly to A&E (again more expensive than a hospital bed) and then to ambulances (even more expensive than A&E).
And the end result of all that is we have 12,000 releasable patients blocking 12, 000 hospital beds resulting in 1,000s waiting hours sat in ambulances resulting in 3-500 people every week dying due to ambulances being unable to answer new calls.
As an aside which might affect things at the margins but not the large scale, it can be unexpectedly difficult to escape from hospital. I've been earbashed with several accounts of patients being told they can go home in the morning (or afternoon) but having to wait hours and occasionally a day before the (low priority but very important) paperwork is done.
I’m told that some hospitals have implemented “reverse waiting rooms” for precisely this reason - you get to sit in a nice room with tea & biscuits on demand whilst everything gets lined up. There’s a nurse there in case anyone needs extra care, or more serious attention. This frees up those beds that morning instead of later in the day & at this level of NHS over-crowding, those bed-hours really matter.
The NHS crisis obviously isn't affecting any BBC journalists yet. Just looked over on the new homepage and the top stories are:
Teen faced terror charges despite evidence of grooming Four in five trains cancelled in rail strike Pele's funeral British couple killed in Australian helicopter crash Wearing a mask if ill is sensible advice Snow shortage threatens Alps with wet winter season Timings of £900 cost of living payments announced MP wears stab vest 44 migrants reach UK in first 2023 crossing Palestinian rage at Israel minister holy site visit Russia plans prolonged drone attacks - Zelenskyy NFL player in critical condition after cardiac arrest De la Soul catalogue finally available for streaming
So, according to the BBC newsdesk the most important cardiac arrest news today is about someone in the USA who plays American Football, and the crisis that we've all been talking about this morning is not in the 13 most important stories (and I've not been selective, scrolling down right to the bottom there is not a single related story on the entire home page).
Sky News is the same.
It's either an odd omission, or this story has far less salience than we or Twitter think. Or the hive mind of the journo world has decided it's not a Tuesday story and is saving it for later in the week.
BBC news is a cowed puppy whimpering in the corner in the sure belief that its master will kick it again if it speaks out. They’ll cover it when everyone else does & not before.
Which means, given today’s newspaper front pages, you can expect BBC explainers & coverage later in the week.
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 had that. Assumed it was Covid as it was so bad. Cough lasted a full month.
So many people have it right now. Did you test out of interest? If so why; if not why not? And did you modify your behaviour?
I thought I had a head cold. I get those - right in the Sinus. You take pills and carry on. But it didn't clear properly and had a 2nd peak. Then left this horrible cough. By that stage I did consider testing, but as NHS Scotland said "do not test" I didn't see the point.
It modified my behaviour as any other 'orrible bug would do. Keep working unless absolutely unable to get out of bed.
@emmafildes 2 year ban on foreign investors buying property in Canada becomes law in areas where the core population is greater than 10,000 people in an attempt to curb rising House prices in metropolitan areas
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.
Try 03442414141.
Got through to them fine earlier on today.
Thanks for all Sky suggestions, would have ticked them off but TSE's number did the trick, slightly better package for £30 a month less. Seems crazy that a company as big as Sky has a non operational telephone number on their own website.
About 6 years ago EE had no other contact number on their website but 150, which you dialled from your mobile.
It was impossible to call if you had lost your mobile and wanted to report it lost and make a claim.
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.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
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.
I’d love to see a focus group of the public on who thinks it’s 7,500 new doctors qualifying each year vs 7,500 spread across all training years. I’d expect the former to win by some margin.
It’s classic politics. It’s not a lie, but is phrased to sound far more than it actually is.
And the former would be correct. Labour are proposing doubling the number who graduate each year from approx 7.5k to 15k.
"‘More than that: We will implement the biggest expansion of medical school places in British history doubling the number of medical students so our NHS has doctors it needs.’"
There should be no shortage of applicants good enough to become doctors even with double the places.
Our neighbour's daughter applied for medicine, got A*AA at A-Level, and didn't get a place.
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.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Unless you are buying a couple of rather unique lego sets - other toy retailers are available and may use different firms.
Sure - but you can't choose which courier they dispatch with. Which is the point - as recipients we are not the customer. Which is why the likes of DPD don't give a fuck.
I've tried to make the effort to complain to the retailer when there's been a problem with the delivery company they've chosen and made the point that I'm less likely to buy from them as a result, but it does make me wonder whether a law that required online retailers to provide a choice of delivery company would be worthwhile.
If I had the choice of paying £x for delivery with Evri, or £x+y for delivery with anyone else, then I'd like to be able to exercise that choice.
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.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
I prefer Portugese wine nowadays
Portugal is making some really nice, good value wines. Whites on the Alentejano coast, for instant. Lush
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 had that. Assumed it was Covid as it was so bad. Cough lasted a full month.
So many people have it right now. Did you test out of interest? If so why; if not why not? And did you modify your behaviour?
I thought I had a head cold. I get those - right in the Sinus. You take pills and carry on. But it didn't clear properly and had a 2nd peak. Then left this horrible cough. By that stage I did consider testing, but as NHS Scotland said "do not test" I didn't see the point.
It modified my behaviour as any other 'orrible bug would do. Keep working unless absolutely unable to get out of bed.
Interesting thanks. NHS Scotland said do not test I wonder why. Did you socialise or workalise?
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.
EXCL: Yet another sign of the pressure in the NHS, as leaked email says from today London Ambulance Service crews will only wait 45 mins at hospitals before handing over patients.
Email has been cascaded down by the NHS to London hospitals. It does make clear that critical patients will still be looked after until a nurse is available, but this is a clear departure from the policy of ambulance crews essentially having to wait as long as it takes.
All relates of course to the crisis in the ambulance service, with crews stuck waiting to hand over patients because hospitals are full. Means they can’t then answer further 999 calls, leading to long wait times for an ambulance, as we exposed in July.
As a complete layman that sounds very sensible. Not sure how routinely stacking ambulances and paramedics outside for 10 hours plus a visit can make any sense?
it comes back to a comment from an earlier thread.
A queue only works when you can remove people from the front of it.
The current situation is that ambulances bring patients and wait until they can be seen by the hospital. This suggests they will now bring even more patients meaning the queue will grow even longer
The patients exist whether they are at the hospital or not so the queue is only growing longer in the sense they are now being counted but not in a real sense
The queue only exists because the queue is for access to A&E which is full because hospital beds are full of patients who could be released if Social care was able to provide the support they needed on release from hospital.
So we have a relatively inexpensive resource (social care) forcing hospitals to keep releasable patients in more epensive hospital beds which a knock of effect firstly to A&E (again more expensive than a hospital bed) and then to ambulances (even more expensive than A&E).
And the end result of all that is we have 12,000 releasable patients blocking 12, 000 hospital beds resulting in 1,000s waiting hours sat in ambulances resulting in 3-500 people every week dying due to ambulances being unable to answer new calls.
As an aside which might affect things at the margins but not the large scale, it can be unexpectedly difficult to escape from hospital. I've been earbashed with several accounts of patients being told they can go home in the morning (or afternoon) but having to wait hours and occasionally a day before the (low priority but very important) paperwork is done.
I’m told that some hospitals have implemented “reverse waiting rooms” for precisely this reason - you get to sit in a nice room with tea & biscuits on demand whilst everything gets lined up. There’s a nurse there in case anyone needs extra care, or more serious attention. This frees up those beds that morning instead of later in the day & at this level of NHS over-crowding, those bed-hours really matter.
Yes I heard that too I think it was on R4 Today the other day. "Departure Lounges" (or something less, er, inappropriate in a hospital) and yes apparently freed up plenty of beds.
Who hasn't been in a hospital on a Friday morning waiting for the prescriptions and discharge letter to come through and knowing that if it doesn't happen by midday you're in there for the weekend.
Under Labour, under the Conservatives. It's the way the NHS does things.
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.
I’d love to see a focus group of the public on who thinks it’s 7,500 new doctors qualifying each year vs 7,500 spread across all training years. I’d expect the former to win by some margin.
It’s classic politics. It’s not a lie, but is phrased to sound far more than it actually is.
And the former would be correct. Labour are proposing doubling the number who graduate each year from approx 7.5k to 15k.
"‘More than that: We will implement the biggest expansion of medical school places in British history doubling the number of medical students so our NHS has doctors it needs.’"
So those arguing it didn’t mean that are wrong? Classic.
So, back to my original question - who does the training? That’s not going to be easy, but I applaud the ambition. It will have knock on effects on pharmacy recruitment I fear (we often get ‘failed’ medics).
To be fair those calling out Labour dissembling were at least equally wrong....
It will soon be cruel to unleash human doctors on humans, because the human doctors will be much WORSE than AI doctors - as well as much more expensive, slow, cumbersome, prone to tiredness etc
It will be like asking a human to carry you 5 miles down a road when there’s a bike or taxi waiting
Please let us know how your AI prostate examination goes...
The NHS crisis obviously isn't affecting any BBC journalists yet. Just looked over on the new homepage and the top stories are:
Teen faced terror charges despite evidence of grooming Four in five trains cancelled in rail strike Pele's funeral British couple killed in Australian helicopter crash Wearing a mask if ill is sensible advice Snow shortage threatens Alps with wet winter season Timings of £900 cost of living payments announced MP wears stab vest 44 migrants reach UK in first 2023 crossing Palestinian rage at Israel minister holy site visit Russia plans prolonged drone attacks - Zelenskyy NFL player in critical condition after cardiac arrest De la Soul catalogue finally available for streaming
So, according to the BBC newsdesk the most important cardiac arrest news today is about someone in the USA who plays American Football, and the crisis that we've all been talking about this morning is not in the 13 most important stories (and I've not been selective, scrolling down right to the bottom there is not a single related story on the entire home page).
Sky News is the same.
It's either an odd omission, or this story has far less salience than we or Twitter think. Or the hive mind of the journo world has decided it's not a Tuesday story and is saving it for later in the week.
BBC news is a cowed puppy whimpering in the corner in the sure belief that its master will kick it again if it speaks out. They’ll cover it when everyone else does & not before.
Which means, given today’s newspaper front pages, you can expect BBC explainers & coverage later in the week.
Is it bollocks. Listen to Today and they give everyone a hard time as much as is possible consistent with actually letting the interviewee speak (listen to Nick Robinson this morning with Mark Harper).
The NHS crisis obviously isn't affecting any BBC journalists yet. Just looked over on the new homepage and the top stories are:
Teen faced terror charges despite evidence of grooming Four in five trains cancelled in rail strike Pele's funeral British couple killed in Australian helicopter crash Wearing a mask if ill is sensible advice Snow shortage threatens Alps with wet winter season Timings of £900 cost of living payments announced MP wears stab vest 44 migrants reach UK in first 2023 crossing Palestinian rage at Israel minister holy site visit Russia plans prolonged drone attacks - Zelenskyy NFL player in critical condition after cardiac arrest De la Soul catalogue finally available for streaming
So, according to the BBC newsdesk the most important cardiac arrest news today is about someone in the USA who plays American Football, and the crisis that we've all been talking about this morning is not in the 13 most important stories (and I've not been selective, scrolling down right to the bottom there is not a single related story on the entire home page).
Sky News is the same.
It's either an odd omission, or this story has far less salience than we or Twitter think. Or the hive mind of the journo world has decided it's not a Tuesday story and is saving it for later in the week.
BBC news is a cowed puppy whimpering in the corner in the sure belief that its master will kick it again if it speaks out. They’ll cover it when everyone else does & not before.
Which means, given today’s newspaper front pages, you can expect BBC explainers & coverage later in the week.
Is it bollocks. Listen to Today and they give everyone a hard time as much as is possible consistent with actually letting the interviewee speak (listen to Nick Robinson this morning with Mark Harper).
My perception is that they’ve completely backed away from the kind of investigative journalism they used to do. Will Nick Robinson ask whoever is in front of him difficult questions? Sure (and thankfully so), but the BBC isn’t out there digging up the dirt, they’re reliant on other media sources to provide them cover for dragging in whichever minister draws the short straw & gets to sit in front of NR that morning.
Am I mistaken? Perhaps I’m missing out on the challenging journalistic work the BBC is doing somehow?
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 had that. Assumed it was Covid as it was so bad. Cough lasted a full month.
So many people have it right now. Did you test out of interest? If so why; if not why not? And did you modify your behaviour?
I thought I had a head cold. I get those - right in the Sinus. You take pills and carry on. But it didn't clear properly and had a 2nd peak. Then left this horrible cough. By that stage I did consider testing, but as NHS Scotland said "do not test" I didn't see the point.
It modified my behaviour as any other 'orrible bug would do. Keep working unless absolutely unable to get out of bed.
Interesting thanks. NHS Scotland said do not test I wonder why. Did you socialise or workalise?
Not testing has been NHS policy across the UK for quite a while, with exceptions for certain groups. As they don't officially care about Covid numbers why bother to test?
Yes, I continued to travel as normal barring the brief spell where I felt dreadful. As I would for a head cold or similar.
I know the point is more about political optics, than actual accounting, but the numbers do matter. The NHS got their £350m/week.
Irrelevant. The NHS getting something is just us reallocating existing money, unless as represented it is a net gain from Brexit. Bribing us with our own money.
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 doesn't seem a question that needs to be avoided. Something like:
"Our family are lucky to have private healthcare but the NHS is world class and can be better than private healthcare in an emergency regardless. We are working hard to get the NHS back to its normal capacity and service as quickly as possible after the disruptions caused by Covid and thank all those working in it."
Now of course a lot of that isn't wholly true, especially in the current time, and it doesn't properly answer the question, but its a non controversial answer that seems straightforward for a politician to give and doesn't lead to it becoming a story.
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.
That number is automated. And then they redirect you to their app. Where you have done everything you have been asked to yet your wazzock local driver still tries to deliver parcels to the wrong village.
Not when I've called it, I've always been able to get through to a person. I think the last time was back in August when I was away and I had to get them to bollock a driver for blocking me in, so I guess it might have changed since then.
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.
I’d love to see a focus group of the public on who thinks it’s 7,500 new doctors qualifying each year vs 7,500 spread across all training years. I’d expect the former to win by some margin.
It’s classic politics. It’s not a lie, but is phrased to sound far more than it actually is.
And the former would be correct. Labour are proposing doubling the number who graduate each year from approx 7.5k to 15k.
"‘More than that: We will implement the biggest expansion of medical school places in British history doubling the number of medical students so our NHS has doctors it needs.’"
There should be no shortage of applicants good enough to become doctors even with double the places.
Our neighbour's daughter applied for medicine, got A*AA at A-Level, and didn't get a place.
Utterly crackers that there's no place with those grades.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
The NHS crisis obviously isn't affecting any BBC journalists yet. Just looked over on the new homepage and the top stories are:
Teen faced terror charges despite evidence of grooming Four in five trains cancelled in rail strike Pele's funeral British couple killed in Australian helicopter crash Wearing a mask if ill is sensible advice Snow shortage threatens Alps with wet winter season Timings of £900 cost of living payments announced MP wears stab vest 44 migrants reach UK in first 2023 crossing Palestinian rage at Israel minister holy site visit Russia plans prolonged drone attacks - Zelenskyy NFL player in critical condition after cardiac arrest De la Soul catalogue finally available for streaming
So, according to the BBC newsdesk the most important cardiac arrest news today is about someone in the USA who plays American Football, and the crisis that we've all been talking about this morning is not in the 13 most important stories (and I've not been selective, scrolling down right to the bottom there is not a single related story on the entire home page).
Sky News is the same.
It's either an odd omission, or this story has far less salience than we or Twitter think. Or the hive mind of the journo world has decided it's not a Tuesday story and is saving it for later in the week.
BBC news is a cowed puppy whimpering in the corner in the sure belief that its master will kick it again if it speaks out. They’ll cover it when everyone else does & not before.
Which means, given today’s newspaper front pages, you can expect BBC explainers & coverage later in the week.
Is it bollocks. Listen to Today and they give everyone a hard time as much as is possible consistent with actually letting the interviewee speak (listen to Nick Robinson this morning with Mark Harper).
My perception is that they’ve completely backed away from the kind of investigative journalism they used to do. Will Nick Robinson ask whoever is in front of him difficult questions? Sure (and thankfully so), but the BBC isn’t out there digging up the dirt, they’re reliant on other media sources to provide them cover for dragging in whichever minister draws the short straw & gets to sit in front of NR that morning.
Am I mistaken? Perhaps I’m missing out on the challenging journalistic work the BBC is doing somehow?
When did the BBC ever do lots of investigative journalism?
It was the Telegraph who had the expenses story, the Guardian had cash for questions, was it the Times who did Thalidomide?
It's always been the case that the BBC have followed the agenda set by the newspapers, which is one reason the newspapers continue to have so much influence even as their print circulation dwindles, and why accusations of BBC news bias are always wide of the mark.
That is a truly terrible state of affairs. It should not be how MPs have to manage their work.
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).
Don't count on it. Anglesey last unseated a sitting MP in 1950.
Yeah, but the previous sitting lady MP was unseated (and against the run of play).
Hardly. She was one of four, almost half, of Liberal MPs who were defeated in 1951 (my mistake on the year). In fact, the swing against her was considerably less than the swing that unseated her neighbour in Merioneth.
(Had there been a Tory candidate in Carmarthen they might well have lost that too. It was a terrible year for the Liberals.)
I was thinking more against the run of play in that Cled won for Labour in a year where Labour were eviscerated elsewhere.
My political history tends to focus on the Labour perspective rather than the other runners and riders. That said I am far less Labour-centred than I used to be. Perhaps I am being sucked in to PB posters constant ramping of how bad Labour are in government and opposition and how fantastic the Conservatives in government are. I am not quite there yet, but getting there.
Well, again, they were hardly eviscerated. They won their highest ever share of the popular vote and lost 22 seats while picking two up (Anglesey and Merioneth). Had the Liberals actually stood more candidates (they went from 475 and 9% of the vote to 109 and 2.5% of the vote) Labour might still have clung on to power. In the absence of Liberal candidates two-thirds of their voters went Conservative which was crucial in flipping those 21 seats.
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.
I’d love to see a focus group of the public on who thinks it’s 7,500 new doctors qualifying each year vs 7,500 spread across all training years. I’d expect the former to win by some margin.
It’s classic politics. It’s not a lie, but is phrased to sound far more than it actually is.
And the former would be correct. Labour are proposing doubling the number who graduate each year from approx 7.5k to 15k.
"‘More than that: We will implement the biggest expansion of medical school places in British history doubling the number of medical students so our NHS has doctors it needs.’"
There should be no shortage of applicants good enough to become doctors even with double the places.
Our neighbour's daughter applied for medicine, got A*AA at A-Level, and didn't get a place.
She should apply to Leicester, we prefer post exam candidates. Some schools are very poor predictors, and in particular private schools over egg them.
Overall 75% of those applying for Medicine get in, albeit often not on their first go. We are finding out via the locked down kids whether there is scope for relaxing entry requirements, as many more got in that year than anticipated.
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.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Unless you are buying a couple of rather unique lego sets - other toy retailers are available and may use different firms.
Sure - but you can't choose which courier they dispatch with. Which is the point - as recipients we are not the customer. Which is why the likes of DPD don't give a fuck.
I've tried to make the effort to complain to the retailer when there's been a problem with the delivery company they've chosen and made the point that I'm less likely to buy from them as a result, but it does make me wonder whether a law that required online retailers to provide a choice of delivery company would be worthwhile.
If I had the choice of paying £x for delivery with Evri, or £x+y for delivery with anyone else, then I'd like to be able to exercise that choice.
I've stopped buying from a local-ish supplier as they insisted on using an atrocious courier. They'd send you an email saying 'We've got your package!'.. and then nothing. It would just arrive randomly. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in 10 days. Maybe 8am, maybe 9pm. And often - not at all.
I spoke to the supplier saying I was going to have to stop ordering (and offered to pay extra for a different option) but they just seemed to think it was par for the course courier-wise.
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.
I’d love to see a focus group of the public on who thinks it’s 7,500 new doctors qualifying each year vs 7,500 spread across all training years. I’d expect the former to win by some margin.
It’s classic politics. It’s not a lie, but is phrased to sound far more than it actually is.
And the former would be correct. Labour are proposing doubling the number who graduate each year from approx 7.5k to 15k.
"‘More than that: We will implement the biggest expansion of medical school places in British history doubling the number of medical students so our NHS has doctors it needs.’"
There should be no shortage of applicants good enough to become doctors even with double the places.
Our neighbour's daughter applied for medicine, got A*AA at A-Level, and didn't get a place.
To add insult to injury, many successful medical students will drop out for at least a year after being awarded their stethoscopes. Obviously this is nothing new, as famous past doctors have become Foreign Secretaries, writers and comedians, but it does seem to be more common nowadays. Either medical school interviews and personal statements are a load of pants and let in the wrong people, or there is something desperately wrong with foundation year training.
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 had that. Assumed it was Covid as it was so bad. Cough lasted a full month.
So many people have it right now. Did you test out of interest? If so why; if not why not? And did you modify your behaviour?
I thought I had a head cold. I get those - right in the Sinus. You take pills and carry on. But it didn't clear properly and had a 2nd peak. Then left this horrible cough. By that stage I did consider testing, but as NHS Scotland said "do not test" I didn't see the point.
It modified my behaviour as any other 'orrible bug would do. Keep working unless absolutely unable to get out of bed.
Interesting thanks. NHS Scotland said do not test I wonder why. Did you socialise or workalise?
Not testing has been NHS policy across the UK for quite a while, with exceptions for certain groups. As they don't officially care about Covid numbers why bother to test?
Yes, I continued to travel as normal barring the brief spell where I felt dreadful. As I would for a head cold or similar.
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.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
Retsina is undeniably the worst offender in that respect. Local firewaters and sweet liqueurs too. But sometimes it does travel. I've found some decent plonk on my travels in the areas of central-Eastern France around Macon, Chalon and Beaune and that tastes OK back at home.
The NHS crisis obviously isn't affecting any BBC journalists yet. Just looked over on the new homepage and the top stories are:
Teen faced terror charges despite evidence of grooming Four in five trains cancelled in rail strike Pele's funeral British couple killed in Australian helicopter crash Wearing a mask if ill is sensible advice Snow shortage threatens Alps with wet winter season Timings of £900 cost of living payments announced MP wears stab vest 44 migrants reach UK in first 2023 crossing Palestinian rage at Israel minister holy site visit Russia plans prolonged drone attacks - Zelenskyy NFL player in critical condition after cardiac arrest De la Soul catalogue finally available for streaming
So, according to the BBC newsdesk the most important cardiac arrest news today is about someone in the USA who plays American Football, and the crisis that we've all been talking about this morning is not in the 13 most important stories (and I've not been selective, scrolling down right to the bottom there is not a single related story on the entire home page).
Sky News is the same.
It's either an odd omission, or this story has far less salience than we or Twitter think. Or the hive mind of the journo world has decided it's not a Tuesday story and is saving it for later in the week.
BBC news is a cowed puppy whimpering in the corner in the sure belief that its master will kick it again if it speaks out. They’ll cover it when everyone else does & not before.
Which means, given today’s newspaper front pages, you can expect BBC explainers & coverage later in the week.
Is it bollocks. Listen to Today and they give everyone a hard time as much as is possible consistent with actually letting the interviewee speak (listen to Nick Robinson this morning with Mark Harper).
My perception is that they’ve completely backed away from the kind of investigative journalism they used to do. Will Nick Robinson ask whoever is in front of him difficult questions? Sure (and thankfully so), but the BBC isn’t out there digging up the dirt, they’re reliant on other media sources to provide them cover for dragging in whichever minister draws the short straw & gets to sit in front of NR that morning.
Am I mistaken? Perhaps I’m missing out on the challenging journalistic work the BBC is doing somehow?
When did the BBC ever do lots of investigative journalism?
It was the Telegraph who had the expenses story, the Guardian had cash for questions, was it the Times who did Thalidomide?
It's always been the case that the BBC have followed the agenda set by the newspapers, which is one reason the newspapers continue to have so much influence even as their print circulation dwindles, and why accusations of BBC news bias are always wide of the mark.
There is a subset of Panorama (as was)-type investigations and the odd piece which begins "the BBC has uncovered..." but yes, it is far less than it used to be with reporters out investigating various issues.
As for the "newspapers continue to have so much influence" that would be because people buy them.
The NHS crisis obviously isn't affecting any BBC journalists yet. Just looked over on the new homepage and the top stories are:
Teen faced terror charges despite evidence of grooming Four in five trains cancelled in rail strike Pele's funeral British couple killed in Australian helicopter crash Wearing a mask if ill is sensible advice Snow shortage threatens Alps with wet winter season Timings of £900 cost of living payments announced MP wears stab vest 44 migrants reach UK in first 2023 crossing Palestinian rage at Israel minister holy site visit Russia plans prolonged drone attacks - Zelenskyy NFL player in critical condition after cardiac arrest De la Soul catalogue finally available for streaming
So, according to the BBC newsdesk the most important cardiac arrest news today is about someone in the USA who plays American Football, and the crisis that we've all been talking about this morning is not in the 13 most important stories (and I've not been selective, scrolling down right to the bottom there is not a single related story on the entire home page).
Sky News is the same.
It's either an odd omission, or this story has far less salience than we or Twitter think. Or the hive mind of the journo world has decided it's not a Tuesday story and is saving it for later in the week.
BBC news is a cowed puppy whimpering in the corner in the sure belief that its master will kick it again if it speaks out. They’ll cover it when everyone else does & not before.
Which means, given today’s newspaper front pages, you can expect BBC explainers & coverage later in the week.
Is it bollocks. Listen to Today and they give everyone a hard time as much as is possible consistent with actually letting the interviewee speak (listen to Nick Robinson this morning with Mark Harper).
My perception is that they’ve completely backed away from the kind of investigative journalism they used to do. Will Nick Robinson ask whoever is in front of him difficult questions? Sure (and thankfully so), but the BBC isn’t out there digging up the dirt, they’re reliant on other media sources to provide them cover for dragging in whichever minister draws the short straw & gets to sit in front of NR that morning.
Am I mistaken? Perhaps I’m missing out on the challenging journalistic work the BBC is doing somehow?
When did the BBC ever do lots of investigative journalism?
It was the Telegraph who had the expenses story, the Guardian had cash for questions, was it the Times who did Thalidomide?
It's always been the case that the BBC have followed the agenda set by the newspapers, which is one reason the newspapers continue to have so much influence even as their print circulation dwindles, and why accusations of BBC news bias are always wide of the mark.
The do pretty good news analysis on occasion, though. "File on 4", for example.
Decent quality analysis of the nation's state, as opposed to 'news', is in pretty short supply in the media. Not as sexy, but just as important, if not more so.
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.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Ethiopian Lasagne was a bit of a revelation to me.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
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 doesn't seem a question that needs to be avoided. Something like:
"Our family are lucky to have private healthcare but the NHS is world class and can be better than private healthcare in an emergency regardless. We are working hard to get the NHS back to its normal capacity and service as quickly as possible after the disruptions caused by Covid and thank all those working in it."
Now of course a lot of that isn't wholly true, especially in the current time, and it doesn't properly answer the question, but its a non controversial answer that seems straightforward for a politician to give and doesn't lead to it becoming a story.
He's uncomfortable generating bullshit, clearly. Quite possible his instinctive answer would have been a simple "no".
Boris, in contrast, would have waxed lyrical, but meaninglessly, without any effort at all.
EXCL: Yet another sign of the pressure in the NHS, as leaked email says from today London Ambulance Service crews will only wait 45 mins at hospitals before handing over patients.
Email has been cascaded down by the NHS to London hospitals. It does make clear that critical patients will still be looked after until a nurse is available, but this is a clear departure from the policy of ambulance crews essentially having to wait as long as it takes.
All relates of course to the crisis in the ambulance service, with crews stuck waiting to hand over patients because hospitals are full. Means they can’t then answer further 999 calls, leading to long wait times for an ambulance, as we exposed in July.
As a complete layman that sounds very sensible. Not sure how routinely stacking ambulances and paramedics outside for 10 hours plus a visit can make any sense?
it comes back to a comment from an earlier thread.
A queue only works when you can remove people from the front of it.
The current situation is that ambulances bring patients and wait until they can be seen by the hospital. This suggests they will now bring even more patients meaning the queue will grow even longer
The patients exist whether they are at the hospital or not so the queue is only growing longer in the sense they are now being counted but not in a real sense
The queue only exists because the queue is for access to A&E which is full because hospital beds are full of patients who could be released if Social care was able to provide the support they needed on release from hospital.
So we have a relatively inexpensive resource (social care) forcing hospitals to keep releasable patients in more epensive hospital beds which a knock of effect firstly to A&E (again more expensive than a hospital bed) and then to ambulances (even more expensive than A&E).
And the end result of all that is we have 12,000 releasable patients blocking 12, 000 hospital beds resulting in 1,000s waiting hours sat in ambulances resulting in 3-500 people every week dying due to ambulances being unable to answer new calls.
As an aside which might affect things at the margins but not the large scale, it can be unexpectedly difficult to escape from hospital. I've been earbashed with several accounts of patients being told they can go home in the morning (or afternoon) but having to wait hours and occasionally a day before the (low priority but very important) paperwork is done.
Just leave. There is fuck all they can do about it.
When I came round after my motorbike accident wrist surgery I just pulled my clothes on and staggered out. The nurse told me I "couldn't" and I told him that he "could" fuck off.
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.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
Retsina is undeniably the worst offender in that respect. Local firewaters and sweet liqueurs too. But sometimes it does travel. I've found some decent plonk on my travels in the areas of central-Eastern France around Macon, Chalon and Beaune and that tastes OK back at home.
LOL indeed.
I was once at the Hotel de Beaune and an (it happened to be) American couple were leafing through the extensive wine list before asking the waiter: "do you have a good chardonnay?"
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.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
I managed to get through to them on the 0121 number twice - both times for the same parcel. First time the guy in the call centre couldn't have been more helpful - got in touch with the local depot and about an hour later the depot manager called me up to arrange a re-delivery. Second time - *about the redelivery not showing up* - the call centre person refused point blank to do anything at all. Said it was impossibly to contact the local depot, even when I explained that's what had happened just days before - nope it was up to me to contact the seller and sort it all out.
Parcel arrived unannounced the next day via DPD - along with a replacement parcel from the seller that came via Evri. Luckily it was something consumable so I didn't need to arrange a return - but it's just hassle all round.
Have also heard about an actual person answering the 0121 number. For me with an actual delivery in the system it refused to go anywhere at all other than automated messages before hanging itself up.
Have seen online comments that the published 0121 number is now automated only, with the one with actual humans now a hidden number not listed on websites...
Jeez. I wonder if this lines up with my noticing their service going downhill about six months ago. Getting lots of expensive calls through the call centre due to delivery problems? Hide the number! Problem solved!
Comments
https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUA018440R01C22A2000000
Nikkei points out trade openness of UK has dropped 6 % points after Brexit + foreign companies' willingness to invest in UK has waned, with inward direct investment falling 76%. UK govt estimate that Brexit will reduce UK GDP by 4%. 2/
Nikkei points out UK stock market capitalization almost overtaken by France. Goldman Sachs has moved part of London trading to Milan. Govt bonds still carrying a moron premium compared to Germany + France. 3/
Nikkei looks back to when UK was flag bearer of globalization - abolition of 1846 Corn Law. Says Europe generally becoming less open - how no German car manufacturer came to Paris motor show in protest at French protectionism. 4/
Nikkei concludes that cannot have cake and eat it. Not possible to leave EU and have free trade, trust in nation was damaged. "Britain's self conceited going it alone has lessons for everyone." 5/5
This isn't a bad thing, any more than designing small, low performance hatchbacks to be easy driven by lower skilled drivers is.
It’s the wine equivalent of “craft beer” (or boutique hotel)
And good luck with your venture - whether "natural" or not. Cheers!
One impressive thing is the ability to deny history. Despite the evidence that wolves used to eat quite a lot of stuff, there is a whole pile of people saying that they won't touch livestock. They will. The only question is, how much.
Some years ago, a guide chap in Africa told me of the time he took some scientists from the US around Tsavo. They told him that all the stories about lions (and the Tsavo lions especially) were nonsense. They rather ridiculed his building fires etc around their camp site, the first night. None of them had been to Africa before.
In the morning, he showed them the spoor from the lions having walked around the perimeter of the camp.
(Had there been a Tory candidate in Carmarthen they might well have lost that too. It was a terrible year for the Liberals.)
"China criticises other countries for ‘excessive’ Covid travel rules
Beijing has criticised recently imposed testing requirements on passengers from China and threatened countermeasures against countries involved.
“We believe that the entry restrictions adopted by some countries targeting China lack scientific basis, and some excessive practices are even more unacceptable,” foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a briefing."
I really hope that's being said with some sense of self awareness and irony.
So we have a relatively inexpensive resource (social care) forcing hospitals to keep releasable patients in more epensive hospital beds which a knock of effect firstly to A&E (again more expensive than a hospital bed) and then to ambulances (even more expensive than A&E).
And the end result of all that is we have 12,000 releasable patients blocking 12, 000 hospital beds resulting in 1,000s waiting hours sat in ambulances resulting in 3-500 people every week dying due to ambulances being unable to answer new calls.
And against an Aussie ranked two stones above me.
Eat that colonial.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Saying that above metric X, you have to deliver nationally won't work either. Companies just below size X will have an advantage and national carriers would die out.....
I’d expect the former to win by some margin.
It’s classic politics. It’s not a lie, but is phrased to sound far more than it actually is.
Captain Darling: So you see, Blackadder, Field Marshall Haig is most anxious to eliminate all these German spies.
General Melchett: Filthy hun weasels, fighting their dirty underhand war!
Captain Darling: And fortunately, one of our spies...
General Melchett: Splendid fellows, brave heroes risking life and limb for Blighty!
Their tweet suggested the wolf was only being targeted because it had the temerity to kill UVdL's pet pony ("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.")
Whereas, the wolf was already on the 'kill list' for previous offences instances of doing what wolves do.
Incidentally, have spoken to drivers for several of the companies when they drop off. Although the H&I premium for up here is 2-3x standard delivery fees, the drivers aren't paid any more for deliveries here than they are across the border in the "mainland". Like mainland drivers they go to the same depot at the same time and fill up their vehicle for drops. So the extra cash charged is profit.
Parcel arrived unannounced the next day via DPD - along with a replacement parcel from the seller that came via Evri. Luckily it was something consumable so I didn't need to arrange a return - but it's just hassle all round.
https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1594
Overall, the total number of doctors retiring rose by 21% over this period, from 2431 in 2007-08 to 2952 in 2020-21.
The total number of doctors employed by the NHS in England and Wales rose by 25% over this period, from 141 000 to 176 000.
https://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/news/workforce/labour-pledges-to-double-the-number-of-medical-school-places/#:~:text=It would include doubling the,midwifery clinical placements every year.
"‘More than that: We will implement the biggest expansion of medical school places in British history doubling the number of medical students so our NHS has doctors it needs.’"
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
My political history tends to focus on the Labour perspective rather than the other runners and riders. That said I am far less Labour-centred than I used to be. Perhaps I am being sucked in to PB posters constant ramping of how bad Labour are in government and opposition and how fantastic the Conservatives in government are. I am not quite there yet, but getting there.
Have seen online comments that the published 0121 number is now automated only, with the one with actual humans now a hidden number not listed on websites...
Teen faced terror charges despite evidence of grooming
Four in five trains cancelled in rail strike
Pele's funeral
British couple killed in Australian helicopter crash
Wearing a mask if ill is sensible advice
Snow shortage threatens Alps with wet winter season
Timings of £900 cost of living payments announced
MP wears stab vest
44 migrants reach UK in first 2023 crossing
Palestinian rage at Israel minister holy site visit
Russia plans prolonged drone attacks - Zelenskyy
NFL player in critical condition after cardiac arrest
De la Soul catalogue finally available for streaming
So, according to the BBC newsdesk the most important cardiac arrest news today is about someone in the USA who plays American Football, and the crisis that we've all been talking about this morning is not in the 13 most important stories (and I've not been selective, scrolling down right to the bottom there is not a single related story on the entire home page).
Sky News is the same.
It's either an odd omission, or this story has far less salience than we or Twitter think. Or the hive mind of the journo world has decided it's not a Tuesday story and is saving it for later in the week.
Given the sensitivity about Spanish involvement in Gibraltar, Frontex doesn’t seem an unreasonable compromise to me
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It will be like asking a human to carry you 5 miles down a road when there’s a bike or taxi waiting
So, back to my original question - who does the training? That’s not going to be easy, but I applaud the ambition. It will have knock on effects on pharmacy recruitment I fear (we often get ‘failed’ medics).
That seems rather contorted logic.
The thing with the hypocrisy angle is that it suggests you're okay with rampant inequality as long as the rich have a rota system where they put up a few sacrificial lambs to pretend they're normal people for a few years.
It's all appearances and no substance. It's very English - the prostitution laws are constructed on the same basis - but it is always a bit provoking when people seem a bit more concerned with how things look than with how things are.
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
But I wasn’t really commenting on that, more highlighting that patients suffering before they reach A&E is not a good thing - Scott was ignoring them
https://order-order.com/2023/01/03/rishis-old-curry-house-liquidated/
Which means, given today’s newspaper front pages, you can expect BBC explainers & coverage later in the week.
It modified my behaviour as any other 'orrible bug would do. Keep working unless absolutely unable to get out of bed.
2 year ban on foreign investors buying property in Canada becomes law in areas where the core population is greater than 10,000 people in an attempt to curb rising House prices in metropolitan areas
https://twitter.com/emmafildes/status/1610188837464031235?s=20&t=nIQd-sQSQAMCLd8rXrjOag
It was impossible to call if you had lost your mobile and wanted to report it lost and make a claim.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
Our neighbour's daughter applied for medicine, got A*AA at A-Level, and didn't get a place.
If I had the choice of paying £x for delivery with Evri, or £x+y for delivery with anyone else, then I'd like to be able to exercise that choice.
Who hasn't been in a hospital on a Friday morning waiting for the prescriptions and discharge letter to come through and knowing that if it doesn't happen by midday you're in there for the weekend.
Under Labour, under the Conservatives. It's the way the NHS does things.
Niece's mother-in-law was in Ikea the other day. Spotted a family sitting down at the dining table in one of the room sets eating a picnic lunch.
@tompeck
Never even seen this before. Mesmerising stuff from @Dominic2306 https://twitter.com/PickardJE/status/1610195337381134337
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-budget
I know the point is more about political optics, than actual accounting, but the numbers do matter. The NHS got their £350m/week.
Am I mistaken? Perhaps I’m missing out on the challenging journalistic work the BBC is doing somehow?
Yes, I continued to travel as normal barring the brief spell where I felt dreadful. As I would for a head cold or similar.
"Our family are lucky to have private healthcare but the NHS is world class and can be better than private healthcare in an emergency regardless. We are working hard to get the NHS back to its normal capacity and service as quickly as possible after the disruptions caused by Covid and thank all those working in it."
Now of course a lot of that isn't wholly true, especially in the current time, and it doesn't properly answer the question, but its a non controversial answer that seems straightforward for a politician to give and doesn't lead to it becoming a story.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
https://twitter.com/Danjsalt/status/1609947676786794502?s=20&t=kemriO5f23usy_SHmlz4Dg
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
It was the Telegraph who had the expenses story, the Guardian had cash for questions, was it the Times who did Thalidomide?
It's always been the case that the BBC have followed the agenda set by the newspapers, which is one reason the newspapers continue to have so much influence even as their print circulation dwindles, and why accusations of BBC news bias are always wide of the mark.
Overall 75% of those applying for Medicine get in, albeit often not on their first go. We are finding out via the locked down kids whether there is scope for relaxing entry requirements, as many more got in that year than anticipated.
I spoke to the supplier saying I was going to have to stop ordering (and offered to pay extra for a different option) but they just seemed to think it was par for the course courier-wise.
It is/was also laugh out loud hysterically funny - other passengers turned round to see what my constant snorting and laughing was all about.
As for the "newspapers continue to have so much influence" that would be because people buy them.
"File on 4", for example.
Decent quality analysis of the nation's state, as opposed to 'news', is in pretty short supply in the media. Not as sexy, but just as important, if not more so.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
Quite possible his instinctive answer would have been a simple "no".
Boris, in contrast, would have waxed lyrical, but meaninglessly, without any effort at all.
Just leave. There is fuck all they can do about it.
When I came round after my motorbike accident wrist surgery I just pulled my clothes on and staggered out. The nurse told me I "couldn't" and I told him that he "could" fuck off.
I was once at the Hotel de Beaune and an (it happened to be) American couple were leafing through the extensive wine list before asking the waiter: "do you have a good chardonnay?"