Kind of a nonsensical comment. By the time they retire they will be old people.
Moreover when the pension was introduced in 1925 to be paid at age 65, average life expectancy was 58. When the payment of pension was linked to retirement in 1948 average life expectancy was 67. Today average life expectancy is 81.
So it hardly seems unreasonable to expect people to work longer for their pension given average life expectancy has moved from 7 years before pension age to 16 years after it.
But they need to raise the pension age now not in 13 years when all of their voters have already retired at the lower age. 68 for men and 70 for women, adjusted every 5 years so that only 10-12 years of retirement is state funded.
I agree generally. Though there is an upper limit to how far you can go with that. Healthy life expectancy has not gone up as quickly as overall life expectancy so simply tracking the latter upwards is impractical.
Given a lot of people work part time in their sixties, why not phase the state pension in?
Maybe 20% at 64, 50% at 66, 80% at 68, 100% at 70?
It varies with who works part time. Much easier for some jobs than others, in particular easier for white collar jobs where you can work from home.
A pretty broad range of people work part time in their sixties, not just white collar jobs.
FWIW I know various tradespeople - plumbers, painter/decorators etc - who work in their late 60s / early 70s, though they tend to work part time 3-4 days a week.
Commenting on the thread header (it’s time someone did), men are used to being in power. Women are threatening this, and some men are unable to accept it. It’s vital that those of us who do accept it ensure that misogyny is called out and rooted out. The SNP example is slightly different, in that it is a political elite who are feeling vulnerable, and are hitting out against all perceived opposition.
Most of the men with women problems that I come across are older than me. Men my age or younger are OK and I rarely experience problems.
Generalising always creates a queue of "what-aboutery" on PB but I would say that the old fashioned type of misogynistic SOB is generally over 70 and rapidly becoming extinct.
It would be nice to think so, but I think there's a tendency for the younger hardcore male misogynists to hide away at home on the internet. Also misogynist men are more likely to bias their interactions with women to ignore women older than them.
We need to see more online people who can be positive role models for this disaffected youth. They need to be following more people like Dr Jordan Peterson, and fewer people like Andrew Tate.
Banning the negative influences from social media doesn’t work though, the likes of Tate and Alex Jones treat being banned as a badge of honour, and their following becomes more hardcore and underground as a result. Thankfully, Tate appears to have gone well over the line in real life, and is likely to end up spending a lot more time in a Romanian jail than he has already.
Dr Jordan Peterson comes across to me as a bit of an @sshat - though I can see why people like him.
One problem with t'Internet is that people give their views and not information; or if they do give information, they give only the information that fits their views. PB is good because of the wide range of views, and the generally healthy debate that surrounds it.
As an aside, a couple of years ago I listened to a podcast series about Napoleon, someone I did not know much about. The hosts were two uber-fans of Napoleon and, as you can imagine, the series was very biased. They had no counter-voices, and when they did touch on criticism of Napoleon, they hand-waved it away. At the end of the series, I felt like I did not really know Napoleon at all; all I knew was a fanboi interpretation of him.
One of the problems with the Internet is exactly that: little rooms where people agree all the time. One of the reasons I still keep inn touch on FB with the person I mentioned earlier is so that I can hear his views, however outrageous and nasty I think they are. It helps that I also quite like him...
Peterson isn’t perfect, but he’s in the ‘space’ where the disaffected youth come across him, and he’s very much qualified to say what he says. He’s 1000 times better as an influence, than Tate or Jones. You’re not going to get the incels following more centrist or left-wing characters, as they all operate in their own little online silos.
Commenting on the thread header (it’s time someone did), men are used to being in power. Women are threatening this, and some men are unable to accept it. It’s vital that those of us who do accept it ensure that misogyny is called out and rooted out. The SNP example is slightly different, in that it is a political elite who are feeling vulnerable, and are hitting out against all perceived opposition.
Most of the men with women problems that I come across are older than me. Men my age or younger are OK and I rarely experience problems.
Generalising always creates a queue of "what-aboutery" on PB but I would say that the old fashioned type of misogynistic SOB is generally over 70 and rapidly becoming extinct.
That doesn't seem to be the case with the Met Police, Andrew Tate or the whole Incel culture. If it was a few old unreconstructed dinosaurs misogyny would be much less of an issue.
Ask an older women, say one in her 70s, and you will find that as a young woman she had to fend off just about every male she came across.
If it is down to incels and weirdos nowadays, that is progress.
When she was younger, my mum was a nurse, and she has a nasty story of when she was nearly attacked when walking back to the nurse's accommodation. That was in the very late 1950s or early 1960s. It was an informative and cautionary tale for a teenage male to hear.
We have a habit of thinking things are getting worse socially, because everything is so much more visible. Child abuse is more rampant, because we hear about the stories. There are more murders, because we hear about them more. Yet that's probably not the whole, or even true, story.
But one thing I'd add: there are increasing numbers of men (including myself) who are fulfilling what are seen as 'traditional' women's roles, such as house-husbands and looking after kids. Most women are cool with that, but some display rather (ahem) odd attitudes.
I've been revisiting the OpenStreetMap data on pubs and bars, so here's a map of the number per 100,000 people for every local authority in Great Britain.
Seems we are being invited to reduce our peak energy use as the windfarms are becalmed by the cold weather
And yet the demand is for even more windfarms when we really need nuclear and tidal to guarantee constant energy supply if we end gas usage
It could be a very long time until we can dispense with gas
We obviously can't dispense with gas, or coal for that matter. The idea is to vastly reduce it during windy and sunny times, or even storing gas/coal for intermittent use. And yes, developing Nuclear as well. It's called a mixed system. We should never put all our eggs in one basket. Obviously there is a demand for more wind farms, like all other sources!
I am in favour of additional wind generation but it does depend on 'wind' and often in very cold weather the wind is not at all reliable as we are seeing just now
Storage when there is wind?
I would assume storage has a role to play
Interestingly under today’s calm cold conditions we are currently generating 5.3gw of wind power, which is greater than our nuclear generation.
Whilst more wind power doesn’t eliminate the problem of intermittency it certainly reduces it. With 4x the current capacity (perfectly feasible especially with new larger turbines coming on) we’d be generating half of our electricity from wind even on a still, high demand night like tonight.
We need more wind (much much more), more solar with built in battery storage, more nuclear, further progress on energy efficiency, more cross border interconnecters to balance European supply and demand, more grid scale storage of various types, and backup gas generation until such time as it’s no longer needed.
I'm sorry but this post is utter rubbish - both according to basic logic, and current real life. All these wind providers must be paid. They get paid to shut off when their power is too much for the grid - currently hundreds of millions a year. The capacity increase you're proposing would propel constraint payments into the stratosphere, all only for half of electricity supply on a low wind night? It's power generation for the severely numerically-challenged. Your barmy theories are why UK energy production is in its pitiful state.
I’m proud to know that my PB posts have had such a profound and important impact on our power system.
We’ve gone over the subsidy and constraint payment canard dozens of times on here before yet you always end up stating the same assumptions.
Constraint payments are a feature of regional imbalances, not national surplus, and insufficient grid carriage capacity largely because sometimes more wind power is generated in the North and Scotland than the grid capacity able to carry it South. Until recently it had to make its way down the equivalent of narrow b roads. The issue is being actively addressed by investment from national grid. Ie they are building big cables to carry the power to where it’s needed.
A lot of anti wind rhetoric seems to take one little issue (take your pick: planning eyesore birds being hit by blades, what about when it’s calm, constraint payments etc) and conclude the answer is therefore to stop wind power and spend our money on old fossil fuel technologies instead. This ignores the problems with them (climate change aside there is air pollution, geopolitical risk, planning etc) and also ignores the fact that in most case there are solutions to the original issue.
It is not a canard, and my recollection of previous discussions is that when people have dismissed the cost of constraint and subsidy, they have moved on from the discussion pretty quickly after the true figures were brought to the table.
I am aware that in many cases, local grid deficiencies mean wind farms have to constrain - that's why they build them in those locations. The grid can be made more robust, but it will never be a bottomless pit, and the overcapacity you're talking about would result in vastly more problems both locally, and, on windy days, nationally. The UK billpayer would be on the hook for every kw produced, and not produced.
The answer is not to 'stop' wind power, or even 'stop' subsidies (which would have the same effect), but to reorganise the subsidy regime to prevent the worst abuses, and incentivise storage and reselling of power amongst wind providers. Meanwhile, invest in reliable, non-intermittent renewables like tidal, and domestic fossil fuel production to clamp down on imported coal, gas and timber, which add even more carbon to the atmosphere. Not increase the issue four-fold ffs.
I didn’t spot that in the previous thread. Much of it is sensible and I don’t disagree. Until the last couple of sentences.
Domestic fossil fuel resources are almost all not financially viable and will become less so. The one exception being existing North Sea oil and gas fields some of which are still viable, and probably have a few years of production left. And as a result they continue to be exploited.
Multiplying wind power, our biggest natural energy resource, remains the cheapest way to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and if there is infrastructure investment needed to tackle constraint issues (as there already has been, as well as improved grid balancing) and ramp up storage then great, get on with investing. Every growing technology comes up against constraints: when cars multiplied we got congestion so built motorways, when industry took off we got pollution so introduced environmental regulations, indeed the national grid and its vast arrays of pylons were put in place to ensure the country could balance supply and demand.
Adding more wind now, without the storage options in place, is an inefficient use of financial resources. The current mix has too much wind, which is why we had to see (thankfully voluntary) domestic power rationing yesterday when it was cold and calm.
Investment in storage needs to be the priority, alongside more reliable baseline power such as SMR and tidal. Then more wind can be added, including export connector options for the windy days.
And if we had no wind power then yesterday would have given us rolling blackouts. If we had 4x as much wind capacity there would have been no rationing yesterday. The more wind turbines we install the lower the impact of intermittency. More power = good.
More power is always good, but the mix is also important. Adding 4x the current wind capacity, is a lot more expensive than adding storage, gas, or even nuclear.
There has to be a baseline of other power sources for the cold and calm days. Rationing is a regression, it should never happen in a modern economy, and represents a failure to get the mix right.
I've been revisiting the OpenStreetMap data on pubs and bars, so here's a map of the number per 100,000 people for every local authority in Great Britain.
I'm surprised I didn't grow up an alcoholic, given the amount of time I spent in the Derbyshire Dales in my youth. Darley Dale alone used to have ?four? pubs I went to - the Square and Compass, the Institute, the one in Church Lane, and the Grouse. A couple of miles north, the tiny village of Rowsley had/has the Peacock and the Grouse and Claret.
@paul__johnson Minister Chris Philp vigorously defending Zahawi and Sunak over tax scandal and Boris Johnson over appointment of Richard Sharp as BBC chair.
That’ll be Chris Philp, sacked four months ago as Chief Sec to Treasury after key role in Liz Truss’s disaster budget
I've been revisiting the OpenStreetMap data on pubs and bars, so here's a map of the number per 100,000 people for every local authority in Great Britain.
I'm surprised I didn't grow up an alcoholic, given the amount of time I spent in the Derbyshire Dales in my youth. Darley Dale alone used to have ?four? pubs I went to - the Square and Compass, the Institute, the one in Church Lane, and the Grouse. A couple of miles north, the tiny village of Rowsley had/has the Peacock and the Grouse and Claret.
'Pubs are more successful in tourist hotspots shock' doesn't really do it for me as a headline.
during fiscal 2020/2021, more than half the population got more in benefits than they paid in tax
Which would be the year when the Covid pandemic was at its peak, when vaccines were only available to a lucky few, and much of the country was shut down.
We don't have more recent data. We certainly don't *know* that more than half the population are still that way.
It’s also fundamentally flawed as analysis
It’s well known that income and expenses change of time. Of course when you are working you will make more of a fiscal contribution than when you are in education or are retired
The analysis should be on a lifetime contribution basis to be meaningful
A lifetime contributions basis would be more meaningful, but even then all it would show is that Britain has strong wealth and income inequalities and a taxation system that raises tax broadly in proportion to income, so that necessarily a minority of people are net contributors and a majority net recipients.
If you wanted a majority of people to be net contributors on a lifetime basis then you would need to have a much less skewed income distribution (and stop running a deficit, natch).
Progressive taxation under Labour the Tories: FYI, a couple of interesting (🤓) tables on income #tax from #HMRC (basically showing 'the rich' *are* paying more tax)...
1. the % shares of total income tax paid by different income groups (the shares paid by the top 10%, 5% and 1% have all risen over the last decade... (1/2)
2. the percentage shares of total income for each percentile group (these haven't changed much over the last decade, meaning that higher earners are paying more #tax on roughly the same share of income). (2/2) https://twitter.com/julianhjessop/status/1617601327856586752
Oh no, not data!
Opinion, that “the rich” need to be taxed more, is much easier to sell to the electorate as a whole, who never think it will affect *them*. IIRC the top decile starts at about £60k annual income, way lower than most people think it would be.
More seriously, those numbers are a precursor to emigration (and immigration forgone), and it doesn’t need many of the top 1% to change their behavior, to have a large effect on the total tax take.
On topic, this is a good and genuinely thought-provoking question that defies easy or glib answers. I suppose perhaps there are two separate questions - why does misogyny exist in the first place, and why do those who see it and know it is wrong not do more to bring it to an end. On the first, it is worth noting that misogyny or at least asigning men and women different roles with women getting inferior roles has been the norm over recorded history so it's probably quite deep rooted in us as a species, like a lot of bad stuff. My observation is that in general women care more about other people than mend do (not all women or men just a generalisation) which perhaps is an evolutionary trait. Maybe this is one reason why a lot of the most antisocial behaviour is carried out by men. The second question is easier to answer - people are cowards. And the people with the worst kinds of behaviour are often the scariest people to stand up to.
Think it is at least as much to do with instititions as people. Resistant and slow to change, care more about reputation than reality and hate to give up power. Religion a particular contributor. The (admittedly unfairly slow) solution is education.
I don't agree with the idea of people generally as cowards. Some are, but not really most people. As a contributory negative human trait I would place it lower than selfishness and indifference in the slow pace of social change.
during fiscal 2020/2021, more than half the population got more in benefits than they paid in tax
Which would be the year when the Covid pandemic was at its peak, when vaccines were only available to a lucky few, and much of the country was shut down.
We don't have more recent data. We certainly don't *know* that more than half the population are still that way.
It’s also fundamentally flawed as analysis
It’s well known that income and expenses change of time. Of course when you are working you will make more of a fiscal contribution than when you are in education or are retired
The analysis should be on a lifetime contribution basis to be meaningful
A lifetime contributions basis would be more meaningful, but even then all it would show is that Britain has strong wealth and income inequalities and a taxation system that raises tax broadly in proportion to income, so that necessarily a minority of people are net contributors and a majority net recipients.
If you wanted a majority of people to be net contributors on a lifetime basis then you would need to have a much less skewed income distribution (and stop running a deficit, natch).
Call me a grumpy middle aged cynic, but I rather doubt that is the solution that Civitas, Tufton Street, London (for it is they), are likely to suggest.
I've been revisiting the OpenStreetMap data on pubs and bars, so here's a map of the number per 100,000 people for every local authority in Great Britain.
Progressive taxation under Labour the Tories: FYI, a couple of interesting (🤓) tables on income #tax from #HMRC (basically showing 'the rich' *are* paying more tax)...
1. the % shares of total income tax paid by different income groups (the shares paid by the top 10%, 5% and 1% have all risen over the last decade... (1/2)
2. the percentage shares of total income for each percentile group (these haven't changed much over the last decade, meaning that higher earners are paying more #tax on roughly the same share of income). (2/2) https://twitter.com/julianhjessop/status/1617601327856586752
Oh no, not data!
Opinion, that “the rich” need to be taxed more, is much easier to sell to the electorate as a whole, who never think it will affect *them*. IIRC the top decile starts at about £60k annual income, way lower than most people think it would be.
More seriously, those numbers are a precursor to emigration (and immigration forgone), and it doesn’t need many of the top 1% to change their behavior, to have a large effect on the total tax take.
The reason the top few % are paying a higher share of tax is simply because the top few % are taking a much higher share of economic profits.
If they want to pay a lower share of tax how about restructuring the economic model to recognise that a CEO is not worth 100x a typical worker? Maybe the typical worker in a company could set board level pay?
I was not one of those who objected to the reposting of tweets but must admit reading half finished sentances, that are cut off mid flow, is not someth
O/T but maybe useful for some of us - the window of opportunity for making up incomplete NI contribution records for the purpose of State Pension is closing, wef end of the financial year. Particularly useful for those who have years with almost but not quite enough payments already credited.
But do it asap and phone up to check the actual records and ask how much to pay. The online things aren't, or weren't, reliable.
Progressive taxation under Labour the Tories: FYI, a couple of interesting (🤓) tables on income #tax from #HMRC (basically showing 'the rich' *are* paying more tax)...
1. the % shares of total income tax paid by different income groups (the shares paid by the top 10%, 5% and 1% have all risen over the last decade... (1/2)
2. the percentage shares of total income for each percentile group (these haven't changed much over the last decade, meaning that higher earners are paying more #tax on roughly the same share of income). (2/2) https://twitter.com/julianhjessop/status/1617601327856586752
Oh no, not data!
Opinion, that “the rich” need to be taxed more, is much easier to sell to the electorate as a whole, who never think it will affect *them*. IIRC the top decile starts at about £60k annual income, way lower than most people think it would be.
More seriously, those numbers are a precursor to emigration (and immigration forgone), and it doesn’t need many of the top 1% to change their behavior, to have a large effect on the total tax take.
The reason the top few % are paying a higher share of tax is simply because the top few % are taking a much higher share of economic profits.
If they want to pay a lower share of tax how about restructuring the economic model to recognise that a CEO is not worth 100x a typical worker? Maybe the typical worker in a company could set board level pay?
The data (down to ‘top percentile’) shows that to be incorrect. The top 1% are not earning more more than they did two decades ago, but are paying a lot more tax.
Now, it’s possible that the top 0.01% (6,500 individuals in the UK) are earning more than previously, in which case there’s even more of an incentive for government to stop them emigrating. After ‘entrepreneur’, the modal occupation of that group is probably ‘footballer’, who are mostly on PAYE after a clampdown by the tax authorities. The entrepreneurs are often internationally mobile - not just for their personal tax affairs, but also for their companies’ tax affairs. I meet many such Brits out here in the sandpit.
during fiscal 2020/2021, more than half the population got more in benefits than they paid in tax
Which would be the year when the Covid pandemic was at its peak, when vaccines were only available to a lucky few, and much of the country was shut down.
We don't have more recent data. We certainly don't *know* that more than half the population are still that way.
With the way things have gone frankly I think locking down was the wrong decision. All old people do is tell young people we're feckless and claim benefits. I think fuck them, I put my life on hold for these arseholes and for what?
Society is about a contribution to the greater good not about the individual
Lockdown 1 was justified by the unknown. Lockdown 2 more difficult to justify. With hindsight lockdown 3 was probably wrong
But your hero was calling for harder and earlier lockdowns on every occasion
I dislike the shorthand of "lockdown", because I think you could achieve the same epidemiological need through voluntary adherence to public health advice to cut down social contact, and therefore viral transmission, rather than passing laws to regulate who can visit private residences. However, that aside*, my view on the three lockdowns was that:
Lockdown 1 was justified as an emergency response to an emergency situation.
Lockdowns 2 & 3 became necessary because the government failed to implement measures that would have reduced transmission without them, or to increase medical capacity. Tracing and isolation to prevent onward transmission was lamentably poor. Measures to improve ventilation and filtration of indoor spaces were lacking. The benefits of socialising outdoors were not fully exploited. Not enough was done to reduce re-importation of the virus from abroad.
* So, when I write, "lockdown," I'm using it as shorthand for, "society-wide action, voluntary or compulsory, to reduce viral transmission by reducing physical social contact."
Progressive taxation under Labour the Tories: FYI, a couple of interesting (🤓) tables on income #tax from #HMRC (basically showing 'the rich' *are* paying more tax)...
1. the % shares of total income tax paid by different income groups (the shares paid by the top 10%, 5% and 1% have all risen over the last decade... (1/2)
2. the percentage shares of total income for each percentile group (these haven't changed much over the last decade, meaning that higher earners are paying more #tax on roughly the same share of income). (2/2) https://twitter.com/julianhjessop/status/1617601327856586752
Oh no, not data!
Opinion, that “the rich” need to be taxed more, is much easier to sell to the electorate as a whole, who never think it will affect *them*. IIRC the top decile starts at about £60k annual income, way lower than most people think it would be.
More seriously, those numbers are a precursor to emigration (and immigration forgone), and it doesn’t need many of the top 1% to change their behavior, to have a large effect on the total tax take.
The reason the top few % are paying a higher share of tax is simply because the top few % are taking a much higher share of economic profits.
If they want to pay a lower share of tax how about restructuring the economic model to recognise that a CEO is not worth 100x a typical worker? Maybe the typical worker in a company could set board level pay?
The countries that seem to have the best combination of economic vibrancy and public service provision are those where the vast majority are fairly well off. Not equally poor, nor massively unequal with super rich and bread line.
Denmark, Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada etc.
That kind of economy makes tax collection and spending so much easier. The base is huge so the rates don’t need to be too punitive. Everyone can afford to pay tax, but they’re still generally also easy to tax because they are employees and live/spend locally.
Seems energy support and debt interest are the reasons behind these figures and maybe explains why Sunak and Hunt are unwilling to agree the public sector pay demands despite their unpopularity
In the nineteen seventies, I remember a conversation with a pub landlord. He was looking for bar staff. "I always hire big lads," he said. "Cos it's a bit rough round here."
He wasn't small himself. "You help out too?" I asked.
"No chance," he said. "I send the wife to sort out the aggro." He smiled at my expression. "No man will hit a woman. When she was six months pregnant, the pub was the calmest it ever was."
A fifty year old anecdote, but with some truth. Nowadays, it seems a big, brave male MP can get away with threatening a woman, and feel proud about it.
At least misogynists in those days had self-respect.
O/T but maybe useful for some of us - the window of opportunity for making up incomplete NI contribution records for the purpose of State Pension is closing, wef end of the financial year. Particularly useful for those who have years with almost but not quite enough payments already credited.
But do it asap and phone up to check the actual records and ask how much to pay. The online things aren't, or weren't, reliable.
Hmm. I might need to look into this. Seeing this has just prompted me that because I am neither working nor claiming benefits, I'm not making any national insurance contributions. The 35-year rule means I'm probably all right but they might change that before my pension is due.
It’s the same story in the commercial sector. Since 2021, we’ve needed ‘strong customer authentication’ for online purchases, which usually requires purchasers to verify their identity with a code texted to their smartphone. I’m sure most people barely even noticed that change. But for me it was like standing in a teeming virtual mall one minute and turning around to find half of the shops boarded up the next.
You can use landline for that as well.
But for Luddites even a landline is a technology too far I'm guessing.
O/T but maybe useful for some of us - the window of opportunity for making up incomplete NI contribution records for the purpose of State Pension is closing, wef end of the financial year. Particularly useful for those who have years with almost but not quite enough payments already credited.
But do it asap and phone up to check the actual records and ask how much to pay. The online things aren't, or weren't, reliable.
Hmm. I might need to look into this. Seeing this has just prompted me that because I am neither working nor claiming benefits, I'm not making any national insurance contributions. The 35-year rule means I'm probably all right but they might change that before my pension is due.
You've got until April before the rules change, so if it effects you act now.
O/T but maybe useful for some of us - the window of opportunity for making up incomplete NI contribution records for the purpose of State Pension is closing, wef end of the financial year. Particularly useful for those who have years with almost but not quite enough payments already credited.
But do it asap and phone up to check the actual records and ask how much to pay. The online things aren't, or weren't, reliable.
Hmm. I might need to look into this. Seeing this has just prompted me that because I am neither working nor claiming benefits, I'm not making any national insurance contributions. The 35-year rule means I'm probably all right but they might change that before my pension is due.
Also if you are getting even trivial amounts of property rental you should/could pay NI on that on the relevant rate.
O/T but maybe useful for some of us - the window of opportunity for making up incomplete NI contribution records for the purpose of State Pension is closing, wef end of the financial year. Particularly useful for those who have years with almost but not quite enough payments already credited.
But do it asap and phone up to check the actual records and ask how much to pay. The online things aren't, or weren't, reliable.
during fiscal 2020/2021, more than half the population got more in benefits than they paid in tax
Which would be the year when the Covid pandemic was at its peak, when vaccines were only available to a lucky few, and much of the country was shut down.
We don't have more recent data. We certainly don't *know* that more than half the population are still that way.
With the way things have gone frankly I think locking down was the wrong decision. All old people do is tell young people we're feckless and claim benefits. I think fuck them, I put my life on hold for these arseholes and for what?
Society is about a contribution to the greater good not about the individual
Lockdown 1 was justified by the unknown. Lockdown 2 more difficult to justify. With hindsight lockdown 3 was probably wrong
But your hero was calling for harder and earlier lockdowns on every occasion
I dislike the shorthand of "lockdown", because I think you could achieve the same epidemiological need through voluntary adherence to public health advice to cut down social contact, and therefore viral transmission, rather than passing laws to regulate who can visit private residences. However, that aside*, my view on the three lockdowns was that:
Lockdown 1 was justified as an emergency response to an emergency situation.
Lockdowns 2 & 3 became necessary because the government failed to implement measures that would have reduced transmission without them, or to increase medical capacity. Tracing and isolation to prevent onward transmission was lamentably poor. Measures to improve ventilation and filtration of indoor spaces were lacking. The benefits of socialising outdoors were not fully exploited. Not enough was done to reduce re-importation of the virus from abroad.
* So, when I write, "lockdown," I'm using it as shorthand for, "society-wide action, voluntary or compulsory, to reduce viral transmission by reducing physical social contact."
That is sloppy. You can't just hand-wave away "voluntary or compulsory" and move on.
That is the critical element - the government made it illegal for you to have Auntie Flo round for tea. Would you have had Auntie Flo round for tea in the middle of a pandemic? That should have been your call. And Auntie Flo's, obvs.
Progressive taxation under Labour the Tories: FYI, a couple of interesting (🤓) tables on income #tax from #HMRC (basically showing 'the rich' *are* paying more tax)...
1. the % shares of total income tax paid by different income groups (the shares paid by the top 10%, 5% and 1% have all risen over the last decade... (1/2)
2. the percentage shares of total income for each percentile group (these haven't changed much over the last decade, meaning that higher earners are paying more #tax on roughly the same share of income). (2/2) https://twitter.com/julianhjessop/status/1617601327856586752
Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
The percentage shares of total income for top percentile groups have in fact increased since 1999, by between 8% and 18% of the 1999 share. Unsurprisingly, given we have a progressive income tax system, the income tax shares have increased more.
The figures are ignoring individual NI contributions. VAT and Council Tax are often forgotten in this debate too. Together these are much less progressive and together they account for more revenue than ICT.
Personally, I would be for normalising the progressive rates of tax on all income, earned, unearned, pensioner income. Then focus additional tax, if required (hint, it is currently), on wealth and property.
Progressive taxation under Labour the Tories: FYI, a couple of interesting (🤓) tables on income #tax from #HMRC (basically showing 'the rich' *are* paying more tax)...
1. the % shares of total income tax paid by different income groups (the shares paid by the top 10%, 5% and 1% have all risen over the last decade... (1/2)
2. the percentage shares of total income for each percentile group (these haven't changed much over the last decade, meaning that higher earners are paying more #tax on roughly the same share of income). (2/2) https://twitter.com/julianhjessop/status/1617601327856586752
Oh no, not data!
Opinion, that “the rich” need to be taxed more, is much easier to sell to the electorate as a whole, who never think it will affect *them*. IIRC the top decile starts at about £60k annual income, way lower than most people think it would be.
More seriously, those numbers are a precursor to emigration (and immigration forgone), and it doesn’t need many of the top 1% to change their behavior, to have a large effect on the total tax take.
Rheinmetall could deliver 29 Leopard 2 tanks by April/May and a further 22 around the end of 2023 or early 2024. It could also supply 88 Leopard 1 tanks, the spokesperson says, without giving a timeframe for their potential delivery. https://mobile.twitter.com/Faytuks/status/1617661566056550400
Without the energy support and debt interest bill the government is borrowing less than last year. Let this be a lesson to the DMO and Treasury to fucking stop selling linkers and make pension fund managers actually work for a living rather than just buy RPI linked bonds. Oh right, that would mean the transfer of wealth from working people to retired people would stop.
No wonder Boris Johnson is working so hard to confirm his pro-Ukraine credentials with friends allegedly holding undisclosed meetings with Kremlin warlords.
during fiscal 2020/2021, more than half the population got more in benefits than they paid in tax
Which would be the year when the Covid pandemic was at its peak, when vaccines were only available to a lucky few, and much of the country was shut down.
We don't have more recent data. We certainly don't *know* that more than half the population are still that way.
With the way things have gone frankly I think locking down was the wrong decision. All old people do is tell young people we're feckless and claim benefits. I think fuck them, I put my life on hold for these arseholes and for what?
Society is about a contribution to the greater good not about the individual
Lockdown 1 was justified by the unknown. Lockdown 2 more difficult to justify. With hindsight lockdown 3 was probably wrong
But your hero was calling for harder and earlier lockdowns on every occasion
I dislike the shorthand of "lockdown", because I think you could achieve the same epidemiological need through voluntary adherence to public health advice to cut down social contact, and therefore viral transmission, rather than passing laws to regulate who can visit private residences. However, that aside*, my view on the three lockdowns was that:
Lockdown 1 was justified as an emergency response to an emergency situation.
Lockdowns 2 & 3 became necessary because the government failed to implement measures that would have reduced transmission without them, or to increase medical capacity. Tracing and isolation to prevent onward transmission was lamentably poor. Measures to improve ventilation and filtration of indoor spaces were lacking. The benefits of socialising outdoors were not fully exploited. Not enough was done to reduce re-importation of the virus from abroad.
* So, when I write, "lockdown," I'm using it as shorthand for, "society-wide action, voluntary or compulsory, to reduce viral transmission by reducing physical social contact."
That is sloppy. You can't just hand-wave away "voluntary or compulsory" and move on.
That is the critical element - the government made it illegal for you to have Auntie Flo round for tea. Would you have had Auntie Flo round for tea in the middle of a pandemic? That should have been your call. And Auntie Flo's, obvs.
I explained my reasoning. I wouldn't have had government legislation, but government advice. The virus, and the epidemiology, doesn't care about the difference, so when talking about what was required to reduce viral transmission the difference isn't important either, unless you think that there would have been a huge difference between adherence to advice than there was to adherence to the law.
Given the extent to which public behaviour changed in advance of legal restrictions being imposed, I don't think there would have been a huge difference.
Debt interest payments on British government debt now running at ~£250 per person, per month.
But, no worries, doesn't have to be paid now, it's just added to the debt total.
It's 30 years of the treasury and DMO selling RPI linked bonds to quietly bail out DB pension funds with taxpayer money. Linkers now account for something like 75-80% of all debt interest paid, the UK is one of a handful of countries that has sold so much index linked paper, at last count 33% of the UK's external debt was RPI linked. It's absolutely crazy.
Worse is that we're still bloody selling them, even now the government hasn't decided enough is enough and to move to standard coupon paper.
There's a rather shocking table on page 18 of the Civitas report that triggered the Daily Mail, that shows that even the top income quintile of retired people receive more in benefits than they pay in tax.
I didn't notice the DM headlining on that particular nugget.
Benefits in kind includes the NHS. Do you think think the basic principle of allocating resources by need should change?
Surely though the top quintile are not in “need”.
They're more in need of expensive healthcare then most people of working age, and it would be hard for them to pay enough tax to pay for that as they go. Whether implicitly, through being net contributors during their working life, or explicitly with an insurance fund, you would expect that people would build up an entitlement to a pension and healthcare that they would drawdown once they retired.
This is how the system is designed. It should come as no surprise.
The problem we are facing now is that because our system was designed as a pay as you go system, the baby boomer generation didn't have to contribute all that much while they were working, because they had much fewer pensioners to support. And now there are relatively many fewer people of working age to provide their expected benefits. If we then try to transition to an explicit insurance fund model, where people pay ahead for their own care, rather than expect the next generation to stump up for it, then the poor bloody generation caught in the middle will end up having to pay for their own retirement as well as for their parents.
Are being thick deliberately. They paid the same NI that you losers pay nowadays and they did not whinge but scrimped and saved to better themselves. Unlike the lazy good for nothing whinging pension hating loser freeloaders on here.
There's a rather shocking table on page 18 of the Civitas report that triggered the Daily Mail, that shows that even the top income quintile of retired people receive more in benefits than they pay in tax.
I didn't notice the DM headlining on that particular nugget.
Benefits in kind includes the NHS. Do you think think the basic principle of allocating resources by need should change?
Surely though the top quintile are not in “need”.
They're more in need of expensive healthcare then most people of working age, and it would be hard for them to pay enough tax to pay for that as they go. Whether implicitly, through being net contributors during their working life, or explicitly with an insurance fund, you would expect that people would build up an entitlement to a pension and healthcare that they would drawdown once they retired.
This is how the system is designed. It should come as no surprise.
The problem we are facing now is that because our system was designed as a pay as you go system, the baby boomer generation didn't have to contribute all that much while they were working, because they had much fewer pensioners to support. And now there are relatively many fewer people of working age to provide their expected benefits. If we then try to transition to an explicit insurance fund model, where people pay ahead for their own care, rather than expect the next generation to stump up for it, then the poor bloody generation caught in the middle will end up having to pay for their own retirement as well as for their parents.
Are being thick deliberately. They paid the same NI that you losers pay nowadays and they did not whinge but scrimped and saved to better themselves. Unlike the lazy good for nothing whinging pension hating loser freeloaders on here.
And you learned so little from these people who "did not whinge"...
There's a rather shocking table on page 18 of the Civitas report that triggered the Daily Mail, that shows that even the top income quintile of retired people receive more in benefits than they pay in tax.
I didn't notice the DM headlining on that particular nugget.
Benefits in kind includes the NHS. Do you think think the basic principle of allocating resources by need should change?
Surely though the top quintile are not in “need”.
We would have fcuknuggets like you or the barking harse deciding "need" no thanks. If you paid for it for 50 years you deserve to get it , NHS and pensions. I have never received a benefit, ie NHS or pension, in my life that I have not paid big money for.
during fiscal 2020/2021, more than half the population got more in benefits than they paid in tax
Which would be the year when the Covid pandemic was at its peak, when vaccines were only available to a lucky few, and much of the country was shut down.
We don't have more recent data. We certainly don't *know* that more than half the population are still that way.
With the way things have gone frankly I think locking down was the wrong decision. All old people do is tell young people we're feckless and claim benefits. I think fuck them, I put my life on hold for these arseholes and for what?
Society is about a contribution to the greater good not about the individual
Lockdown 1 was justified by the unknown. Lockdown 2 more difficult to justify. With hindsight lockdown 3 was probably wrong
But your hero was calling for harder and earlier lockdowns on every occasion
I dislike the shorthand of "lockdown", because I think you could achieve the same epidemiological need through voluntary adherence to public health advice to cut down social contact, and therefore viral transmission, rather than passing laws to regulate who can visit private residences. However, that aside*, my view on the three lockdowns was that:
Lockdown 1 was justified as an emergency response to an emergency situation.
Lockdowns 2 & 3 became necessary because the government failed to implement measures that would have reduced transmission without them, or to increase medical capacity. Tracing and isolation to prevent onward transmission was lamentably poor. Measures to improve ventilation and filtration of indoor spaces were lacking. The benefits of socialising outdoors were not fully exploited. Not enough was done to reduce re-importation of the virus from abroad.
* So, when I write, "lockdown," I'm using it as shorthand for, "society-wide action, voluntary or compulsory, to reduce viral transmission by reducing physical social contact."
That is sloppy. You can't just hand-wave away "voluntary or compulsory" and move on.
That is the critical element - the government made it illegal for you to have Auntie Flo round for tea. Would you have had Auntie Flo round for tea in the middle of a pandemic? That should have been your call. And Auntie Flo's, obvs.
I explained my reasoning. I wouldn't have had government legislation, but government advice. The virus, and the epidemiology, doesn't care about the difference, so when talking about what was required to reduce viral transmission the difference isn't important either, unless you think that there would have been a huge difference between adherence to advice than there was to adherence to the law.
Given the extent to which public behaviour changed in advance of legal restrictions being imposed, I don't think there would have been a huge difference.
There is a huge difference between legal obligation and voluntary choice. That is the very crux of the issue. Once that gets blurred then the govt can do whatever the hell they want. And just about have done these past three years.
during fiscal 2020/2021, more than half the population got more in benefits than they paid in tax
Which would be the year when the Covid pandemic was at its peak, when vaccines were only available to a lucky few, and much of the country was shut down.
We don't have more recent data. We certainly don't *know* that more than half the population are still that way.
With the way things have gone frankly I think locking down was the wrong decision. All old people do is tell young people we're feckless and claim benefits. I think fuck them, I put my life on hold for these arseholes and for what?
You are either a nasty piece of work or mentally disturbed. Seek help. What the F**K did you put on hold for anybody you trumpet.
Peak wind in the autumn is about 15GW, so today it’s at 27% efficiency (against the peak, not against rated power).
Do we really think that adding more wind capacity, is the *cheapest* way to avoid (at the moment voluntary) blackouts?
Energy policy is trying to achieve several objectives at once, of which maintaining continuity if supply is just one. We should be adding lots of wind capacity to reduce our usage of gas and to increase our overall supply of electricity.
But, of course, we should be doing other things as well, such as tidal, nuclear, storage, interconnectors and solar.
Watched the end of that. "who?" "Where?" "Playing in what league?"
Has there ever been a bigger upset than this in Scotland or England cup ties? All the big FA Cup ones I can think of we're Conference sides beating old Division One. This lot play in the West of Scotland Premier League - the 6th tier!
Who can forget 'Super Cally go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious'?
I've been revisiting the OpenStreetMap data on pubs and bars, so here's a map of the number per 100,000 people for every local authority in Great Britain.
I'm surprised I didn't grow up an alcoholic, given the amount of time I spent in the Derbyshire Dales in my youth. Darley Dale alone used to have ?four? pubs I went to - the Square and Compass, the Institute, the one in Church Lane, and the Grouse. A couple of miles north, the tiny village of Rowsley had/has the Peacock and the Grouse and Claret.
'Pubs are more successful in tourist hotspots shock' doesn't really do it for me as a headline.
Well, yes, except I wouldn't necessarily call Darley Dale a 'tourist hotspot', particularly when compared to areas actually in the PDNP.
There's a rather shocking table on page 18 of the Civitas report that triggered the Daily Mail, that shows that even the top income quintile of retired people receive more in benefits than they pay in tax.
I didn't notice the DM headlining on that particular nugget.
Benefits in kind includes the NHS. Do you think think the basic principle of allocating resources by need should change?
Surely though the top quintile are not in “need”.
They're more in need of expensive healthcare then most people of working age, and it would be hard for them to pay enough tax to pay for that as they go. Whether implicitly, through being net contributors during their working life, or explicitly with an insurance fund, you would expect that people would build up an entitlement to a pension and healthcare that they would drawdown once they retired.
This is how the system is designed. It should come as no surprise.
The problem we are facing now is that because our system was designed as a pay as you go system, the baby boomer generation didn't have to contribute all that much while they were working, because they had much fewer pensioners to support. And now there are relatively many fewer people of working age to provide their expected benefits. If we then try to transition to an explicit insurance fund model, where people pay ahead for their own care, rather than expect the next generation to stump up for it, then the poor bloody generation caught in the middle will end up having to pay for their own retirement as well as for their parents.
Are being thick deliberately. They paid the same NI that you losers pay nowadays and they did not whinge but scrimped and saved to better themselves. Unlike the lazy good for nothing whinging pension hating loser freeloaders on here.
National Insurance rates were a lot lower in the past. So, that's not true. We also see that the rate of taxation as a whole is at a high, and yet the budget is still running a large deficit. The older generation now had fewer old people to support when they were working than people of working age have to support now - so it obviously takes more as a proportion of our income to pay that support.
There's a rather shocking table on page 18 of the Civitas report that triggered the Daily Mail, that shows that even the top income quintile of retired people receive more in benefits than they pay in tax.
I didn't notice the DM headlining on that particular nugget.
Benefits in kind includes the NHS. Do you think think the basic principle of allocating resources by need should change?
Surely though the top quintile are not in “need”.
We would have fcuknuggets like you or the barking harse deciding "need" no thanks. If you paid for it for 50 years you deserve to get it , NHS and pensions. I have never received a benefit, ie NHS or pension, in my life that I have not paid big money for.
If it weren't for your Scottish Nationalism you'd be up there with all the other carping old PB Tories. You certainly don't have much of the SWP-SNP about you.
It is not our job to worry about Putin, or where his career might go next, or to engage in pointless Kremlinology. Our job is to help Ukraine win – as fast as possible.
Those heroic people are fighting for all of us. The Ukrainians are fighting for the Georgians, for the Moldovans, for the Baltic states, for the Poles – for anyone who might in due time be threatened by Putin's crazed revanchism and neo-imperialism. They are fighting for the principle that nations should not have their borders changed by force.
When Ukraine wins, that is a message that will be heard around the world. So let us help them win, not next year or the year after, but this year, 2023; and don't talk to me, finally, about expense.
If you want to minimise the world's economic pain, if you want to avoid the enormous cost – in blood and treasure – of letting this tragedy stretch on, then let's together do the obvious thing.
Let's give the Ukrainians all they need to win now.
He was always at his best with slightly vague boosterism, it's what he is made for far more than trying to run a country.
I think there is a basic point where a full on invasion of this nature (well beyond even the 2014 snatch and grab) means the kind of tip toeing worry about provoking Putin or giving him an excuse to escalate no longer really works, if it ever did. There's still the sensible worry about him being so mad he might go nuclear, but short of that what further escalation can he realistically threaten, in which case there should be less coyness around backing his opponents in Ukraine.
The bolded bit is the critical bit, but it's the bit you skated over.
Why is it critical? If you believe it to be true, weakening our support for Ukraine will not make him any less mad.
It's why support for Ukraine has to be moderated. If the Russian army is routed, it becomes more likely that Putin will resort to nukes. The least dangerous strategy is to grind Russia down in a long way of attrition that is less likely to provide a trigger for nuclear war. Ukraine has to win, but nuclear war must be avoided.
Garbage , we should be sending more and longer range weapons so Ukraine can beat the crap out of them. Last thing we need is cowardluy appeasers like you whining about the poor Russians.
Peak wind in the autumn is about 15GW, so today it’s at 27% efficiency (against the peak, not against rated power).
Do we really think that adding more wind capacity, is the *cheapest* way to avoid (at the moment voluntary) blackouts?
Energy policy is trying to achieve several objectives at once, of which maintaining continuity if supply is just one. We should be adding lots of wind capacity to reduce our usage of gas and to increase our overall supply of electricity.
But, of course, we should be doing other things as well, such as tidal, nuclear, storage, interconnectors and solar.
We also need to overcome the mindset that demand is fixed. This isn't the case. By using flexible pricing, demand can be modified to help match supply.
during fiscal 2020/2021, more than half the population got more in benefits than they paid in tax
Which would be the year when the Covid pandemic was at its peak, when vaccines were only available to a lucky few, and much of the country was shut down.
We don't have more recent data. We certainly don't *know* that more than half the population are still that way.
With the way things have gone frankly I think locking down was the wrong decision. All old people do is tell young people we're feckless and claim benefits. I think fuck them, I put my life on hold for these arseholes and for what?
Society is about a contribution to the greater good not about the individual
Lockdown 1 was justified by the unknown. Lockdown 2 more difficult to justify. With hindsight lockdown 3 was probably wrong
But your hero was calling for harder and earlier lockdowns on every occasion
I dislike the shorthand of "lockdown", because I think you could achieve the same epidemiological need through voluntary adherence to public health advice to cut down social contact, and therefore viral transmission, rather than passing laws to regulate who can visit private residences. However, that aside*, my view on the three lockdowns was that:
Lockdown 1 was justified as an emergency response to an emergency situation.
Lockdowns 2 & 3 became necessary because the government failed to implement measures that would have reduced transmission without them, or to increase medical capacity. Tracing and isolation to prevent onward transmission was lamentably poor. Measures to improve ventilation and filtration of indoor spaces were lacking. The benefits of socialising outdoors were not fully exploited. Not enough was done to reduce re-importation of the virus from abroad.
* So, when I write, "lockdown," I'm using it as shorthand for, "society-wide action, voluntary or compulsory, to reduce viral transmission by reducing physical social contact."
That is sloppy. You can't just hand-wave away "voluntary or compulsory" and move on.
That is the critical element - the government made it illegal for you to have Auntie Flo round for tea. Would you have had Auntie Flo round for tea in the middle of a pandemic? That should have been your call. And Auntie Flo's, obvs.
I explained my reasoning. I wouldn't have had government legislation, but government advice. The virus, and the epidemiology, doesn't care about the difference, so when talking about what was required to reduce viral transmission the difference isn't important either, unless you think that there would have been a huge difference between adherence to advice than there was to adherence to the law.
Given the extent to which public behaviour changed in advance of legal restrictions being imposed, I don't think there would have been a huge difference.
There is a huge difference between legal obligation and voluntary choice. That is the very crux of the issue. Once that gets blurred then the govt can do whatever the hell they want. And just about have done these past three years.
It's not the crux of the issue, otherwise people would be talking about the ways in which you can encourage citizens in a mature democracy to do the right thing without compulsion.
Instead, we have arguments about whether it was necessary to slow down transmission of the virus at all - which is an entirely different argument.
for clarity: the children were attacked by bears after being cursed by the prophet Elisha, who they mocked for being bald - it's in the bible, so must be true.
There's a rather shocking table on page 18 of the Civitas report that triggered the Daily Mail, that shows that even the top income quintile of retired people receive more in benefits than they pay in tax.
I didn't notice the DM headlining on that particular nugget.
Benefits in kind includes the NHS. Do you think think the basic principle of allocating resources by need should change?
Surely though the top quintile are not in “need”.
They're more in need of expensive healthcare then most people of working age, and it would be hard for them to pay enough tax to pay for that as they go. Whether implicitly, through being net contributors during their working life, or explicitly with an insurance fund, you would expect that people would build up an entitlement to a pension and healthcare that they would drawdown once they retired.
This is how the system is designed. It should come as no surprise.
The problem we are facing now is that because our system was designed as a pay as you go system, the baby boomer generation didn't have to contribute all that much while they were working, because they had much fewer pensioners to support. And now there are relatively many fewer people of working age to provide their expected benefits. If we then try to transition to an explicit insurance fund model, where people pay ahead for their own care, rather than expect the next generation to stump up for it, then the poor bloody generation caught in the middle will end up having to pay for their own retirement as well as for their parents.
Are being thick deliberately. They paid the same NI that you losers pay nowadays and they did not whinge but scrimped and saved to better themselves. Unlike the lazy good for nothing whinging pension hating loser freeloaders on here.
Your generation are true heroes, we are not worthy. You have been such wonderful people, but must have been quite shit parents if you think your progeny are all good for nothing freeloaders.
It is not our job to worry about Putin, or where his career might go next, or to engage in pointless Kremlinology. Our job is to help Ukraine win – as fast as possible.
Those heroic people are fighting for all of us. The Ukrainians are fighting for the Georgians, for the Moldovans, for the Baltic states, for the Poles – for anyone who might in due time be threatened by Putin's crazed revanchism and neo-imperialism. They are fighting for the principle that nations should not have their borders changed by force.
When Ukraine wins, that is a message that will be heard around the world. So let us help them win, not next year or the year after, but this year, 2023; and don't talk to me, finally, about expense.
If you want to minimise the world's economic pain, if you want to avoid the enormous cost – in blood and treasure – of letting this tragedy stretch on, then let's together do the obvious thing.
Let's give the Ukrainians all they need to win now.
He was always at his best with slightly vague boosterism, it's what he is made for far more than trying to run a country.
I think there is a basic point where a full on invasion of this nature (well beyond even the 2014 snatch and grab) means the kind of tip toeing worry about provoking Putin or giving him an excuse to escalate no longer really works, if it ever did. There's still the sensible worry about him being so mad he might go nuclear, but short of that what further escalation can he realistically threaten, in which case there should be less coyness around backing his opponents in Ukraine.
The bolded bit is the critical bit, but it's the bit you skated over.
Why is it critical? If you believe it to be true, weakening our support for Ukraine will not make him any less mad.
It's why support for Ukraine has to be moderated. If the Russian army is routed, it becomes more likely that Putin will resort to nukes. The least dangerous strategy is to grind Russia down in a long way of attrition that is less likely to provide a trigger for nuclear war. Ukraine has to win, but nuclear war must be avoided.
Garbage , we should be sending more and longer range weapons so Ukraine can beat the crap out of them. Last thing we need is cowardluy appeasers like you whining about the poor Russians.
You're on fire this morning Malc - a few Buckies to the good by 9am?
Kind of a nonsensical comment. By the time they retire they will be old people.
Moreover when the pension was introduced in 1925 to be paid at age 65, average life expectancy was 58. When the payment of pension was linked to retirement in 1948 average life expectancy was 67. Today average life expectancy is 81.
So it hardly seems unreasonable to expect people to work longer for their pension given average life expectancy has moved from 7 years before pension age to 16 years after it.
But they need to raise the pension age now not in 13 years when all of their voters have already retired at the lower age. 68 for men and 70 for women, adjusted every 5 years so that only 10-12 years of retirement is state funded.
I agree generally. Though there is an upper limit to how far you can go with that. Healthy life expectancy has not gone up as quickly as overall life expectancy so simply tracking the latter upwards is impractical.
Given a lot of people work part time in their sixties, why not phase the state pension in?
Maybe 20% at 64, 50% at 66, 80% at 68, 100% at 70?
It is not our job to worry about Putin, or where his career might go next, or to engage in pointless Kremlinology. Our job is to help Ukraine win – as fast as possible.
Those heroic people are fighting for all of us. The Ukrainians are fighting for the Georgians, for the Moldovans, for the Baltic states, for the Poles – for anyone who might in due time be threatened by Putin's crazed revanchism and neo-imperialism. They are fighting for the principle that nations should not have their borders changed by force.
When Ukraine wins, that is a message that will be heard around the world. So let us help them win, not next year or the year after, but this year, 2023; and don't talk to me, finally, about expense.
If you want to minimise the world's economic pain, if you want to avoid the enormous cost – in blood and treasure – of letting this tragedy stretch on, then let's together do the obvious thing.
Let's give the Ukrainians all they need to win now.
He was always at his best with slightly vague boosterism, it's what he is made for far more than trying to run a country.
I think there is a basic point where a full on invasion of this nature (well beyond even the 2014 snatch and grab) means the kind of tip toeing worry about provoking Putin or giving him an excuse to escalate no longer really works, if it ever did. There's still the sensible worry about him being so mad he might go nuclear, but short of that what further escalation can he realistically threaten, in which case there should be less coyness around backing his opponents in Ukraine.
The bolded bit is the critical bit, but it's the bit you skated over.
Why is it critical? If you believe it to be true, weakening our support for Ukraine will not make him any less mad.
It's why support for Ukraine has to be moderated. If the Russian army is routed, it becomes more likely that Putin will resort to nukes. The least dangerous strategy is to grind Russia down in a long way of attrition that is less likely to provide a trigger for nuclear war. Ukraine has to win, but nuclear war must be avoided.
Garbage , we should be sending more and longer range weapons so Ukraine can beat the crap out of them. Last thing we need is cowardluy appeasers like you whining about the poor Russians.
You seem to have completely missed the point of my post.
It’s the same story in the commercial sector. Since 2021, we’ve needed ‘strong customer authentication’ for online purchases, which usually requires purchasers to verify their identity with a code texted to their smartphone. I’m sure most people barely even noticed that change. But for me it was like standing in a teeming virtual mall one minute and turning around to find half of the shops boarded up the next.
You can use landline for that as well.
But for Luddites even a landline is a technology too far I'm guessing.
Well, you can use a landline (older PBers will recall the days when we used to sneer at people who said landline to mean landline because it originally meant those wired together phone sets used in the trenches, or something) for multi-factor authentication if the other party says you can.
So it is no good if your payment card will use sms to landline when you cannot log in to the shop site without a texted code to your mobile.
ETA you might (untested but it sounds plausible) be able to use a second hand mobile with no phone contract, by connecting it to your wifi.
It is not our job to worry about Putin, or where his career might go next, or to engage in pointless Kremlinology. Our job is to help Ukraine win – as fast as possible.
Those heroic people are fighting for all of us. The Ukrainians are fighting for the Georgians, for the Moldovans, for the Baltic states, for the Poles – for anyone who might in due time be threatened by Putin's crazed revanchism and neo-imperialism. They are fighting for the principle that nations should not have their borders changed by force.
When Ukraine wins, that is a message that will be heard around the world. So let us help them win, not next year or the year after, but this year, 2023; and don't talk to me, finally, about expense.
If you want to minimise the world's economic pain, if you want to avoid the enormous cost – in blood and treasure – of letting this tragedy stretch on, then let's together do the obvious thing.
Let's give the Ukrainians all they need to win now.
He was always at his best with slightly vague boosterism, it's what he is made for far more than trying to run a country.
I think there is a basic point where a full on invasion of this nature (well beyond even the 2014 snatch and grab) means the kind of tip toeing worry about provoking Putin or giving him an excuse to escalate no longer really works, if it ever did. There's still the sensible worry about him being so mad he might go nuclear, but short of that what further escalation can he realistically threaten, in which case there should be less coyness around backing his opponents in Ukraine.
The bolded bit is the critical bit, but it's the bit you skated over.
Why is it critical? If you believe it to be true, weakening our support for Ukraine will not make him any less mad.
It's why support for Ukraine has to be moderated. If the Russian army is routed, it becomes more likely that Putin will resort to nukes. The least dangerous strategy is to grind Russia down in a long way of attrition that is less likely to provide a trigger for nuclear war. Ukraine has to win, but nuclear war must be avoided.
Garbage , we should be sending more and longer range weapons so Ukraine can beat the crap out of them. Last thing we need is cowardluy appeasers like you whining about the poor Russians.
You seem to have completely missed the point of my post.
There's a rather shocking table on page 18 of the Civitas report that triggered the Daily Mail, that shows that even the top income quintile of retired people receive more in benefits than they pay in tax.
Peak wind in the autumn is about 15GW, so today it’s at 27% efficiency (against the peak, not against rated power).
Do we really think that adding more wind capacity, is the *cheapest* way to avoid (at the moment voluntary) blackouts?
Energy policy is trying to achieve several objectives at once, of which maintaining continuity if supply is just one. We should be adding lots of wind capacity to reduce our usage of gas and to increase our overall supply of electricity.
But, of course, we should be doing other things as well, such as tidal, nuclear, storage, interconnectors and solar.
We also need to overcome the mindset that demand is fixed. This isn't the case. By using flexible pricing, demand can be modified to help match supply.
Certainly with dynamic pricing there's the potential to shift around demand from electric car charging to quite a large extent, but that only gets you so far, particularly with the large-scale variations in wind energy production that occur on the timescale of 7-10 days.
Ireland, who generate a greater proportion of their electricity from wind than Britain, and so are further along in encountering this issue, appear to be moving towards production and storage of hydrogen as the way to store energy on those longer timescales.
during fiscal 2020/2021, more than half the population got more in benefits than they paid in tax
Which would be the year when the Covid pandemic was at its peak, when vaccines were only available to a lucky few, and much of the country was shut down.
We don't have more recent data. We certainly don't *know* that more than half the population are still that way.
With the way things have gone frankly I think locking down was the wrong decision. All old people do is tell young people we're feckless and claim benefits. I think fuck them, I put my life on hold for these arseholes and for what?
Society is about a contribution to the greater good not about the individual
Lockdown 1 was justified by the unknown. Lockdown 2 more difficult to justify. With hindsight lockdown 3 was probably wrong
But your hero was calling for harder and earlier lockdowns on every occasion
I dislike the shorthand of "lockdown", because I think you could achieve the same epidemiological need through voluntary adherence to public health advice to cut down social contact, and therefore viral transmission, rather than passing laws to regulate who can visit private residences. However, that aside*, my view on the three lockdowns was that:
Lockdown 1 was justified as an emergency response to an emergency situation.
Lockdowns 2 & 3 became necessary because the government failed to implement measures that would have reduced transmission without them, or to increase medical capacity. Tracing and isolation to prevent onward transmission was lamentably poor. Measures to improve ventilation and filtration of indoor spaces were lacking. The benefits of socialising outdoors were not fully exploited. Not enough was done to reduce re-importation of the virus from abroad.
* So, when I write, "lockdown," I'm using it as shorthand for, "society-wide action, voluntary or compulsory, to reduce viral transmission by reducing physical social contact."
That is sloppy. You can't just hand-wave away "voluntary or compulsory" and move on.
That is the critical element - the government made it illegal for you to have Auntie Flo round for tea. Would you have had Auntie Flo round for tea in the middle of a pandemic? That should have been your call. And Auntie Flo's, obvs.
I explained my reasoning. I wouldn't have had government legislation, but government advice. The virus, and the epidemiology, doesn't care about the difference, so when talking about what was required to reduce viral transmission the difference isn't important either, unless you think that there would have been a huge difference between adherence to advice than there was to adherence to the law.
Given the extent to which public behaviour changed in advance of legal restrictions being imposed, I don't think there would have been a huge difference.
There is a huge difference between legal obligation and voluntary choice. That is the very crux of the issue. Once that gets blurred then the govt can do whatever the hell they want. And just about have done these past three years.
It's not the crux of the issue, otherwise people would be talking about the ways in which you can encourage citizens in a mature democracy to do the right thing without compulsion.
Instead, we have arguments about whether it was necessary to slow down transmission of the virus at all - which is an entirely different argument.
We disagree. Introducing laws to determine how many people you can invite into your own home, or how many times you can leave it, or how many sesame toasts you're allowed in the pub, or any of the other measures that were introduced is just about as fundamental as you can get in terms of the nature of society.
Commenting on the thread header (it’s time someone did), men are used to being in power. Women are threatening this, and some men are unable to accept it. It’s vital that those of us who do accept it ensure that misogyny is called out and rooted out. The SNP example is slightly different, in that it is a political elite who are feeling vulnerable, and are hitting out against all perceived opposition.
Yes, that is part of it, and recently sociopathy has become celebrated, for example Donald Trump, Kanye West or Andrew Tate. It has become a lifestyle to desire for many men.
I think now that 15% of teenage girls identify as bisexuality or lesbian, and I understand why. A lot of men are bastards. Increasingly too the Trans community is not M to F, but F to M at young ages. That is a bit more alien to me, but does speak of how difficult being female can be.
That second paragraph seems like confusing correlation with causation to me. You could just as well say it’s the increased exposure of the young to phthalates and similar endocrine disrupters. We really don’t know.
Doesn’t the limited evidence we have suggest social media contagion as a highly likely contributory factor - with previous examples like the explosion of bulimia among young females in Hong Kong after a well publicised death there being an early example?
Progressive taxation under Labour the Tories: FYI, a couple of interesting (🤓) tables on income #tax from #HMRC (basically showing 'the rich' *are* paying more tax)...
1. the % shares of total income tax paid by different income groups (the shares paid by the top 10%, 5% and 1% have all risen over the last decade... (1/2)
2. the percentage shares of total income for each percentile group (these haven't changed much over the last decade, meaning that higher earners are paying more #tax on roughly the same share of income). (2/2) https://twitter.com/julianhjessop/status/1617601327856586752
Oh no, not data!
Opinion, that “the rich” need to be taxed more, is much easier to sell to the electorate as a whole, who never think it will affect *them*. IIRC the top decile starts at about £60k annual income, way lower than most people think it would be.
More seriously, those numbers are a precursor to emigration (and immigration forgone), and it doesn’t need many of the top 1% to change their behavior, to have a large effect on the total tax take.
It's a tricky one, and the sort of thing our politicians should really seek to achieve a cross-party consensus on to take the heat out of it.
Retiring at 68 would be fine for most of the well-heeled contributors to PB. But for low-paid manual workers with gruelling jobs, it's a stretch. I can't help but think that a more radical solution may be needed.
Office workers should retire at 70. Manual workers should retire at 65. Alternatively, nobody should be allowed to retire until they have worked for 50 years. Went into an apprenticeship at 16? Retire at 66. Went to university and stayed on for a PhD? Retire at 75.
Bloody oldies, hanging on to all the cushy, well-paid white collar professional jobs so young'uns can't get promoted.
young'uns could not lace my boots hence reason they are where they are, overinflated opinions of themselves that do match reality.
As well as not having photo ID to vote, it turns out I've not got any identifying documents that will allow me to check my NIC record via the government gateway.
Commenting on the thread header (it’s time someone did), men are used to being in power. Women are threatening this, and some men are unable to accept it. It’s vital that those of us who do accept it ensure that misogyny is called out and rooted out. The SNP example is slightly different, in that it is a political elite who are feeling vulnerable, and are hitting out against all perceived opposition.
Most of the men with women problems that I come across are older than me. Men my age or younger are OK and I rarely experience problems.
Generalising always creates a queue of "what-aboutery" on PB but I would say that the old fashioned type of misogynistic SOB is generally over 70 and rapidly becoming extinct.
It would be nice to think so, but I think there's a tendency for the younger hardcore male misogynists to hide away at home on the internet. Also misogynist men are more likely to bias their interactions with women to ignore women older than them.
Also, to the pure, all things are pure.
No doubt the MPs jeering at Rosie Duffield believe that their misogyny is righteous.
And there are men who simply hate women, and will latch onto any cause where they can vent their hatred for women.
Really? I would have thought their hatred for women is a symptom of, for example, a need to exert power and control
That, too.
But, bad people still like to think of themselves as the good guys. Threatening rape and violence in furtherance of a “good” cause let’s them maintain a good opinion of themselves.
Debt interest payments on British government debt now running at ~£250 per person, per month.
But, no worries, doesn't have to be paid now, it's just added to the debt total.
These numbers are being distorted by the way the borrowing data are recorded on an accruals basis, which means that accrued payments relating to interest on index linked debt spike upwards when RPI inflation moves up a lot two months previously. We saw this in June (when accrued interest payments were even higher than in December) as RPI inflation increased thanks to rail fares and other regulated prices increasing in April and we have now seen the same thing in December after the energy related increase in RPI in October. The IFS wrote about the June increase here: https://ifs.org.uk/articles/governments-debt-interest-bill-june-hugely-increased-high-inflation-and-seasonal-effects. The borrowing numbers seen in other months that are around half the June/Dec level are more typical. I'm not trying to downplay the fact that government borrowing is high or the role of linkers in that, but it is worth noting that there are statistical quirks biasing the number in December higher and it's not representative of the actual cash debt payments the government is making every month.
Peak wind in the autumn is about 15GW, so today it’s at 27% efficiency (against the peak, not against rated power).
Do we really think that adding more wind capacity, is the *cheapest* way to avoid (at the moment voluntary) blackouts?
Energy policy is trying to achieve several objectives at once, of which maintaining continuity if supply is just one. We should be adding lots of wind capacity to reduce our usage of gas and to increase our overall supply of electricity.
But, of course, we should be doing other things as well, such as tidal, nuclear, storage, interconnectors and solar.
We also need to overcome the mindset that demand is fixed. This isn't the case. By using flexible pricing, demand can be modified to help match supply.
Certainly with dynamic pricing there's the potential to shift around demand from electric car charging to quite a large extent, but that only gets you so far, particularly with the large-scale variations in wind energy production that occur on the timescale of 7-10 days.
Ireland, who generate a greater proportion of their electricity from wind than Britain, and so are further along in encountering this issue, appear to be moving towards production and storage of hydrogen as the way to store energy on those longer timescales.
Yes, and I reading this morning about a scheme being introduced in Ireland to use surplus electricity during windy times to provide free hot water heating for poorer people. There are all sorts of possibilities.
It is not our job to worry about Putin, or where his career might go next, or to engage in pointless Kremlinology. Our job is to help Ukraine win – as fast as possible.
Those heroic people are fighting for all of us. The Ukrainians are fighting for the Georgians, for the Moldovans, for the Baltic states, for the Poles – for anyone who might in due time be threatened by Putin's crazed revanchism and neo-imperialism. They are fighting for the principle that nations should not have their borders changed by force.
When Ukraine wins, that is a message that will be heard around the world. So let us help them win, not next year or the year after, but this year, 2023; and don't talk to me, finally, about expense.
If you want to minimise the world's economic pain, if you want to avoid the enormous cost – in blood and treasure – of letting this tragedy stretch on, then let's together do the obvious thing.
Let's give the Ukrainians all they need to win now.
He was always at his best with slightly vague boosterism, it's what he is made for far more than trying to run a country.
I think there is a basic point where a full on invasion of this nature (well beyond even the 2014 snatch and grab) means the kind of tip toeing worry about provoking Putin or giving him an excuse to escalate no longer really works, if it ever did. There's still the sensible worry about him being so mad he might go nuclear, but short of that what further escalation can he realistically threaten, in which case there should be less coyness around backing his opponents in Ukraine.
The bolded bit is the critical bit, but it's the bit you skated over.
Why is it critical? If you believe it to be true, weakening our support for Ukraine will not make him any less mad.
It's why support for Ukraine has to be moderated. If the Russian army is routed, it becomes more likely that Putin will resort to nukes. The least dangerous strategy is to grind Russia down in a long way of attrition that is less likely to provide a trigger for nuclear war. Ukraine has to win, but nuclear war must be avoided.
Garbage , we should be sending more and longer range weapons so Ukraine can beat the crap out of them. Last thing we need is cowardluy appeasers like you whining about the poor Russians.
You seem to have completely missed the point of my post.
Not at all , F**k Putin and threats just give Ukraine the means to thrash them. No trembling behind the sofa in case they fire off a nuke.
for clarity: the children were attacked by bears after being cursed by the prophet Elisha, who they mocked for being bald - it's in the bible, so must be true.
That’s excellent advice, from the book of Kings. Never, ever, make fun of balding middle-aged men.
Guido’s going for the Labour Comms team, who are talking at odds with the leadership: also the Lobby hacks who are trying their best to ignore the story. https://twitter.com/MediaGuido
The younger generation have been royally screwed .
Student debt , unaffordable homes , extortionate rents . Meanwhile grannie and grandad were able to study , afford a home and retire at 60 and 65 . Grannie and grandad then decided to stick the knife in by robbing their grand children of freedom of movement.
The bunch of pensioner Leavers should be ashamed !
Another idiotic comment. Granny and Grandad grew up in an age when only 10% or so were able to stay in education past the age of 18 - with only 4% going to university. Now that number is just under 40%. The young today have far more opportunity to study than granny and grandad ever did.
Grannie and grandad allegedly would do anything for the grandkids so we’re told. They clearly ignored their wishes and decided to limit the horizons and freedoms of their grandkids. Perhaps they’ll think twice when there’s no care worker to wipe their arse!
Still blubbering about your beloved EU? Sad idiot.
I’m perfectly happy thanks . I still have my freedom of movement ! It’s a shame most younger people have now lost that .
Simply a return to the way it was when those Grannies and Grandads you so despise and blame for all these ills were young.
Which is part of why the age cohort who voted for it so disproportionately is so resented by the young who voted against it. Why would the young not blame them for that ?
Because it is a pointless and ill informed attitude. It is, quite literally, the ignorance of youth.
Pointless, perhaps; the rest, not so much.
You could say much the same, just as fairly, for most of the older cohort who voted for Brexit. The ignorance and entrenched prejudice of old age.
The only difference is that the young have not left the problems for the old to someday solve.
They absolutely do exactly that by opting out of the democratic process and failing to vote!
during fiscal 2020/2021, more than half the population got more in benefits than they paid in tax
Which would be the year when the Covid pandemic was at its peak, when vaccines were only available to a lucky few, and much of the country was shut down.
We don't have more recent data. We certainly don't *know* that more than half the population are still that way.
With the way things have gone frankly I think locking down was the wrong decision. All old people do is tell young people we're feckless and claim benefits. I think fuck them, I put my life on hold for these arseholes and for what?
Society is about a contribution to the greater good not about the individual
Lockdown 1 was justified by the unknown. Lockdown 2 more difficult to justify. With hindsight lockdown 3 was probably wrong
But your hero was calling for harder and earlier lockdowns on every occasion
I dislike the shorthand of "lockdown", because I think you could achieve the same epidemiological need through voluntary adherence to public health advice to cut down social contact, and therefore viral transmission, rather than passing laws to regulate who can visit private residences. However, that aside*, my view on the three lockdowns was that:
Lockdown 1 was justified as an emergency response to an emergency situation.
Lockdowns 2 & 3 became necessary because the government failed to implement measures that would have reduced transmission without them, or to increase medical capacity. Tracing and isolation to prevent onward transmission was lamentably poor. Measures to improve ventilation and filtration of indoor spaces were lacking. The benefits of socialising outdoors were not fully exploited. Not enough was done to reduce re-importation of the virus from abroad.
* So, when I write, "lockdown," I'm using it as shorthand for, "society-wide action, voluntary or compulsory, to reduce viral transmission by reducing physical social contact."
That is sloppy. You can't just hand-wave away "voluntary or compulsory" and move on.
That is the critical element - the government made it illegal for you to have Auntie Flo round for tea. Would you have had Auntie Flo round for tea in the middle of a pandemic? That should have been your call. And Auntie Flo's, obvs.
I explained my reasoning. I wouldn't have had government legislation, but government advice. The virus, and the epidemiology, doesn't care about the difference, so when talking about what was required to reduce viral transmission the difference isn't important either, unless you think that there would have been a huge difference between adherence to advice than there was to adherence to the law.
Given the extent to which public behaviour changed in advance of legal restrictions being imposed, I don't think there would have been a huge difference.
There is a huge difference between legal obligation and voluntary choice. That is the very crux of the issue. Once that gets blurred then the govt can do whatever the hell they want. And just about have done these past three years.
It's not the crux of the issue, otherwise people would be talking about the ways in which you can encourage citizens in a mature democracy to do the right thing without compulsion.
Instead, we have arguments about whether it was necessary to slow down transmission of the virus at all - which is an entirely different argument.
We disagree. Introducing laws to determine how many people you can invite into your own home, or how many times you can leave it, or how many sesame toasts you're allowed in the pub, or any of the other measures that were introduced is just about as fundamental as you can get in terms of the nature of society.
Whatever (repeat: whatever) the reason.
I think you are misunderstanding me. It is an important question, but it's not the only question, and I was choosing to separate two questions. Those two questions are:
1. What was required from an epidemiological point of view to prevent large, avoidable, losses of life due to the virus?
2, How should the reduction in virus transmission required for question 1 be achieved in a mature democracy?
A lot of people who disagree with the government's actions on question 2, have chosen to make their argument by attacking the conclusions from question 1. I chose to answer question 2 briefly in my post to address the arguments around question 1.
I believe that we are in agreement on question 2, but you seem to confuse the two questions in most of your contributions to the topic, so I don't know what your view on question 1 is.
Comments
We have a habit of thinking things are getting worse socially, because everything is so much more visible. Child abuse is more rampant, because we hear about the stories. There are more murders, because we hear about them more. Yet that's probably not the whole, or even true, story.
But one thing I'd add: there are increasing numbers of men (including myself) who are fulfilling what are seen as 'traditional' women's roles, such as house-husbands and looking after kids. Most women are cool with that, but some display rather (ahem) odd attitudes.
Or perhaps that's just me...
I've been revisiting the OpenStreetMap data on pubs and bars, so here's a map of the number per 100,000 people for every local authority in Great Britain.
Derbyshire Dales is the pubbiest place in the country - one pub for every 731 inhabitants.
https://twitter.com/VictimOfMaths/status/1617491213061423106
There has to be a baseline of other power sources for the cold and calm days. Rationing is a regression, it should never happen in a modern economy, and represents a failure to get the mix right.
Minister Chris Philp vigorously defending Zahawi and Sunak over tax scandal and Boris Johnson over appointment of Richard Sharp as BBC chair.
That’ll be Chris Philp, sacked four months ago as Chief Sec to Treasury after key role in Liz Truss’s disaster budget
#BBCR4Today
7 farm workers killed by a disgruntled co-worker .
We should be very thankful we live in Europe where people care more about their kids than building up a huge collection of guns!
Do Americans still believe they live in the greatest country in the world ?
If you wanted a majority of people to be net contributors on a lifetime basis then you would need to have a much less skewed income distribution (and stop running a deficit, natch).
Opinion, that “the rich” need to be taxed more, is much easier to sell to the electorate as a whole, who never think it will affect *them*. IIRC the top decile starts at about £60k annual income, way lower than most people think it would be.
More seriously, those numbers are a precursor to emigration (and immigration forgone), and it doesn’t need many of the top 1% to change their behavior, to have a large effect on the total tax take.
I don't agree with the idea of people generally as cowards. Some are, but not really most people. As a contributory negative human trait I would place it lower than selfishness and indifference in the slow pace of social change.
@JamesAALongman: Chris Philp was the guy defending the ‘mini budget’ until hours before it was scrapped. He’s now the one chosen to… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1617803225142562817
Nadhim Zahawi held undisclosed meeting with Kremlin-linked warlord claiming to represent Lib… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1617803571294244864
If they want to pay a lower share of tax how about restructuring the economic model to recognise that a CEO is not worth 100x a typical worker? Maybe the typical worker in a company could set board level pay?
But do it asap and phone up to check the actual records and ask how much to pay. The online things aren't, or weren't, reliable.
https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/change-to-state-pension-top-ups-comes-into-force-from-april-should-you-boost-your-contributions-aGylP9P18MpE?&utm_content=top-story&utm_medium=Email&utm_source=ExactTarget&utm_campaign=4223574-M_MW_EM_230123&mi_u=192517299&mi_ecmp=M_MW_EM_230123
Twelve countries have agreed to supply Ukraine with around 100 Leopard 2 tanks if the German government gives its consent, a senior Ukrainian official tells ABC News
https://mobile.twitter.com/Faytuks/status/1617681688708145154
Now, it’s possible that the top 0.01% (6,500 individuals in the UK) are earning more than previously, in which case there’s even more of an incentive for government to stop them emigrating. After ‘entrepreneur’, the modal occupation of that group is probably ‘footballer’, who are mostly on PAYE after a clampdown by the tax authorities. The entrepreneurs are often internationally mobile - not just for their personal tax affairs, but also for their companies’ tax affairs. I meet many such Brits out here in the sandpit.
Lockdown 1 was justified as an emergency response to an emergency situation.
Lockdowns 2 & 3 became necessary because the government failed to implement measures that would have reduced transmission without them, or to increase medical capacity. Tracing and isolation to prevent onward transmission was lamentably poor. Measures to improve ventilation and filtration of indoor spaces were lacking. The benefits of socialising outdoors were not fully exploited. Not enough was done to reduce re-importation of the virus from abroad.
* So, when I write, "lockdown," I'm using it as shorthand for, "society-wide action, voluntary or compulsory, to reduce viral transmission by reducing physical social contact."
Denmark, Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada etc.
That kind of economy makes tax collection and spending so much easier. The base is huge so the rates don’t need to be too punitive. Everyone can afford to pay tax, but they’re still generally also easy to tax because they are employees and live/spend locally.
Seems energy support and debt interest are the reasons behind these figures and maybe explains why Sunak and Hunt are unwilling to agree the public sector pay demands despite their unpopularity
https://news.sky.com/story/energy-support-and-debt-costs-drive-record-public-borrowing-in-december-12794050
He wasn't small himself. "You help out too?" I asked.
"No chance," he said. "I send the wife to sort out the aggro." He smiled at my expression. "No man will hit a woman. When she was six months pregnant, the pub was the calmest it ever was."
A fifty year old anecdote, but with some truth. Nowadays, it seems a big, brave male MP can get away with threatening a woman, and feel proud about it.
At least misogynists in those days had self-respect.
It’s the same story in the commercial sector. Since 2021, we’ve needed ‘strong customer authentication’ for online purchases, which usually requires purchasers to verify their identity with a code texted to their smartphone. I’m sure most people barely even noticed that change. But for me it was like standing in a teeming virtual mall one minute and turning around to find half of the shops boarded up the next.
You can use landline for that as well.
But for Luddites even a landline is a technology too far I'm guessing.
But, no worries, doesn't have to be paid now, it's just added to the debt total.
For the cosplaying Thatcherites.
Mrs Thatcher first put up taxes to get a handle on the public finances, then she cut taxes.
children being eaten by bears as punishment for mocking a bald man, germany, 15th century
https://mobile.twitter.com/WeirdMedieval/status/1617537705637974017
That is the critical element - the government made it illegal for you to have Auntie Flo round for tea. Would you have had Auntie Flo round for tea in the middle of a pandemic? That should have been your call. And Auntie Flo's, obvs.
The percentage shares of total income for top percentile groups have in fact increased since 1999, by between 8% and 18% of the 1999 share. Unsurprisingly, given we have a progressive income tax system, the income tax shares have increased more.
The figures are ignoring individual NI contributions. VAT and Council Tax are often forgotten in this debate too. Together these are much less progressive and together they account for more revenue than ICT.
Personally, I would be for normalising the progressive rates of tax on all income, earned, unearned, pensioner income. Then focus additional tax, if required (hint, it is currently), on wealth and property.
Truss' big tax cuts with Kwarteng were not accompanied by big spending cuts so were not viable as the markets told her
https://mobile.twitter.com/Faytuks/status/1617661566056550400
Peak wind in the autumn is about 15GW, so today it’s at 27% efficiency (against the peak, not against rated power).
Do we really think that adding more wind capacity, is the *cheapest* way to avoid (at the moment voluntary) blackouts?
International comparisons of causal factors impacting excess mortality before and during the coronavirus pandemic
Comparisons of the causal factors that may result in all-cause and cause specific excess mortality before the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and those that may have caused varying degrees of excess mortality across different countries since the pandemic started.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/international-comparisons-of-causal-factors-impacting-excess-mortality-before-and-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic
Given the extent to which public behaviour changed in advance of legal restrictions being imposed, I don't think there would have been a huge difference.
Worse is that we're still bloody selling them, even now the government hasn't decided enough is enough and to move to standard coupon paper.
I have never received a benefit, ie NHS or pension, in my life that I have not paid big money for.
But, of course, we should be doing other things as well, such as tidal, nuclear, storage, interconnectors and solar.
Instead, we have arguments about whether it was necessary to slow down transmission of the virus at all - which is an entirely different argument.
So it is no good if your payment card will use sms to landline when you cannot log in to the shop site without a texted code to your mobile.
ETA you might (untested but it sounds plausible) be able to use a second hand mobile with no phone contract, by connecting it to your wifi.
Ireland, who generate a greater proportion of their electricity from wind than Britain, and so are further along in encountering this issue, appear to be moving towards production and storage of hydrogen as the way to store energy on those longer timescales.
Whatever (repeat: whatever) the reason.
Who sees stories like this in his local newspaper:
https://www.thenationalnews.com/weekend/2023/01/13/all-roads-lead-to-dubai-for-the-workers-deserting-britains-sinking-ship/
Amused by this article about the spin doctor who-must-not-be-named. He's Matthew Doyle not Voldemort.
https://twitter.com/MediaGuido/status/1617802580842934275
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/21143268/jk-rowling-keir-starmer-labour-spin-doctor/
As well as not having photo ID to vote, it turns out I've not got any identifying documents that will allow me to check my NIC record via the government gateway.
No doubt the MPs jeering at Rosie Duffield believe that their misogyny is righteous.
But, bad people still like to think of themselves as the good guys. Threatening rape and violence in furtherance of a “good” cause let’s them maintain a good opinion of themselves.
The borrowing numbers seen in other months that are around half the June/Dec level are more typical. I'm not trying to downplay the fact that government borrowing is high or the role of linkers in that, but it is worth noting that there are statistical quirks biasing the number in December higher and it's not representative of the actual cash debt payments the government is making every month.
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/savings/voluntary-national-insurance-contributions/
https://twitter.com/MediaGuido
https://mobile.twitter.com/AJEnglish/status/1617612765031501824
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is a leading counterterror force and essential to Europe’s security interests in the Middle East...
1. What was required from an epidemiological point of view to prevent large, avoidable, losses of life due to the virus?
2, How should the reduction in virus transmission required for question 1 be achieved in a mature democracy?
A lot of people who disagree with the government's actions on question 2, have chosen to make their argument by attacking the conclusions from question 1. I chose to answer question 2 briefly in my post to address the arguments around question 1.
I believe that we are in agreement on question 2, but you seem to confuse the two questions in most of your contributions to the topic, so I don't know what your view on question 1 is.