It's rather bizarre that the example given is the electric Hummer, which weighs 9000 lbs, as opposed to the standard Hummer at 6000 lbs. A better question might be why the f*** does anyone need to drive such an enormous vehicle in the first place? There weren't any complaints about heavy vehicles as petrol cars got bigger and bigger.
Yes there were. From the story:-
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average vehicle weight has reached an all-time record and is predicted to continue rising in the coming years. Vehicle weights dropped considerably in the 1980s compared to highs measured in 1975, but since then the average car and truck has increased from 3,200lbs to 4,200lbs.
EVs are certainly heavier, which is part of the reason they have such a smooth ride, and have rapid acceleration despite the weight. They do seem to all come with advanced electronic stability and collision avoidance technology though.
Is there real evidence of increased fatalities and injuries from them? Or is it just based on mass?
According to the story, there has been an increase in the number of deaths to their highest level since 2005. It would be difficult, one imagines, to link any particular death to weight.
Staggering difference UK vs USA. In the UK in 2021 there were 1608 road deaths. Rough calculation, taking account of population, the roads in the USA are 6x more dangerous (or at least fatalities are occurring at 6x the rate.
More driving, poor driving and a reliance on traffic light intersections rather than roundabouts.
France used to have an appalling record for deaths caused by road traffic accidents - IIRC they had twice as many per year as Germany. Over the past 20 years they have been doing well in cutting the rate though.
1.3m deaths are caused in the world each year by RTAs.
They're not called RTAs anymore. RTCs because someone important did not like the way "accident" implied no-one caused the collision.
Isn't it more to do with blame in the era of ambulance chasers? Accident implies everybody was blameless, collision is just stating a fact there was a coming together without any implication of blame or not i.e. left up to legal profession.
I don't think "accident" does imply a lack of blame, just a lack of intention.
Of course. Only reasonable for a Tory to go where the money is. That hardly detracts from the conclusions of the report.
Of all of those it's the phasing out of gas boilers that is the most unrealistic.
Well, perhaps it looks unrealistic now, but I have a reasonable degree of confidence that with the attention and investment that it could easily look a lot more realistic in five years time.
A lot of people said that wind energy would never amount to anything and now it is happening.
Yup. Progress towards a sustainable existence is a constant struggle against defeatism. Just as with wind power, the same types who are ridiculing heat pumps and the like now will no doubt be taking credit for them in a couple of decades.
Pointing out the problems and demanding answers is not defeatism, it's realism.
I'm tired of armchair commentators who know nothing about what they're talking about passing judgement on those who do, and have to do all the work, whilst they recline back in blissful spectation.
These are difficult problems,and they need careful thought, planning, resources and investment.
In light of your own remarks commenting about my insight into education that's deliciously ironic.
You didn't provide insight. You provided an expletive ridden and capitalised rant which you seemed to think was a killer argument.
I'd have been happy to take on point well-considered and fact based points.
You didn't make them.
Which tells me you didn't read it. Because I rebutted, point by point, what you had listed. True, I used swearing and capitalisations. But there was plenty of fact in there. You didn't at any point even try to show how I hadn't done so - just airily claimed in a fact free fashion that I hadn't done so.
I'm afraid the real issue is that what you posted didn't deserve anything less than swearing and capitalisations, as it was complete and utter nonsense. It was also rude, patronising, ignorant and failed to grapple with the key problems education faces.
If the original report was not as summarised, it may be worth reading. If it was, then it isn't.
Similarly, as you note armchair generals of various sorts generally don't understand what they're talking about. The issue is that bizarrely in education people listen to the armchair generals and dismiss the experts. And then wonder (a) why things aren't working as they expected (b) why teachers get mad at them for talking essentially abusive nonsense.
About time somebody called out Condescending_Royale. Go on!!!
It's rather bizarre that the example given is the electric Hummer, which weighs 9000 lbs, as opposed to the standard Hummer at 6000 lbs. A better question might be why the f*** does anyone need to drive such an enormous vehicle in the first place? There weren't any complaints about heavy vehicles as petrol cars got bigger and bigger.
Yes there were. From the story:-
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average vehicle weight has reached an all-time record and is predicted to continue rising in the coming years. Vehicle weights dropped considerably in the 1980s compared to highs measured in 1975, but since then the average car and truck has increased from 3,200lbs to 4,200lbs.
EVs are certainly heavier, which is part of the reason they have such a smooth ride, and have rapid acceleration despite the weight. They do seem to all come with advanced electronic stability and collision avoidance technology though.
Is there real evidence of increased fatalities and injuries from them? Or is it just based on mass?
According to the story, there has been an increase in the number of deaths to their highest level since 2005. It would be difficult, one imagines, to link any particular death to weight.
Staggering difference UK vs USA. In the UK in 2021 there were 1608 road deaths. Rough calculation, taking account of population, the roads in the USA are 6x more dangerous (or at least fatalities are occurring at 6x the rate.
More driving, poor driving and a reliance on traffic light intersections rather than roundabouts.
France used to have an appalling record for deaths caused by road traffic accidents - IIRC they had twice as many per year as Germany. Over the past 20 years they have been doing well in cutting the rate though.
1.3m deaths are caused in the world each year by RTAs.
They're not called RTAs anymore. RTCs because someone important did not like the way "accident" implied no-one caused the collision.
Isn't it more to do with blame in the era of ambulance chasers? Accident implies everybody was blameless, collision is just stating a fact there was a coming together without any implication of blame or not i.e. left up to legal profession.
Azerbaijan is blessed with more than its fair share of beautiful women.
The guys though just look like they will never climb very far up the greasy pole of chartered accountancy. Crazy fast leg action does not compensate.
Yes, I've been to Baku. The women are lovely
They are partly Iranian of course. And Iranian women are *chef's kiss*. It is noticeable in all the vids of the Iranian insurrection - the beauty of the women
The unfathomable doctrine of a religion requiring exquisite beauty to be wrapped up from wider appreciation.
Unpopular controversial thought.....does the UK need a proper recession to shake out weak businesses and focus on productivity?
I am of the opinion that 2008 approach of companies, supported by government, to try and minimise business failure and amount of unemployment, by encouraging wage reductions / freezes, might have had the unintended consequence that it allowed a lot of weak businesses with poor productivity to continue unreformed. Same with support during COVID.
OK so we lose a lot of weak businesses, the economy shrinks and more people are claiming benefits. If productivity goes up but production falls, who gains? If efficiency goes up but more workers are on the dole, who gains? There needs to be some mechanism by which new, better businesses are created.
In the past, natural order is eventually restored and we see lots of new businesses popping up, with ones that make it through being in much better positions to exploit opportunities, and as a result it was normal to see a strong recovery leading to a stronger economy than before. The telling thing about post 2008, we never really saw that. Poor productivity, wage stagnation etc etc etc.
I am not being entirely serious, just condemning millions to unemployment benefits isn't great, on both a personal level and for society. But I think there is a something here, some lessons to be learned. Have we cushioned too much, particularly during COVID? We definitely have lots of weak businesses with poor productivity.
"The country has suffered a net outflow of 12,000 wealthy individuals – those with assets and cash of more than $1m (£830,000) – since 2017, with some 1,500 rich individuals leaving in 2022."
UK report, UK consultancy, dollar values to raise the headline "millionaire" count, which then becomes ultra wealthy in the sub head. If you have sold a house and fcked off, $1m makes you hardly even well off these days, not wealthy and never mind ultra.
There may be a story about this, but this is not it.
“A bunch of people sold their London townhouses & retired to the Dordogne” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it does it?
Lets see, there are about 5million higher rate taxpayers (source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/number-of-individual-income-taxpayers-by-marginal-rate-gender-and-age ) so if they have an average forty year career, that’s 125,000 retiring each year. I bet most of those have assets worth > £800k on retirement (Bought a house in the 1990s & paid of the mortgage + pension assets gets you there easily). If all of those 1,500 leaving in 2022 were from this demographic that means that about 1% of these people are choosing to exit the country & enjoy retirement elsewhere.
Without more data on who this population are (an age breakdown would help!) this statistic is irrelevant to the story the Telegraph wants to tell.
The bit about the drop in non-doms is actually interesting though. HMRC claims they’ve taken the same amount in tax despite the 50% drop, not sure how that works? I guess the remaining non-doms are earning a lot of UK income & so were paying the majority of the tax raised from non-doms in the first place, which would imply that whilst the “citizens of nowhere” have f’ed off elsewhere those actually invested in the UK have stayed. Not quite the story the Telegraph wanted to tell!
As ever, newspaper spin on statistics is usually a far stronger story than one the stats will actually support.
Being cheeky here - I am doing a project looking at the potential size of the luxury goods demographic in a group of markets. This is great for the UK but does anyone know any similar source of data globally and / or in selected markets?
This is what happens when you try to squeeze the rich. They go away. And everyone else ends up having to pay more.
Who's tried to squeeze the rich?
Have you not been following politics of late? If I was very rich, and I lived in a country where things like wealth taxes were being touted as the answer, or punitive tax rates on high incomes, I'd find somewhere where these things were less likely.
Yesterday it was nothing could take you from the North of England. Today all it takes is a few quid redistributed that would change your wealth level from very rich to still very rich.....
But according to my mate down the pub, you do not need planning permission to fit solar panels on the roof unless your house is listed or in a conservation area. So that would be an easy win for Rishi. It makes you wonder about the rest.
Our house is in a conservation area and we're having to apply for full planning permission for panels on a flat roof that would be completely invisible from the street or back garden.
How are the “roof tile” options looking, these days?
Apropos of not much, someone pointed the new R4 podcast - 'Nazis - the road to power'. I have listened to the first few episodes. Its interesting but there are some glaring issues. On the whole, the party within Germany did not use the term Nazi, or indeed did most Germans - they were National Socialists. This podcast is dramatised reconstructions and they keep using Nazi, something that is totally wrong. The second thing is this - the National Socialists were an anti semitic party, but their programme was not solely anti-semitic, yet to here this podcast its all about the Jews, and has lots of talk of stopping Jewish immigration - not something I have come across before in the many texts I've read about this era. In the early stages of the party and for many members the national socialist idea meant something - the subjugation of individual will to the greater good for the nation. I wonder at the credentials behind the production. It seems that they are quite clearly trying to link to modern concerns re immigration (that might just be my take on it).
For all that, its interesting, but there are far better sources than this. The World At War, for instance.
Even the DLR has a member of staff on every train that can drive them. They are paid the same as Underground staff.
Driverless does not exist.
“Like the NUM, the rail unions are engaged in a futile effort to preserve jobs which in many cases are no longer needed and should have been abolished decades ago. Trains have not needed guards since the mid 19th century when the invention of block signalling did away with the need to defend a broken-down train by running back down the line to warn approaching trains. Many commuter trains have run perfectly safely since the early 1980s with driver-only operation. As for drivers, in many cases they are not required, either. Driverless trains are not futuristic – they have existed for over 40 years. There are now over 100 metro systems in the world which run without drivers – at much lower expense and with the threat of strikes eliminated. On lightly-used rural lines, where traffic levels do not justify investment in driverless operation, it still makes sense to employ drivers, but there is no excuse for doing so on the London Underground.“
You're not arguing against the point I actually made - like a good Tory.
The Government wanted driver-only operation but they also claimed there would be no job losses as guards would be assigned another role and pay would remain the same. So it doesn't actually achieve anything except change for the sake of it.
The Government has a separate argument about driverless trains but as has been pointed out to them, this concept doesn't actually exist and wouldn't save any money. You'd still have drivers on the trains being paid the same - as on the DLR - they just wouldn't be running the trains all the time.
This is basically already what happens on certain parts of the Underground where they have CBTC
The DLR has 'passenger services agents', who usually act to check tickets/ disturbances but only drive manually to get to/from the depot and in case of emergency, and they are paid much less than tube drivers.
Also this is totally incorrect. I am happy to provide citations but anyone who has ridden the DLR knows that staff drive the trains frequently. They are trained to drive the trains in all conditions (including in case of emergency) and are paid the same as Tube drivers.
"The country has suffered a net outflow of 12,000 wealthy individuals – those with assets and cash of more than $1m (£830,000) – since 2017, with some 1,500 rich individuals leaving in 2022."
UK report, UK consultancy, dollar values to raise the headline "millionaire" count, which then becomes ultra wealthy in the sub head. If you have sold a house and fcked off, $1m makes you hardly even well off these days, not wealthy and never mind ultra.
There may be a story about this, but this is not it.
“A bunch of people sold their London townhouses & retired to the Dordogne” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it does it?
Lets see, there are about 5million higher rate taxpayers (source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/number-of-individual-income-taxpayers-by-marginal-rate-gender-and-age ) so if they have an average forty year career, that’s 125,000 retiring each year. I bet most of those have assets worth > £800k on retirement (Bought a house in the 1990s & paid of the mortgage + pension assets gets you there easily). If all of those 1,500 leaving in 2022 were from this demographic that means that about 1% of these people are choosing to exit the country & enjoy retirement elsewhere.
Without more data on who this population are (an age breakdown would help!) this statistic is irrelevant to the story the Telegraph wants to tell.
The bit about the drop in non-doms is actually interesting though. HMRC claims they’ve taken the same amount in tax despite the 50% drop, not sure how that works? I guess the remaining non-doms are earning a lot of UK income & so were paying the majority of the tax raised from non-doms in the first place, which would imply that whilst the “citizens of nowhere” have f’ed off elsewhere those actually invested in the UK have stayed. Not quite the story the Telegraph wanted to tell!
As ever, newspaper spin on statistics is usually a far stronger story than one the stats will actually support.
Being cheeky here - I am doing a project looking at the potential size of the luxury goods demographic in a group of markets. This is great for the UK but does anyone know any similar source of data globally and / or in selected markets?
There must be some pretty good proxies - Rolex dealerships etc.
This is what happens when you try to squeeze the rich. They go away. And everyone else ends up having to pay more.
Who's tried to squeeze the rich?
Have you not been following politics of late? If I was very rich, and I lived in a country where things like wealth taxes were being touted as the answer, or punitive tax rates on high incomes, I'd find somewhere where these things were less likely.
Yesterday it was nothing could take you from the North of England. Today all it takes is a few quid redistributed that would change your wealth level from very rich to still very rich.....
Ha, fair point! Nothing would move me personally. (Well, not nothing. Who knows what will happen in life? But I'm very happy here.) But I'm not motivated by the same things that motivate the super rich. Which is one reason (among many) that I'm NOT super rich.
It's rather bizarre that the example given is the electric Hummer, which weighs 9000 lbs, as opposed to the standard Hummer at 6000 lbs. A better question might be why the f*** does anyone need to drive such an enormous vehicle in the first place? There weren't any complaints about heavy vehicles as petrol cars got bigger and bigger.
Yes there were. From the story:-
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average vehicle weight has reached an all-time record and is predicted to continue rising in the coming years. Vehicle weights dropped considerably in the 1980s compared to highs measured in 1975, but since then the average car and truck has increased from 3,200lbs to 4,200lbs.
Yes, it's a fact that heavier vehicles, petrol or electric, increase accident fatality risk, but I don't remember it being particularly newsworthy when it was just increasingly large petrol vehicles. That's the point I was making.
The increasing weight of traditional cars, was somewhat related to the increases in safety technology, both for occupants and pedestrians.
The step-change in weight for electric cars, has not been accompanied by increases in safety technology in the same way.
Most studies on the subject are quite flawed, because the current use case for an EV is quite different to that of a traditional car. In the UK, for example, most are company cars purchased for tax reasons.
I thought it was related to increased market share of SUVs, which are much more dangerous for pedestrians because of the higher vehicle profile, quite apart from the fact they are also heavier.
You'd think the increasing weight of pedestrians themselves would be protective, particularly given the energy absorbing properties of that extra weight... Although maybe pedestrians are not the group with greatest increasing weight.
The distribution of the extra weight isn't uniform, so very little additional cranial protection, for example.
Isn't it that while crash protection for passengers has vastly improved, for pedestrians it has got worse? Not helped by large blind spots on many SUV.
That's one thing I don't get about Tesla's Cybertruck: I just cannot see how it will pass the EU's frontal pedestrian tests. Although IANAE, so might well be wrong.
There’s plenty of US cars, including supercharged versions of the old Corvette and Dodge Charger, that failed European pedestrian impact tests in the past few years. The style is to stick the supercharger on top of the engine, partially sticking out of the bonnet, which is no-no as far as the EU is concerned.
A lot of people don’t realise that Corvettes are really good for storing classified US government documents next to
DOOCY: "Classified materials next to your Corvette?! What were you thinking?"
BIDEN: "My Corvette's in a locked garage so it's not like it's sitting on the street."
Biden's Corvette is undeniably cool. All original 67 C2 vert in Goodwood Green that he's owned since new.
Have you done a top 10 and worst 10 of politician's cars yet?
Poop, poop!
While IDS is clearly a plonker, if you think that a Morgan is a bad car it says more about you! Trying to think what a ScotNat/Anglophobe would drive? Apparently the leaders of your party like to be chauffeured about at great cost to the taxpayer. A link here shows a nationalist being chauffeured: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/hitler-car.html?sortBy=relevant
At my son's school they've had to reduce the number of science lessons in year 9 because they can't recruit science teachers. This government is running the country into the ground and ruining our childrens' future. Of course their privately educated kids will be fine. I'm so fucking furious with what these idiots are doing to us.
Is it always "the government"? They do, of course, have ultimate accountability, but other institutions, not least a very vocal minority of very left wing teachers who believe the "prizes for all" mentality, who seem to bask in their love of mediocrity also have a lot to answer for our poor state school provision. Until those on the left start to realise that improving standards also requires the weeding out of people who encourage those low standards then no public sector organisations will improve. Sadly the Left is the protector of the rights of vested interests to the detriment of pupils, patients and those who receive public sector "service".
Easier to blame the government and those terrible private schools though eh? Left wing thinking = simplistic chippy solutions for complex problems.
What a load of rubbish. The problem at my son's school is very specific - they can't hire teachers because the pay set by the government isn't competitive. There is absolutely zero problem with "prizes for all" (what does that even mean?) or low standards - it's a good school that simply can't afford to staff itself properly. And the people who could fix it - the government - simply don't fucking care. It actually isn't especially complex.
Apropos of not much, someone pointed the new R4 podcast - 'Nazis - the road to power'. I have listened to the first few episodes. Its interesting but there are some glaring issues. On the whole, the party within Germany did not use the term Nazi, or indeed did most Germans - they were National Socialists. This podcast is dramatised reconstructions and they keep using Nazi, something that is totally wrong. The second thing is this - the National Socialists were an anti semitic party, but their programme was not solely anti-semitic, yet to here this podcast its all about the Jews, and has lots of talk of stopping Jewish immigration - not something I have come across before in the many texts I've read about this era. In the early stages of the party and for many members the national socialist idea meant something - the subjugation of individual will to the greater good for the nation. I wonder at the credentials behind the production. It seems that they are quite clearly trying to link to modern concerns re immigration (that might just be my take on it).
For all that, its interesting, but there are far better sources than this. The World At War, for instance.
Seems an odd thing to be concerned about the Nazis' policies on immigration when it was their political violence that was much more noticeable.
Especially when that was a big deal all over the world at the time with the increasing economic and social dislocation from WW1 and rising populations. It was an important strand of interwar Tory thinking under Joynson-Hicks, for example. You also had nativist regimes in Hungary and Italy. Even in Ireland Cosgrave was noted for trying to restrict immigration (such as there was to Ireland) particularly personally refusing a request from Trotsky for asylum.
"The country has suffered a net outflow of 12,000 wealthy individuals – those with assets and cash of more than $1m (£830,000) – since 2017, with some 1,500 rich individuals leaving in 2022."
UK report, UK consultancy, dollar values to raise the headline "millionaire" count, which then becomes ultra wealthy in the sub head. If you have sold a house and fcked off, $1m makes you hardly even well off these days, not wealthy and never mind ultra.
There may be a story about this, but this is not it.
“A bunch of people sold their London townhouses & retired to the Dordogne” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it does it?
Lets see, there are about 5million higher rate taxpayers (source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/number-of-individual-income-taxpayers-by-marginal-rate-gender-and-age ) so if they have an average forty year career, that’s 125,000 retiring each year. I bet most of those have assets worth > £800k on retirement (Bought a house in the 1990s & paid of the mortgage + pension assets gets you there easily). If all of those 1,500 leaving in 2022 were from this demographic that means that about 1% of these people are choosing to exit the country & enjoy retirement elsewhere.
Without more data on who this population are (an age breakdown would help!) this statistic is irrelevant to the story the Telegraph wants to tell.
The bit about the drop in non-doms is actually interesting though. HMRC claims they’ve taken the same amount in tax despite the 50% drop, not sure how that works? I guess the remaining non-doms are earning a lot of UK income & so were paying the majority of the tax raised from non-doms in the first place, which would imply that whilst the “citizens of nowhere” have f’ed off elsewhere those actually invested in the UK have stayed. Not quite the story the Telegraph wanted to tell!
As ever, newspaper spin on statistics is usually a far stronger story than one the stats will actually support.
Being cheeky here - I am doing a project looking at the potential size of the luxury goods demographic in a group of markets. This is great for the UK but does anyone know any similar source of data globally and / or in selected markets?
There must be some pretty good proxies - Rolex dealerships etc.
This is what happens when you try to squeeze the rich. They go away. And everyone else ends up having to pay more.
Who's tried to squeeze the rich?
Have you not been following politics of late? If I was very rich, and I lived in a country where things like wealth taxes were being touted as the answer, or punitive tax rates on high incomes, I'd find somewhere where these things were less likely.
Yesterday it was nothing could take you from the North of England. Today all it takes is a few quid redistributed that would change your wealth level from very rich to still very rich.....
Ha, fair point! Nothing would move me personally. (Well, not nothing. Who knows what will happen in life? But I'm very happy here.) But I'm not motivated by the same things that motivate the super rich. Which is one reason (among many) that I'm NOT super rich.
The UK is one of the best places to live. We should have confidence in that statement and understand that lots of ultra rich people will still be happy to live here if they had to pay a wealth tax. Of course they may prefer not to pay it, and some will say they will leave if it is introduced. Even of those who say they will leave, the vast majority won't.
At my son's school they've had to reduce the number of science lessons in year 9 because they can't recruit science teachers. This government is running the country into the ground and ruining our childrens' future. Of course their privately educated kids will be fine. I'm so fucking furious with what these idiots are doing to us.
Is it always "the government"? They do, of course, have ultimate accountability, but other institutions, not least a very vocal minority of very left wing teachers who believe the "prizes for all" mentality, who seem to bask in their love of mediocrity also have a lot to answer for our poor state school provision. Until those on the left start to realise that improving standards also requires the weeding out of people who encourage those low standards then no public sector organisations will improve. Sadly the Left is the protector of the rights of vested interests to the detriment of pupils, patients and those who receive public sector "service".
Easier to blame the government and those terrible private schools though eh? Left wing thinking = simplistic chippy solutions for complex problems.
What a load of rubbish. The problem at my son's school is very specific - they can't hire teachers because the pay set by the government isn't competitive. There is absolutely zero problem with "prizes for all" (what does that even mean?) or low standards - it's a good school that simply can't afford to staff itself properly. And the people who could fix it - the government - simply don't fucking care. It actually isn't especially complex.
Not forgetting the government have set teacher pay at a level higher than the funding they've actually provided for it, so staffing is having to be cut to stay in budget.
On top of that, supply budgets are about sucked dry after the last three years.
Unpopular controversial thought.....does the UK need a proper recession to shake out weak businesses and focus on productivity?
I am of the opinion that 2008 approach of companies, supported by government, to try and minimise business failure and amount of unemployment, by encouraging wage reductions / freezes, might have had the unintended consequence that it allowed a lot of weak businesses with poor productivity to continue unreformed. Same with support during COVID.
If you want businesses to focus on productivity you need an economic environment that encourages investment in infrastructure & training. Put corporation tax back up but 0-rate investments in capital investment or employee training?
A benefits system that’s more focused on training the out of work than it is on subsidising employers to employ unproductive workers on minimum wage might help too.
The latter is particularly difficult to unwind right now, but we’re back to that old problem with the UK economy - all the sensible solutions take ten years to have a noticeable effect.
Looks like a warmer London to me. I am off to the Masai Mara, then Lamu.
Masai Mara - you'll miss the wildebeest migration though. Need to be heading for the Serengeti for that at this time. And make sure to go slightly east, to take in the Ngorongoro Crater. Undiscovered by Europeans until 1892.
One of the most wonderful places I've been on Earth.
Apropos of not much, someone pointed the new R4 podcast - 'Nazis - the road to power'. I have listened to the first few episodes. Its interesting but there are some glaring issues. On the whole, the party within Germany did not use the term Nazi, or indeed did most Germans - they were National Socialists. This podcast is dramatised reconstructions and they keep using Nazi, something that is totally wrong. The second thing is this - the National Socialists were an anti semitic party, but their programme was not solely anti-semitic, yet to here this podcast its all about the Jews, and has lots of talk of stopping Jewish immigration - not something I have come across before in the many texts I've read about this era. In the early stages of the party and for many members the national socialist idea meant something - the subjugation of individual will to the greater good for the nation. I wonder at the credentials behind the production. It seems that they are quite clearly trying to link to modern concerns re immigration (that might just be my take on it).
For all that, its interesting, but there are far better sources than this. The World At War, for instance.
National Socialism was, originally, the idea of socialism applied on a country/racial basis.
See Mussolini’s progression to Fascism.
The whole “Nazis were/weren’t socialist” thing has become impossibly toxic, due to scumbags trying to score political points.
But they certainly believed in state control of the economy. The bit people get confused by is that the fascists didn’t want to *own* the means of production.
Krupp could be owned privately. Just as long as Krupp bought materials from the right sources (defined by the Nazi regime), employed the right amount of people in the right places, produced the right products at the right prices… and kicked back the right amount of money in “gifts” to the right people…
Looks like a warmer London to me. I am off to the Masai Mara, then Lamu.
Masai Mara - you'll miss the wildebeest migration though. Need to be heading for the Serengeti for that at this time. And make sure to go slightly east, to take in the Ngorongoro Crater. Undiscovered by Europeans until 1892.
One of the most wonderful places I've been on Earth.
Ugh more evidence, if more proof were needed, that the University of Oxford needs to be razed. Also what is it about Swedes and their xenophobia and racism?
An Oxford academic has apologised for a 1996 email in which he wrote: “Blacks are more stupid than whites.”
In the message, Professor Nick Bostrom added: “I won’t have much success with most people if I speak like that . . . [it] seems to be synonymous with: I hate those bloody n*****s!!!!”
The University of Oxford said it had launched an investigation and condemned “in the strongest terms possible the views this particular academic expressed in his communications”.
Bostrom, a Swedish-born philosopher, is director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. He made the comments as part of a mailing list for an internet forum, The Extropians. In a statement published on his website, Bostrom said he chose to apologise — and re-publish the message — after hearing rumours that past comments would be “maliciously framed” and used in “smear campaigns”.
Bostrom said that the Extropians forum had been a place for conversations about “science fiction, future technologies, society and all sorts of random things” but that there was also a lot of “silly, mistaken, or outright offensive stuff”.
I’m surprised his comments were even acceptable back then. I doubt holding him to account for those words would be a smear campaign. But he is the victim here.
Mind you in other race/Uni/woke News, and I am sure @Leon has seen it, fields are racist.
They weren't. Though rather more common to hear back then.
I recall being slightly surprised in the early eighties when a North American took offence over the idiomatic “n*****r in the woodpile” - but it was clear even then that it’s days as acceptable language were numbered…..meanwhile, in a great win for genderists:
"I look forward to a time where awards shows can be reflective of society we live in" -Sam Smith at the Brits , 2021 Wish granted? this year our sexist society is reflected so brilliantly that no women are nominated for best artist Bravo genderists 👏👏
It's pretty astonishing to me that the woodpile phrase was ever acceptable.
One that did surprise me was eeny, meeny, miny, moe. As a kid I understood that we were saying 'nicker' (which I took to mean 'thief') but now I wonder what other children and parents understood by it. I only became aware of the other version after the Clarkson fuss. Should maybe ask my parents.
I've never heard 'nicker' for that. It wa always the bad version.
One I used to hear frequently was "As black as a ****** down a coalmine at night."
Which never made much sense to me, as the 'night' bit is fairly irrelevant if they're in a coalmine. Unless, perhaps, it was an opencast pit. But then I'd realise I was probably overthinking it.
Another one that I still use, and which I'm fairly sure is not at all racist, is "It's a bit black over Bill's mother's", for when there are distant dark clouds threatening rain.
Yep. Makes me wonder if I was the only person saying 'nicker' At that age (primary school) I'd never heard the infamous N-word. I also didn't realise golliewogs were supposed to depict black people - I had no knowledge of the term 'wog' (to me didn't look like a person at all, some kind of weird monster, which is kind of the point, I guess). Sheltered childhood, I guess.
I remember at primary school in the early 80s watching a video which probably wasn't entitled 'don't be racist, kids', in which we found it utterly hilarious that the antagonist was calling the black character 'n****r'. We were aware of the word 'n****r' but had no idea it was pejoratively applied to black people - we just thought it a funny and vaguely rude word. I don't think it had occurred to anyone in our almost-but-not-quite all white class to be racist before that video was shown.
In my own kids' world, eeny meeny miny moe still exists but one catches a catcher by its toe, which is slightly more poetic and makes no less sense than the original.
'Tiger' seems to be the version in use round here. That's what my kids have been taught, anyway. PETA would not be impressed, I'm sure. (The tiger is not required to holler - "If you do, let it go" is the followup line).
I was also in a very white school, perhaps relevant, but I'm not sure. Young kids are accepting of differences until they're taught not to be. They barely even notice. Mine haven't ever asked why one of their uncles lives with another man, rather than a woman. They don't seem to have noticed or think of non-white children at school/playgroup as in any way different, any more than someone with different hair colour.
Unpopular controversial thought.....does the UK need a proper recession to shake out weak businesses and focus on productivity?
I am of the opinion that 2008 approach of companies, supported by government, to try and minimise business failure and amount of unemployment, by encouraging wage reductions / freezes, might have had the unintended consequence that it allowed a lot of weak businesses with poor productivity to continue unreformed. Same with support during COVID.
OK so we lose a lot of weak businesses, the economy shrinks and more people are claiming benefits. If productivity goes up but production falls, who gains? If efficiency goes up but more workers are on the dole, who gains? There needs to be some mechanism by which new, better businesses are created.
In the past, natural order is eventually restored and we see lots of new businesses popping up, with ones that make it through being in much better positions to exploit opportunities, and as a result it was normal to see a strong recovery leading to a stronger economy than before. The telling thing about post 2008, we never really saw that. Poor productivity, wage stagnation etc etc etc.
I am not being entirely serious, just condemning millions to unemployment benefits isn't great, on both a personal level and for society. But I think there is a something here, some lessons to be learned. Have we cushioned too much, particularly during COVID? We definitely have lots of weak businesses with poor productivity.
I'd be more worried that in-work benefits, while intended to help workers, in fact subsidise bad employers and allows them to undercut good firms.
Unpopular controversial thought.....does the UK need a proper recession to shake out weak businesses and focus on productivity?
I am of the opinion that 2008 approach of companies, supported by government, to try and minimise business failure and amount of unemployment, by encouraging wage reductions / freezes, might have had the unintended consequence that it allowed a lot of weak businesses with poor productivity to continue unreformed. Same with support during COVID.
Covid is a bit different. Closing businesses by law requires support. But yes, there probably is something in the idea that the poor businesses get taken out by recessions.
Its also important to remember that in a recession, most people are not badly affected (this is different from the CoL crisis). If you are still in work life carries on. Its those that lose jobs and businesses that suffer, but thats only a small minority. Doesn't make it right and of course it reduces the money that the government has to spend on really important stuff like schools and hospitals.
Unpopular controversial thought.....does the UK need a proper recession to shake out weak businesses and focus on productivity?
I am of the opinion that 2008 approach of companies, supported by government, to try and minimise business failure and amount of unemployment, by encouraging wage reductions / freezes, might have had the unintended consequence that it allowed a lot of weak businesses with poor productivity to continue unreformed. Same with support during COVID.
If you want businesses to focus on productivity you need an economic environment that encourages investment in infrastructure & training. Put corporation tax back up but 0-rate investments in capital investment or employee training?
A benefits system that’s more focused on training the out of work than it is on subsidising employers to employ unproductive workers on minimum wage might help too.
The latter is particularly difficult to unwind right now, but we’re back to that old problem with the UK economy - all the sensible solutions take ten years to have a noticeable effect.
That was kind of my point. My comment was somewhat tongue in cheek as the information out today making it seem like recession won't be as bad as forecast, but I do think there is any underlying issue here and that for instance COVID we isolated a lot of workers / businesses when we know there are lots of weak businesses with poor productivity.
In 2008 was all about focus on saving jobs / minimising unemployment, then a slowing of increases in public spending 2010-2015. My real question is what policies should government be taking, I don't believe save all jobs at all cost / everybody take a wage freeze to stop us having to fire anybody is the best way forward (obviously getting 5 million unemployed isn't either).
Of course. Only reasonable for a Tory to go where the money is. That hardly detracts from the conclusions of the report.
Of all of those it's the phasing out of gas boilers that is the most unrealistic.
Well, perhaps it looks unrealistic now, but I have a reasonable degree of confidence that with the attention and investment that it could easily look a lot more realistic in five years time.
A lot of people said that wind energy would never amount to anything and now it is happening.
Yup. Progress towards a sustainable existence is a constant struggle against defeatism. Just as with wind power, the same types who are ridiculing heat pumps and the like now will no doubt be taking credit for them in a couple of decades.
Pointing out the problems and demanding answers is not defeatism, it's realism.
I'm tired of armchair commentators who know nothing about what they're talking about passing judgement on those who do, and have to do all the work, whilst they recline back in blissful spectation.
These are difficult problems,and they need careful thought, planning, resources and investment.
In light of your own remarks commenting about my insight into education that's deliciously ironic.
You didn't provide insight. You provided an expletive ridden and capitalised rant which you seemed to think was a killer argument.
I'd have been happy to take on point well-considered and fact based points.
You didn't make them.
Which tells me you didn't read it. Because I rebutted, point by point, what you had listed. True, I used swearing and capitalisations. But there was plenty of fact in there. You didn't at any point even try to show how I hadn't done so - just airily claimed in a fact free fashion that I hadn't done so.
I'm afraid the real issue is that what you posted didn't deserve anything less than swearing and capitalisations, as it was complete and utter nonsense. It was also rude, patronising, ignorant and failed to grapple with the key problems education faces.
If the original report was not as summarised, it may be worth reading. If it was, then it isn't.
Similarly, as you note armchair generals of various sorts generally don't understand what they're talking about. The issue is that bizarrely in education people listen to the armchair generals and dismiss the experts. And then wonder (a) why things aren't working as they expected (b) why teachers get mad at them for talking essentially abusive nonsense.
About time somebody called out Condescending_Royale. Go on!!!
How disappointing. In a voyeuristic attempt to find this expletive-laden barney between ydoethur and CR i scrolled through two pages of ydoethur’s comments but couldn’t find a single swear word. The least you can do if you are going to bear a grudge on here is to link to your original argument so we can all enjoy it
At my son's school they've had to reduce the number of science lessons in year 9 because they can't recruit science teachers. This government is running the country into the ground and ruining our childrens' future. Of course their privately educated kids will be fine. I'm so fucking furious with what these idiots are doing to us.
Is it always "the government"? They do, of course, have ultimate accountability, but other institutions, not least a very vocal minority of very left wing teachers who believe the "prizes for all" mentality, who seem to bask in their love of mediocrity also have a lot to answer for our poor state school provision. Until those on the left start to realise that improving standards also requires the weeding out of people who encourage those low standards then no public sector organisations will improve. Sadly the Left is the protector of the rights of vested interests to the detriment of pupils, patients and those who receive public sector "service".
Easier to blame the government and those terrible private schools though eh? Left wing thinking = simplistic chippy solutions for complex problems.
What a load of rubbish. The problem at my son's school is very specific - they can't hire teachers because the pay set by the government isn't competitive. There is absolutely zero problem with "prizes for all" (what does that even mean?) or low standards - it's a good school that simply can't afford to staff itself properly. And the people who could fix it - the government - simply don't fucking care. It actually isn't especially complex.
Recruitment for everyone at the moment is difficult. It is a massive problem. People do not want to change jobs, particularly when they have job security, so there is limited supply. There are private companies I know that have massively increased pay for roles and still can't find people to do them. Recruitment is very rarely just about pay. Teaching has challenges, but also benefits that other areas cannot compete with. One of the biggest challenges to pay is when schools (similar to hospitals) are not allowed by the unions to offer attractive pay differentials to attract people. So yes it is very complex, but carry on blaming "the government" if you must, and carry on letting off all the other actors such as local authorities, unions and teachers themselves off the hook. The vested interests like it that way.
Apropos of not much, someone pointed the new R4 podcast - 'Nazis - the road to power'. I have listened to the first few episodes. Its interesting but there are some glaring issues. On the whole, the party within Germany did not use the term Nazi, or indeed did most Germans - they were National Socialists. This podcast is dramatised reconstructions and they keep using Nazi, something that is totally wrong. The second thing is this - the National Socialists were an anti semitic party, but their programme was not solely anti-semitic, yet to here this podcast its all about the Jews, and has lots of talk of stopping Jewish immigration - not something I have come across before in the many texts I've read about this era. In the early stages of the party and for many members the national socialist idea meant something - the subjugation of individual will to the greater good for the nation. I wonder at the credentials behind the production. It seems that they are quite clearly trying to link to modern concerns re immigration (that might just be my take on it).
For all that, its interesting, but there are far better sources than this. The World At War, for instance.
Seems an odd thing to be concerned about the Nazis' policies on immigration when it was their political violence that was much more noticeable.
Especially when that was a big deal all over the world at the time with the increasing economic and social dislocation from WW1 and rising populations. It was an important strand of interwar Tory thinking under Joynson-Hicks, for example. You also had nativist regimes in Hungary and Italy. Even in Ireland Cosgrave was noted for trying to restrict immigration (such as there was to Ireland) particularly personally refusing a request from Trotsky for asylum.
If you have time to spare have a listen and let me know if I am overreacting.
Unpopular controversial thought.....does the UK need a proper recession to shake out weak businesses and focus on productivity?
I am of the opinion that 2008 approach of companies, supported by government, to try and minimise business failure and amount of unemployment, by encouraging wage reductions / freezes, might have had the unintended consequence that it allowed a lot of weak businesses with poor productivity to continue unreformed. Same with support during COVID.
If you want businesses to focus on productivity you need an economic environment that encourages investment in infrastructure & training. Put corporation tax back up but 0-rate investments in capital investment or employee training?
A benefits system that’s more focused on training the out of work than it is on subsidising employers to employ unproductive workers on minimum wage might help too.
The latter is particularly difficult to unwind right now, but we’re back to that old problem with the UK economy - all the sensible solutions take ten years to have a noticeable effect.
That was kind of my point. My comment was somewhat tongue in cheek as the information out today making it seem like recession won't be as bad as forecast, but I do think there is any underlying issue here and that for instance COVID we isolated a lot of workers / businesses when we know there are lots of weak businesses with poor productivity.
In 2008 was all about focus on saving jobs / minimising unemployment, then a slowing of increases in public spending 2010-2015. My real question is what policies should government be taking, I don't believe save all jobs at all cost / everybody take a wage freeze to stop us having to fire anybody is the best way forward (obviously getting 5 million unemployed isn't either).
Around West London, lockdown did filter out businesses.
A number of the “staggering on with no apparent customers” shops gave up.
A number of the surviving ones took the grants and did some rebuilding/reimaging during lockdown.
Unpopular controversial thought.....does the UK need a proper recession to shake out weak businesses and focus on productivity?
I am of the opinion that 2008 approach of companies, supported by government, to try and minimise business failure and amount of unemployment, by encouraging wage reductions / freezes, might have had the unintended consequence that it allowed a lot of weak businesses with poor productivity to continue unreformed. Same with support during COVID.
OK so we lose a lot of weak businesses, the economy shrinks and more people are claiming benefits. If productivity goes up but production falls, who gains? If efficiency goes up but more workers are on the dole, who gains? There needs to be some mechanism by which new, better businesses are created.
In the past, natural order is eventually restored and we see lots of new businesses popping up, with ones that make it through being in much better positions to exploit opportunities, and as a result it was normal to see a strong recovery leading to a stronger economy than before. The telling thing about post 2008, we never really saw that. Poor productivity, wage stagnation etc etc etc.
I am not being entirely serious, just condemning millions to unemployment benefits isn't great, on both a personal level and for society. But I think there is a something here, some lessons to be learned. Have we cushioned too much, particularly during COVID? We definitely have lots of weak businesses with poor productivity.
I'd be more worried that in-work benefits, while intended to help workers, in fact subsidise bad employers and allows them to undercut good firms.
Absolutely. The system, which really became warped by Gordon Brown obsession with his relative poverty rate versus pressure on not increasing minimum wage too fast led to all these in work benefits*, has led to a very perverse system, where race to the bottom employers effectively get subsidised by the state for paying crap (and which were filled by immigration), while having people on £40-50k still get in-work benefits combined with cliff-ends to these.
Of course. Only reasonable for a Tory to go where the money is. That hardly detracts from the conclusions of the report.
Of all of those it's the phasing out of gas boilers that is the most unrealistic.
Well, perhaps it looks unrealistic now, but I have a reasonable degree of confidence that with the attention and investment that it could easily look a lot more realistic in five years time.
A lot of people said that wind energy would never amount to anything and now it is happening.
Yup. Progress towards a sustainable existence is a constant struggle against defeatism. Just as with wind power, the same types who are ridiculing heat pumps and the like now will no doubt be taking credit for them in a couple of decades.
Pointing out the problems and demanding answers is not defeatism, it's realism.
I'm tired of armchair commentators who know nothing about what they're talking about passing judgement on those who do, and have to do all the work, whilst they recline back in blissful spectation.
These are difficult problems,and they need careful thought, planning, resources and investment.
In light of your own remarks commenting about my insight into education that's deliciously ironic.
You didn't provide insight. You provided an expletive ridden and capitalised rant which you seemed to think was a killer argument.
I'd have been happy to take on point well-considered and fact based points.
You didn't make them.
Which tells me you didn't read it. Because I rebutted, point by point, what you had listed. True, I used swearing and capitalisations. But there was plenty of fact in there. You didn't at any point even try to show how I hadn't done so - just airily claimed in a fact free fashion that I hadn't done so.
I'm afraid the real issue is that what you posted didn't deserve anything less than swearing and capitalisations, as it was complete and utter nonsense. It was also rude, patronising, ignorant and failed to grapple with the key problems education faces.
If the original report was not as summarised, it may be worth reading. If it was, then it isn't.
Similarly, as you note armchair generals of various sorts generally don't understand what they're talking about. The issue is that bizarrely in education people listen to the armchair generals and dismiss the experts. And then wonder (a) why things aren't working as they expected (b) why teachers get mad at them for talking essentially abusive nonsense.
About time somebody called out Condescending_Royale. Go on!!!
How disappointing. In a voyeuristic attempt to find this expletive-laden barney between ydoethur and CR i scrolled through two pages of ydoethur’s comments but couldn’t find a single swear word. The least you can do if you are going to bear a grudge on here is to link to your original argument so we can all enjoy it
My word. That's dedication. However, in the interests of science:
At my son's school they've had to reduce the number of science lessons in year 9 because they can't recruit science teachers. This government is running the country into the ground and ruining our childrens' future. Of course their privately educated kids will be fine. I'm so fucking furious with what these idiots are doing to us.
Is it always "the government"? They do, of course, have ultimate accountability, but other institutions, not least a very vocal minority of very left wing teachers who believe the "prizes for all" mentality, who seem to bask in their love of mediocrity also have a lot to answer for our poor state school provision. Until those on the left start to realise that improving standards also requires the weeding out of people who encourage those low standards then no public sector organisations will improve. Sadly the Left is the protector of the rights of vested interests to the detriment of pupils, patients and those who receive public sector "service".
Easier to blame the government and those terrible private schools though eh? Left wing thinking = simplistic chippy solutions for complex problems.
What a load of rubbish. The problem at my son's school is very specific - they can't hire teachers because the pay set by the government isn't competitive. There is absolutely zero problem with "prizes for all" (what does that even mean?) or low standards - it's a good school that simply can't afford to staff itself properly. And the people who could fix it - the government - simply don't fucking care. It actually isn't especially complex.
Not forgetting the government have set teacher pay at a level higher than the funding they've actually provided for it, so staffing is having to be cut to stay in budget.
On top of that, supply budgets are about sucked dry after the last three years.
My goodness Nigel. I think you win todays uninformed-bullshit-whataboutery award.
Poor teachers are kept on? Wut, have you been in a school in the last 20 years?
No, but I know a couple of governors. their experience has been that getting rid of the incompetent is a very long winded process and they normally pop up at another school. Same with the NHS. the public sector doesn't sack people, it simply pays them a large amount of money to go and be incompetent in another school/hospital/local authority.
Unpopular controversial thought.....does the UK need a proper recession to shake out weak businesses and focus on productivity?
I am of the opinion that 2008 approach of companies, supported by government, to try and minimise business failure and amount of unemployment, by encouraging wage reductions / freezes, might have had the unintended consequence that it allowed a lot of weak businesses with poor productivity to continue unreformed. Same with support during COVID.
If you want businesses to focus on productivity you need an economic environment that encourages investment in infrastructure & training. Put corporation tax back up but 0-rate investments in capital investment or employee training?
A benefits system that’s more focused on training the out of work than it is on subsidising employers to employ unproductive workers on minimum wage might help too.
The latter is particularly difficult to unwind right now, but we’re back to that old problem with the UK economy - all the sensible solutions take ten years to have a noticeable effect.
That was kind of my point. My comment was somewhat tongue in cheek as the information out today making it seem like recession won't be as bad as forecast, but I do think there is any underlying issue here and that for instance COVID we isolated a lot of workers / businesses when we know there are lots of weak businesses with poor productivity.
In 2008 was all about focus on saving jobs / minimising unemployment, then a slowing of increases in public spending 2010-2015. My real question is what policies should government be taking, I don't believe save all jobs at all cost / everybody take a wage freeze to stop us having to fire anybody is the best way forward (obviously getting 5 million unemployed isn't either).
Around West London, lockdown did filter out businesses.
A number of the “staggering on with no apparent customers” shops gave up.
A number of the surviving ones took the grants and did some rebuilding/reimaging during lockdown.
I think this is most true for retail / hospitality who obviously had to be totally shut, but I wonder about other sectors where slow down was just people on furlough the government are paying anyway.
At my son's school they've had to reduce the number of science lessons in year 9 because they can't recruit science teachers. This government is running the country into the ground and ruining our childrens' future. Of course their privately educated kids will be fine. I'm so fucking furious with what these idiots are doing to us.
Is it always "the government"? They do, of course, have ultimate accountability, but other institutions, not least a very vocal minority of very left wing teachers who believe the "prizes for all" mentality, who seem to bask in their love of mediocrity also have a lot to answer for our poor state school provision. Until those on the left start to realise that improving standards also requires the weeding out of people who encourage those low standards then no public sector organisations will improve. Sadly the Left is the protector of the rights of vested interests to the detriment of pupils, patients and those who receive public sector "service".
Easier to blame the government and those terrible private schools though eh? Left wing thinking = simplistic chippy solutions for complex problems.
What a load of rubbish. The problem at my son's school is very specific - they can't hire teachers because the pay set by the government isn't competitive. There is absolutely zero problem with "prizes for all" (what does that even mean?) or low standards - it's a good school that simply can't afford to staff itself properly. And the people who could fix it - the government - simply don't fucking care. It actually isn't especially complex.
Not forgetting the government have set teacher pay at a level higher than the funding they've actually provided for it, so staffing is having to be cut to stay in budget.
On top of that, supply budgets are about sucked dry after the last three years.
My goodness Nigel. I think you win todays uninformed-bullshit-whataboutery award.
That’s stretching it a bit - we are nowhere near the largershed where @Leon is. Surely we need to wait for that, before awarding?
Unpopular controversial thought.....does the UK need a proper recession to shake out weak businesses and focus on productivity?
I am of the opinion that 2008 approach of companies, supported by government, to try and minimise business failure and amount of unemployment, by encouraging wage reductions / freezes, might have had the unintended consequence that it allowed a lot of weak businesses with poor productivity to continue unreformed. Same with support during COVID.
I think there's an element of truth in that. When I hear small business owners complain about various costs I do often wonder how viable their businesses really are. It's a tricky question though because the pain might be realised a lot sooner than the gain, and it's always hard to argue for "it will be better in the long term".
Poor teachers are kept on? Wut, have you been in a school in the last 20 years?
No, but I know a couple of governors. their experience has been that getting rid of the incompetent is a very long winded process and they normally pop up at another school. Same with the NHS. the public sector doesn't sack people, it simply pays them a large amount of money to go and be incompetent in another school/hospital/local authority.
Well the offer of a good reference goes a long way. Of course in the new role the person is found out again and promised a good reference if they move on. And so it goes on...
Poor teachers are kept on? Wut, have you been in a school in the last 20 years?
No, but I know a couple of governors. their experience has been that getting rid of the incompetent is a very long winded process and they normally pop up at another school. Same with the NHS. the public sector doesn't sack people, it simply pays them a large amount of money to go and be incompetent in another school/hospital/local authority.
About 5-6years back, the Head at the local Free School Primary didn’t renew the contract for a new teacher after the probationary period. This caused awful ructions.
Mainly from the parents. The other teachers seemed entirely of the “How sad. never mind” way of thinking.
Of course. Only reasonable for a Tory to go where the money is. That hardly detracts from the conclusions of the report.
Of all of those it's the phasing out of gas boilers that is the most unrealistic.
Well, perhaps it looks unrealistic now, but I have a reasonable degree of confidence that with the attention and investment that it could easily look a lot more realistic in five years time.
A lot of people said that wind energy would never amount to anything and now it is happening.
Yup. Progress towards a sustainable existence is a constant struggle against defeatism. Just as with wind power, the same types who are ridiculing heat pumps and the like now will no doubt be taking credit for them in a couple of decades.
Pointing out the problems and demanding answers is not defeatism, it's realism.
I'm tired of armchair commentators who know nothing about what they're talking about passing judgement on those who do, and have to do all the work, whilst they recline back in blissful spectation.
These are difficult problems,and they need careful thought, planning, resources and investment.
In light of your own remarks commenting about my insight into education that's deliciously ironic.
You didn't provide insight. You provided an expletive ridden and capitalised rant which you seemed to think was a killer argument.
I'd have been happy to take on point well-considered and fact based points.
You didn't make them.
Which tells me you didn't read it. Because I rebutted, point by point, what you had listed. True, I used swearing and capitalisations. But there was plenty of fact in there. You didn't at any point even try to show how I hadn't done so - just airily claimed in a fact free fashion that I hadn't done so.
I'm afraid the real issue is that what you posted didn't deserve anything less than swearing and capitalisations, as it was complete and utter nonsense. It was also rude, patronising, ignorant and failed to grapple with the key problems education faces.
If the original report was not as summarised, it may be worth reading. If it was, then it isn't.
Similarly, as you note armchair generals of various sorts generally don't understand what they're talking about. The issue is that bizarrely in education people listen to the armchair generals and dismiss the experts. And then wonder (a) why things aren't working as they expected (b) why teachers get mad at them for talking essentially abusive nonsense.
Your point by point rebuttal shredded Royale's rather weak and dream laden thesis.
Why shouldn't you use profanity? You are angry at the bizarre and systematic undermining of all but elite schooling.
Secondary schooling in Wales is not great in Wales (although my children's experience in a RC comp was first class) so it is not necessarily a Party political issue. Where party politics does come into this is the Conservative Party fixation with elite selection to the detriment of all others.
I had an excellent non-selective experience and a dreadful selective experience. An experience not borne out by, for example, HY's promoted narrative. My non-selective experience was superb because at that moment in time resources, the political will and the enthused teachers to make the experience work were showered upon comprehensive schools.
I have no real idea how the nation moves forward with its vastly substandard educational system. What I do know is selective education is not the answer, and I realise that whatever we do, we can only progress when the current state of inertia that you highlight is thrown in the educational dumpster.
Education is not, and should not be all about exam success. Yes that is part of it, but the most important measure is that of value added.
Unpopular controversial thought.....does the UK need a proper recession to shake out weak businesses and focus on productivity?
I am of the opinion that 2008 approach of companies, supported by government, to try and minimise business failure and amount of unemployment, by encouraging wage reductions / freezes, might have had the unintended consequence that it allowed a lot of weak businesses with poor productivity to continue unreformed. Same with support during COVID.
OK so we lose a lot of weak businesses, the economy shrinks and more people are claiming benefits. If productivity goes up but production falls, who gains? If efficiency goes up but more workers are on the dole, who gains? There needs to be some mechanism by which new, better businesses are created.
In the past, natural order is eventually restored and we see lots of new businesses popping up, with ones that make it through being in much better positions to exploit opportunities, and as a result it was normal to see a strong recovery leading to a stronger economy than before. The telling thing about post 2008, we never really saw that. Poor productivity, wage stagnation etc etc etc.
I am not being entirely serious, just condemning millions to unemployment benefits isn't great, on both a personal level and for society. But I think there is a something here, some lessons to be learned. Have we cushioned too much, particularly during COVID? We definitely have lots of weak businesses with poor productivity.
I'd be more worried that in-work benefits, while intended to help workers, in fact subsidise bad employers and allows them to undercut good firms.
Absolutely. The system, which really became warped by Gordon Brown obsession with his relative poverty rate versus pressure on not increasing minimum wage too fast led to all these in work benefits*, has led to a very perverse system, where race to the bottom employers effectively get subsidised by the state for paying crap (and which were filled by immigration), while having people on £40-50k still get in-work benefits combined with cliff-ends to these.
(and Osborne kicking reform into the long grass)
You'd think a Conservative government which cared about free markets would be all over this, especially as they could blame Gordon Brown. That they are not says something about the party's capture by the rentier class.
This is what happens when you try to squeeze the rich. They go away. And everyone else ends up having to pay more.
Who's tried to squeeze the rich?
Have you not been following politics of late? If I was very rich, and I lived in a country where things like wealth taxes were being touted as the answer, or punitive tax rates on high incomes, I'd find somewhere where these things were less likely.
But nobody has actually done any of those things and, as far as I am aware, nobody in government is suggesting it. If you are going to flee the country every time some random moots an increase in taxes, then you're going to spend a lot of time moving house.
Unpopular controversial thought.....does the UK need a proper recession to shake out weak businesses and focus on productivity?
I am of the opinion that 2008 approach of companies, supported by government, to try and minimise business failure and amount of unemployment, by encouraging wage reductions / freezes, might have had the unintended consequence that it allowed a lot of weak businesses with poor productivity to continue unreformed. Same with support during COVID.
OK so we lose a lot of weak businesses, the economy shrinks and more people are claiming benefits. If productivity goes up but production falls, who gains? If efficiency goes up but more workers are on the dole, who gains? There needs to be some mechanism by which new, better businesses are created.
In the past, natural order is eventually restored and we see lots of new businesses popping up, with ones that make it through being in much better positions to exploit opportunities, and as a result it was normal to see a strong recovery leading to a stronger economy than before. The telling thing about post 2008, we never really saw that. Poor productivity, wage stagnation etc etc etc.
I am not being entirely serious, just condemning millions to unemployment benefits isn't great, on both a personal level and for society. But I think there is a something here, some lessons to be learned. Have we cushioned too much, particularly during COVID? We definitely have lots of weak businesses with poor productivity.
I'd be more worried that in-work benefits, while intended to help workers, in fact subsidise bad employers and allows them to undercut good firms.
Absolutely. The system, which really became warped by Gordon Brown obsession with his relative poverty rate versus pressure on not increasing minimum wage too fast led to all these in work benefits*, has led to a very perverse system, where race to the bottom employers effectively get subsidised by the state for paying crap (and which were filled by immigration), while having people on £40-50k still get in-work benefits combined with cliff-ends to these.
(and Osborne kicking reform into the long grass)
A gentle reminder that the Conservatives have been in power for the last 13 years. They've had plenty of time to change the benefits system.
At my son's school they've had to reduce the number of science lessons in year 9 because they can't recruit science teachers. This government is running the country into the ground and ruining our childrens' future. Of course their privately educated kids will be fine. I'm so fucking furious with what these idiots are doing to us.
Is it always "the government"? They do, of course, have ultimate accountability, but other institutions, not least a very vocal minority of very left wing teachers who believe the "prizes for all" mentality, who seem to bask in their love of mediocrity also have a lot to answer for our poor state school provision. Until those on the left start to realise that improving standards also requires the weeding out of people who encourage those low standards then no public sector organisations will improve. Sadly the Left is the protector of the rights of vested interests to the detriment of pupils, patients and those who receive public sector "service".
Easier to blame the government and those terrible private schools though eh? Left wing thinking = simplistic chippy solutions for complex problems.
What a load of rubbish. The problem at my son's school is very specific - they can't hire teachers because the pay set by the government isn't competitive. There is absolutely zero problem with "prizes for all" (what does that even mean?) or low standards - it's a good school that simply can't afford to staff itself properly. And the people who could fix it - the government - simply don't fucking care. It actually isn't especially complex.
Not forgetting the government have set teacher pay at a level higher than the funding they've actually provided for it, so staffing is having to be cut to stay in budget.
On top of that, supply budgets are about sucked dry after the last three years.
My goodness Nigel. I think you win todays uninformed-bullshit-whataboutery award.
Really? I simply asked whether it is always "the government"? I did not say that they have no culpability.I know that this is a political site, and there is a tendency of those of a more rigid political perspective to be tribal but do try reading peoples' posts before trying to be a smartarse. @ydoethur's point is an interesting one, but it still doesn't remove my point, that blaming everything on "the government" is for simplistic fools. I see you confine yourself to the aforementioned category.
It's rather bizarre that the example given is the electric Hummer, which weighs 9000 lbs, as opposed to the standard Hummer at 6000 lbs. A better question might be why the f*** does anyone need to drive such an enormous vehicle in the first place? There weren't any complaints about heavy vehicles as petrol cars got bigger and bigger.
Yes there were. From the story:-
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average vehicle weight has reached an all-time record and is predicted to continue rising in the coming years. Vehicle weights dropped considerably in the 1980s compared to highs measured in 1975, but since then the average car and truck has increased from 3,200lbs to 4,200lbs.
Yes, it's a fact that heavier vehicles, petrol or electric, increase accident fatality risk, but I don't remember it being particularly newsworthy when it was just increasingly large petrol vehicles. That's the point I was making.
The increasing weight of traditional cars, was somewhat related to the increases in safety technology, both for occupants and pedestrians.
The step-change in weight for electric cars, has not been accompanied by increases in safety technology in the same way.
Most studies on the subject are quite flawed, because the current use case for an EV is quite different to that of a traditional car. In the UK, for example, most are company cars purchased for tax reasons.
I thought it was related to increased market share of SUVs, which are much more dangerous for pedestrians because of the higher vehicle profile, quite apart from the fact they are also heavier.
You'd think the increasing weight of pedestrians themselves would be protective, particularly given the energy absorbing properties of that extra weight... Although maybe pedestrians are not the group with greatest increasing weight.
The distribution of the extra weight isn't uniform, so very little additional cranial protection, for example.
Isn't it that while crash protection for passengers has vastly improved, for pedestrians it has got worse? Not helped by large blind spots on many SUV.
That's one thing I don't get about Tesla's Cybertruck: I just cannot see how it will pass the EU's frontal pedestrian tests. Although IANAE, so might well be wrong.
There’s plenty of US cars, including supercharged versions of the old Corvette and Dodge Charger, that failed European pedestrian impact tests in the past few years. The style is to stick the supercharger on top of the engine, partially sticking out of the bonnet, which is no-no as far as the EU is concerned.
A lot of people don’t realise that Corvettes are really good for storing classified US government documents next to
DOOCY: "Classified materials next to your Corvette?! What were you thinking?"
BIDEN: "My Corvette's in a locked garage so it's not like it's sitting on the street."
Biden's Corvette is undeniably cool. All original 67 C2 vert in Goodwood Green that he's owned since new.
Have you done a top 10 and worst 10 of politician's cars yet?
Good 1. Guy Verhofstadt - Excellent collection but we'll give him top spot for his AMG GT 2. Idi Amin - Citroen SM 3. Biden - '67 C2 vert 4. Trump - Lamborghini Diablo VT (think he also had a Countach) 5. Bush 43 - Ford F150 King Ranch 6. Medvedev - Porsche Cayenne Turbo 7. Uday Hussein - Lamborghini LM002 8. Shappsie - F80 330i 9. Mohammad Pahlavi - Lamborghini Miura 10. Francois Mitterand - Hotchkiss Grégoire
Bad 1. Johnson - Toyota Previa 2. IDS - Morgan Plus 8. Twatmobile of the highest order. 3. Sunak - Fucking X-Type 4. Marcus "Billy The" Fysh, MP - Subaru Forester (Once spat on by me, he was lucky I didn't need a shit.) 5. Starmer - RAV4 6. Cameron - Nissan Micra. Rich person with a shit car = scum of the earth 7. JRM - XJ Jag. Fuck off. 8. Brown - Vauxhall Omega. Jesus Christ. 9. Balls. Toyota Yaris. See Cameron. 10. Airey Neave. Mk.1 Cavalier
Poor teachers are kept on? Wut, have you been in a school in the last 20 years?
No, but I know a couple of governors. their experience has been that getting rid of the incompetent is a very long winded process and they normally pop up at another school. Same with the NHS. the public sector doesn't sack people, it simply pays them a large amount of money to go and be incompetent in another school/hospital/local authority.
About 5-6years back, the Head at the local Free School Primary didn’t renew the contract for a new teacher after the probationary period. This caused awful ructions.
Mainly from the parents. The other teachers seemed entirely of the “How sad. never mind” way of thinking.
My first teaching job was as a temporary replacement for somebody who'd been fired for poor performance.*
My first Head of Department role was for somebody whose probationary contract was not extended.
My last role came about when I applied for a job to replace somebody who had been fired for poor performance and I was offered a different job within the same school.
That doesn't suggest it is particularly unusual. Even allowing for the fact my reputation was as a shock trooper to turn problems around.
*To be exact, she was on competencies when in a stroke of sheer genius not given to all people, she told a bunch of German girls on exchange to line up at the front of the class while she explained whether or not they measured up to Nazi ideals. She had just got to commenting on their breasts when the - Polish - headteacher walked in.
Unpopular controversial thought.....does the UK need a proper recession to shake out weak businesses and focus on productivity?
I am of the opinion that 2008 approach of companies, supported by government, to try and minimise business failure and amount of unemployment, by encouraging wage reductions / freezes, might have had the unintended consequence that it allowed a lot of weak businesses with poor productivity to continue unreformed. Same with support during COVID.
OK so we lose a lot of weak businesses, the economy shrinks and more people are claiming benefits. If productivity goes up but production falls, who gains? If efficiency goes up but more workers are on the dole, who gains? There needs to be some mechanism by which new, better businesses are created.
In the past, natural order is eventually restored and we see lots of new businesses popping up, with ones that make it through being in much better positions to exploit opportunities, and as a result it was normal to see a strong recovery leading to a stronger economy than before. The telling thing about post 2008, we never really saw that. Poor productivity, wage stagnation etc etc etc.
I am not being entirely serious, just condemning millions to unemployment benefits isn't great, on both a personal level and for society. But I think there is a something here, some lessons to be learned. Have we cushioned too much, particularly during COVID? We definitely have lots of weak businesses with poor productivity.
I'd be more worried that in-work benefits, while intended to help workers, in fact subsidise bad employers and allows them to undercut good firms.
Absolutely. The system, which really became warped by Gordon Brown obsession with his relative poverty rate versus pressure on not increasing minimum wage too fast led to all these in work benefits*, has led to a very perverse system, where race to the bottom employers effectively get subsidised by the state for paying crap (and which were filled by immigration), while having people on £40-50k still get in-work benefits combined with cliff-ends to these.
(and Osborne kicking reform into the long grass)
You'd think a Conservative government which cared about free markets would be all over this, especially as they could blame Gordon Brown. That they are not says something about the party's capture by the rentier class.
Osborne bottled some easy wins, like combine NI / IC. In a stroke you equalise thresholds, take the most low paid out of tax and could also reform how we tax businesses. Yes we know the issue with oldies in work, but that can definitely be dealt with. Also from a purely political perspective, if you believe in keeping taxation under control, which I thought was the Tories, Tories going forward could "reveal" true rates of tax and effects on trying to raise i.e. Gordon Brown's playbook (but then again that seems to now be the Tories too).
Poor teachers are kept on? Wut, have you been in a school in the last 20 years?
No, but I know a couple of governors. their experience has been that getting rid of the incompetent is a very long winded process and they normally pop up at another school. Same with the NHS. the public sector doesn't sack people, it simply pays them a large amount of money to go and be incompetent in another school/hospital/local authority.
About 5-6years back, the Head at the local Free School Primary didn’t renew the contract for a new teacher after the probationary period. This caused awful ructions.
Mainly from the parents. The other teachers seemed entirely of the “How sad. never mind” way of thinking.
My son's primary appoints all new teachers on a one year contract. If they're good, they are then at some point offered a permanent post. If not, they're not and are out at the year end (they are of course free to apply for the vacant position).
(My son's teacher is new this year and has already been offered a permanent post from next year; she appears very good).
At my son's school they've had to reduce the number of science lessons in year 9 because they can't recruit science teachers. This government is running the country into the ground and ruining our childrens' future. Of course their privately educated kids will be fine. I'm so fucking furious with what these idiots are doing to us.
Is it always "the government"? They do, of course, have ultimate accountability, but other institutions, not least a very vocal minority of very left wing teachers who believe the "prizes for all" mentality, who seem to bask in their love of mediocrity also have a lot to answer for our poor state school provision. Until those on the left start to realise that improving standards also requires the weeding out of people who encourage those low standards then no public sector organisations will improve. Sadly the Left is the protector of the rights of vested interests to the detriment of pupils, patients and those who receive public sector "service".
Easier to blame the government and those terrible private schools though eh? Left wing thinking = simplistic chippy solutions for complex problems.
What a load of rubbish. The problem at my son's school is very specific - they can't hire teachers because the pay set by the government isn't competitive. There is absolutely zero problem with "prizes for all" (what does that even mean?) or low standards - it's a good school that simply can't afford to staff itself properly. And the people who could fix it - the government - simply don't fucking care. It actually isn't especially complex.
Recruitment for everyone at the moment is difficult. It is a massive problem. People do not want to change jobs, particularly when they have job security, so there is limited supply. There are private companies I know that have massively increased pay for roles and still can't find people to do them. Recruitment is very rarely just about pay. Teaching has challenges, but also benefits that other areas cannot compete with. One of the biggest challenges to pay is when schools (similar to hospitals) are not allowed by the unions to offer attractive pay differentials to attract people. So yes it is very complex, but carry on blaming "the government" if you must, and carry on letting off all the other actors such as local authorities, unions and teachers themselves off the hook. The vested interests like it that way.
What have the local authorities got to do with it? They don't run the school. It's the job of the government to run schools properly (especially since under the Academies system they have centralised control over education). If schools can't recruit at current funding levels then they need more money, end of story. Nothing is more critical to this country's future than the education of our children. It should be the government's top priority. If this government won't fund that properly then don't be surprised if parents vote in a government that will. There is so much anger and frustration at the school gates, believe me.
It's rather bizarre that the example given is the electric Hummer, which weighs 9000 lbs, as opposed to the standard Hummer at 6000 lbs. A better question might be why the f*** does anyone need to drive such an enormous vehicle in the first place? There weren't any complaints about heavy vehicles as petrol cars got bigger and bigger.
Yes there were. From the story:-
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average vehicle weight has reached an all-time record and is predicted to continue rising in the coming years. Vehicle weights dropped considerably in the 1980s compared to highs measured in 1975, but since then the average car and truck has increased from 3,200lbs to 4,200lbs.
Yes, it's a fact that heavier vehicles, petrol or electric, increase accident fatality risk, but I don't remember it being particularly newsworthy when it was just increasingly large petrol vehicles. That's the point I was making.
The increasing weight of traditional cars, was somewhat related to the increases in safety technology, both for occupants and pedestrians.
The step-change in weight for electric cars, has not been accompanied by increases in safety technology in the same way.
Most studies on the subject are quite flawed, because the current use case for an EV is quite different to that of a traditional car. In the UK, for example, most are company cars purchased for tax reasons.
I thought it was related to increased market share of SUVs, which are much more dangerous for pedestrians because of the higher vehicle profile, quite apart from the fact they are also heavier.
You'd think the increasing weight of pedestrians themselves would be protective, particularly given the energy absorbing properties of that extra weight... Although maybe pedestrians are not the group with greatest increasing weight.
The distribution of the extra weight isn't uniform, so very little additional cranial protection, for example.
Isn't it that while crash protection for passengers has vastly improved, for pedestrians it has got worse? Not helped by large blind spots on many SUV.
That's one thing I don't get about Tesla's Cybertruck: I just cannot see how it will pass the EU's frontal pedestrian tests. Although IANAE, so might well be wrong.
There’s plenty of US cars, including supercharged versions of the old Corvette and Dodge Charger, that failed European pedestrian impact tests in the past few years. The style is to stick the supercharger on top of the engine, partially sticking out of the bonnet, which is no-no as far as the EU is concerned.
A lot of people don’t realise that Corvettes are really good for storing classified US government documents next to
DOOCY: "Classified materials next to your Corvette?! What were you thinking?"
BIDEN: "My Corvette's in a locked garage so it's not like it's sitting on the street."
Biden's Corvette is undeniably cool. All original 67 C2 vert in Goodwood Green that he's owned since new.
Have you done a top 10 and worst 10 of politician's cars yet?
Poop, poop!
While IDS is clearly a plonker, if you think that a Morgan is a bad car it says more about you! Trying to think what a ScotNat/Anglophobe would drive? Apparently the leaders of your party like to be chauffeured about at great cost to the taxpayer. A link here shows a nationalist being chauffeured: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/hitler-car.html?sortBy=relevant
They are barstewards to drive. There is a several stage procedure before you start them, the ride is bone-shaking, the steering is heavy and all but the V8s are quite slow for a relatively light car. I love them but they are driven by people like IDS, so a Caterham is a much better bet.
Unpopular controversial thought.....does the UK need a proper recession to shake out weak businesses and focus on productivity?
I am of the opinion that 2008 approach of companies, supported by government, to try and minimise business failure and amount of unemployment, by encouraging wage reductions / freezes, might have had the unintended consequence that it allowed a lot of weak businesses with poor productivity to continue unreformed. Same with support during COVID.
OK so we lose a lot of weak businesses, the economy shrinks and more people are claiming benefits. If productivity goes up but production falls, who gains? If efficiency goes up but more workers are on the dole, who gains? There needs to be some mechanism by which new, better businesses are created.
In the past, natural order is eventually restored and we see lots of new businesses popping up, with ones that make it through being in much better positions to exploit opportunities, and as a result it was normal to see a strong recovery leading to a stronger economy than before. The telling thing about post 2008, we never really saw that. Poor productivity, wage stagnation etc etc etc.
I am not being entirely serious, just condemning millions to unemployment benefits isn't great, on both a personal level and for society. But I think there is a something here, some lessons to be learned. Have we cushioned too much, particularly during COVID? We definitely have lots of weak businesses with poor productivity.
I'd be more worried that in-work benefits, while intended to help workers, in fact subsidise bad employers and allows them to undercut good firms.
Absolutely. The system, which really became warped by Gordon Brown obsession with his relative poverty rate versus pressure on not increasing minimum wage too fast led to all these in work benefits*, has led to a very perverse system, where race to the bottom employers effectively get subsidised by the state for paying crap (and which were filled by immigration), while having people on £40-50k still get in-work benefits combined with cliff-ends to these.
(and Osborne kicking reform into the long grass)
A gentle reminder that the Conservatives have been in power for the last 13 years. They've had plenty of time to change the benefits system.
Which is what I said....they have tinkered around the edges e.g. tax credits at the top end and the introduction of UC.
You say 13 years, but there has been the little issue of 2010-2015 they were in coalition (and the Lib Dems wouldn't allow too much revolution in this area), 2015-2018 BREXITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT / no majority, then 2020-2022 COVID (but I doubt a Boris government elected by a Red Wall would have done much to address this even without a global pandemic).
Which is why I said, Osborne certainly bottled opportunities for more.
Even the DLR has a member of staff on every train that can drive them. They are paid the same as Underground staff.
Driverless does not exist.
“Like the NUM, the rail unions are engaged in a futile effort to preserve jobs which in many cases are no longer needed and should have been abolished decades ago. Trains have not needed guards since the mid 19th century when the invention of block signalling did away with the need to defend a broken-down train by running back down the line to warn approaching trains. Many commuter trains have run perfectly safely since the early 1980s with driver-only operation. As for drivers, in many cases they are not required, either. Driverless trains are not futuristic – they have existed for over 40 years. There are now over 100 metro systems in the world which run without drivers – at much lower expense and with the threat of strikes eliminated. On lightly-used rural lines, where traffic levels do not justify investment in driverless operation, it still makes sense to employ drivers, but there is no excuse for doing so on the London Underground.“
You're not arguing against the point I actually made - like a good Tory.
The Government wanted driver-only operation but they also claimed there would be no job losses as guards would be assigned another role and pay would remain the same. So it doesn't actually achieve anything except change for the sake of it.
The Government has a separate argument about driverless trains but as has been pointed out to them, this concept doesn't actually exist and wouldn't save any money. You'd still have drivers on the trains being paid the same - as on the DLR - they just wouldn't be running the trains all the time.
This is basically already what happens on certain parts of the Underground where they have CBTC
The DLR has 'passenger services agents', who usually act to check tickets/ disturbances but only drive manually to get to/from the depot and in case of emergency, and they are paid much less than tube drivers.
Also this is totally incorrect. I am happy to provide citations but anyone who has ridden the DLR knows that staff drive the trains frequently. They are trained to drive the trains in all conditions (including in case of emergency) and are paid the same as Tube drivers.
It's a few years since I regularly commuted on the DLR, but back then when the PSAs sat at the front they were mostly not really driving the train, they were just pushing the same buttons that they can use at the panel by any of the doors.
One of them even let me press one of the buttons once, which was probably incompatible with insurance if nothing else...
At my son's school they've had to reduce the number of science lessons in year 9 because they can't recruit science teachers. This government is running the country into the ground and ruining our childrens' future. Of course their privately educated kids will be fine. I'm so fucking furious with what these idiots are doing to us.
Is it always "the government"? They do, of course, have ultimate accountability, but other institutions, not least a very vocal minority of very left wing teachers who believe the "prizes for all" mentality, who seem to bask in their love of mediocrity also have a lot to answer for our poor state school provision. Until those on the left start to realise that improving standards also requires the weeding out of people who encourage those low standards then no public sector organisations will improve. Sadly the Left is the protector of the rights of vested interests to the detriment of pupils, patients and those who receive public sector "service".
Easier to blame the government and those terrible private schools though eh? Left wing thinking = simplistic chippy solutions for complex problems.
What a load of rubbish. The problem at my son's school is very specific - they can't hire teachers because the pay set by the government isn't competitive. There is absolutely zero problem with "prizes for all" (what does that even mean?) or low standards - it's a good school that simply can't afford to staff itself properly. And the people who could fix it - the government - simply don't fucking care. It actually isn't especially complex.
Recruitment for everyone at the moment is difficult. It is a massive problem. People do not want to change jobs, particularly when they have job security, so there is limited supply. There are private companies I know that have massively increased pay for roles and still can't find people to do them. Recruitment is very rarely just about pay. Teaching has challenges, but also benefits that other areas cannot compete with. One of the biggest challenges to pay is when schools (similar to hospitals) are not allowed by the unions to offer attractive pay differentials to attract people. So yes it is very complex, but carry on blaming "the government" if you must, and carry on letting off all the other actors such as local authorities, unions and teachers themselves off the hook. The vested interests like it that way.
What have the local authorities got to do with it? They don't run the school. It's the job of the government to run schools properly (especially since under the Academies system they have centralised control over education). If schools can't recruit at current funding levels then they need more money, end of story. Nothing is more critical to this country's future than the education of our children. It should be the government's top priority. If this government won't fund that properly then don't be surprised if parents vote in a government that will. There is so much anger and frustration at the school gates, believe me.
For the record, I see nothing as more important than the education of children and would love to see a massive increase in investment in teachers and education generally, (though this should be aligned with productivity). However, I would also like to see a break with the malign influence of left wing unions over teaching.
Of course. Only reasonable for a Tory to go where the money is. That hardly detracts from the conclusions of the report.
Of all of those it's the phasing out of gas boilers that is the most unrealistic.
Well, perhaps it looks unrealistic now, but I have a reasonable degree of confidence that with the attention and investment that it could easily look a lot more realistic in five years time.
A lot of people said that wind energy would never amount to anything and now it is happening.
Yup. Progress towards a sustainable existence is a constant struggle against defeatism. Just as with wind power, the same types who are ridiculing heat pumps and the like now will no doubt be taking credit for them in a couple of decades.
Pointing out the problems and demanding answers is not defeatism, it's realism.
I'm tired of armchair commentators who know nothing about what they're talking about passing judgement on those who do, and have to do all the work, whilst they recline back in blissful spectation.
These are difficult problems,and they need careful thought, planning, resources and investment.
In light of your own remarks commenting about my insight into education that's deliciously ironic.
You didn't provide insight. You provided an expletive ridden and capitalised rant which you seemed to think was a killer argument.
I'd have been happy to take on point well-considered and fact based points.
You didn't make them.
Which tells me you didn't read it. Because I rebutted, point by point, what you had listed. True, I used swearing and capitalisations. But there was plenty of fact in there. You didn't at any point even try to show how I hadn't done so - just airily claimed in a fact free fashion that I hadn't done so.
I'm afraid the real issue is that what you posted didn't deserve anything less than swearing and capitalisations, as it was complete and utter nonsense. It was also rude, patronising, ignorant and failed to grapple with the key problems education faces.
If the original report was not as summarised, it may be worth reading. If it was, then it isn't.
Similarly, as you note armchair generals of various sorts generally don't understand what they're talking about. The issue is that bizarrely in education people listen to the armchair generals and dismiss the experts. And then wonder (a) why things aren't working as they expected (b) why teachers get mad at them for talking essentially abusive nonsense.
You didn't rebut me point by point, you just posted a rant. The TEC report and its headline findings triggered you, and that was your response.
It was in no sense considered or insightful, and I learnt nothing from it other than what I already knew: you hate the DfE, Ofsted and politicians - and teachers already do all this/need more funding and for government to stay out of their hair.
There might be something in it, but it isn't the whole of the answer - particularly where public policy requires join-up across education sectors, industry and communities - and more targeted investment, so it deserved more thought than your knee-jerk diatribe provided, particularly since there were plenty of education experts on the commission itself.
Poor teachers are kept on? Wut, have you been in a school in the last 20 years?
No, but I know a couple of governors. their experience has been that getting rid of the incompetent is a very long winded process and they normally pop up at another school. Same with the NHS. the public sector doesn't sack people, it simply pays them a large amount of money to go and be incompetent in another school/hospital/local authority.
Well the offer of a good reference goes a long way. Of course in the new role the person is found out again and promised a good reference if they move on. And so it goes on...
There's a Yes, Minister bit about that, where Humphrey (or maybe Bernard) explains that you should never employ anyone with a glowing reference, as the previous employer is clearly keen to get rid.
Unpopular controversial thought.....does the UK need a proper recession to shake out weak businesses and focus on productivity?
I am of the opinion that 2008 approach of companies, supported by government, to try and minimise business failure and amount of unemployment, by encouraging wage reductions / freezes, might have had the unintended consequence that it allowed a lot of weak businesses with poor productivity to continue unreformed. Same with support during COVID.
OK so we lose a lot of weak businesses, the economy shrinks and more people are claiming benefits. If productivity goes up but production falls, who gains? If efficiency goes up but more workers are on the dole, who gains? There needs to be some mechanism by which new, better businesses are created.
In the past, natural order is eventually restored and we see lots of new businesses popping up, with ones that make it through being in much better positions to exploit opportunities, and as a result it was normal to see a strong recovery leading to a stronger economy than before. The telling thing about post 2008, we never really saw that. Poor productivity, wage stagnation etc etc etc.
I am not being entirely serious, just condemning millions to unemployment benefits isn't great, on both a personal level and for society. But I think there is a something here, some lessons to be learned. Have we cushioned too much, particularly during COVID? We definitely have lots of weak businesses with poor productivity.
I'd be more worried that in-work benefits, while intended to help workers, in fact subsidise bad employers and allows them to undercut good firms.
Absolutely. The system, which really became warped by Gordon Brown obsession with his relative poverty rate versus pressure on not increasing minimum wage too fast led to all these in work benefits*, has led to a very perverse system, where race to the bottom employers effectively get subsidised by the state for paying crap (and which were filled by immigration), while having people on £40-50k still get in-work benefits combined with cliff-ends to these.
(and Osborne kicking reform into the long grass)
A gentle reminder that the Conservatives have been in power for the last 13 years. They've had plenty of time to change the benefits system.
Which is what I said....they have tinkered around the edges e.g. tax credits at the top end and the introduction of UC.
You say 13 years, but there has been the little issue of 2010-2015 they were in coalition (and the Lib Dems wouldn't allow too much revolution in this area), 2015-2018 BREXITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT / no majority, then 2020-2022 COVID (but I doubt a Boris government elected by a Red Wall would have done much to address this even without a global pandemic).
Which is why I said, Osborne certainly bottled opportunities for more.
Of course, another possibility is that in-work benefits are responsible for keeping unemployment down, and the Conservatives realise that.
It's rather bizarre that the example given is the electric Hummer, which weighs 9000 lbs, as opposed to the standard Hummer at 6000 lbs. A better question might be why the f*** does anyone need to drive such an enormous vehicle in the first place? There weren't any complaints about heavy vehicles as petrol cars got bigger and bigger.
Yes there were. From the story:-
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average vehicle weight has reached an all-time record and is predicted to continue rising in the coming years. Vehicle weights dropped considerably in the 1980s compared to highs measured in 1975, but since then the average car and truck has increased from 3,200lbs to 4,200lbs.
Yes, it's a fact that heavier vehicles, petrol or electric, increase accident fatality risk, but I don't remember it being particularly newsworthy when it was just increasingly large petrol vehicles. That's the point I was making.
The increasing weight of traditional cars, was somewhat related to the increases in safety technology, both for occupants and pedestrians.
The step-change in weight for electric cars, has not been accompanied by increases in safety technology in the same way.
Most studies on the subject are quite flawed, because the current use case for an EV is quite different to that of a traditional car. In the UK, for example, most are company cars purchased for tax reasons.
I thought it was related to increased market share of SUVs, which are much more dangerous for pedestrians because of the higher vehicle profile, quite apart from the fact they are also heavier.
You'd think the increasing weight of pedestrians themselves would be protective, particularly given the energy absorbing properties of that extra weight... Although maybe pedestrians are not the group with greatest increasing weight.
The distribution of the extra weight isn't uniform, so very little additional cranial protection, for example.
Isn't it that while crash protection for passengers has vastly improved, for pedestrians it has got worse? Not helped by large blind spots on many SUV.
That's one thing I don't get about Tesla's Cybertruck: I just cannot see how it will pass the EU's frontal pedestrian tests. Although IANAE, so might well be wrong.
There’s plenty of US cars, including supercharged versions of the old Corvette and Dodge Charger, that failed European pedestrian impact tests in the past few years. The style is to stick the supercharger on top of the engine, partially sticking out of the bonnet, which is no-no as far as the EU is concerned.
A lot of people don’t realise that Corvettes are really good for storing classified US government documents next to
DOOCY: "Classified materials next to your Corvette?! What were you thinking?"
BIDEN: "My Corvette's in a locked garage so it's not like it's sitting on the street."
Biden's Corvette is undeniably cool. All original 67 C2 vert in Goodwood Green that he's owned since new.
Have you done a top 10 and worst 10 of politician's cars yet?
Poop, poop!
While IDS is clearly a plonker, if you think that a Morgan is a bad car it says more about you! Trying to think what a ScotNat/Anglophobe would drive? Apparently the leaders of your party like to be chauffeured about at great cost to the taxpayer. A link here shows a nationalist being chauffeured: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/hitler-car.html?sortBy=relevant
They are barstewards to drive. There is a several stage procedure before you start them, the ride is bone-shaking, the steering is heavy and all but the V8s are quite slow for a relatively light car. I love them but they are driven by people like IDS, so a Caterham is a much better bet.
Caterham is cool. I wouldn't have a Morgan, but I know three people who have them; all of them could not be less like the bonehead aka IDS.
Unpopular controversial thought.....does the UK need a proper recession to shake out weak businesses and focus on productivity?
I am of the opinion that 2008 approach of companies, supported by government, to try and minimise business failure and amount of unemployment, by encouraging wage reductions / freezes, might have had the unintended consequence that it allowed a lot of weak businesses with poor productivity to continue unreformed. Same with support during COVID.
OK so we lose a lot of weak businesses, the economy shrinks and more people are claiming benefits. If productivity goes up but production falls, who gains? If efficiency goes up but more workers are on the dole, who gains? There needs to be some mechanism by which new, better businesses are created.
In the past, natural order is eventually restored and we see lots of new businesses popping up, with ones that make it through being in much better positions to exploit opportunities, and as a result it was normal to see a strong recovery leading to a stronger economy than before. The telling thing about post 2008, we never really saw that. Poor productivity, wage stagnation etc etc etc.
I am not being entirely serious, just condemning millions to unemployment benefits isn't great, on both a personal level and for society. But I think there is a something here, some lessons to be learned. Have we cushioned too much, particularly during COVID? We definitely have lots of weak businesses with poor productivity.
I'd be more worried that in-work benefits, while intended to help workers, in fact subsidise bad employers and allows them to undercut good firms.
Absolutely. The system, which really became warped by Gordon Brown obsession with his relative poverty rate versus pressure on not increasing minimum wage too fast led to all these in work benefits*, has led to a very perverse system, where race to the bottom employers effectively get subsidised by the state for paying crap (and which were filled by immigration), while having people on £40-50k still get in-work benefits combined with cliff-ends to these.
(and Osborne kicking reform into the long grass)
A gentle reminder that the Conservatives have been in power for the last 13 years. They've had plenty of time to change the benefits system.
Which is what I said....they have tinkered around the edges e.g. tax credits at the top end and the introduction of UC.
You say 13 years, but there has been the little issue of 2010-2015 they were in coalition (and the Lib Dems wouldn't allow too much revolution in this area), 2015-2018 BREXITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT / no majority, then 2020-2022 COVID (but I doubt a Boris government elected by a Red Wall would have done much to address this even without a global pandemic).
Which is why I said, Osborne certainly bottled opportunities for more.
Of course, another possibility is that it is in-work benefits that are keeping unemployment down, and the Conservatives realise that.
Yes, but this comes back to the original point I made.....we have weak businesses with poor productivity and a system with encourages this to continue by subsidising it (versus encouraging long term investment).
It's rather bizarre that the example given is the electric Hummer, which weighs 9000 lbs, as opposed to the standard Hummer at 6000 lbs. A better question might be why the f*** does anyone need to drive such an enormous vehicle in the first place? There weren't any complaints about heavy vehicles as petrol cars got bigger and bigger.
Yes there were. From the story:-
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average vehicle weight has reached an all-time record and is predicted to continue rising in the coming years. Vehicle weights dropped considerably in the 1980s compared to highs measured in 1975, but since then the average car and truck has increased from 3,200lbs to 4,200lbs.
Yes, it's a fact that heavier vehicles, petrol or electric, increase accident fatality risk, but I don't remember it being particularly newsworthy when it was just increasingly large petrol vehicles. That's the point I was making.
The increasing weight of traditional cars, was somewhat related to the increases in safety technology, both for occupants and pedestrians.
The step-change in weight for electric cars, has not been accompanied by increases in safety technology in the same way.
Most studies on the subject are quite flawed, because the current use case for an EV is quite different to that of a traditional car. In the UK, for example, most are company cars purchased for tax reasons.
I thought it was related to increased market share of SUVs, which are much more dangerous for pedestrians because of the higher vehicle profile, quite apart from the fact they are also heavier.
You'd think the increasing weight of pedestrians themselves would be protective, particularly given the energy absorbing properties of that extra weight... Although maybe pedestrians are not the group with greatest increasing weight.
The distribution of the extra weight isn't uniform, so very little additional cranial protection, for example.
Isn't it that while crash protection for passengers has vastly improved, for pedestrians it has got worse? Not helped by large blind spots on many SUV.
That's one thing I don't get about Tesla's Cybertruck: I just cannot see how it will pass the EU's frontal pedestrian tests. Although IANAE, so might well be wrong.
There’s plenty of US cars, including supercharged versions of the old Corvette and Dodge Charger, that failed European pedestrian impact tests in the past few years. The style is to stick the supercharger on top of the engine, partially sticking out of the bonnet, which is no-no as far as the EU is concerned.
A lot of people don’t realise that Corvettes are really good for storing classified US government documents next to
DOOCY: "Classified materials next to your Corvette?! What were you thinking?"
BIDEN: "My Corvette's in a locked garage so it's not like it's sitting on the street."
Biden's Corvette is undeniably cool. All original 67 C2 vert in Goodwood Green that he's owned since new.
Have you done a top 10 and worst 10 of politician's cars yet?
Poop, poop!
While IDS is clearly a plonker, if you think that a Morgan is a bad car it says more about you! Trying to think what a ScotNat/Anglophobe would drive? Apparently the leaders of your party like to be chauffeured about at great cost to the taxpayer. A link here shows a nationalist being chauffeured: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/hitler-car.html?sortBy=relevant
Golly, what a load of vitriolic supposition from a photo and the words poop and poop!
Poor teachers are kept on? Wut, have you been in a school in the last 20 years?
No, but I know a couple of governors. their experience has been that getting rid of the incompetent is a very long winded process and they normally pop up at another school. Same with the NHS. the public sector doesn't sack people, it simply pays them a large amount of money to go and be incompetent in another school/hospital/local authority.
So anecdote of an anecdote. Teachers dismissed on grounds of capability don't just 'normally pop up at another school' in my experience.
Of course. Only reasonable for a Tory to go where the money is. That hardly detracts from the conclusions of the report.
Of all of those it's the phasing out of gas boilers that is the most unrealistic.
Well, perhaps it looks unrealistic now, but I have a reasonable degree of confidence that with the attention and investment that it could easily look a lot more realistic in five years time.
A lot of people said that wind energy would never amount to anything and now it is happening.
Yup. Progress towards a sustainable existence is a constant struggle against defeatism. Just as with wind power, the same types who are ridiculing heat pumps and the like now will no doubt be taking credit for them in a couple of decades.
Pointing out the problems and demanding answers is not defeatism, it's realism.
I'm tired of armchair commentators who know nothing about what they're talking about passing judgement on those who do, and have to do all the work, whilst they recline back in blissful spectation.
These are difficult problems,and they need careful thought, planning, resources and investment.
In light of your own remarks commenting about my insight into education that's deliciously ironic.
You didn't provide insight. You provided an expletive ridden and capitalised rant which you seemed to think was a killer argument.
I'd have been happy to take on point well-considered and fact based points.
You didn't make them.
Which tells me you didn't read it. Because I rebutted, point by point, what you had listed. True, I used swearing and capitalisations. But there was plenty of fact in there. You didn't at any point even try to show how I hadn't done so - just airily claimed in a fact free fashion that I hadn't done so.
I'm afraid the real issue is that what you posted didn't deserve anything less than swearing and capitalisations, as it was complete and utter nonsense. It was also rude, patronising, ignorant and failed to grapple with the key problems education faces.
If the original report was not as summarised, it may be worth reading. If it was, then it isn't.
Similarly, as you note armchair generals of various sorts generally don't understand what they're talking about. The issue is that bizarrely in education people listen to the armchair generals and dismiss the experts. And then wonder (a) why things aren't working as they expected (b) why teachers get mad at them for talking essentially abusive nonsense.
You didn't rebut me point by point, you just posted a rant. The TEC report and its headline findings triggered you, and that was your response.
It was in no sense considered or insightful, and I learnt nothing from it other than what I already knew: you hate the DfE, Ofsted and politicians - and teachers already do all this/need more funding and for government to stay out of their hair.
There might be something in it, but it isn't the whole of the answer - particularly where public policy requires join-up across education sectors, industry and communities - and more targeted investment, so it deserved more thought than your knee-jerk diatribe provided, particularly since there were plenty of education experts on the commission itself.
That is simply not true. I pointed out where they were wrong and why. Especially, I pointed out where they wanted people to do things that were already happening, and made statements that were nonsensical (which I might add is not easy to rebut, because if I say 'pixies don't exist' proving a negative is hard) or where they had misunderstood the problem (OFSTED).
I also noted they did make one very good point, on technology, but had misidentified the cause of the problem and therefore did not have a solution for it.
No way is that an expert report. Whoever wrote it is profoundly ignorant of education, and the way it was couched was actually pure rudeness. I responded in kind.
The genuine irony is that you are complaining about people doing in your field what they were doing in mine.
At my son's school they've had to reduce the number of science lessons in year 9 because they can't recruit science teachers. This government is running the country into the ground and ruining our childrens' future. Of course their privately educated kids will be fine. I'm so fucking furious with what these idiots are doing to us.
Is it always "the government"? They do, of course, have ultimate accountability, but other institutions, not least a very vocal minority of very left wing teachers who believe the "prizes for all" mentality, who seem to bask in their love of mediocrity also have a lot to answer for our poor state school provision. Until those on the left start to realise that improving standards also requires the weeding out of people who encourage those low standards then no public sector organisations will improve. Sadly the Left is the protector of the rights of vested interests to the detriment of pupils, patients and those who receive public sector "service".
Easier to blame the government and those terrible private schools though eh? Left wing thinking = simplistic chippy solutions for complex problems.
What a load of rubbish. The problem at my son's school is very specific - they can't hire teachers because the pay set by the government isn't competitive. There is absolutely zero problem with "prizes for all" (what does that even mean?) or low standards - it's a good school that simply can't afford to staff itself properly. And the people who could fix it - the government - simply don't fucking care. It actually isn't especially complex.
And there's a very good reason why this is happening in science. Most teachers are deployable as teachers of anything- a lot of schools already cover a lot of maths teaching with people who are qualified in something else using prepacked lessons and hoping for the best. In general, the teacher shortage won't lead to collapse or closures, just a creeping increase in class sizes, more use of temporary staff and that sort of thing.
Science is different because of the specific H+S requirements which can't be fudged. No science-qualified teacher, no science lessons. There is a minority of lefty "prizes for all" types, though they are less numerous and less influential than in the 1980s. But the specific issue here- schools can't get the number of teachers they need at the pay and conditions on offer- doesn't have much to do with that. You may resent it, but people cost what they cost. Time to open the national wallet, I'm afraid.
(Unfortunately, some of the problem is just maths. I learnt a new term this week; Baumol’s cost disease, a bit of economics jargon that means sectors that aren’t getting more productive, often one’s involving a lot of human contact, see costs going up because they have to compete for staff against sectors that are. Of course healthcare can be made more productive through technology, and because of capital underinvestment the NHS IT systems are dire, but ultimately caring professions are just going to keep sucking up an ever greater part of our collective income.)
Unpopular controversial thought.....does the UK need a proper recession to shake out weak businesses and focus on productivity?
I am of the opinion that 2008 approach of companies, supported by government, to try and minimise business failure and amount of unemployment, by encouraging wage reductions / freezes, might have had the unintended consequence that it allowed a lot of weak businesses with poor productivity to continue unreformed. Same with support during COVID.
OK so we lose a lot of weak businesses, the economy shrinks and more people are claiming benefits. If productivity goes up but production falls, who gains? If efficiency goes up but more workers are on the dole, who gains? There needs to be some mechanism by which new, better businesses are created.
In the past, natural order is eventually restored and we see lots of new businesses popping up, with ones that make it through being in much better positions to exploit opportunities, and as a result it was normal to see a strong recovery leading to a stronger economy than before. The telling thing about post 2008, we never really saw that. Poor productivity, wage stagnation etc etc etc.
I am not being entirely serious, just condemning millions to unemployment benefits isn't great, on both a personal level and for society. But I think there is a something here, some lessons to be learned. Have we cushioned too much, particularly during COVID? We definitely have lots of weak businesses with poor productivity.
I'd be more worried that in-work benefits, while intended to help workers, in fact subsidise bad employers and allows them to undercut good firms.
Absolutely. The system, which really became warped by Gordon Brown obsession with his relative poverty rate versus pressure on not increasing minimum wage too fast led to all these in work benefits*, has led to a very perverse system, where race to the bottom employers effectively get subsidised by the state for paying crap (and which were filled by immigration), while having people on £40-50k still get in-work benefits combined with cliff-ends to these.
(and Osborne kicking reform into the long grass)
A gentle reminder that the Conservatives have been in power for the last 13 years. They've had plenty of time to change the benefits system.
Which is what I said....they have tinkered around the edges e.g. tax credits at the top end and the introduction of UC.
You say 13 years, but there has been the little issue of 2010-2015 they were in coalition (and the Lib Dems wouldn't allow too much revolution in this area), 2015-2018 BREXITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT / no majority, then 2020-2022 COVID (but I doubt a Boris government elected by a Red Wall would have done much to address this even without a global pandemic).
Which is why I said, Osborne certainly bottled opportunities for more.
Of course, another possibility is that it is in-work benefits that are keeping unemployment down, and the Conservatives realise that.
Yes, but this comes back to the original point I made.....
On the whole, I think it's better for the government to be subsidising employment than paying even more for people to do nothing. Think of it as a half-way house to a universal basic income.
Ugh more evidence, if more proof were needed, that the University of Oxford needs to be razed. Also what is it about Swedes and their xenophobia and racism?
An Oxford academic has apologised for a 1996 email in which he wrote: “Blacks are more stupid than whites.”
In the message, Professor Nick Bostrom added: “I won’t have much success with most people if I speak like that . . . [it] seems to be synonymous with: I hate those bloody n*****s!!!!”
The University of Oxford said it had launched an investigation and condemned “in the strongest terms possible the views this particular academic expressed in his communications”.
Bostrom, a Swedish-born philosopher, is director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. He made the comments as part of a mailing list for an internet forum, The Extropians. In a statement published on his website, Bostrom said he chose to apologise — and re-publish the message — after hearing rumours that past comments would be “maliciously framed” and used in “smear campaigns”.
Bostrom said that the Extropians forum had been a place for conversations about “science fiction, future technologies, society and all sorts of random things” but that there was also a lot of “silly, mistaken, or outright offensive stuff”.
Poor teachers are kept on? Wut, have you been in a school in the last 20 years?
No, but I know a couple of governors. their experience has been that getting rid of the incompetent is a very long winded process and they normally pop up at another school. Same with the NHS. the public sector doesn't sack people, it simply pays them a large amount of money to go and be incompetent in another school/hospital/local authority.
Well the offer of a good reference goes a long way. Of course in the new role the person is found out again and promised a good reference if they move on. And so it goes on...
There's a Yes, Minister bit about that, where Humphrey (or maybe Bernard) explains that you should never employ anyone with a glowing reference, as the previous employer is clearly keen to get rid.
A friends relative had done this for years, moving from post to post until he made a fatal miscalculation - he tried to contest so he could stay in the current job. Outcome - no job and no reference either (so a nice three year hole in the CV). Now getting fatter and sicker on benefits, so we are all paying the cost!
It's rather bizarre that the example given is the electric Hummer, which weighs 9000 lbs, as opposed to the standard Hummer at 6000 lbs. A better question might be why the f*** does anyone need to drive such an enormous vehicle in the first place? There weren't any complaints about heavy vehicles as petrol cars got bigger and bigger.
Yes there were. From the story:-
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average vehicle weight has reached an all-time record and is predicted to continue rising in the coming years. Vehicle weights dropped considerably in the 1980s compared to highs measured in 1975, but since then the average car and truck has increased from 3,200lbs to 4,200lbs.
Yes, it's a fact that heavier vehicles, petrol or electric, increase accident fatality risk, but I don't remember it being particularly newsworthy when it was just increasingly large petrol vehicles. That's the point I was making.
The increasing weight of traditional cars, was somewhat related to the increases in safety technology, both for occupants and pedestrians.
The step-change in weight for electric cars, has not been accompanied by increases in safety technology in the same way.
Most studies on the subject are quite flawed, because the current use case for an EV is quite different to that of a traditional car. In the UK, for example, most are company cars purchased for tax reasons.
I thought it was related to increased market share of SUVs, which are much more dangerous for pedestrians because of the higher vehicle profile, quite apart from the fact they are also heavier.
You'd think the increasing weight of pedestrians themselves would be protective, particularly given the energy absorbing properties of that extra weight... Although maybe pedestrians are not the group with greatest increasing weight.
The distribution of the extra weight isn't uniform, so very little additional cranial protection, for example.
Isn't it that while crash protection for passengers has vastly improved, for pedestrians it has got worse? Not helped by large blind spots on many SUV.
That's one thing I don't get about Tesla's Cybertruck: I just cannot see how it will pass the EU's frontal pedestrian tests. Although IANAE, so might well be wrong.
There’s plenty of US cars, including supercharged versions of the old Corvette and Dodge Charger, that failed European pedestrian impact tests in the past few years. The style is to stick the supercharger on top of the engine, partially sticking out of the bonnet, which is no-no as far as the EU is concerned.
A lot of people don’t realise that Corvettes are really good for storing classified US government documents next to
DOOCY: "Classified materials next to your Corvette?! What were you thinking?"
BIDEN: "My Corvette's in a locked garage so it's not like it's sitting on the street."
Biden's Corvette is undeniably cool. All original 67 C2 vert in Goodwood Green that he's owned since new.
Have you done a top 10 and worst 10 of politician's cars yet?
Good 1. Guy Verhofstadt - Excellent collection but we'll give him top spot for his AMG GT 2. Idi Amin - Citroen SM 3. Biden - '67 C2 vert 4. Trump - Lamborghini Diablo VT (think he also had a Countach) 5. Bush 43 - Ford F150 King Ranch 6. Medvedev - Porsche Cayenne Turbo 7. Uday Hussein - Lamborghini LM002 8. Shappsie - F80 330i 9. Mohammad Pahlavi - Lamborghini Miura 10. Francois Mitterand - Hotchkiss Grégoire
Bad 1. Johnson - Toyota Previa 2. IDS - Morgan Plus 8. Twatmobile of the highest order. 3. Sunak - Fucking X-Type 4. Marcus "Billy The" Fysh, MP - Subaru Forester (Once spat on by me, he was lucky I didn't need a shit.) 5. Starmer - RAV4 6. Cameron - Nissan Micra. Rich person with a shit car = scum of the earth 7. JRM - XJ Jag. Fuck off. 8. Brown - Vauxhall Omega. Jesus Christ. 9. Balls. Toyota Yaris. See Cameron. 10. Airey Neave. Mk.1 Cavalier
Weren't Johnson's Previa and early model Focus ( total value- current weigh-in price at Sims Metals) down to his personal cash flow issues. I daresay he'd have an M8 if someone donated it to him. Although there is the story that when he wrote car reviews for the Telegraph, the starting mileages when the cars were dropped off had an uncanny resemblance to the recorded mileages when the cars were collected.
It's rather bizarre that the example given is the electric Hummer, which weighs 9000 lbs, as opposed to the standard Hummer at 6000 lbs. A better question might be why the f*** does anyone need to drive such an enormous vehicle in the first place? There weren't any complaints about heavy vehicles as petrol cars got bigger and bigger.
Yes there were. From the story:-
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average vehicle weight has reached an all-time record and is predicted to continue rising in the coming years. Vehicle weights dropped considerably in the 1980s compared to highs measured in 1975, but since then the average car and truck has increased from 3,200lbs to 4,200lbs.
Yes, it's a fact that heavier vehicles, petrol or electric, increase accident fatality risk, but I don't remember it being particularly newsworthy when it was just increasingly large petrol vehicles. That's the point I was making.
The increasing weight of traditional cars, was somewhat related to the increases in safety technology, both for occupants and pedestrians.
The step-change in weight for electric cars, has not been accompanied by increases in safety technology in the same way.
Most studies on the subject are quite flawed, because the current use case for an EV is quite different to that of a traditional car. In the UK, for example, most are company cars purchased for tax reasons.
I thought it was related to increased market share of SUVs, which are much more dangerous for pedestrians because of the higher vehicle profile, quite apart from the fact they are also heavier.
You'd think the increasing weight of pedestrians themselves would be protective, particularly given the energy absorbing properties of that extra weight... Although maybe pedestrians are not the group with greatest increasing weight.
The distribution of the extra weight isn't uniform, so very little additional cranial protection, for example.
Isn't it that while crash protection for passengers has vastly improved, for pedestrians it has got worse? Not helped by large blind spots on many SUV.
That's one thing I don't get about Tesla's Cybertruck: I just cannot see how it will pass the EU's frontal pedestrian tests. Although IANAE, so might well be wrong.
There’s plenty of US cars, including supercharged versions of the old Corvette and Dodge Charger, that failed European pedestrian impact tests in the past few years. The style is to stick the supercharger on top of the engine, partially sticking out of the bonnet, which is no-no as far as the EU is concerned.
A lot of people don’t realise that Corvettes are really good for storing classified US government documents next to
DOOCY: "Classified materials next to your Corvette?! What were you thinking?"
BIDEN: "My Corvette's in a locked garage so it's not like it's sitting on the street."
Biden's Corvette is undeniably cool. All original 67 C2 vert in Goodwood Green that he's owned since new.
Have you done a top 10 and worst 10 of politician's cars yet?
Poop, poop!
While IDS is clearly a plonker, if you think that a Morgan is a bad car it says more about you! Trying to think what a ScotNat/Anglophobe would drive? Apparently the leaders of your party like to be chauffeured about at great cost to the taxpayer. A link here shows a nationalist being chauffeured: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/hitler-car.html?sortBy=relevant
Golly, what a load of vitriolic supposition from a photo and the words poop and poop!
Vitriolic? Do you understand the word, or is that just the usual hyperbole? I leave vitriol to Nats as they are expert at that particular vice. It was called piss take. Any thoughts on the chauffeuring thing, or should we ask your driver?
Of course. Only reasonable for a Tory to go where the money is. That hardly detracts from the conclusions of the report.
Of all of those it's the phasing out of gas boilers that is the most unrealistic.
Well, perhaps it looks unrealistic now, but I have a reasonable degree of confidence that with the attention and investment that it could easily look a lot more realistic in five years time.
A lot of people said that wind energy would never amount to anything and now it is happening.
But, it's not rhetoric that delivers that - it's people like me that deliver complex infrastructure. And retrofitting tens of millions of homes and their distribution networks (some over a century old) is a mammoth undertaking.
It's also far harder than the cost efficient mass manufacturing of wind turbines and their deployment offshore.
And it's legislation which forces people like you to plan for it. The reality is that a 2033 date means all new properties will have to be properly insulated - and old properties with gas appliances have the best part of another decade to retrofit.
Just kicking the can down the road achieves nothing.
And no doubt nearer the time there will be exemptions for hard cases.
People like me need the government to think through the implications of their policy decisions and consult with industry first on its implications, which they have not done, and then fund it properly, which they have also not done.
I am not arguing for the can being kicked down the road. I am stating when it is likely to be achieved on current trends.
If we want to achieve it earlier then all these things need to be carefully thought through (which requires hard work) and not sniped at or the messenger shot.
Regarding funding, the report specifically says: "Moving quickly must include spending money. We know that investing in net zero today will be cheaper than delaying, as well as increasing the economic and climate benefits."
It is precisely an attempt to think through the implications of what accelerating the transition requires. It's not something that can be implemented piecemeal, but rather a framework for rethinking policy wholesale.
This discussion started with me explaining why phasing out of gas boilers would be the hardest to achieve. You then said this wouldn't be a problem because it's only for new gas boilers. I then explained why it was, and the scale of the challenge.
You are now reduced to quoting a couple of sentences in the BBC news article to say my point has already been precisely covered, when it hasn't.
It's rather bizarre that the example given is the electric Hummer, which weighs 9000 lbs, as opposed to the standard Hummer at 6000 lbs. A better question might be why the f*** does anyone need to drive such an enormous vehicle in the first place? There weren't any complaints about heavy vehicles as petrol cars got bigger and bigger.
Yes there were. From the story:-
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average vehicle weight has reached an all-time record and is predicted to continue rising in the coming years. Vehicle weights dropped considerably in the 1980s compared to highs measured in 1975, but since then the average car and truck has increased from 3,200lbs to 4,200lbs.
Yes, it's a fact that heavier vehicles, petrol or electric, increase accident fatality risk, but I don't remember it being particularly newsworthy when it was just increasingly large petrol vehicles. That's the point I was making.
The increasing weight of traditional cars, was somewhat related to the increases in safety technology, both for occupants and pedestrians.
The step-change in weight for electric cars, has not been accompanied by increases in safety technology in the same way.
Most studies on the subject are quite flawed, because the current use case for an EV is quite different to that of a traditional car. In the UK, for example, most are company cars purchased for tax reasons.
I thought it was related to increased market share of SUVs, which are much more dangerous for pedestrians because of the higher vehicle profile, quite apart from the fact they are also heavier.
You'd think the increasing weight of pedestrians themselves would be protective, particularly given the energy absorbing properties of that extra weight... Although maybe pedestrians are not the group with greatest increasing weight.
The distribution of the extra weight isn't uniform, so very little additional cranial protection, for example.
Isn't it that while crash protection for passengers has vastly improved, for pedestrians it has got worse? Not helped by large blind spots on many SUV.
That's one thing I don't get about Tesla's Cybertruck: I just cannot see how it will pass the EU's frontal pedestrian tests. Although IANAE, so might well be wrong.
There’s plenty of US cars, including supercharged versions of the old Corvette and Dodge Charger, that failed European pedestrian impact tests in the past few years. The style is to stick the supercharger on top of the engine, partially sticking out of the bonnet, which is no-no as far as the EU is concerned.
A lot of people don’t realise that Corvettes are really good for storing classified US government documents next to
DOOCY: "Classified materials next to your Corvette?! What were you thinking?"
BIDEN: "My Corvette's in a locked garage so it's not like it's sitting on the street."
Unpopular controversial thought.....does the UK need a proper recession to shake out weak businesses and focus on productivity?
I am of the opinion that 2008 approach of companies, supported by government, to try and minimise business failure and amount of unemployment, by encouraging wage reductions / freezes, might have had the unintended consequence that it allowed a lot of weak businesses with poor productivity to continue unreformed. Same with support during COVID.
OK so we lose a lot of weak businesses, the economy shrinks and more people are claiming benefits. If productivity goes up but production falls, who gains? If efficiency goes up but more workers are on the dole, who gains? There needs to be some mechanism by which new, better businesses are created.
In the past, natural order is eventually restored and we see lots of new businesses popping up, with ones that make it through being in much better positions to exploit opportunities, and as a result it was normal to see a strong recovery leading to a stronger economy than before. The telling thing about post 2008, we never really saw that. Poor productivity, wage stagnation etc etc etc.
I am not being entirely serious, just condemning millions to unemployment benefits isn't great, on both a personal level and for society. But I think there is a something here, some lessons to be learned. Have we cushioned too much, particularly during COVID? We definitely have lots of weak businesses with poor productivity.
I'd be more worried that in-work benefits, while intended to help workers, in fact subsidise bad employers and allows them to undercut good firms.
Absolutely. The system, which really became warped by Gordon Brown obsession with his relative poverty rate versus pressure on not increasing minimum wage too fast led to all these in work benefits*, has led to a very perverse system, where race to the bottom employers effectively get subsidised by the state for paying crap (and which were filled by immigration), while having people on £40-50k still get in-work benefits combined with cliff-ends to these.
(and Osborne kicking reform into the long grass)
A gentle reminder that the Conservatives have been in power for the last 13 years. They've had plenty of time to change the benefits system.
Which is what I said....they have tinkered around the edges e.g. tax credits at the top end and the introduction of UC.
You say 13 years, but there has been the little issue of 2010-2015 they were in coalition (and the Lib Dems wouldn't allow too much revolution in this area), 2015-2018 BREXITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT / no majority, then 2020-2022 COVID (but I doubt a Boris government elected by a Red Wall would have done much to address this even without a global pandemic).
Which is why I said, Osborne certainly bottled opportunities for more.
Of course, another possibility is that it is in-work benefits that are keeping unemployment down, and the Conservatives realise that.
Yes, but this comes back to the original point I made.....
On the whole, I think it's better for the government to be subsidising employment than paying even more for people to do nothing. Think of it as a half-way house to a universal basic income.
Is it though....long term....that's my point. 2008-2022 has been this approach and we have seen weak businesses, poor productivity, weak growth etc etc etc. Lots of businesses have been run off the fact it is cheaper and easier to just hire immigrant labour on minimum wage (subsided by the state). And when the road has become bumpy, the state has stepped in a insulated a lot of them. The trivial example we always talk about, car washes, no investment in technology, just import an Albanian to do it.
As I say, my original statement was somewhat tongue in cheek, I am not genuinely hoping we have a terrible recession and millions of people lose their jobs. However, I am saying do we have a system that encourages poorly run businesses / poor business practices to continue to exist in the market and that this needs to change....
It's rather bizarre that the example given is the electric Hummer, which weighs 9000 lbs, as opposed to the standard Hummer at 6000 lbs. A better question might be why the f*** does anyone need to drive such an enormous vehicle in the first place? There weren't any complaints about heavy vehicles as petrol cars got bigger and bigger.
Yes there were. From the story:-
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average vehicle weight has reached an all-time record and is predicted to continue rising in the coming years. Vehicle weights dropped considerably in the 1980s compared to highs measured in 1975, but since then the average car and truck has increased from 3,200lbs to 4,200lbs.
Yes, it's a fact that heavier vehicles, petrol or electric, increase accident fatality risk, but I don't remember it being particularly newsworthy when it was just increasingly large petrol vehicles. That's the point I was making.
The increasing weight of traditional cars, was somewhat related to the increases in safety technology, both for occupants and pedestrians.
The step-change in weight for electric cars, has not been accompanied by increases in safety technology in the same way.
Most studies on the subject are quite flawed, because the current use case for an EV is quite different to that of a traditional car. In the UK, for example, most are company cars purchased for tax reasons.
I thought it was related to increased market share of SUVs, which are much more dangerous for pedestrians because of the higher vehicle profile, quite apart from the fact they are also heavier.
You'd think the increasing weight of pedestrians themselves would be protective, particularly given the energy absorbing properties of that extra weight... Although maybe pedestrians are not the group with greatest increasing weight.
The distribution of the extra weight isn't uniform, so very little additional cranial protection, for example.
Isn't it that while crash protection for passengers has vastly improved, for pedestrians it has got worse? Not helped by large blind spots on many SUV.
That's one thing I don't get about Tesla's Cybertruck: I just cannot see how it will pass the EU's frontal pedestrian tests. Although IANAE, so might well be wrong.
There’s plenty of US cars, including supercharged versions of the old Corvette and Dodge Charger, that failed European pedestrian impact tests in the past few years. The style is to stick the supercharger on top of the engine, partially sticking out of the bonnet, which is no-no as far as the EU is concerned.
A lot of people don’t realise that Corvettes are really good for storing classified US government documents next to
DOOCY: "Classified materials next to your Corvette?! What were you thinking?"
BIDEN: "My Corvette's in a locked garage so it's not like it's sitting on the street."
Biden's Corvette is undeniably cool. All original 67 C2 vert in Goodwood Green that he's owned since new.
Have you done a top 10 and worst 10 of politician's cars yet?
Good 1. Guy Verhofstadt - Excellent collection but we'll give him top spot for his AMG GT 2. Idi Amin - Citroen SM 3. Biden - '67 C2 vert 4. Trump - Lamborghini Diablo VT (think he also had a Countach) 5. Bush 43 - Ford F150 King Ranch 6. Medvedev - Porsche Cayenne Turbo 7. Uday Hussein - Lamborghini LM002 8. Shappsie - F80 330i 9. Mohammad Pahlavi - Lamborghini Miura 10. Francois Mitterand - Hotchkiss Grégoire
Bad 1. Johnson - Toyota Previa 2. IDS - Morgan Plus 8. Twatmobile of the highest order. 3. Sunak - Fucking X-Type 4. Marcus "Billy The" Fysh, MP - Subaru Forester (Once spat on by me, he was lucky I didn't need a shit.) 5. Starmer - RAV4 6. Cameron - Nissan Micra. Rich person with a shit car = scum of the earth 7. JRM - XJ Jag. Fuck off. 8. Brown - Vauxhall Omega. Jesus Christ. 9. Balls. Toyota Yaris. See Cameron. 10. Airey Neave. Mk.1 Cavalier
The correct answer, of course, is that a 'good' car is one that allows me to do the job I need to do with absolutely no fuss. I get in, drive it where I want to go, and get out.
A 'bad' car is one where I have to get jump-leads to start it every so often, where I'm always worried whether it'll finish the journey without it breaking down, and where, when I'm at the destination, I'm worried if someone will key it.
Oddly enough, this means that my idea of a 'good' car is often the direct opposite of a petrol-heads. Which is why I think I'm much wiser than an average petrol-head.
It's rather bizarre that the example given is the electric Hummer, which weighs 9000 lbs, as opposed to the standard Hummer at 6000 lbs. A better question might be why the f*** does anyone need to drive such an enormous vehicle in the first place? There weren't any complaints about heavy vehicles as petrol cars got bigger and bigger.
Yes there were. From the story:-
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average vehicle weight has reached an all-time record and is predicted to continue rising in the coming years. Vehicle weights dropped considerably in the 1980s compared to highs measured in 1975, but since then the average car and truck has increased from 3,200lbs to 4,200lbs.
Yes, it's a fact that heavier vehicles, petrol or electric, increase accident fatality risk, but I don't remember it being particularly newsworthy when it was just increasingly large petrol vehicles. That's the point I was making.
The increasing weight of traditional cars, was somewhat related to the increases in safety technology, both for occupants and pedestrians.
The step-change in weight for electric cars, has not been accompanied by increases in safety technology in the same way.
Most studies on the subject are quite flawed, because the current use case for an EV is quite different to that of a traditional car. In the UK, for example, most are company cars purchased for tax reasons.
I thought it was related to increased market share of SUVs, which are much more dangerous for pedestrians because of the higher vehicle profile, quite apart from the fact they are also heavier.
You'd think the increasing weight of pedestrians themselves would be protective, particularly given the energy absorbing properties of that extra weight... Although maybe pedestrians are not the group with greatest increasing weight.
The distribution of the extra weight isn't uniform, so very little additional cranial protection, for example.
Isn't it that while crash protection for passengers has vastly improved, for pedestrians it has got worse? Not helped by large blind spots on many SUV.
That's one thing I don't get about Tesla's Cybertruck: I just cannot see how it will pass the EU's frontal pedestrian tests. Although IANAE, so might well be wrong.
There’s plenty of US cars, including supercharged versions of the old Corvette and Dodge Charger, that failed European pedestrian impact tests in the past few years. The style is to stick the supercharger on top of the engine, partially sticking out of the bonnet, which is no-no as far as the EU is concerned.
A lot of people don’t realise that Corvettes are really good for storing classified US government documents next to
DOOCY: "Classified materials next to your Corvette?! What were you thinking?"
BIDEN: "My Corvette's in a locked garage so it's not like it's sitting on the street."
Biden's Corvette is undeniably cool. All original 67 C2 vert in Goodwood Green that he's owned since new.
Have you done a top 10 and worst 10 of politician's cars yet?
Good 1. Guy Verhofstadt - Excellent collection but we'll give him top spot for his AMG GT 2. Idi Amin - Citroen SM 3. Biden - '67 C2 vert 4. Trump - Lamborghini Diablo VT (think he also had a Countach) 5. Bush 43 - Ford F150 King Ranch 6. Medvedev - Porsche Cayenne Turbo 7. Uday Hussein - Lamborghini LM002 8. Shappsie - F80 330i 9. Mohammad Pahlavi - Lamborghini Miura 10. Francois Mitterand - Hotchkiss Grégoire
Bad 1. Johnson - Toyota Previa 2. IDS - Morgan Plus 8. Twatmobile of the highest order. 3. Sunak - Fucking X-Type 4. Marcus "Billy The" Fysh, MP - Subaru Forester (Once spat on by me, he was lucky I didn't need a shit.) 5. Starmer - RAV4 6. Cameron - Nissan Micra. Rich person with a shit car = scum of the earth 7. JRM - XJ Jag. Fuck off. 8. Brown - Vauxhall Omega. Jesus Christ. 9. Balls. Toyota Yaris. See Cameron. 10. Airey Neave. Mk.1 Cavalier
The correct answer, of course, is that a 'good' car is one that allows me to do the job I need to do with absolutely no fuss. I get in, drive it where I want to go, and get out.
A 'bad' car is one where I have to get jump-leads to start it every so often, where I'm always worried whether it'll finish the journey without it breaking down, and where, when I'm at the destination, I'm worried if someone will key it.
Oddly enough, this means that my idea of a 'good' car is often the direct opposite of a petrol-heads. Which is why I think I'm much wiser than an average petrol-head.
Add in low cost and low damage to the environment too....
At my son's school they've had to reduce the number of science lessons in year 9 because they can't recruit science teachers. This government is running the country into the ground and ruining our childrens' future. Of course their privately educated kids will be fine. I'm so fucking furious with what these idiots are doing to us.
Is it always "the government"? They do, of course, have ultimate accountability, but other institutions, not least a very vocal minority of very left wing teachers who believe the "prizes for all" mentality, who seem to bask in their love of mediocrity also have a lot to answer for our poor state school provision. Until those on the left start to realise that improving standards also requires the weeding out of people who encourage those low standards then no public sector organisations will improve. Sadly the Left is the protector of the rights of vested interests to the detriment of pupils, patients and those who receive public sector "service".
Easier to blame the government and those terrible private schools though eh? Left wing thinking = simplistic chippy solutions for complex problems.
What a load of rubbish. The problem at my son's school is very specific - they can't hire teachers because the pay set by the government isn't competitive. There is absolutely zero problem with "prizes for all" (what does that even mean?) or low standards - it's a good school that simply can't afford to staff itself properly. And the people who could fix it - the government - simply don't fucking care. It actually isn't especially complex.
Not forgetting the government have set teacher pay at a level higher than the funding they've actually provided for it, so staffing is having to be cut to stay in budget.
On top of that, supply budgets are about sucked dry after the last three years.
My goodness Nigel. I think you win todays uninformed-bullshit-whataboutery award.
Really? I simply asked whether it is always "the government"? I did not say that they have no culpability.I know that this is a political site, and there is a tendency of those of a more rigid political perspective to be tribal but do try reading peoples' posts before trying to be a smartarse. @ydoethur's point is an interesting one, but it still doesn't remove my point, that blaming everything on "the government" is for simplistic fools. I see you confine yourself to the aforementioned category.
Nigel dissembling is always less effective when what you actually wrote is in a quote chain.
I don’t have much issue with you asking whether it is all the government’s fault (except that your question is so clearly a straw man).
But you very clearly didn’t just ask that. You attempted to lay blame for the fact that OLB’s kids school can’t recruit science teachers on left wing teachers and a ‘prizes for all’ mentality.
Poor teachers are kept on? Wut, have you been in a school in the last 20 years?
No, but I know a couple of governors. their experience has been that getting rid of the incompetent is a very long winded process and they normally pop up at another school. Same with the NHS. the public sector doesn't sack people, it simply pays them a large amount of money to go and be incompetent in another school/hospital/local authority.
So anecdote of an anecdote. Teachers dismissed on grounds of capability don't just 'normally pop up at another school' in my experience.
No doubt you have your own anecdotes to inform your view. I have more direct experience of the NHS where I can tell you with absolute certainty that it is the case that doctors and other professionals are sacked after very long processes that then award a payout (often with NDAs attached) and they then find a job within the NHS at an institution close by. It seems very unlikely to me that teachers who are "managed out" of a school do not simply become a teacher at another school, particularly when there is such a shortage.
Poor teachers are kept on? Wut, have you been in a school in the last 20 years?
No, but I know a couple of governors. their experience has been that getting rid of the incompetent is a very long winded process and they normally pop up at another school. Same with the NHS. the public sector doesn't sack people, it simply pays them a large amount of money to go and be incompetent in another school/hospital/local authority.
Well the offer of a good reference goes a long way. Of course in the new role the person is found out again and promised a good reference if they move on. And so it goes on...
I don't think good references are particularly relevant to employment decisions these days, since they are usually taken up after the preliminary decision on whether or not to employ has already been made. They are more of a final check.
At my son's school they've had to reduce the number of science lessons in year 9 because they can't recruit science teachers. This government is running the country into the ground and ruining our childrens' future. Of course their privately educated kids will be fine. I'm so fucking furious with what these idiots are doing to us.
Is it always "the government"? They do, of course, have ultimate accountability, but other institutions, not least a very vocal minority of very left wing teachers who believe the "prizes for all" mentality, who seem to bask in their love of mediocrity also have a lot to answer for our poor state school provision. Until those on the left start to realise that improving standards also requires the weeding out of people who encourage those low standards then no public sector organisations will improve. Sadly the Left is the protector of the rights of vested interests to the detriment of pupils, patients and those who receive public sector "service".
Easier to blame the government and those terrible private schools though eh? Left wing thinking = simplistic chippy solutions for complex problems.
What a load of rubbish. The problem at my son's school is very specific - they can't hire teachers because the pay set by the government isn't competitive. There is absolutely zero problem with "prizes for all" (what does that even mean?) or low standards - it's a good school that simply can't afford to staff itself properly. And the people who could fix it - the government - simply don't fucking care. It actually isn't especially complex.
Recruitment for everyone at the moment is difficult. It is a massive problem. People do not want to change jobs, particularly when they have job security, so there is limited supply. There are private companies I know that have massively increased pay for roles and still can't find people to do them. Recruitment is very rarely just about pay. Teaching has challenges, but also benefits that other areas cannot compete with. One of the biggest challenges to pay is when schools (similar to hospitals) are not allowed by the unions to offer attractive pay differentials to attract people. So yes it is very complex, but carry on blaming "the government" if you must, and carry on letting off all the other actors such as local authorities, unions and teachers themselves off the hook. The vested interests like it that way.
What have the local authorities got to do with it? They don't run the school. It's the job of the government to run schools properly (especially since under the Academies system they have centralised control over education). If schools can't recruit at current funding levels then they need more money, end of story. Nothing is more critical to this country's future than the education of our children. It should be the government's top priority. If this government won't fund that properly then don't be surprised if parents vote in a government that will. There is so much anger and frustration at the school gates, believe me.
For the record, I see nothing as more important than the education of children and would love to see a massive increase in investment in teachers and education generally, (though this should be aligned with productivity). However, I would also like to see a break with the malign influence of left wing unions over teaching.
Maybe they would be less inclined to "malign influence" if government (s) desisted in interference every 5 minutes.
Even the DLR has a member of staff on every train that can drive them. They are paid the same as Underground staff.
Driverless does not exist.
“Like the NUM, the rail unions are engaged in a futile effort to preserve jobs which in many cases are no longer needed and should have been abolished decades ago. Trains have not needed guards since the mid 19th century when the invention of block signalling did away with the need to defend a broken-down train by running back down the line to warn approaching trains. Many commuter trains have run perfectly safely since the early 1980s with driver-only operation. As for drivers, in many cases they are not required, either. Driverless trains are not futuristic – they have existed for over 40 years. There are now over 100 metro systems in the world which run without drivers – at much lower expense and with the threat of strikes eliminated. On lightly-used rural lines, where traffic levels do not justify investment in driverless operation, it still makes sense to employ drivers, but there is no excuse for doing so on the London Underground.“
You're not arguing against the point I actually made - like a good Tory.
The Government wanted driver-only operation but they also claimed there would be no job losses as guards would be assigned another role and pay would remain the same. So it doesn't actually achieve anything except change for the sake of it.
The Government has a separate argument about driverless trains but as has been pointed out to them, this concept doesn't actually exist and wouldn't save any money. You'd still have drivers on the trains being paid the same - as on the DLR - they just wouldn't be running the trains all the time.
This is basically already what happens on certain parts of the Underground where they have CBTC
The DLR has 'passenger services agents', who usually act to check tickets/ disturbances but only drive manually to get to/from the depot and in case of emergency, and they are paid much less than tube drivers.
Also this is totally incorrect. I am happy to provide citations but anyone who has ridden the DLR knows that staff drive the trains frequently. They are trained to drive the trains in all conditions (including in case of emergency) and are paid the same as Tube drivers.
I worked at Canary Wharf for 7 years. I worked there because I was on the senior leadership team of Crossrail in the technical directorate, and worked very closely with TfL - including the operators. I am familiar with the DLR trains and how they operate. I also commuted on the Jubilee Line and DLR daily. So I am well aware of how frequently staff take over the controls, which tends to be in peak times with high frequency, and also that DLR passenger services agents are not paid the same as Tube drivers.
No doubt you'll mark this down to 'condescension' but although someone pointing out you've got the facts wrong might occasionally embarrass you it is not the same thing.
*To be exact, she was on competencies when in a stroke of sheer genius not given to all people, she told a bunch of German girls on exchange to line up at the front of the class while she explained whether or not they measured up to Nazi ideals. She had just got to commenting on their breasts when the - Polish - headteacher walked in.
My god! That would have been a frightening experience for the German girls.
Of course. Only reasonable for a Tory to go where the money is. That hardly detracts from the conclusions of the report.
Of all of those it's the phasing out of gas boilers that is the most unrealistic.
Well, perhaps it looks unrealistic now, but I have a reasonable degree of confidence that with the attention and investment that it could easily look a lot more realistic in five years time.
A lot of people said that wind energy would never amount to anything and now it is happening.
Yup. Progress towards a sustainable existence is a constant struggle against defeatism. Just as with wind power, the same types who are ridiculing heat pumps and the like now will no doubt be taking credit for them in a couple of decades.
Pointing out the problems and demanding answers is not defeatism, it's realism.
I'm tired of armchair commentators who know nothing about what they're talking about passing judgement on those who do, and have to do all the work, whilst they recline back in blissful spectation.
These are difficult problems,and they need careful thought, planning, resources and investment.
In light of your own remarks commenting about my insight into education that's deliciously ironic.
You didn't provide insight. You provided an expletive ridden and capitalised rant which you seemed to think was a killer argument.
I'd have been happy to take on point well-considered and fact based points.
You didn't make them.
Which tells me you didn't read it. Because I rebutted, point by point, what you had listed. True, I used swearing and capitalisations. But there was plenty of fact in there. You didn't at any point even try to show how I hadn't done so - just airily claimed in a fact free fashion that I hadn't done so.
I'm afraid the real issue is that what you posted didn't deserve anything less than swearing and capitalisations, as it was complete and utter nonsense. It was also rude, patronising, ignorant and failed to grapple with the key problems education faces.
If the original report was not as summarised, it may be worth reading. If it was, then it isn't.
Similarly, as you note armchair generals of various sorts generally don't understand what they're talking about. The issue is that bizarrely in education people listen to the armchair generals and dismiss the experts. And then wonder (a) why things aren't working as they expected (b) why teachers get mad at them for talking essentially abusive nonsense.
About time somebody called out Condescending_Royale. Go on!!!
How disappointing. In a voyeuristic attempt to find this expletive-laden barney between ydoethur and CR i scrolled through two pages of ydoethur’s comments but couldn’t find a single swear word. The least you can do if you are going to bear a grudge on here is to link to your original argument so we can all enjoy it
My word. That's dedication. However, in the interests of science:
Looks like a warmer London to me. I am off to the Masai Mara, then Lamu.
Bangkok is always great at this time of year. Climatically it is perfect, the “cool” dry season, which means 32C and mostly sunny every day, with low humidity. The total sweet spot. Evenings are deliciously warm but not sticky
But this winter, after 3 years of Covid, it is magnificent
Even the DLR has a member of staff on every train that can drive them. They are paid the same as Underground staff.
Driverless does not exist.
“Like the NUM, the rail unions are engaged in a futile effort to preserve jobs which in many cases are no longer needed and should have been abolished decades ago. Trains have not needed guards since the mid 19th century when the invention of block signalling did away with the need to defend a broken-down train by running back down the line to warn approaching trains. Many commuter trains have run perfectly safely since the early 1980s with driver-only operation. As for drivers, in many cases they are not required, either. Driverless trains are not futuristic – they have existed for over 40 years. There are now over 100 metro systems in the world which run without drivers – at much lower expense and with the threat of strikes eliminated. On lightly-used rural lines, where traffic levels do not justify investment in driverless operation, it still makes sense to employ drivers, but there is no excuse for doing so on the London Underground.“
You're not arguing against the point I actually made - like a good Tory.
The Government wanted driver-only operation but they also claimed there would be no job losses as guards would be assigned another role and pay would remain the same. So it doesn't actually achieve anything except change for the sake of it.
The Government has a separate argument about driverless trains but as has been pointed out to them, this concept doesn't actually exist and wouldn't save any money. You'd still have drivers on the trains being paid the same - as on the DLR - they just wouldn't be running the trains all the time.
This is basically already what happens on certain parts of the Underground where they have CBTC
The DLR has 'passenger services agents', who usually act to check tickets/ disturbances but only drive manually to get to/from the depot and in case of emergency, and they are paid much less than tube drivers.
Also this is totally incorrect. I am happy to provide citations but anyone who has ridden the DLR knows that staff drive the trains frequently. They are trained to drive the trains in all conditions (including in case of emergency) and are paid the same as Tube drivers.
I worked at Canary Wharf for 7 years. I worked there because I was on the senior leadership team of Crossrail in the technical directorate, and worked very closely with TfL - including the operators. I am familiar with the DLR trains and how they operate. I also commuted on the Jubilee Line and DLR daily. So I am well aware of how frequently staff take over the controls, which tends to be in peak times with high frequency, and also that DLR passenger services agents are not paid the same as Tube drivers.
No doubt you'll mark this down to 'condescension' but although someone pointing out you've got the facts wrong might occasionally embarrass you it is not the same thing.
The Elizabeth Line is fantastic. Can't wait for it to be fully operational in May.
Of course. Only reasonable for a Tory to go where the money is. That hardly detracts from the conclusions of the report.
Of all of those it's the phasing out of gas boilers that is the most unrealistic.
Well, perhaps it looks unrealistic now, but I have a reasonable degree of confidence that with the attention and investment that it could easily look a lot more realistic in five years time.
A lot of people said that wind energy would never amount to anything and now it is happening.
Yup. Progress towards a sustainable existence is a constant struggle against defeatism. Just as with wind power, the same types who are ridiculing heat pumps and the like now will no doubt be taking credit for them in a couple of decades.
Pointing out the problems and demanding answers is not defeatism, it's realism.
I'm tired of armchair commentators who know nothing about what they're talking about passing judgement on those who do, and have to do all the work, whilst they recline back in blissful spectation.
These are difficult problems,and they need careful thought, planning, resources and investment.
In light of your own remarks commenting about my insight into education that's deliciously ironic.
You didn't provide insight. You provided an expletive ridden and capitalised rant which you seemed to think was a killer argument.
I'd have been happy to take on point well-considered and fact based points.
You didn't make them.
Which tells me you didn't read it. Because I rebutted, point by point, what you had listed. True, I used swearing and capitalisations. But there was plenty of fact in there. You didn't at any point even try to show how I hadn't done so - just airily claimed in a fact free fashion that I hadn't done so.
I'm afraid the real issue is that what you posted didn't deserve anything less than swearing and capitalisations, as it was complete and utter nonsense. It was also rude, patronising, ignorant and failed to grapple with the key problems education faces.
If the original report was not as summarised, it may be worth reading. If it was, then it isn't.
Similarly, as you note armchair generals of various sorts generally don't understand what they're talking about. The issue is that bizarrely in education people listen to the armchair generals and dismiss the experts. And then wonder (a) why things aren't working as they expected (b) why teachers get mad at them for talking essentially abusive nonsense.
You didn't rebut me point by point, you just posted a rant. The TEC report and its headline findings triggered you, and that was your response.
It was in no sense considered or insightful, and I learnt nothing from it other than what I already knew: you hate the DfE, Ofsted and politicians - and teachers already do all this/need more funding and for government to stay out of their hair.
There might be something in it, but it isn't the whole of the answer - particularly where public policy requires join-up across education sectors, industry and communities - and more targeted investment, so it deserved more thought than your knee-jerk diatribe provided, particularly since there were plenty of education experts on the commission itself.
That is simply not true. I pointed out where they were wrong and why. Especially, I pointed out where they wanted people to do things that were already happening, and made statements that were nonsensical (which I might add is not easy to rebut, because if I say 'pixies don't exist' proving a negative is hard) or where they had misunderstood the problem (OFSTED).
I also noted they did make one very good point, on technology, but had misidentified the cause of the problem and therefore did not have a solution for it.
No way is that an expert report. Whoever wrote it is profoundly ignorant of education, and the way it was couched was actually pure rudeness. I responded in kind.
The genuine irony is that you are complaining about people doing in your field what they were doing in mine.
They were perfectly reasonable and innocuous headline statements. You read into them a level of rudeness that was not there, presumably because you inferred that the headline recommendations suggested they were not already being done/done effectively by teachers and you found that offensive.
The authors included head teachers of secondary schools, those from further/adult education colleges and universities and - whilst I don't doubt your qualifications in the slightest - neither do I doubt theirs and your views are but one input into forming my views on the education sector as a whole.
If you're asking me to just dismiss those of anyone else who works in the sector, and take yours at face value and no-one elses, I'm afraid I don't do that, particularly since I know you are emotionally triggered depending on who provides the source which I think could colour your judgement.
At my son's school they've had to reduce the number of science lessons in year 9 because they can't recruit science teachers. This government is running the country into the ground and ruining our childrens' future. Of course their privately educated kids will be fine. I'm so fucking furious with what these idiots are doing to us.
Is it always "the government"? They do, of course, have ultimate accountability, but other institutions, not least a very vocal minority of very left wing teachers who believe the "prizes for all" mentality, who seem to bask in their love of mediocrity also have a lot to answer for our poor state school provision. Until those on the left start to realise that improving standards also requires the weeding out of people who encourage those low standards then no public sector organisations will improve. Sadly the Left is the protector of the rights of vested interests to the detriment of pupils, patients and those who receive public sector "service".
Easier to blame the government and those terrible private schools though eh? Left wing thinking = simplistic chippy solutions for complex problems.
What a load of rubbish. The problem at my son's school is very specific - they can't hire teachers because the pay set by the government isn't competitive. There is absolutely zero problem with "prizes for all" (what does that even mean?) or low standards - it's a good school that simply can't afford to staff itself properly. And the people who could fix it - the government - simply don't fucking care. It actually isn't especially complex.
Not forgetting the government have set teacher pay at a level higher than the funding they've actually provided for it, so staffing is having to be cut to stay in budget.
On top of that, supply budgets are about sucked dry after the last three years.
My goodness Nigel. I think you win todays uninformed-bullshit-whataboutery award.
Really? I simply asked whether it is always "the government"? I did not say that they have no culpability.I know that this is a political site, and there is a tendency of those of a more rigid political perspective to be tribal but do try reading peoples' posts before trying to be a smartarse. @ydoethur's point is an interesting one, but it still doesn't remove my point, that blaming everything on "the government" is for simplistic fools. I see you confine yourself to the aforementioned category.
Nigel dissembling is always less effective when what you actually wrote is in a quote chain.
I don’t have much issue with you asking whether it is all the government’s fault (except that your question is so clearly a straw man).
But you very clearly didn’t just ask that. You attempted to lay blame for the fact that OLB’s kids school can’t recruit science teachers on left wing teachers and a ‘prizes for all’ mentality.
Which is nonsense.
No I didn't. You really need some lessons on debating. I do hope you are not a teacher if your ability to analyse and debate is so poor.
I did not say that "OLB’s kids school can’t recruit science teachers on left wing teachers and a ‘prizes for all’ mentality." (sic). If you thought that, then maybe your ability at literacy needs some remedial attention (indeed how you constructed the sentence also indicates that - maybe it is your rage that has caused this?). I only hope your numeracy is better.
For the avoidance of doubt and the instruction of those that cannot read well, I said that such issues (I am sure you are in denial about them) are indicative of issues relating to our education system. That clear enough for you?
It's rather bizarre that the example given is the electric Hummer, which weighs 9000 lbs, as opposed to the standard Hummer at 6000 lbs. A better question might be why the f*** does anyone need to drive such an enormous vehicle in the first place? There weren't any complaints about heavy vehicles as petrol cars got bigger and bigger.
Yes there were. From the story:-
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average vehicle weight has reached an all-time record and is predicted to continue rising in the coming years. Vehicle weights dropped considerably in the 1980s compared to highs measured in 1975, but since then the average car and truck has increased from 3,200lbs to 4,200lbs.
Yes, it's a fact that heavier vehicles, petrol or electric, increase accident fatality risk, but I don't remember it being particularly newsworthy when it was just increasingly large petrol vehicles. That's the point I was making.
The increasing weight of traditional cars, was somewhat related to the increases in safety technology, both for occupants and pedestrians.
The step-change in weight for electric cars, has not been accompanied by increases in safety technology in the same way.
Most studies on the subject are quite flawed, because the current use case for an EV is quite different to that of a traditional car. In the UK, for example, most are company cars purchased for tax reasons.
I thought it was related to increased market share of SUVs, which are much more dangerous for pedestrians because of the higher vehicle profile, quite apart from the fact they are also heavier.
You'd think the increasing weight of pedestrians themselves would be protective, particularly given the energy absorbing properties of that extra weight... Although maybe pedestrians are not the group with greatest increasing weight.
The distribution of the extra weight isn't uniform, so very little additional cranial protection, for example.
Isn't it that while crash protection for passengers has vastly improved, for pedestrians it has got worse? Not helped by large blind spots on many SUV.
That's one thing I don't get about Tesla's Cybertruck: I just cannot see how it will pass the EU's frontal pedestrian tests. Although IANAE, so might well be wrong.
There’s plenty of US cars, including supercharged versions of the old Corvette and Dodge Charger, that failed European pedestrian impact tests in the past few years. The style is to stick the supercharger on top of the engine, partially sticking out of the bonnet, which is no-no as far as the EU is concerned.
A lot of people don’t realise that Corvettes are really good for storing classified US government documents next to
DOOCY: "Classified materials next to your Corvette?! What were you thinking?"
BIDEN: "My Corvette's in a locked garage so it's not like it's sitting on the street."
Biden's Corvette is undeniably cool. All original 67 C2 vert in Goodwood Green that he's owned since new.
Have you done a top 10 and worst 10 of politician's cars yet?
Good 1. Guy Verhofstadt - Excellent collection but we'll give him top spot for his AMG GT 2. Idi Amin - Citroen SM 3. Biden - '67 C2 vert 4. Trump - Lamborghini Diablo VT (think he also had a Countach) 5. Bush 43 - Ford F150 King Ranch 6. Medvedev - Porsche Cayenne Turbo 7. Uday Hussein - Lamborghini LM002 8. Shappsie - F80 330i 9. Mohammad Pahlavi - Lamborghini Miura 10. Francois Mitterand - Hotchkiss Grégoire
Bad 1. Johnson - Toyota Previa 2. IDS - Morgan Plus 8. Twatmobile of the highest order. 3. Sunak - Fucking X-Type 4. Marcus "Billy The" Fysh, MP - Subaru Forester (Once spat on by me, he was lucky I didn't need a shit.) 5. Starmer - RAV4 6. Cameron - Nissan Micra. Rich person with a shit car = scum of the earth 7. JRM - XJ Jag. Fuck off. 8. Brown - Vauxhall Omega. Jesus Christ. 9. Balls. Toyota Yaris. See Cameron. 10. Airey Neave. Mk.1 Cavalier
Odd that no female politician has made it onto your list.
Poor teachers are kept on? Wut, have you been in a school in the last 20 years?
No, but I know a couple of governors. their experience has been that getting rid of the incompetent is a very long winded process and they normally pop up at another school. Same with the NHS. the public sector doesn't sack people, it simply pays them a large amount of money to go and be incompetent in another school/hospital/local authority.
So anecdote of an anecdote. Teachers dismissed on grounds of capability don't just 'normally pop up at another school' in my experience.
No doubt you have your own anecdotes to inform your view. I have more direct experience of the NHS where I can tell you with absolute certainty that it is the case that doctors and other professionals are sacked after very long processes that then award a payout (often with NDAs attached) and they then find a job within the NHS at an institution close by. It seems very unlikely to me that teachers who are "managed out" of a school do not simply become a teacher at another school, particularly when there is such a shortage.
We were discussing education.
I wouldn't claim to tell you how the NHS works as I don't have the knowledge.
Poor teachers are kept on? Wut, have you been in a school in the last 20 years?
No, but I know a couple of governors. their experience has been that getting rid of the incompetent is a very long winded process and they normally pop up at another school. Same with the NHS. the public sector doesn't sack people, it simply pays them a large amount of money to go and be incompetent in another school/hospital/local authority.
So anecdote of an anecdote. Teachers dismissed on grounds of capability don't just 'normally pop up at another school' in my experience.
Also how does one measure good or bad teachers?
I had teachers at Grammar School who were heralded as brilliant because they got 100% pass marks for all those entered for O and A levels. The small print didn't identify that anyone who might fail was pulled from O levels and entered for CSE and borderline A level candidates were just pulled. Oh and they were poor teachers who just taught by rote.
At my son's school they've had to reduce the number of science lessons in year 9 because they can't recruit science teachers. This government is running the country into the ground and ruining our childrens' future. Of course their privately educated kids will be fine. I'm so fucking furious with what these idiots are doing to us.
Is it always "the government"? They do, of course, have ultimate accountability, but other institutions, not least a very vocal minority of very left wing teachers who believe the "prizes for all" mentality, who seem to bask in their love of mediocrity also have a lot to answer for our poor state school provision. Until those on the left start to realise that improving standards also requires the weeding out of people who encourage those low standards then no public sector organisations will improve. Sadly the Left is the protector of the rights of vested interests to the detriment of pupils, patients and those who receive public sector "service".
Easier to blame the government and those terrible private schools though eh? Left wing thinking = simplistic chippy solutions for complex problems.
What a load of rubbish. The problem at my son's school is very specific - they can't hire teachers because the pay set by the government isn't competitive. There is absolutely zero problem with "prizes for all" (what does that even mean?) or low standards - it's a good school that simply can't afford to staff itself properly. And the people who could fix it - the government - simply don't fucking care. It actually isn't especially complex.
Recruitment for everyone at the moment is difficult. It is a massive problem. People do not want to change jobs, particularly when they have job security, so there is limited supply. There are private companies I know that have massively increased pay for roles and still can't find people to do them. Recruitment is very rarely just about pay. Teaching has challenges, but also benefits that other areas cannot compete with. One of the biggest challenges to pay is when schools (similar to hospitals) are not allowed by the unions to offer attractive pay differentials to attract people. So yes it is very complex, but carry on blaming "the government" if you must, and carry on letting off all the other actors such as local authorities, unions and teachers themselves off the hook. The vested interests like it that way.
What have the local authorities got to do with it? They don't run the school. It's the job of the government to run schools properly (especially since under the Academies system they have centralised control over education). If schools can't recruit at current funding levels then they need more money, end of story. Nothing is more critical to this country's future than the education of our children. It should be the government's top priority. If this government won't fund that properly then don't be surprised if parents vote in a government that will. There is so much anger and frustration at the school gates, believe me.
For the record, I see nothing as more important than the education of children and would love to see a massive increase in investment in teachers and education generally, (though this should be aligned with productivity). However, I would also like to see a break with the malign influence of left wing unions over teaching.
Yes, I agree. Rationally, I'd like to see teachers higher paid, thereby attracting better teachers. But then you see representatives of National Education Union, and your emotional reaction is 'there is no way that person should be better paid'.
The teachers at my kids' primary school are largely very good, but there is one who is half-useless. We have dodged him so far. But it seems unfair that he gets paid as much as his much more competent colleagues who are educating their charges considerably better. There was one who was entirely, laughably useless, but fortunately for us (though not for his new charges down south) he has moved schools. How do we arrange matters so we better reward - and therefore retain - the good teachers while removing the bad ones? I say this not out of spite towards the bad teachers (some of whom are quite pleasant people) but our of a desire to see kids not have a year of their education blighted by having an idiot in charge (or, God forbid, one of the talking heads who get trotted out to represent the views of the NEU).
Poor teachers are kept on? Wut, have you been in a school in the last 20 years?
No, but I know a couple of governors. their experience has been that getting rid of the incompetent is a very long winded process and they normally pop up at another school. Same with the NHS. the public sector doesn't sack people, it simply pays them a large amount of money to go and be incompetent in another school/hospital/local authority.
Well the offer of a good reference goes a long way. Of course in the new role the person is found out again and promised a good reference if they move on. And so it goes on...
I don't think good references are particularly relevant to employment decisions these days, since they are usually taken up after the preliminary decision on whether or not to employ has already been made. They are more of a final check.
I find them somewhat maddening. Very often in a set company format. I provide a lot of references for our past students, so no I don't have knowledge of their 'employment' etc. It seems a lot of modern references are about making sure the person actually did the job they say they did, rather than seeing if the referee can actually advise the new employer
Of course. Only reasonable for a Tory to go where the money is. That hardly detracts from the conclusions of the report.
Of all of those it's the phasing out of gas boilers that is the most unrealistic.
Well, perhaps it looks unrealistic now, but I have a reasonable degree of confidence that with the attention and investment that it could easily look a lot more realistic in five years time.
A lot of people said that wind energy would never amount to anything and now it is happening.
Yup. Progress towards a sustainable existence is a constant struggle against defeatism. Just as with wind power, the same types who are ridiculing heat pumps and the like now will no doubt be taking credit for them in a couple of decades.
Pointing out the problems and demanding answers is not defeatism, it's realism.
I'm tired of armchair commentators who know nothing about what they're talking about passing judgement on those who do, and have to do all the work, whilst they recline back in blissful spectation.
These are difficult problems,and they need careful thought, planning, resources and investment.
In light of your own remarks commenting about my insight into education that's deliciously ironic.
You didn't provide insight. You provided an expletive ridden and capitalised rant which you seemed to think was a killer argument.
I'd have been happy to take on point well-considered and fact based points.
You didn't make them.
Which tells me you didn't read it. Because I rebutted, point by point, what you had listed. True, I used swearing and capitalisations. But there was plenty of fact in there. You didn't at any point even try to show how I hadn't done so - just airily claimed in a fact free fashion that I hadn't done so.
I'm afraid the real issue is that what you posted didn't deserve anything less than swearing and capitalisations, as it was complete and utter nonsense. It was also rude, patronising, ignorant and failed to grapple with the key problems education faces.
If the original report was not as summarised, it may be worth reading. If it was, then it isn't.
Similarly, as you note armchair generals of various sorts generally don't understand what they're talking about. The issue is that bizarrely in education people listen to the armchair generals and dismiss the experts. And then wonder (a) why things aren't working as they expected (b) why teachers get mad at them for talking essentially abusive nonsense.
Your point by point rebuttal shredded Royale's rather weak and dream laden thesis.
Why shouldn't you use profanity? You are angry at the bizarre and systematic undermining of all but elite schooling.
Secondary schooling in Wales is not great in Wales (although my children's experience in a RC comp was first class) so it is not necessarily a Party political issue. Where party politics does come into this is the Conservative Party fixation with elite selection to the detriment of all others.
I had an excellent non-selective experience and a dreadful selective experience. An experience not borne out by, for example, HY's promoted narrative. My non-selective experience was superb because at that moment in time resources, the political will and the enthused teachers to make the experience work were showered upon comprehensive schools.
I have no real idea how the nation moves forward with its vastly substandard educational system. What I do know is selective education is not the answer, and I realise that whatever we do, we can only progress when the current state of inertia that you highlight is thrown in the educational dumpster.
Education is not, and should not be all about exam success. Yes that is part of it, but the most important measure is that of value added.
I copied and pasted the headline findings of the Times Education Commission onto this blog for all to see. It was neither my dream or my thesis. It was an independent report into the future of the education sector one, in which as I pointed out, commands strong cross-party support - including from several previous Prime Ministers and ten previous Education Secretaries.
I think it's a serious piece of work. I don't yet know in full what I thought about it myself. But, I thought the future of education in England (and across the UK more broadly) was worth starting off an interesting debate on this blog. Instead, we've got a lot of petty sniping and ad hominem, largely depending upon how posters felt about the person who was saying it.
We used to be so much better than that but, if that's what pb.com has now become, quite frankly I can't be bothered and will also leave the site as many others have.
There are plenty of other blogs and forums where rocks can be pointlessly hurled if that's all we're now interested in.
Poor teachers are kept on? Wut, have you been in a school in the last 20 years?
No, but I know a couple of governors. their experience has been that getting rid of the incompetent is a very long winded process and they normally pop up at another school. Same with the NHS. the public sector doesn't sack people, it simply pays them a large amount of money to go and be incompetent in another school/hospital/local authority.
About 5-6years back, the Head at the local Free School Primary didn’t renew the contract for a new teacher after the probationary period. This caused awful ructions.
Mainly from the parents. The other teachers seemed entirely of the “How sad. never mind” way of thinking.
My first teaching job was as a temporary replacement for somebody who'd been fired for poor performance.*
My first Head of Department role was for somebody whose probationary contract was not extended.
My last role came about when I applied for a job to replace somebody who had been fired for poor performance and I was offered a different job within the same school.
That doesn't suggest it is particularly unusual. Even allowing for the fact my reputation was as a shock trooper to turn problems around.
*To be exact, she was on competencies when in a stroke of sheer genius not given to all people, she told a bunch of German girls on exchange to line up at the front of the class while she explained whether or not they measured up to Nazi ideals. She had just got to commenting on their breasts when the - Polish - headteacher walked in.
On binning the useless. I have never found an environment where binning the useless was not applauded by the other workers.
On your example of a way to fail. Wow. That isn't just crushing into a wall. That's crashing into a mountain in a Dyane 4 with added rust, while pouring petrol over your head. And lighting road flares.
Looks like a warmer London to me. I am off to the Masai Mara, then Lamu.
Bangkok is always great at this time of year. Climatically it is perfect, the “cool” dry season, which means 32C and mostly sunny every day, with low humidity. The total sweet spot. Evenings are deliciously warm but not sticky
But this winter, after 3 years of Covid, it is magnificent
It's rather bizarre that the example given is the electric Hummer, which weighs 9000 lbs, as opposed to the standard Hummer at 6000 lbs. A better question might be why the f*** does anyone need to drive such an enormous vehicle in the first place? There weren't any complaints about heavy vehicles as petrol cars got bigger and bigger.
Yes there were. From the story:-
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average vehicle weight has reached an all-time record and is predicted to continue rising in the coming years. Vehicle weights dropped considerably in the 1980s compared to highs measured in 1975, but since then the average car and truck has increased from 3,200lbs to 4,200lbs.
Yes, it's a fact that heavier vehicles, petrol or electric, increase accident fatality risk, but I don't remember it being particularly newsworthy when it was just increasingly large petrol vehicles. That's the point I was making.
The increasing weight of traditional cars, was somewhat related to the increases in safety technology, both for occupants and pedestrians.
The step-change in weight for electric cars, has not been accompanied by increases in safety technology in the same way.
Most studies on the subject are quite flawed, because the current use case for an EV is quite different to that of a traditional car. In the UK, for example, most are company cars purchased for tax reasons.
I thought it was related to increased market share of SUVs, which are much more dangerous for pedestrians because of the higher vehicle profile, quite apart from the fact they are also heavier.
You'd think the increasing weight of pedestrians themselves would be protective, particularly given the energy absorbing properties of that extra weight... Although maybe pedestrians are not the group with greatest increasing weight.
The distribution of the extra weight isn't uniform, so very little additional cranial protection, for example.
Isn't it that while crash protection for passengers has vastly improved, for pedestrians it has got worse? Not helped by large blind spots on many SUV.
That's one thing I don't get about Tesla's Cybertruck: I just cannot see how it will pass the EU's frontal pedestrian tests. Although IANAE, so might well be wrong.
There’s plenty of US cars, including supercharged versions of the old Corvette and Dodge Charger, that failed European pedestrian impact tests in the past few years. The style is to stick the supercharger on top of the engine, partially sticking out of the bonnet, which is no-no as far as the EU is concerned.
A lot of people don’t realise that Corvettes are really good for storing classified US government documents next to
DOOCY: "Classified materials next to your Corvette?! What were you thinking?"
BIDEN: "My Corvette's in a locked garage so it's not like it's sitting on the street."
Biden's Corvette is undeniably cool. All original 67 C2 vert in Goodwood Green that he's owned since new.
Have you done a top 10 and worst 10 of politician's cars yet?
Good 1. Guy Verhofstadt - Excellent collection but we'll give him top spot for his AMG GT 2. Idi Amin - Citroen SM 3. Biden - '67 C2 vert 4. Trump - Lamborghini Diablo VT (think he also had a Countach) 5. Bush 43 - Ford F150 King Ranch 6. Medvedev - Porsche Cayenne Turbo 7. Uday Hussein - Lamborghini LM002 8. Shappsie - F80 330i 9. Mohammad Pahlavi - Lamborghini Miura 10. Francois Mitterand - Hotchkiss Grégoire
Bad 1. Johnson - Toyota Previa 2. IDS - Morgan Plus 8. Twatmobile of the highest order. 3. Sunak - Fucking X-Type 4. Marcus "Billy The" Fysh, MP - Subaru Forester (Once spat on by me, he was lucky I didn't need a shit.) 5. Starmer - RAV4 6. Cameron - Nissan Micra. Rich person with a shit car = scum of the earth 7. JRM - XJ Jag. Fuck off. 8. Brown - Vauxhall Omega. Jesus Christ. 9. Balls. Toyota Yaris. See Cameron. 10. Airey Neave. Mk.1 Cavalier
The correct answer, of course, is that a 'good' car is one that allows me to do the job I need to do with absolutely no fuss. I get in, drive it where I want to go, and get out.
A 'bad' car is one where I have to get jump-leads to start it every so often, where I'm always worried whether it'll finish the journey without it breaking down, and where, when I'm at the destination, I'm worried if someone will key it.
Oddly enough, this means that my idea of a 'good' car is often the direct opposite of a petrol-heads. Which is why I think I'm much wiser than an average petrol-head.
I don’t give a fuck about cars, generally, and have always found most petrolheads quite weird and nerdy - but then I am sure most of them would find me weird for many reasons
However I now own a Mini JCW automatic. This is a properly fast car with a lot of vroom, and the cliche is true, it feels like a go-kart. As I have detailed on here, i once drove it at 138mph, in Dorset, at noon, on an A Road, and it felt like it could go twice as fast
There is a genuine pleasure in a purring machine. I begin to understand it
Apropos of not much, someone pointed the new R4 podcast - 'Nazis - the road to power'. I have listened to the first few episodes. Its interesting but there are some glaring issues. On the whole, the party within Germany did not use the term Nazi, or indeed did most Germans - they were National Socialists. This podcast is dramatised reconstructions and they keep using Nazi, something that is totally wrong. The second thing is this - the National Socialists were an anti semitic party, but their programme was not solely anti-semitic, yet to here this podcast its all about the Jews, and has lots of talk of stopping Jewish immigration - not something I have come across before in the many texts I've read about this era. In the early stages of the party and for many members the national socialist idea meant something - the subjugation of individual will to the greater good for the nation. I wonder at the credentials behind the production. It seems that they are quite clearly trying to link to modern concerns re immigration (that might just be my take on it).
For all that, its interesting, but there are far better sources than this. The World At War, for instance.
I read that Nazi - short for Ignatius - predated Adolf and his mates as a term for Bavarian yokels and was thus enthusiastically appropriated by their opponents when the boys in brown came along. I think there were attempts by the Nazis to reclaim the term as their own and de-yokelify it but they never really took off.
N-TRTP was ok though a bit too much in the comic opera line for me but I’ll persevere.
Two of my favourite books are by Richard Hughes, The Fox in the Attic and The Wooden Shepherdess, part of his incomplete trilogy which covers the period from 1923. I love his dead pan, sardonic style and his depiction of the Nazis as a rackety project pursued by grifters and chancers.
Of course. Only reasonable for a Tory to go where the money is. That hardly detracts from the conclusions of the report.
Of all of those it's the phasing out of gas boilers that is the most unrealistic.
Well, perhaps it looks unrealistic now, but I have a reasonable degree of confidence that with the attention and investment that it could easily look a lot more realistic in five years time.
A lot of people said that wind energy would never amount to anything and now it is happening.
Yup. Progress towards a sustainable existence is a constant struggle against defeatism. Just as with wind power, the same types who are ridiculing heat pumps and the like now will no doubt be taking credit for them in a couple of decades.
Pointing out the problems and demanding answers is not defeatism, it's realism.
I'm tired of armchair commentators who know nothing about what they're talking about passing judgement on those who do, and have to do all the work, whilst they recline back in blissful spectation.
These are difficult problems,and they need careful thought, planning, resources and investment.
In light of your own remarks commenting about my insight into education that's deliciously ironic.
You didn't provide insight. You provided an expletive ridden and capitalised rant which you seemed to think was a killer argument.
I'd have been happy to take on point well-considered and fact based points.
You didn't make them.
Which tells me you didn't read it. Because I rebutted, point by point, what you had listed. True, I used swearing and capitalisations. But there was plenty of fact in there. You didn't at any point even try to show how I hadn't done so - just airily claimed in a fact free fashion that I hadn't done so.
I'm afraid the real issue is that what you posted didn't deserve anything less than swearing and capitalisations, as it was complete and utter nonsense. It was also rude, patronising, ignorant and failed to grapple with the key problems education faces.
If the original report was not as summarised, it may be worth reading. If it was, then it isn't.
Similarly, as you note armchair generals of various sorts generally don't understand what they're talking about. The issue is that bizarrely in education people listen to the armchair generals and dismiss the experts. And then wonder (a) why things aren't working as they expected (b) why teachers get mad at them for talking essentially abusive nonsense.
You didn't rebut me point by point, you just posted a rant. The TEC report and its headline findings triggered you, and that was your response.
It was in no sense considered or insightful, and I learnt nothing from it other than what I already knew: you hate the DfE, Ofsted and politicians - and teachers already do all this/need more funding and for government to stay out of their hair.
There might be something in it, but it isn't the whole of the answer - particularly where public policy requires join-up across education sectors, industry and communities - and more targeted investment, so it deserved more thought than your knee-jerk diatribe provided, particularly since there were plenty of education experts on the commission itself.
That is simply not true. I pointed out where they were wrong and why. Especially, I pointed out where they wanted people to do things that were already happening, and made statements that were nonsensical (which I might add is not easy to rebut, because if I say 'pixies don't exist' proving a negative is hard) or where they had misunderstood the problem (OFSTED).
I also noted they did make one very good point, on technology, but had misidentified the cause of the problem and therefore did not have a solution for it.
No way is that an expert report. Whoever wrote it is profoundly ignorant of education, and the way it was couched was actually pure rudeness. I responded in kind.
The genuine irony is that you are complaining about people doing in your field what they were doing in mine.
They were perfectly reasonable and innocuous headline statements. You read into them a level of rudeness that was not there, presumably because you inferred that the headline recommendations suggested they were not already being done/done effectively by teachers and you found that offensive.
The authors included head teachers of secondary schools, those from further/adult education colleges and universities and - whilst I don't doubt your qualifications in the slightest - neither do I doubt theirs and your views are but one input into forming my views on the education sector as a whole.
If you're asking me to just dismiss those of anyone else who works in the sector, and take yours at face value and no-one elses, I'm afraid I don't do that, particularly since I know you are emotionally triggered depending on who provides the source which I think could colour your judgement.
So basically, you couldn't rebut it, but I must be wrong because I'm too close to it?
Surprisingly few of the TEC you were quoting are actually teachers. I make it four in total. And one of them works at Ark, which is a very peculiar organisation indeed that has some very dodgy past episodes that it mysteriously gets away with. Others include the astronomer royal (why?) and Tristram Hunt (also why)?
Their recommendations may have been well meant but were positively offensive. Which is disappointing. Some of the evidence they took is very interesting but they drew some extremely strange conclusions from it. For example, just 10% of teachers trust OFSTED, so reform it? But if it's that mistrusted, just abolish it. Go back to local authority supervision instead. (Get rid of the ISI at the same time please, because they're even worse.)
The further irony is I have every sympathy with you complaining that people are ignoring your expertise, or quoting others who mean well but don't quite get the problems, because I know exactly how you feel. As does every teacher. Because it's what you're doing right now.
Unpopular controversial thought.....does the UK need a proper recession to shake out weak businesses and focus on productivity?
I am of the opinion that 2008 approach of companies, supported by government, to try and minimise business failure and amount of unemployment, by encouraging wage reductions / freezes, might have had the unintended consequence that it allowed a lot of weak businesses with poor productivity to continue unreformed. Same with support during COVID.
OK so we lose a lot of weak businesses, the economy shrinks and more people are claiming benefits. If productivity goes up but production falls, who gains? If efficiency goes up but more workers are on the dole, who gains? There needs to be some mechanism by which new, better businesses are created.
The idea is that you've got staff, premises, equipment, etc, now available for new businesses to have a go with new, more productive, ideas. There's an element of truth to it, but ideally the economy would run in such a way that weak businesses were picked off without requiring a recession. Higher interest rates might be enough to do it.
But you also need to look at things like barriers to entry for new businesses, which is where regulation can sometimes cause problems.
Comments
I am not being entirely serious, just condemning millions to unemployment benefits isn't great, on both a personal level and for society. But I think there is a something here, some lessons to be learned. Have we cushioned too much, particularly during COVID? We definitely have lots of weak businesses with poor productivity.
The second thing is this - the National Socialists were an anti semitic party, but their programme was not solely anti-semitic, yet to here this podcast its all about the Jews, and has lots of talk of stopping Jewish immigration - not something I have come across before in the many texts I've read about this era. In the early stages of the party and for many members the national socialist idea meant something - the subjugation of individual will to the greater good for the nation.
I wonder at the credentials behind the production. It seems that they are quite clearly trying to link to modern concerns re immigration (that might just be my take on it).
For all that, its interesting, but there are far better sources than this. The World At War, for instance.
Nothing would move me personally. (Well, not nothing. Who knows what will happen in life? But I'm very happy here.) But I'm not motivated by the same things that motivate the super rich.
Which is one reason (among many) that I'm NOT super rich.
Especially when that was a big deal all over the world at the time with the increasing economic and social dislocation from WW1 and rising populations. It was an important strand of interwar Tory thinking under Joynson-Hicks, for example. You also had nativist regimes in Hungary and Italy. Even in Ireland Cosgrave was noted for trying to restrict immigration (such as there was to Ireland) particularly personally refusing a request from Trotsky for asylum.
On top of that, supply budgets are about sucked dry after the last three years.
A benefits system that’s more focused on training the out of work than it is on subsidising employers to employ unproductive workers on minimum wage might help too.
The latter is particularly difficult to unwind right now, but we’re back to that old problem with the UK economy - all the sensible solutions take ten years to have a noticeable effect.
One of the most wonderful places I've been on Earth.
See Mussolini’s progression to Fascism.
The whole “Nazis were/weren’t socialist” thing has become impossibly toxic, due to scumbags trying to score political points.
But they certainly believed in state control of the economy. The bit people get confused by is that the fascists didn’t want to *own* the means of production.
Krupp could be owned privately. Just as long as Krupp bought materials from the right sources (defined by the Nazi regime), employed the right amount of people in the right places, produced the right products at the right prices… and kicked back the right amount of money in “gifts” to the right people…
I was also in a very white school, perhaps relevant, but I'm not sure. Young kids are accepting of differences until they're taught not to be. They barely even notice. Mine haven't ever asked why one of their uncles lives with another man, rather than a woman. They don't seem to have noticed or think of non-white children at school/playgroup as in any way different, any more than someone with different hair colour.
Its also important to remember that in a recession, most people are not badly affected (this is different from the CoL crisis). If you are still in work life carries on. Its those that lose jobs and businesses that suffer, but thats only a small minority. Doesn't make it right and of course it reduces the money that the government has to spend on really important stuff like schools and hospitals.
In 2008 was all about focus on saving jobs / minimising unemployment, then a slowing of increases in public spending 2010-2015. My real question is what policies should government be taking, I don't believe save all jobs at all cost / everybody take a wage freeze to stop us having to fire anybody is the best way forward (obviously getting 5 million unemployed isn't either).
https://bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0dt0s50
A number of the “staggering on with no apparent customers” shops gave up.
A number of the surviving ones took the grants and did some rebuilding/reimaging during lockdown.
(and Osborne kicking reform into the long grass)
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4270270#Comment_4270270
It starts with 'bullshit' and carries on with 'what the fuck does this even mean?'
Mainly from the parents. The other teachers seemed entirely of the “How sad. never mind” way of thinking.
Why shouldn't you use profanity? You are angry at the bizarre and systematic undermining of all but elite schooling.
Secondary schooling in Wales is not great in Wales (although my children's experience in a RC comp was first class) so it is not necessarily a Party political issue. Where party politics does come into this is the Conservative Party fixation with elite selection to the detriment of all others.
I had an excellent non-selective experience and a dreadful selective experience. An experience not borne out by, for example, HY's promoted narrative. My non-selective experience was superb because at that moment in time resources, the political will and the enthused teachers to make the experience work were showered upon comprehensive schools.
I have no real idea how the nation moves forward with its vastly substandard educational system. What I do know is selective education is not the answer, and I realise that whatever we do, we can only progress when the current state of inertia that you highlight is thrown in the educational dumpster.
Education is not, and should not be all about exam success. Yes that is part of it, but the most important measure is that of value added.
1. Guy Verhofstadt - Excellent collection but we'll give him top spot for his AMG GT
2. Idi Amin - Citroen SM
3. Biden - '67 C2 vert
4. Trump - Lamborghini Diablo VT (think he also had a Countach)
5. Bush 43 - Ford F150 King Ranch
6. Medvedev - Porsche Cayenne Turbo
7. Uday Hussein - Lamborghini LM002
8. Shappsie - F80 330i
9. Mohammad Pahlavi - Lamborghini Miura
10. Francois Mitterand - Hotchkiss Grégoire
Bad
1. Johnson - Toyota Previa
2. IDS - Morgan Plus 8. Twatmobile of the highest order.
3. Sunak - Fucking X-Type
4. Marcus "Billy The" Fysh, MP - Subaru Forester (Once spat on by me, he was lucky I didn't need a shit.)
5. Starmer - RAV4
6. Cameron - Nissan Micra. Rich person with a shit car = scum of the earth
7. JRM - XJ Jag. Fuck off.
8. Brown - Vauxhall Omega. Jesus Christ.
9. Balls. Toyota Yaris. See Cameron.
10. Airey Neave. Mk.1 Cavalier
My first Head of Department role was for somebody whose probationary contract was not extended.
My last role came about when I applied for a job to replace somebody who had been fired for poor performance and I was offered a different job within the same school.
That doesn't suggest it is particularly unusual. Even allowing for the fact my reputation was as a shock trooper to turn problems around.
*To be exact, she was on competencies when in a stroke of sheer genius not given to all people, she told a bunch of German girls on exchange to line up at the front of the class while she explained whether or not they measured up to Nazi ideals. She had just got to commenting on their breasts when the - Polish - headteacher walked in.
(My son's teacher is new this year and has already been offered a permanent post from next year; she appears very good).
You say 13 years, but there has been the little issue of 2010-2015 they were in coalition (and the Lib Dems wouldn't allow too much revolution in this area), 2015-2018 BREXITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT / no majority, then 2020-2022 COVID (but I doubt a Boris government elected by a Red Wall would have done much to address this even without a global pandemic).
Which is why I said, Osborne certainly bottled opportunities for more.
One of them even let me press one of the buttons once, which was probably incompatible with insurance if nothing else...
It was in no sense considered or insightful, and I learnt nothing from it other than what I already knew: you hate the DfE, Ofsted and politicians - and teachers already do all this/need more funding and for government to stay out of their hair.
There might be something in it, but it isn't the whole of the answer - particularly where public policy requires join-up across education sectors, industry and communities - and more targeted investment, so it deserved more thought than your knee-jerk diatribe provided, particularly since there were plenty of education experts on the commission itself.
Teachers dismissed on grounds of capability don't just 'normally pop up at another school' in my experience.
I also noted they did make one very good point, on technology, but had misidentified the cause of the problem and therefore did not have a solution for it.
No way is that an expert report. Whoever wrote it is profoundly ignorant of education, and the way it was couched was actually pure rudeness. I responded in kind.
The genuine irony is that you are complaining about people doing in your field what they were doing in mine.
Science is different because of the specific H+S requirements which can't be fudged. No science-qualified teacher, no science lessons. There is a minority of lefty "prizes for all" types, though they are less numerous and less influential than in the 1980s. But the specific issue here- schools can't get the number of teachers they need at the pay and conditions on offer- doesn't have much to do with that. You may resent it, but people cost what they cost. Time to open the national wallet, I'm afraid.
(Unfortunately, some of the problem is just maths. I learnt a new term this week; Baumol’s cost disease, a bit of economics jargon that means sectors that aren’t getting more productive, often one’s involving a lot of human contact, see costs going up because they have to compete for staff against sectors that are. Of course healthcare can be made more productive through technology, and because of capital underinvestment the NHS IT systems are dire, but ultimately caring professions are just going to keep sucking up an ever greater part of our collective income.)
You are now reduced to quoting a couple of sentences in the BBC news article to say my point has already been precisely covered, when it hasn't.
https://twitter.com/TmorrowsPapers/status/1613673608982761472/photo/1
As I say, my original statement was somewhat tongue in cheek, I am not genuinely hoping we have a terrible recession and millions of people lose their jobs. However, I am saying do we have a system that encourages poorly run businesses / poor business practices to continue to exist in the market and that this needs to change....
A 'bad' car is one where I have to get jump-leads to start it every so often, where I'm always worried whether it'll finish the journey without it breaking down, and where, when I'm at the destination, I'm worried if someone will key it.
Oddly enough, this means that my idea of a 'good' car is often the direct opposite of a petrol-heads. Which is why I think I'm much wiser than an average petrol-head.
I don’t have much issue with you asking whether it is all the government’s fault (except that your question is so clearly a
straw man).
But you very clearly didn’t just ask that. You attempted to lay blame for the fact that OLB’s kids school can’t recruit science teachers on left wing teachers and a ‘prizes for all’ mentality.
Which is nonsense.
They are more of a final check.
No doubt you'll mark this down to 'condescension' but although someone pointing out you've got the facts wrong might occasionally embarrass you it is not the same thing.
But this winter, after 3 years of Covid, it is magnificent
The authors included head teachers of secondary schools, those from further/adult education colleges and universities and - whilst I don't doubt your qualifications in the slightest - neither do I doubt theirs and your views are but one input into forming my views on the education sector as a whole.
If you're asking me to just dismiss those of anyone else who works in the sector, and take yours at face value and no-one elses, I'm afraid I don't do that, particularly since I know you are emotionally triggered depending on who provides the source which I think could colour your judgement.
I did not say that "OLB’s kids school can’t recruit science teachers on left wing teachers and a ‘prizes for all’ mentality." (sic). If you thought that, then maybe your ability at literacy needs some remedial attention (indeed how you constructed the sentence also indicates that - maybe it is your rage that has caused this?). I only hope your numeracy is better.
For the avoidance of doubt and the instruction of those that cannot read well, I said that such issues (I am sure you are in denial about them) are indicative of issues relating to our education system. That clear enough for you?
I wouldn't claim to tell you how the NHS works as I don't have the knowledge.
I had teachers at Grammar School who were heralded as brilliant because they got 100% pass marks for all those entered for O and A levels. The small print didn't identify that anyone who might fail was pulled from O levels and entered for CSE and borderline A level candidates were just pulled. Oh and they were poor teachers who just taught by rote.
Rationally, I'd like to see teachers higher paid, thereby attracting better teachers.
But then you see representatives of National Education Union, and your emotional reaction is 'there is no way that person should be better paid'.
The teachers at my kids' primary school are largely very good, but there is one who is half-useless. We have dodged him so far. But it seems unfair that he gets paid as much as his much more competent colleagues who are educating their charges considerably better. There was one who was entirely, laughably useless, but fortunately for us (though not for his new charges down south) he has moved schools.
How do we arrange matters so we better reward - and therefore retain - the good teachers while removing the bad ones? I say this not out of spite towards the bad teachers (some of whom are quite pleasant people) but our of a desire to see kids not have a year of their education blighted by having an idiot in charge (or, God forbid, one of the talking heads who get trotted out to represent the views of the NEU).
I think it's a serious piece of work. I don't yet know in full what I thought about it myself. But, I thought the future of education in England (and across the UK more broadly) was worth starting off an interesting debate on this blog. Instead, we've got a lot of petty sniping and ad hominem, largely depending upon how posters felt about the person who was saying it.
We used to be so much better than that but, if that's what pb.com has now become, quite frankly I can't be bothered and will also leave the site as many others have.
There are plenty of other blogs and forums where rocks can be pointlessly hurled if that's all we're now interested in.
On your example of a way to fail. Wow. That isn't just crushing into a wall. That's crashing into a mountain in a Dyane 4 with added rust, while pouring petrol over your head. And lighting road flares.
However I now own a Mini JCW automatic. This is a properly fast car with a lot of vroom, and the cliche is true, it feels like a go-kart. As I have detailed on here, i once drove it at 138mph, in Dorset, at noon, on an A Road, and it felt like it could go twice as fast
There is a genuine pleasure in a purring machine. I begin to understand it
N-TRTP was ok though a bit too much in the comic opera line for me but I’ll persevere.
Two of my favourite books are by Richard Hughes, The Fox in the Attic and The Wooden Shepherdess, part of his incomplete trilogy which covers the period from 1923. I love his dead pan, sardonic style and his depiction of the Nazis as a rackety project pursued by grifters and chancers.
Surprisingly few of the TEC you were quoting are actually teachers. I make it four in total. And one of them works at Ark, which is a very peculiar organisation indeed that has some very dodgy past episodes that it mysteriously gets away with. Others include the astronomer royal (why?) and Tristram Hunt (also why)?
Their recommendations may have been well meant but were positively offensive. Which is disappointing. Some of the evidence they took is very interesting but they drew some extremely strange conclusions from it. For example, just 10% of teachers trust OFSTED, so reform it? But if it's that mistrusted, just abolish it. Go back to local authority supervision instead. (Get rid of the ISI at the same time please, because they're even worse.)
The further irony is I have every sympathy with you complaining that people are ignoring your expertise, or quoting others who mean well but don't quite get the problems, because I know exactly how you feel. As does every teacher. Because it's what you're doing right now.
But you also need to look at things like barriers to entry for new businesses, which is where regulation can sometimes cause problems.