Given that we are talking about schools - are secondary school pupil numbers due to rise or fall over the next few years.
I can't remember where to look for accurate details.
Rise but not much further I believe.
After number of live births fell to a plateau at the turn of the century, it then started rising again in 2003 (so young adults who are now 20) reaching a peak in 2012 (so primary age kids who are now 10).
Numbers then drifted off and started falling post-2017.
So I believe senior schools are due a rise in pupils over next few years, primary schools would be due a fall in pupils in next few years though.
Immigration probably means that the numbers of both will rise though, secondary schools certainly should given a natural bump coming and record migration too.
So this year is the final intake with numbers increasing then a few years with slight drops before they started dropping in 2018 onwards.
Thanks - I have a reason why I wanted the answer sadly I can't say why but you should be able to guess.
That's only births though, given migration it wouldn't surprise me if the cohort is even bigger than that suggests. Immigration has been higher than prior decades too, so that should represent another bump on top of the natural bump that is happening.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
While superficially frivolous, it’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
I stick by my odds;
Evens, the tories never again win a majority.
4/1 they cease to be a meaningful electoral force within a decade.
Given I earlier posted a poll with 53% of UK voters backing restoring the cane in schools (even if 10 years ago) yet another example of leftwingers like you underestimating support for rightwing policies
Oh dear!
I suspect part of your Conservative populist soul died alongside Boris Johnson's career on Friday
Far be it from me to provide actual evidence on Ofsted, but this is what the report on the school in Reading that led to the tragic suicide actually says on safeguarding:
Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures. They have not exercised sufficient leadership or oversight of this important work. As a result, records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions are poor. Leaders have not ensured that all required employment checks are complete for some staff employed at the school. These weaknesses pose potential risks to pupils.
Now, one can argue against the inspection framework and the emphasis on safeguarding, but I suspect we'd all agree that not completing all the required employment checks is pretty poor.
However this is in the context of the school in Cambridge where Ofsted have actually apologized and withdrawn the report because it was total garbage (full disclosure: a friend of mine is on the Board of Governors at that school). Ofsted is sufficiently broken for the reports to be considered unreliable.
Of course Ofsted will make errors in the thousands of inspections it does, and I'm not particularly defending them. But in the case of the Reading School and the tragedy surrounding it, the report would have been pulled by now if it were not factually accurate. I pulled it off the Ofsted site this morning.
{The management of the Post Office have entered the chat}
Which highlights the problem - the Post Office were police force, prosecutor, judge and executioner
And Ofsted are the same - there is no independent sanity check...
I don't think the two comparisons are remotely the same. Ofsted are the independent sanity check.
The Post Office were not just the above but they were also a party to the issues. Their own software was at fault, but they were marking their own homework so refused to see it.
Ofsted aren't a party in the same way as the Post Office is. Its not like schools are running flawed Ofsted software that is causing the problems Ofsted are then marking them down on.
You've clearly not had to deal with an Ofsted report - I have and when I did the number of mistakes they made where they had to back down was significant. Now it didn't change the final score but it was rather annoying to see things that were factually impossible (review of a teacher who was off sick that day) being written down as fact...
It should be noted that schools aren't arguing against inspection, which is essential, but rather complaining about the fallibility OFSTED, and the difficulty of doing anything about it.
I think the complaint is that paperwork is seen as essential by Ofsted - yet paperwork would be the very first thing we binned if we were trying to solve x issues at the same time.
Paperwork allows issues to be both hidden away (we documented it but didn't do anything to actively fixed it) or the exact opposite - paperwork is incomplete because I spent the 3 hours the form takes to actually raise the issue with social services by finding someone to speak to.
Yeah I mean I hear you but it's a bit like democracy. Paperwork is the worst form of record-keeping...
There has to be an audit trail to ensure that actions are first identified and then followed up. How else would you have a system which does this.
When I was at school in the 90s it was a badly-kept secret that my English and Theory of Knowledge (Philosophy) teacher had done porn. Based on her age, I'd guess in the 70s or 80s.
Obviously @TSE needs to educate you on the various flavours of such entertainment on offer these days.
It would depend on the nature of the porn. If it’s Hot Teacher Seduces Teen Slut, there may be a safeguarding issue.
It would also depend on the timeline. If someone did a dirty mag shoot or ‘Page 3’ as a student, and then some time later went on to become a teacher, that’s very different to if the teacher currently has an OnlyFans account, or is working at the local Spearmint Rhino on Friday nights. Much modern ‘porn’ is very, very different, to what was available in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
Far be it from me to provide actual evidence on Ofsted, but this is what the report on the school in Reading that led to the tragic suicide actually says on safeguarding:
Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures. They have not exercised sufficient leadership or oversight of this important work. As a result, records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions are poor. Leaders have not ensured that all required employment checks are complete for some staff employed at the school. These weaknesses pose potential risks to pupils.
Now, one can argue against the inspection framework and the emphasis on safeguarding, but I suspect we'd all agree that not completing all the required employment checks is pretty poor.
However this is in the context of the school in Cambridge where Ofsted have actually apologized and withdrawn the report because it was total garbage (full disclosure: a friend of mine is on the Board of Governors at that school). Ofsted is sufficiently broken for the reports to be considered unreliable.
Of course Ofsted will make errors in the thousands of inspections it does, and I'm not particularly defending them. But in the case of the Reading School and the tragedy surrounding it, the report would have been pulled by now if it were not factually accurate. I pulled it off the Ofsted site this morning.
{The management of the Post Office have entered the chat}
Which highlights the problem - the Post Office were police force, prosecutor, judge and executioner
And Ofsted are the same - there is no independent sanity check...
I don't think the two comparisons are remotely the same. Ofsted are the independent sanity check.
The Post Office were not just the above but they were also a party to the issues. Their own software was at fault, but they were marking their own homework so refused to see it.
Ofsted aren't a party in the same way as the Post Office is. Its not like schools are running flawed Ofsted software that is causing the problems Ofsted are then marking them down on.
You've clearly not had to deal with an Ofsted report - I have and when I did the number of mistakes they made where they had to back down was significant. Now it didn't change the final score but it was rather annoying to see things that were factually impossible (review of a teacher who was off sick that day) being written down as fact...
It should be noted that schools aren't arguing against inspection, which is essential, but rather complaining about the fallibility OFSTED, and the difficulty of doing anything about it.
I think the complaint is that paperwork is seen as essential by Ofsted - yet paperwork would be the very first thing we binned if we were trying to solve x issues at the same time.
Paperwork allows issues to be both hidden away (we documented it but didn't do anything to actively fixed it) or the exact opposite - paperwork is incomplete because I spent the 3 hours the form takes to actually raise the issue with social services by finding someone to speak to.
Sorry but paperwork is essential in any audit, anywhere.
Try getting an audit from HMRC, or the EHO or anyone else and saying "paperwork doesn't matter, I binned it".
Where paperwork is stupid boxticking of meaningless nonsense, then that absolutely should be addressed. However for the paperwork that is necessary, it absolutely has to be done.
One thing I was taught early in my career, and have lived by, is if its not recorded its not been done. That may be irritating, but its how any audit by anyone has to operate.
Perhaps there should be a better term, such as interviewed under caution, rather than arrested (and presumably dearrested or unarrested or some such immediately afterwards).
They aren't the same thing. You can be interviewed under caution without being arrested (but can leave the interview at any time in such circumstances).
Yes, but an alternative term *like* that. One that does not imply the police know they've got you bang to rights and it is only those lefty lawyers saving you from being strung up in the town centre.
I don't think that would help in any way as the "no smoke without fire" people would read whatever term was chosen as implying guilt.
It might be helpful to avoid confusion in international contexts if our uses of the terms didn't drift too far from the common ones -- for instance IIRC the US asks on ESTA forms and the like "if you've ever been arrested" and implicitly assumes a similar use of the term to the US.
I don't think our terminology differs all that much from the US and elsewhere. "Arrest" generally means to take someone into custody on suspicion of them having committed a crime.
Right, but I thought this subthread started because the Scottish law changes meant the police could now arrest you when they didn't suspect you of having committed a crime but just wanted to get your witness evidence on video for potential later court cases? Maybe I misunderstood...
You did indeed misunderstand.
You don't need to arrest someone either in Scotland or England (and indeed can't arrest them) in order to interview them merely as a witness. You can broadly use the witness evidence they give, not as a suspect but simply as a witness who saw something relevant.
But, if they are under suspicion of a crime, you certainly interview them under caution (i.e. you explain you're interviewing them as a suspect, that the evidence may be used, and certain protections apply). And you'd quite often also arrest them as they cannot then simply walk out of the interview (particularly relevant where there is felt to be a danger they'd walk out to get their story straight with others). These formal steps both protect the suspect and reduce risk that the evidence will be deemed inadmissible at a later date.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
While superficially frivolous, it’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
I stick by my odds;
Evens, the tories never again win a majority.
4/1 they cease to be a meaningful electoral force within a decade.
Given I earlier posted a poll with 53% of UK voters backing restoring the cane in schools (even if 10 years ago) yet another example of leftwingers like you underestimating support for rightwing policies
Oh dear!
I suspect part of your Conservative populist soul died alongside Boris Johnson's career on Friday
Oh if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election Conservative populism will be back strongly in Opposition be assured.
Of course the same applies on the left too, the liberal establishment also underestimated the popularity of Corbyn's anti austerity policies pre 2017.
Voters are more fiscally pro higher spending and more socially conservative than the liberal elite consider (see also their shock at the Brexit vote in 2016).
The UK elite are largely socially liberal and fiscally conservative and for them elections should just be about which party is more competent to deliver that, the average voter rather less so
Far be it from me to provide actual evidence on Ofsted, but this is what the report on the school in Reading that led to the tragic suicide actually says on safeguarding:
Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures. They have not exercised sufficient leadership or oversight of this important work. As a result, records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions are poor. Leaders have not ensured that all required employment checks are complete for some staff employed at the school. These weaknesses pose potential risks to pupils.
Now, one can argue against the inspection framework and the emphasis on safeguarding, but I suspect we'd all agree that not completing all the required employment checks is pretty poor.
However this is in the context of the school in Cambridge where Ofsted have actually apologized and withdrawn the report because it was total garbage (full disclosure: a friend of mine is on the Board of Governors at that school). Ofsted is sufficiently broken for the reports to be considered unreliable.
Of course Ofsted will make errors in the thousands of inspections it does, and I'm not particularly defending them. But in the case of the Reading School and the tragedy surrounding it, the report would have been pulled by now if it were not factually accurate. I pulled it off the Ofsted site this morning.
{The management of the Post Office have entered the chat}
Which highlights the problem - the Post Office were police force, prosecutor, judge and executioner
And Ofsted are the same - there is no independent sanity check...
I don't think the two comparisons are remotely the same. Ofsted are the independent sanity check.
The Post Office were not just the above but they were also a party to the issues. Their own software was at fault, but they were marking their own homework so refused to see it.
Ofsted aren't a party in the same way as the Post Office is. Its not like schools are running flawed Ofsted software that is causing the problems Ofsted are then marking them down on.
You've clearly not had to deal with an Ofsted report - I have and when I did the number of mistakes they made where they had to back down was significant. Now it didn't change the final score but it was rather annoying to see things that were factually impossible (review of a teacher who was off sick that day) being written down as fact...
It should be noted that schools aren't arguing against inspection, which is essential, but rather complaining about the fallibility OFSTED, and the difficulty of doing anything about it.
I think the complaint is that paperwork is seen as essential by Ofsted - yet paperwork would be the very first thing we binned if we were trying to solve x issues at the same time.
Paperwork allows issues to be both hidden away (we documented it but didn't do anything to actively fixed it) or the exact opposite - paperwork is incomplete because I spent the 3 hours the form takes to actually raise the issue with social services by finding someone to speak to.
Sorry but paperwork is essential in any audit, anywhere.
Try getting an audit from HMRC, or the EHO or anyone else and saying "paperwork doesn't matter, I binned it".
Where paperwork is stupid boxticking of meaningless nonsense, then that absolutely should be addressed. However for the paperwork that is necessary, it absolutely has to be done.
One thing I was taught early in my career, and have lived by, is if its not recorded its not been done. That may be irritating, but its how any audit by anyone has to operate.
Problem is most ofsted paperwork is boxticking meaningless...
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
While superficially frivolous, it’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
I stick by my odds;
Evens, the tories never again win a majority.
4/1 they cease to be a meaningful electoral force within a decade.
Given I earlier posted a poll with 53% of UK voters backing restoring the cane in schools (even if 10 years ago) yet another example of leftwingers like you underestimating support for rightwing policies
Oh dear!
I suspect part of your Conservative populist soul died alongside Boris Johnson's career on Friday
Apart from anything else, flagellation is a well-known and traditional sexual perversion of the English upper classes - la vice Anglaise - arising from their attending posh public schools, of the kind HYUFD advocates.
Though not used so much in recent decades, I gather.
But then some of us say "don't talk to strangers" is all one needs. Which conveniently leave out Mr Beak with the cane or tawse.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
It’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
"True conservatives" like HYUFD have never been serious about being in/staying in government. Hence his penchant for sending the tanks into Spain/Scotland, caning, and 'brownfield'.
The problem with the Conservative Party is when "true conservatives" come to represent party policy rather than be eccentric oddballs.
I am not a scientist but I have seen an argument that the reduction of Sulphur Dioxide for ships after a new UN Treaty came into effect is having a significant impact as SO2 causes cooling. Does that argument make sense?
Far be it from me to provide actual evidence on Ofsted, but this is what the report on the school in Reading that led to the tragic suicide actually says on safeguarding:
Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures. They have not exercised sufficient leadership or oversight of this important work. As a result, records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions are poor. Leaders have not ensured that all required employment checks are complete for some staff employed at the school. These weaknesses pose potential risks to pupils.
Now, one can argue against the inspection framework and the emphasis on safeguarding, but I suspect we'd all agree that not completing all the required employment checks is pretty poor.
However this is in the context of the school in Cambridge where Ofsted have actually apologized and withdrawn the report because it was total garbage (full disclosure: a friend of mine is on the Board of Governors at that school). Ofsted is sufficiently broken for the reports to be considered unreliable.
Of course Ofsted will make errors in the thousands of inspections it does, and I'm not particularly defending them. But in the case of the Reading School and the tragedy surrounding it, the report would have been pulled by now if it were not factually accurate. I pulled it off the Ofsted site this morning.
{The management of the Post Office have entered the chat}
Which highlights the problem - the Post Office were police force, prosecutor, judge and executioner
And Ofsted are the same - there is no independent sanity check...
I don't think the two comparisons are remotely the same. Ofsted are the independent sanity check.
The Post Office were not just the above but they were also a party to the issues. Their own software was at fault, but they were marking their own homework so refused to see it.
Ofsted aren't a party in the same way as the Post Office is. Its not like schools are running flawed Ofsted software that is causing the problems Ofsted are then marking them down on.
You've clearly not had to deal with an Ofsted report - I have and when I did the number of mistakes they made where they had to back down was significant. Now it didn't change the final score but it was rather annoying to see things that were factually impossible (review of a teacher who was off sick that day) being written down as fact...
It should be noted that schools aren't arguing against inspection, which is essential, but rather complaining about the fallibility OFSTED, and the difficulty of doing anything about it.
I think the complaint is that paperwork is seen as essential by Ofsted - yet paperwork would be the very first thing we binned if we were trying to solve x issues at the same time.
Paperwork allows issues to be both hidden away (we documented it but didn't do anything to actively fixed it) or the exact opposite - paperwork is incomplete because I spent the 3 hours the form takes to actually raise the issue with social services by finding someone to speak to.
Sorry but paperwork is essential in any audit, anywhere.
Try getting an audit from HMRC, or the EHO or anyone else and saying "paperwork doesn't matter, I binned it".
Where paperwork is stupid boxticking of meaningless nonsense, then that absolutely should be addressed. However for the paperwork that is necessary, it absolutely has to be done.
One thing I was taught early in my career, and have lived by, is if its not recorded its not been done. That may be irritating, but its how any audit by anyone has to operate.
Problem is most ofsted paperwork is boxticking meaningless...
Then agitate to get that changed.
But unless or until it is you can't just not do it, unless you want to fail the inspection. And if you fail the inspection because you've not done it, then that judgment is completely accurate on the standards set.
The same happened with finance especially in the build-up to Brown's crash, with his reams of box ticking nonsense. But that still doesn't mean you won't fail an audit if you haven't got the paperwork to back yourself up in any industry, not just teaching.
Far be it from me to provide actual evidence on Ofsted, but this is what the report on the school in Reading that led to the tragic suicide actually says on safeguarding:
Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures. They have not exercised sufficient leadership or oversight of this important work. As a result, records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions are poor. Leaders have not ensured that all required employment checks are complete for some staff employed at the school. These weaknesses pose potential risks to pupils.
Now, one can argue against the inspection framework and the emphasis on safeguarding, but I suspect we'd all agree that not completing all the required employment checks is pretty poor.
However this is in the context of the school in Cambridge where Ofsted have actually apologized and withdrawn the report because it was total garbage (full disclosure: a friend of mine is on the Board of Governors at that school). Ofsted is sufficiently broken for the reports to be considered unreliable.
Of course Ofsted will make errors in the thousands of inspections it does, and I'm not particularly defending them. But in the case of the Reading School and the tragedy surrounding it, the report would have been pulled by now if it were not factually accurate. I pulled it off the Ofsted site this morning.
{The management of the Post Office have entered the chat}
Which highlights the problem - the Post Office were police force, prosecutor, judge and executioner
And Ofsted are the same - there is no independent sanity check...
I don't think the two comparisons are remotely the same. Ofsted are the independent sanity check.
The Post Office were not just the above but they were also a party to the issues. Their own software was at fault, but they were marking their own homework so refused to see it.
Ofsted aren't a party in the same way as the Post Office is. Its not like schools are running flawed Ofsted software that is causing the problems Ofsted are then marking them down on.
You've clearly not had to deal with an Ofsted report - I have and when I did the number of mistakes they made where they had to back down was significant. Now it didn't change the final score but it was rather annoying to see things that were factually impossible (review of a teacher who was off sick that day) being written down as fact...
It should be noted that schools aren't arguing against inspection, which is essential, but rather complaining about the fallibility OFSTED, and the difficulty of doing anything about it.
I think the complaint is that paperwork is seen as essential by Ofsted - yet paperwork would be the very first thing we binned if we were trying to solve x issues at the same time.
Paperwork allows issues to be both hidden away (we documented it but didn't do anything to actively fixed it) or the exact opposite - paperwork is incomplete because I spent the 3 hours the form takes to actually raise the issue with social services by finding someone to speak to.
Sorry but paperwork is essential in any audit, anywhere.
Try getting an audit from HMRC, or the EHO or anyone else and saying "paperwork doesn't matter, I binned it".
Where paperwork is stupid boxticking of meaningless nonsense, then that absolutely should be addressed. However for the paperwork that is necessary, it absolutely has to be done.
One thing I was taught early in my career, and have lived by, is if its not recorded its not been done. That may be irritating, but its how any audit by anyone has to operate.
Problem is most ofsted paperwork is boxticking meaningless...
I find that difficult to believe.
And even if it is, then so what, really. If a school is able to cover up safeguarding issues by ticking the appropriate boxes then how is it better if they have safeguarding issues but don't have to tick any boxes? At least if they tick the boxes and then are found to have lied there is definite redress. Because there is an audit trail.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
While superficially frivolous, it’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
I stick by my odds;
Evens, the tories never again win a majority.
4/1 they cease to be a meaningful electoral force within a decade.
Given I earlier posted a poll with 53% of UK voters backing restoring the cane in schools (even if 10 years ago) yet another example of leftwingers like you underestimating support for rightwing policies
Oh dear!
I suspect part of your Conservative populist soul died alongside Boris Johnson's career on Friday
That poll is 12 years old and showed very marked differences between older voters (probably now significantly reduced in numbers) to younger voters.
I would say you are clutching at straws especially given how cheap it is for Yougov to rerun the question yet they never have.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
While superficially frivolous, it’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
I stick by my odds;
Evens, the tories never again win a majority.
4/1 they cease to be a meaningful electoral force within a decade.
Given I earlier posted a poll with 53% of UK voters backing restoring the cane in schools (even if 10 years ago) yet another example of leftwingers like you underestimating support for rightwing policies
Oh dear!
I suspect part of your Conservative populist soul died alongside Boris Johnson's career on Friday
Oh if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election Conservative populism will be back strongly in Opposition be assured.
Of course the same applies on the left too, the liberal establishment also underestimated the popularity of Corbyn's anti austerity policies pre 2017.
Voters are more fiscally pro higher spending and more socially conservative than the liberal elite consider (see also their shock at the Brexit vote in 2016).
The UK elite are largely socially liberal and fiscally conservative and for them elections should just be about which party is more competent to deliver that, the average voter rather less so
If Conservative populism like you support is back strongly, then long may it be back in Opposition where it belongs.
When the Conservatives are serious about governance and come back to someone like Cameron, they might be electable again.
So that baby boomlet (say 2008- 2015) is starting to leave primary schools and enter secondary schools.
So all those expanded primary schools we built over the last decade or so are about to become redundant (the final bulge class is leaving our local primary this summer; it's worse in Inner London because having children is now an unaffordable luxury). And secondary schools (where you really don't want to look at the recruitment and training numbers) are in much the same situation as the characters in those videos on those websites.
When those cohorts hit HE, it's going to be even worse.
No doubt as pupil numbers fall, teachers will be laid off and schools closed because it is unthinkable that state school class sizes should be as low as in private schools.
UK population pyramid 2020 (source: Wikipedia, from ONS)
Peak at around age 9 (will be around 12 now) then declining.
(Scary to note the male surplus in children there as well. One can draw their own conclusions as to why that might be the case, but I have my thoughts)
A lot of people (not just teenagers) don't rate the right to vote much - they correctly judge that they will probably never make an individual difference in their entire lives, plus they think politics is pretty seedy and uninteresting anyway. After all, a "good" turnout is 75%, and I don't believe the other 25% are all dead or incapacitated. Nor are all the 75% really that niterested - it's just something one does.
Not endorsing any of that, of course, but it's sadly reality. Fits with the polls showing large minorities would welcome a Strong Man sorting things out.
Interesting. I know this was specifically TikTok, but there are some serious points here. An engaged young person could well do more with social media to influence the state of the country than with a single vote - it could be quite sensible for e.g. a Greta Thunberg to choose keeping her social media accounts over her vote to effect change. That, of course, is as long as everyone else gets to vote!
I understand that in reality it's much more likely that people wish to lol over the latest TikTok sensation than have a vote they likely won't bother to use anyway.
If people feel their vote is unimportant there is a significant democratic deficit that needs to be addressed. With younger people especially, I do feel that there is a concern that the issues of the elderly are given more weight, culturally and politically, than the issues of the young. We need only look at the seriousness of discourse and policy around climate change, a big issue for younger voters, or "wokeness", an issue most younger people don't care about strongly, as well as the entire economic structure of this country to see that. It should also be concerning to people that the policy proposals favoured by younger voters, presented by Jeremy Corbyn, versus the policy proposals favoured by older voters, presented by May and Johnson, are almost diametrically opposed in a way that hasn't really been the case in the past. A lot of young people (I wouldn't call myself young anymore, but I am in my early 30s with a sister in her early 20s) see many older voters as pulling up the ladder behind them - I can't afford the mortgage my parents got, let alone my grandparents. And the response from a lot of older voters / the press is the idea that "it was bad when I was young, it should always be bad, and it being bad is good for you" despite the fact that it was actually much better in many ways when those people were young.
As an old fart, I can't agree more. When it came to university I was pampered - cost of living grants, tuition fees paid - and it upsets me so much to see how youngsters are treated today. Same with housing. Ladder not just pulled up but ritually burnt in public, like 100 pound notes in front of dossers in Oxford High Street.
One might however note that May was in some respects more progressive than the Tories are now - on trans, recycling, and so on. Some of the current SNP problems arise from UKG suddenly retracting proposals for England in its current war on woke.
I am not a scientist but I have seen an argument that the reduction of Sulphur Dioxide for ships after a new UN Treaty came into effect is having a significant impact as SO2 causes cooling. Does that argument make sense?
I mean, I was just seeing that this could be in the error bars of current projections - with a lot of climate projections going hundreds of years into the future meaning an error of 20-30 years either way would not be uncommon. So we could just be living in the projections for 2050 (which makes sense as some of the temperatures experienced last year around the polar caps were already worrying some people who thought we wouldn't get to those for at least another decade or two)
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
While superficially frivolous, it’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
I stick by my odds;
Evens, the tories never again win a majority.
4/1 they cease to be a meaningful electoral force within a decade.
Given I earlier posted a poll with 53% of UK voters backing restoring the cane in schools (even if 10 years ago) yet another example of leftwingers like you underestimating support for rightwing policies
Oh dear!
I suspect part of your Conservative populist soul died alongside Boris Johnson's career on Friday
Good morning
Just logging in after having spent a fantastic 24 hours at Liverpool's waterfront before we leave for the Isle Of Man later and read @HYUFD comment
Utterly luddite, almost shocking, and not acceptable to the vast majority of us
Re your last sentence I suspect far more than part of his populist soul died with the end of the malign and dreadful Johnson
I am not a scientist but I have seen an argument that the reduction of Sulphur Dioxide for ships after a new UN Treaty came into effect is having a significant impact as SO2 causes cooling. Does that argument make sense?
Yes. In the short term. But CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere while SO2 is washed out, so over a longer time period it doesn't make a difference.
Far be it from me to provide actual evidence on Ofsted, but this is what the report on the school in Reading that led to the tragic suicide actually says on safeguarding:
Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures. They have not exercised sufficient leadership or oversight of this important work. As a result, records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions are poor. Leaders have not ensured that all required employment checks are complete for some staff employed at the school. These weaknesses pose potential risks to pupils.
Now, one can argue against the inspection framework and the emphasis on safeguarding, but I suspect we'd all agree that not completing all the required employment checks is pretty poor.
However this is in the context of the school in Cambridge where Ofsted have actually apologized and withdrawn the report because it was total garbage (full disclosure: a friend of mine is on the Board of Governors at that school). Ofsted is sufficiently broken for the reports to be considered unreliable.
Of course Ofsted will make errors in the thousands of inspections it does, and I'm not particularly defending them. But in the case of the Reading School and the tragedy surrounding it, the report would have been pulled by now if it were not factually accurate. I pulled it off the Ofsted site this morning.
{The management of the Post Office have entered the chat}
Which highlights the problem - the Post Office were police force, prosecutor, judge and executioner
And Ofsted are the same - there is no independent sanity check...
I don't think the two comparisons are remotely the same. Ofsted are the independent sanity check.
The Post Office were not just the above but they were also a party to the issues. Their own software was at fault, but they were marking their own homework so refused to see it.
Ofsted aren't a party in the same way as the Post Office is. Its not like schools are running flawed Ofsted software that is causing the problems Ofsted are then marking them down on.
You've clearly not had to deal with an Ofsted report - I have and when I did the number of mistakes they made where they had to back down was significant. Now it didn't change the final score but it was rather annoying to see things that were factually impossible (review of a teacher who was off sick that day) being written down as fact...
It should be noted that schools aren't arguing against inspection, which is essential, but rather complaining about the fallibility OFSTED, and the difficulty of doing anything about it.
I think the complaint is that paperwork is seen as essential by Ofsted - yet paperwork would be the very first thing we binned if we were trying to solve x issues at the same time.
Paperwork allows issues to be both hidden away (we documented it but didn't do anything to actively fixed it) or the exact opposite - paperwork is incomplete because I spent the 3 hours the form takes to actually raise the issue with social services by finding someone to speak to.
Sorry but paperwork is essential in any audit, anywhere.
Try getting an audit from HMRC, or the EHO or anyone else and saying "paperwork doesn't matter, I binned it".
Where paperwork is stupid boxticking of meaningless nonsense, then that absolutely should be addressed. However for the paperwork that is necessary, it absolutely has to be done.
One thing I was taught early in my career, and have lived by, is if its not recorded its not been done. That may be irritating, but its how any audit by anyone has to operate.
Problem is most ofsted paperwork is boxticking meaningless...
And they’re more interested in the paperwork, than the actual safeguarding of children.
I am not a scientist but I have seen an argument that the reduction of Sulphur Dioxide for ships after a new UN Treaty came into effect is having a significant impact as SO2 causes cooling. Does that argument make sense?
It is possible but of course, it also reduces air pollution and acid rain. Whether acid rain matters much in the middle of the Pacific is another question but it must have some effect.
We went from the first manned powered heavier than air flight - for about 1 minute a few feet above sand dunes - to putting a man on the MOON (and returning him) in 66 years
That is mind blowing
What have we done with the 54 years since Apollo 11?
I guess if we achieve AI then we can say Yeah we did it again
It's already been answered by EPG, but the advances since 1969 have been huge. Just not necessarily huge in terms of air/space travel.
Vast, vast advances in computing is the one of them. In 1969 we had basically bugger all except whole rooms of magnetic tape arrays. Now we've got a computer in your pocket that has access to the entire information of the world (and all the lunatic conspiracy theories to boot).
But other advances, in medical science, have also been remarkable (And I know a lot less about that).
So we've achieved plenty, just not necessarily in the same field.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
While superficially frivolous, it’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
I stick by my odds;
Evens, the tories never again win a majority.
4/1 they cease to be a meaningful electoral force within a decade.
Given I earlier posted a poll with 53% of UK voters backing restoring the cane in schools (even if 10 years ago) yet another example of leftwingers like you underestimating support for rightwing policies
Oh dear!
I suspect part of your Conservative populist soul died alongside Boris Johnson's career on Friday
Apart from anything else, flagellation is a well-known and traditional sexual perversion of the English upper classes - la vice Anglaise - arising from their attending posh public schools, of the kind HYUFD advocates.
Though not used so much in recent decades, I gather.
But then some of us say "don't talk to strangers" is all one needs. Which conveniently leave out Mr Beak with the cane or tawse.
It's remarkable how those who rightly condemn Rotherham taxi drivers are so enthused to restore the right to 50 something headteachers to indulge in one of their preferred sexual perversions.
So that baby boomlet (say 2008- 2015) is starting to leave primary schools and enter secondary schools.
So all those expanded primary schools we built over the last decade or so are about to become redundant (the final bulge class is leaving our local primary this summer; it's worse in Inner London because having children is now an unaffordable luxury). And secondary schools (where you really don't want to look at the recruitment and training numbers) are in much the same situation as the characters in those videos on those websites.
When those cohorts hit HE, it's going to be even worse.
No doubt as pupil numbers fall, teachers will be laid off and schools closed because it is unthinkable that state school class sizes should be as low as in private schools.
I hate class sizes being used as a metric.
Pupil to staff ratio is a much better metric.
My kids school is fantastic, I think they're really great. They have 30+ kids per class and its not remotely an issue. They also have 2 adults in the classroom at all times.
When I was at school we only have 20-25 in the class, but there was only one adult. If an unruly child is disrupting the only teacher's attention, then that leaves no support available for any other kids.
Bigger classrooms, with more adults per classroom, seems to me to be to entirely reasonable and can be better than the alternative.
And since private schools have better discipline than state schools, there's less of a reason for that to be an issue there.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
While superficially frivolous, it’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
I stick by my odds;
Evens, the tories never again win a majority.
4/1 they cease to be a meaningful electoral force within a decade.
Given I earlier posted a poll with 53% of UK voters backing restoring the cane in schools (even if 10 years ago) yet another example of leftwingers like you underestimating support for rightwing policies
Oh dear!
I suspect part of your Conservative populist soul died alongside Boris Johnson's career on Friday
Good morning
Just logging in after having spent a fantastic 24 hours at Liverpool's waterfront before we leave for the Isle Of Man later and read @HYUFD comment
Utterly luddite, almost shocking, and not acceptable to the vast majority of us
Re your last sentence I suspect far more than part of his populist soul died with the end of the malign and dreadful Johnson
Did they have the cane or tawse at Berwick, as a matter of incidental interest, might one inquire?
Brilliant summary of the political situation in the UK.
"The permanent possibility of demagoguery is the price that must be paid for universal suffrage. Politicians, if they desire office (and few do not desire it), must pander to electorates who may not be very logical, consistent, or well-informed. People want medicines without side effects and laws without unintended consequences, or even foreseeable ones. Demagoguery creates problems, then worsens them with the solutions it proposes to what it has caused in the first place.
Demagoguery thrives in crisis, and there is little doubt that we are going through one. In Britain, food inflation is running at 20 percent and energy prices are soaring. These increases weigh particularly on the poor, though energy costs also affect industry. Government debt is rising fast; last year, the number of migrants in the country was equivalent to nearly 1 percent of the population, and most will require lodging separately amid a housing shortage that is already acute.
What does the political and administrative class have to offer in response to all this? Paralysis and demagoguery. Recently, the government, misnamed conservative, mooted price caps on food, as if no one in history had ever thought to control prices by such measures. By even pondering these steps publicly, the government was trying to demonstrate that it cares—hoping, no doubt, that an expression of benevolent concern will counteract the opprobrium of the disaster it has wrought."
UK population pyramid 2020 (source: Wikipedia, from ONS)
Peak at around age 9 (will be around 12 now) then declining.
(Scary to note the male surplus in children there as well. One can draw their own conclusions as to why that might be the case, but I have my thoughts)
Biology is one reason. 105 males to 100 females is the natural ratio without any foul play.
In some countries and some cultures its much more skewed than that.
Thanks for sharing that, I'd never heard it before. Not sure if its just as I'm used to it, but I do prefer the rock version to that one, but its interesting to hear him in a different style.
UK population pyramid 2020 (source: Wikipedia, from ONS)
Peak at around age 9 (will be around 12 now) then declining.
(Scary to note the male surplus in children there as well. One can draw their own conclusions as to why that might be the case, but I have my thoughts)
Biology is one reason. 105 males to 100 females is the natural ratio without any foul play.
In some countries and some cultures its much more skewed than that.
'Natural' ratio with modern medicine, to be fair: it compensates for the lesser survival chance of male children.
I am not a scientist but I have seen an argument that the reduction of Sulphur Dioxide for ships after a new UN Treaty came into effect is having a significant impact as SO2 causes cooling. Does that argument make sense?
Yes. In the short term. But CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere while SO2 is washed out, so over a longer time period it doesn't make a difference.
Yes, “Termination shock” is the term. Like cold Turkey (or hot Turkey). I think also partly responsible for recent warming in China.
But the other big contributor must be ocean and atmosphere circulation in the Northern Hemisphere. For a couple of decades from the mid 2000s we had unusually negative Arctic Oscillation and a rapidly warming Arctic with accelerating ice melt. Since around 2018 things have shifted back to more positive AO. Arctic melt has stalled (a good news story, for now) but the heat has to go somewhere and it’s returned to the mid latitudes.
But oceans worldwide are dead hot at the moment. It’s more than a little scary to look at.
UK population pyramid 2020 (source: Wikipedia, from ONS)
Peak at around age 9 (will be around 12 now) then declining.
(Scary to note the male surplus in children there as well. One can draw their own conclusions as to why that might be the case, but I have my thoughts)
Biology is one reason. 105 males to 100 females is the natural ratio without any foul play.
In some countries and some cultures its much more skewed than that.
The 105 sex ratio at birth is something that I only learned when I was QAing the 2011 Census figures. Feels like something that should be taught in science classes at school (maybe it was and I wasn't listening, which is a distinct possibility).
(Scary to note the male surplus in children there as well. One can draw their own conclusions as to why that might be the case, but I have my thoughts)
There's a fair amount of debate about the apparent fact that slightly more boys are recorded as being born than girls (not just in the UK but the world generally). However, I think the balance of opinion is that selective abortion and infanticide are not a major factor (although of course it's awful that they are a factor at all).
"...Just the top few metres of our oceans store as much energy as the entirety of our atmosphere..."
Some interesting weather is in prospect.
Clarify svp
Any settled airmass coming off the NE Atlantic this summer (ie TM) will be warmer than usual so heatwaves have potential to be more intense than average and more humid. (Continental source heatwaves less affected, and tend to be less humid).
Any unsettled airmass coming from that direction will have higher moisture content so potential for more intense rainfall events.
A lot of people (not just teenagers) don't rate the right to vote much - they correctly judge that they will probably never make an individual difference in their entire lives, plus they think politics is pretty seedy and uninteresting anyway. After all, a "good" turnout is 75%, and I don't believe the other 25% are all dead or incapacitated. Nor are all the 75% really that niterested - it's just something one does.
Not endorsing any of that, of course, but it's sadly reality. Fits with the polls showing large minorities would welcome a Strong Man sorting things out.
A positive spin on this is that we need to explain to teenagers that social media can be very effective in politics, particularly for local elections.
You need to be funny and acerbic, with some good video editing
UK population pyramid 2020 (source: Wikipedia, from ONS)
Peak at around age 9 (will be around 12 now) then declining.
(Scary to note the male surplus in children there as well. One can draw their own conclusions as to why that might be the case, but I have my thoughts)
Biology is one reason. 105 males to 100 females is the natural ratio without any foul play.
In some countries and some cultures its much more skewed than that.
'Natural' ratio with modern medicine, to be fair: it compensates for the lesser survival chance of male children.
For various different reasons (warfare, greater risk appetite, others), more males die in their teens/early 20s than females. It's called the "mortality hump"
UK population pyramid 2020 (source: Wikipedia, from ONS)
Peak at around age 9 (will be around 12 now) then declining.
(Scary to note the male surplus in children there as well. One can draw their own conclusions as to why that might be the case, but I have my thoughts)
Biology is one reason. 105 males to 100 females is the natural ratio without any foul play.
In some countries and some cultures its much more skewed than that.
'Natural' ratio with modern medicine, to be fair: it compensates for the lesser survival chance of male children.
Actually and this is somewhat surprising, the male excess is entirely explained by natural reasons.
The ratio of male to female birth has not changed in the past century besides some natural variance.
All the female excess in that chart, was a male excess when they were born too.
(Scary to note the male surplus in children there as well. One can draw their own conclusions as to why that might be the case, but I have my thoughts)
There's a fair amount of debate about the apparent fact that slightly more boys are recorded as being born than girls (not just in the UK but the world generally). However, I think the balance of opinion is that selective abortion and infanticide are not a major factor (although of course it's awful that they are a factor at all).
At ONS, I worked with a biologist who said that you find much more extreme examples in other species. For whatever reason, our evolution has worked out that 105 boys for 100 girls is optimal.
A lot of people (not just teenagers) don't rate the right to vote much - they correctly judge that they will probably never make an individual difference in their entire lives, plus they think politics is pretty seedy and uninteresting anyway. After all, a "good" turnout is 75%, and I don't believe the other 25% are all dead or incapacitated. Nor are all the 75% really that niterested - it's just something one does.
Not endorsing any of that, of course, but it's sadly reality. Fits with the polls showing large minorities would welcome a Strong Man sorting things out.
Interesting. I know this was specifically TikTok, but there are some serious points here. An engaged young person could well do more with social media to influence the state of the country than with a single vote - it could be quite sensible for e.g. a Greta Thunberg to choose keeping her social media accounts over her vote to effect change. That, of course, is as long as everyone else gets to vote!
I understand that in reality it's much more likely that people wish to lol over the latest TikTok sensation than have a vote they likely won't bother to use anyway.
If people feel their vote is unimportant there is a significant democratic deficit that needs to be addressed. With younger people especially, I do feel that there is a concern that the issues of the elderly are given more weight, culturally and politically, than the issues of the young. We need only look at the seriousness of discourse and policy around climate change, a big issue for younger voters, or "wokeness", an issue most younger people don't care about strongly, as well as the entire economic structure of this country to see that. It should also be concerning to people that the policy proposals favoured by younger voters, presented by Jeremy Corbyn, versus the policy proposals favoured by older voters, presented by May and Johnson, are almost diametrically opposed in a way that hasn't really been the case in the past. A lot of young people (I wouldn't call myself young anymore, but I am in my early 30s with a sister in her early 20s) see many older voters as pulling up the ladder behind them - I can't afford the mortgage my parents got, let alone my grandparents. And the response from a lot of older voters / the press is the idea that "it was bad when I was young, it should always be bad, and it being bad is good for you" despite the fact that it was actually much better in many ways when those people were young.
'One person one vote' from age 18, with complete freedom to organise politically and stand for election, is about as representative as a system can get when it comes to asking a population of 68 million what they want.
63% of the population are aged 15-64. 19% are over 65. As long as people vote, the votes of the pensioner class are overwhelmed by the votes of those younger. Not voting is decisively acting against your group's and your own interests.
BTW I have lost count of the number of younger voters who supported Remain but could not be bothered to vote.
UK heatwave prompts order to fire up coal plant to meet aircon demand National Grid asks for Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant to go on standby as Britons cope with 30C temperatures https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/12/uk-heatwave-prompts-order-to-fire-up-coal-plant-to-meet-aircon-demand ...Temperatures broke 30C for the first time this year over the weekend and meteorologists forecast the chance of Britain experiencing a hot summer is now 45% – 2.3 times the typical figure.
The hot weather is expected to push up demand for power, as households and businesses switch on airconditioning systems and units. Air conditioning accounts for about a fifth of the total electricity used in buildings around the world.
The earliest the coal-fired plant would be able to connect to Great Britain’s electricity grid would be 2.25pm and it may not be needed. If it is connected to the network on Monday, it would end a 46-day run in which coal has not been used to generate electricity in Britain.
National Grid has suggested that consumers can improve the energy efficiency of air conditioning by changing or cleaning the machine’s reusable filter, closing windows and doors and by shutting curtains to block the sun’s light and heat coming into the home.
Last week, a fault was found on the 1,400 megawatt North Sea Link interconnector which carries power between Norway and the UK, cutting electricity supplies. The power flowing through the 450-mile subsea cable has been reduced by half while the fault, discovered at an onshore facility in Norway, is repaired...
A lot of people (not just teenagers) don't rate the right to vote much - they correctly judge that they will probably never make an individual difference in their entire lives, plus they think politics is pretty seedy and uninteresting anyway. After all, a "good" turnout is 75%, and I don't believe the other 25% are all dead or incapacitated. Nor are all the 75% really that niterested - it's just something one does.
Not endorsing any of that, of course, but it's sadly reality. Fits with the polls showing large minorities would welcome a Strong Man sorting things out.
Interesting. I know this was specifically TikTok, but there are some serious points here. An engaged young person could well do more with social media to influence the state of the country than with a single vote - it could be quite sensible for e.g. a Greta Thunberg to choose keeping her social media accounts over her vote to effect change. That, of course, is as long as everyone else gets to vote!
I understand that in reality it's much more likely that people wish to lol over the latest TikTok sensation than have a vote they likely won't bother to use anyway.
If people feel their vote is unimportant there is a significant democratic deficit that needs to be addressed. With younger people especially, I do feel that there is a concern that the issues of the elderly are given more weight, culturally and politically, than the issues of the young. We need only look at the seriousness of discourse and policy around climate change, a big issue for younger voters, or "wokeness", an issue most younger people don't care about strongly, as well as the entire economic structure of this country to see that. It should also be concerning to people that the policy proposals favoured by younger voters, presented by Jeremy Corbyn, versus the policy proposals favoured by older voters, presented by May and Johnson, are almost diametrically opposed in a way that hasn't really been the case in the past. A lot of young people (I wouldn't call myself young anymore, but I am in my early 30s with a sister in her early 20s) see many older voters as pulling up the ladder behind them - I can't afford the mortgage my parents got, let alone my grandparents. And the response from a lot of older voters / the press is the idea that "it was bad when I was young, it should always be bad, and it being bad is good for you" despite the fact that it was actually much better in many ways when those people were young.
At the moment everyone's vote is worth the same. How do you address the problem you describe in a way that doesn't change that?
Brilliant summary of the political situation in the UK.
"The permanent possibility of demagoguery is the price that must be paid for universal suffrage. Politicians, if they desire office (and few do not desire it), must pander to electorates who may not be very logical, consistent, or well-informed. People want medicines without side effects and laws without unintended consequences, or even foreseeable ones. Demagoguery creates problems, then worsens them with the solutions it proposes to what it has caused in the first place.
Demagoguery thrives in crisis, and there is little doubt that we are going through one. In Britain, food inflation is running at 20 percent and energy prices are soaring. These increases weigh particularly on the poor, though energy costs also affect industry. Government debt is rising fast; last year, the number of migrants in the country was equivalent to nearly 1 percent of the population, and most will require lodging separately amid a housing shortage that is already acute.
What does the political and administrative class have to offer in response to all this? Paralysis and demagoguery. Recently, the government, misnamed conservative, mooted price caps on food, as if no one in history had ever thought to control prices by such measures. By even pondering these steps publicly, the government was trying to demonstrate that it cares—hoping, no doubt, that an expression of benevolent concern will counteract the opprobrium of the disaster it has wrought."
It goes back well over a decade. The seeds were laid in the 2008 financial crisis.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
While superficially frivolous, it’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
I stick by my odds;
Evens, the tories never again win a majority.
4/1 they cease to be a meaningful electoral force within a decade.
Given I earlier posted a poll with 53% of UK voters backing restoring the cane in schools (even if 10 years ago) yet another example of leftwingers like you underestimating support for rightwing policies
Oh dear!
I suspect part of your Conservative populist soul died alongside Boris Johnson's career on Friday
Good morning
Just logging in after having spent a fantastic 24 hours at Liverpool's waterfront before we leave for the Isle Of Man later and read @HYUFD comment
Utterly luddite, almost shocking, and not acceptable to the vast majority of us
Re your last sentence I suspect far more than part of his populist soul died with the end of the malign and dreadful Johnson
Did they have the cane or tawse at Berwick, as a matter of incidental interest, might one inquire?
The cane and it hurt my fingers so much so I remember the pain 70 years later
When I was at school in the 90s it was a badly-kept secret that my English and Theory of Knowledge (Philosophy) teacher had done porn. Based on her age, I'd guess in the 70s or 80s.
Obviously @TSE needs to educate you on the various flavours of such entertainment on offer these days.
It would depend on the nature of the porn. If it’s Hot Teacher Seduces Teen Slut, there may be a safeguarding issue.
Would it be an issue for you if the teacher had, in a previous job as an actor, played child-killer Richard III at the RSC?
I'm slightly struggling to see the practical difference in safeguarding terms. They are rather different sorts of acting jobs, but they are acting jobs.
Should unemployed actors be encouraged to do porn by their local jobcentres?
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
While superficially frivolous, it’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
I stick by my odds;
Evens, the tories never again win a majority.
4/1 they cease to be a meaningful electoral force within a decade.
Given I earlier posted a poll with 53% of UK voters backing restoring the cane in schools (even if 10 years ago) yet another example of leftwingers like you underestimating support for rightwing policies
Oh dear!
I suspect part of your Conservative populist soul died alongside Boris Johnson's career on Friday
Good morning
Just logging in after having spent a fantastic 24 hours at Liverpool's waterfront before we leave for the Isle Of Man later and read @HYUFD comment
Utterly luddite, almost shocking, and not acceptable to the vast majority of us
Re your last sentence I suspect far more than part of his populist soul died with the end of the malign and dreadful Johnson
Did they have the cane or tawse at Berwick, as a matter of incidental interest, might one inquire?
The cane and it hurt my fingers so much so I remember the pain 70 years later
Thanks. I did wonder, from your reaction earlier, if you remembered. Interesting bit of cultural border there!
A lot of people (not just teenagers) don't rate the right to vote much - they correctly judge that they will probably never make an individual difference in their entire lives, plus they think politics is pretty seedy and uninteresting anyway. After all, a "good" turnout is 75%, and I don't believe the other 25% are all dead or incapacitated. Nor are all the 75% really that niterested - it's just something one does.
Not endorsing any of that, of course, but it's sadly reality. Fits with the polls showing large minorities would welcome a Strong Man sorting things out.
Interesting. I know this was specifically TikTok, but there are some serious points here. An engaged young person could well do more with social media to influence the state of the country than with a single vote - it could be quite sensible for e.g. a Greta Thunberg to choose keeping her social media accounts over her vote to effect change. That, of course, is as long as everyone else gets to vote!
I understand that in reality it's much more likely that people wish to lol over the latest TikTok sensation than have a vote they likely won't bother to use anyway.
If people feel their vote is unimportant there is a significant democratic deficit that needs to be addressed. With younger people especially, I do feel that there is a concern that the issues of the elderly are given more weight, culturally and politically, than the issues of the young. We need only look at the seriousness of discourse and policy around climate change, a big issue for younger voters, or "wokeness", an issue most younger people don't care about strongly, as well as the entire economic structure of this country to see that. It should also be concerning to people that the policy proposals favoured by younger voters, presented by Jeremy Corbyn, versus the policy proposals favoured by older voters, presented by May and Johnson, are almost diametrically opposed in a way that hasn't really been the case in the past. A lot of young people (I wouldn't call myself young anymore, but I am in my early 30s with a sister in her early 20s) see many older voters as pulling up the ladder behind them - I can't afford the mortgage my parents got, let alone my grandparents. And the response from a lot of older voters / the press is the idea that "it was bad when I was young, it should always be bad, and it being bad is good for you" despite the fact that it was actually much better in many ways when those people were young.
Democracy is about the free exchange of ideas and one person, one vote is critical to that.
If there is a demographic issue, then partially that is simply because the battle of ideas hasn't been won yet, but its possible to win it.
Quite frankly, as a "woke" individual who's was young but has just reached middle age, I'd say we're winning the battle of ideas when it comes to social liberalism. The idea of gay marriage was laughed at when I was supporting it at university, now everyone accepts it. On racial matters etc things have come tremendously forward too.
Indeed one thing I find interesting is how an iconic show of my teenage years, Friends, while still funny is now quite dated when looking back at it. It was modern at its time, discussing issues like homosexuality, having a girl-girl kiss etc, but looking back now its extremely dated. Ross's wife being gay is a punchline more than anything else, Chandler's dad being a transvestite is something he's embarrassed by and a joke more than anything else. The cast is all white, with no non-white characters introduced until the 9th season in the 2000s. A show like that was progressive then, but wouldn't get made today.
I completely agree with the problem of the ladder being pulled up, and I was an early advocate here for housing being a major issue and reform needed, before it was popular. There too, I think we're winning the battle for ideas. While plenty of NIMBYs still exist, most people now at least realise ethically its an issue and are at least embarrassed to be a NIMBY which is some small progress.
That Starmer is considering taking on the NIMBYs and may win an election on that platform (and it will be with my vote if he's serious, I don't believe he is yet so he doesn't have it yet) is another sign of progress being made.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
While superficially frivolous, it’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
I stick by my odds;
Evens, the tories never again win a majority.
4/1 they cease to be a meaningful electoral force within a decade.
Given I earlier posted a poll with 53% of UK voters backing restoring the cane in schools (even if 10 years ago) yet another example of leftwingers like you underestimating support for rightwing policies
Oh dear!
I suspect part of your Conservative populist soul died alongside Boris Johnson's career on Friday
Good morning
Just logging in after having spent a fantastic 24 hours at Liverpool's waterfront before we leave for the Isle Of Man later and read @HYUFD comment
Utterly luddite, almost shocking, and not acceptable to the vast majority of us
Re your last sentence I suspect far more than part of his populist soul died with the end of the malign and dreadful Johnson
Did they have the cane or tawse at Berwick, as a matter of incidental interest, might one inquire?
The cane and it hurt my fingers so much so I remember the pain 70 years later
Thanks. I did wonder, from your reaction earlier, if you remembered. Interesting bit of cultural border there!
And it wasn't just once but then I was a bit of a rebel !!!
UK heatwave prompts order to fire up coal plant to meet aircon demand National Grid asks for Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant to go on standby as Britons cope with 30C temperatures https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/12/uk-heatwave-prompts-order-to-fire-up-coal-plant-to-meet-aircon-demand ...Temperatures broke 30C for the first time this year over the weekend and meteorologists forecast the chance of Britain experiencing a hot summer is now 45% – 2.3 times the typical figure.
The hot weather is expected to push up demand for power, as households and businesses switch on airconditioning systems and units. Air conditioning accounts for about a fifth of the total electricity used in buildings around the world.
The earliest the coal-fired plant would be able to connect to Great Britain’s electricity grid would be 2.25pm and it may not be needed. If it is connected to the network on Monday, it would end a 46-day run in which coal has not been used to generate electricity in Britain.
National Grid has suggested that consumers can improve the energy efficiency of air conditioning by changing or cleaning the machine’s reusable filter, closing windows and doors and by shutting curtains to block the sun’s light and heat coming into the home.
Last week, a fault was found on the 1,400 megawatt North Sea Link interconnector which carries power between Norway and the UK, cutting electricity supplies. The power flowing through the 450-mile subsea cable has been reduced by half while the fault, discovered at an onshore facility in Norway, is repaired...
I've emboldened the key part. I am always amazed at the number of houses that in 30c+ weather have all their windows and doors wide open. Particularly in modern houses as soon as the temperature outside is above that inside then everything should be closed up.
I do wonder if for new house builds we should be requiring shutters. They make a massive difference by keeping direct sun from even reaching windows.
Like him or not Mr Berlusconi was one of the most prominent politicians of the age and may well have influenced the likes of Putin and Trump or even Johnson.
Brilliant summary of the political situation in the UK.
"The permanent possibility of demagoguery is the price that must be paid for universal suffrage. Politicians, if they desire office (and few do not desire it), must pander to electorates who may not be very logical, consistent, or well-informed. People want medicines without side effects and laws without unintended consequences, or even foreseeable ones. Demagoguery creates problems, then worsens them with the solutions it proposes to what it has caused in the first place.
Demagoguery thrives in crisis, and there is little doubt that we are going through one. In Britain, food inflation is running at 20 percent and energy prices are soaring. These increases weigh particularly on the poor, though energy costs also affect industry. Government debt is rising fast; last year, the number of migrants in the country was equivalent to nearly 1 percent of the population, and most will require lodging separately amid a housing shortage that is already acute.
What does the political and administrative class have to offer in response to all this? Paralysis and demagoguery. Recently, the government, misnamed conservative, mooted price caps on food, as if no one in history had ever thought to control prices by such measures. By even pondering these steps publicly, the government was trying to demonstrate that it cares—hoping, no doubt, that an expression of benevolent concern will counteract the opprobrium of the disaster it has wrought."
It isn't all that hard to do misanthropy, and TD does it well, though it dulls the senses after a bit.
What is hard is to suggest alternatives, propose better (non unicorn) solutions to difficult problems and so on.
He mentions no political party and elides them all into one ('the political and admin class') as he calls it.
But is it true? Is Sir Keir a demagogue? How? What evidence? Is even Sunak one? Is Mark Drakeford one? A parliamentary process, carried out in a non demagogue like way, has just precipitated yesterday's narcissist out of the HoC. Is the administrative class (civil service) full of demagogues? Is academia and the BBC a set of populist lackeys of right wing demagogues?
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
While superficially frivolous, it’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
I stick by my odds;
Evens, the tories never again win a majority.
4/1 they cease to be a meaningful electoral force within a decade.
Given I earlier posted a poll with 53% of UK voters backing restoring the cane in schools (even if 10 years ago) yet another example of leftwingers like you underestimating support for rightwing policies
Oh dear!
I suspect part of your Conservative populist soul died alongside Boris Johnson's career on Friday
Good morning
Just logging in after having spent a fantastic 24 hours at Liverpool's waterfront before we leave for the Isle Of Man later and read @HYUFD comment
Utterly luddite, almost shocking, and not acceptable to the vast majority of us
Re your last sentence I suspect far more than part of his populist soul died with the end of the malign and dreadful Johnson
Boris will be a relative liberal moderate compared to the likes of Braverman, Rees Mogg, Patel, Frost and Badenoch who will increasingly come to the fore of the Conservative Party in opposition if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election.
With Silvio's passing left liberals used to think he was a rightwing populist extremist, now the Italian PM is the even more rightwing nationalist Meloni (albeit she is less friendly with Putin than he was)
A lot of people (not just teenagers) don't rate the right to vote much - they correctly judge that they will probably never make an individual difference in their entire lives, plus they think politics is pretty seedy and uninteresting anyway. After all, a "good" turnout is 75%, and I don't believe the other 25% are all dead or incapacitated. Nor are all the 75% really that niterested - it's just something one does.
Not endorsing any of that, of course, but it's sadly reality. Fits with the polls showing large minorities would welcome a Strong Man sorting things out.
Interesting. I know this was specifically TikTok, but there are some serious points here. An engaged young person could well do more with social media to influence the state of the country than with a single vote - it could be quite sensible for e.g. a Greta Thunberg to choose keeping her social media accounts over her vote to effect change. That, of course, is as long as everyone else gets to vote!
I understand that in reality it's much more likely that people wish to lol over the latest TikTok sensation than have a vote they likely won't bother to use anyway.
If people feel their vote is unimportant there is a significant democratic deficit that needs to be addressed. With younger people especially, I do feel that there is a concern that the issues of the elderly are given more weight, culturally and politically, than the issues of the young. We need only look at the seriousness of discourse and policy around climate change, a big issue for younger voters, or "wokeness", an issue most younger people don't care about strongly, as well as the entire economic structure of this country to see that. It should also be concerning to people that the policy proposals favoured by younger voters, presented by Jeremy Corbyn, versus the policy proposals favoured by older voters, presented by May and Johnson, are almost diametrically opposed in a way that hasn't really been the case in the past. A lot of young people (I wouldn't call myself young anymore, but I am in my early 30s with a sister in her early 20s) see many older voters as pulling up the ladder behind them - I can't afford the mortgage my parents got, let alone my grandparents. And the response from a lot of older voters / the press is the idea that "it was bad when I was young, it should always be bad, and it being bad is good for you" despite the fact that it was actually much better in many ways when those people were young.
Democracy is about the free exchange of ideas and one person, one vote is critical to that.
If there is a demographic issue, then partially that is simply because the battle of ideas hasn't been won yet, but its possible to win it.
Quite frankly, as a "woke" individual who's was young but has just reached middle age, I'd say we're winning the battle of ideas when it comes to social liberalism. The idea of gay marriage was laughed at when I was supporting it at university, now everyone accepts it. On racial matters etc things have come tremendously forward too.
Indeed one thing I find interesting is how an iconic show of my teenage years, Friends, while still funny is now quite dated when looking back at it. It was modern at its time, discussing issues like homosexuality, having a girl-girl kiss etc, but looking back now its extremely dated. Ross's wife being gay is a punchline more than anything else, Chandler's dad being a transvestite is something he's embarrassed by and a joke more than anything else. The cast is all white, with no non-white characters introduced until the 9th season in the 2000s. A show like that was progressive then, but wouldn't get made today.
I completely agree with the problem of the ladder being pulled up, and I was an early advocate here for housing being a major issue and reform needed, before it was popular. There too, I think we're winning the battle for ideas. While plenty of NIMBYs still exist, most people now at least realise ethically its an issue and are at least embarrassed to be a NIMBY which is some small progress.
That Starmer is considering taking on the NIMBYs and may win an election on that platform (and it will be with my vote if he's serious, I don't believe he is yet so he doesn't have it yet) is another sign of progress being made.
Don't give up on democracy.
My own view is that the political class is pretty awful across the Western world, and that has been the case for most of my lifetime.
Brilliant summary of the political situation in the UK.
"The permanent possibility of demagoguery is the price that must be paid for universal suffrage. Politicians, if they desire office (and few do not desire it), must pander to electorates who may not be very logical, consistent, or well-informed. People want medicines without side effects and laws without unintended consequences, or even foreseeable ones. Demagoguery creates problems, then worsens them with the solutions it proposes to what it has caused in the first place.
Demagoguery thrives in crisis, and there is little doubt that we are going through one. In Britain, food inflation is running at 20 percent and energy prices are soaring. These increases weigh particularly on the poor, though energy costs also affect industry. Government debt is rising fast; last year, the number of migrants in the country was equivalent to nearly 1 percent of the population, and most will require lodging separately amid a housing shortage that is already acute.
What does the political and administrative class have to offer in response to all this? Paralysis and demagoguery. Recently, the government, misnamed conservative, mooted price caps on food, as if no one in history had ever thought to control prices by such measures. By even pondering these steps publicly, the government was trying to demonstrate that it cares—hoping, no doubt, that an expression of benevolent concern will counteract the opprobrium of the disaster it has wrought."
It isn't all that hard to do misanthropy, and TD does it well, though it dulls the senses after a bit.
What is hard is to suggest alternatives, propose better (non unicorn) solutions to difficult problems and so on.
He mentions no political party and elides them all into one ('the political and admin class') as he calls it.
But is it true? Is Sir Keir a demagogue? How? What evidence? Is even Sunak one? Is Mark Drakeford one? A parliamentary process, carried out in a non demagogue like way, has just precipitated yesterday's narcissist out of the HoC. Is the administrative class (civil service) full of demagogues? Is academia and the BBC a set of populist lackeys of right wing demagogues?
TD is being simplistic.
"The Johnson variant" was pure demagoguery from Starmer.
A lot of people (not just teenagers) don't rate the right to vote much - they correctly judge that they will probably never make an individual difference in their entire lives, plus they think politics is pretty seedy and uninteresting anyway. After all, a "good" turnout is 75%, and I don't believe the other 25% are all dead or incapacitated. Nor are all the 75% really that niterested - it's just something one does.
Not endorsing any of that, of course, but it's sadly reality. Fits with the polls showing large minorities would welcome a Strong Man sorting things out.
Interesting. I know this was specifically TikTok, but there are some serious points here. An engaged young person could well do more with social media to influence the state of the country than with a single vote - it could be quite sensible for e.g. a Greta Thunberg to choose keeping her social media accounts over her vote to effect change. That, of course, is as long as everyone else gets to vote!
I understand that in reality it's much more likely that people wish to lol over the latest TikTok sensation than have a vote they likely won't bother to use anyway.
If people feel their vote is unimportant there is a significant democratic deficit that needs to be addressed. With younger people especially, I do feel that there is a concern that the issues of the elderly are given more weight, culturally and politically, than the issues of the young. We need only look at the seriousness of discourse and policy around climate change, a big issue for younger voters, or "wokeness", an issue most younger people don't care about strongly, as well as the entire economic structure of this country to see that. It should also be concerning to people that the policy proposals favoured by younger voters, presented by Jeremy Corbyn, versus the policy proposals favoured by older voters, presented by May and Johnson, are almost diametrically opposed in a way that hasn't really been the case in the past. A lot of young people (I wouldn't call myself young anymore, but I am in my early 30s with a sister in her early 20s) see many older voters as pulling up the ladder behind them - I can't afford the mortgage my parents got, let alone my grandparents. And the response from a lot of older voters / the press is the idea that "it was bad when I was young, it should always be bad, and it being bad is good for you" despite the fact that it was actually much better in many ways when those people were young.
'One person one vote' from age 18, with complete freedom to organise politically and stand for election, is about as representative as a system can get when it comes to asking a population of 68 million what they want.
63% of the population are aged 15-64. 19% are over 65. As long as people vote, the votes of the pensioner class are overwhelmed by the votes of those younger. Not voting is decisively acting against your group's and your own interests.
BTW I have lost count of the number of younger voters who supported Remain but could not be bothered to vote.
If you don't vote, you can be quite sure the people in power will ignore your interests.
Like him or not Mr Berlusconi was one of the most prominent politicians of the age and may well have influenced the likes of Putin and Trump or even Johnson.
And a billionaire to boot (and genuine self made one)
This has a feel of the Battle of the Bulge to it (one last throw of the dice).
Aleksandr Dugin appears to have entered some kind of delirium suggesting an asymmetric move to respond to the Ukrainian offensive. For instance, he suggests sending new forces to Kharkiv and Odesa. The denial is palpable. https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1668204733335519232
At the moment everyone's vote is worth the same. How do you address the problem you describe in a way that doesn't change that?
In theory yes, in practice no.
Look at my profile picture. How much value does my vote have, really? I could vote Labour, but Labour will win anyway, so does it matter if I don't vote. I could vote 'not' Labour, but Labour will still win anyway, so it still doesn't matter.
Of course, the power of your vote is really determined by:
1. The system of voting used (FPTP really does diminish the value of a vote - every vote after the winning one is wasted, and every vote for the losers are wasted too). 2. How many people can be bothered to vote, or not bothered to vote. The less people vote, the more powerful your own vote then becomes. 3. What you are voting for. (ie, are you electing a government, or is it a vote in the Kaiserreich, were the Kaiser simply overrules the 'government' anyway) - this isn't a problem in the UK usually.
The honest answer is: Everyone should vote. Imagine the vast changes in results if the 25% of those who don't vote suddenly did. The system should be fairer to avoid situations like Bootle.
I've no idea how to implement the first. Making it illegal to not vote seems (itself) undemocratic to me. As to the second, scrapping FPTP seems a logical move, but I don't claim to know what is better to replace it with.
When I was at school in the 90s it was a badly-kept secret that my English and Theory of Knowledge (Philosophy) teacher had done porn. Based on her age, I'd guess in the 70s or 80s.
Obviously @TSE needs to educate you on the various flavours of such entertainment on offer these days.
It would depend on the nature of the porn. If it’s Hot Teacher Seduces Teen Slut, there may be a safeguarding issue.
It would also depend on the timeline. If someone did a dirty mag shoot or ‘Page 3’ as a student, and then some time later went on to become a teacher, that’s very different to if the teacher currently has an OnlyFans account, or is working at the local Spearmint Rhino on Friday nights. Much modern ‘porn’ is very, very different, to what was available in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
It tends to be more graphic, and more pseudo-rapey.
This has a feel of the Battle of the Bulge to it (one last throw of the dice).
Aleksandr Dugin appears to have entered some kind of delirium suggesting an asymmetric move to respond to the Ukrainian offensive. For instance, he suggests sending new forces to Kharkiv and Odesa. The denial is palpable. https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1668204733335519232
I fully support his proposal that their troops be removed from defending occupied territory and moved elsewhere. 👍
UK heatwave prompts order to fire up coal plant to meet aircon demand National Grid asks for Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant to go on standby as Britons cope with 30C temperatures https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/12/uk-heatwave-prompts-order-to-fire-up-coal-plant-to-meet-aircon-demand ...Temperatures broke 30C for the first time this year over the weekend and meteorologists forecast the chance of Britain experiencing a hot summer is now 45% – 2.3 times the typical figure.
The hot weather is expected to push up demand for power, as households and businesses switch on airconditioning systems and units. Air conditioning accounts for about a fifth of the total electricity used in buildings around the world.
The earliest the coal-fired plant would be able to connect to Great Britain’s electricity grid would be 2.25pm and it may not be needed. If it is connected to the network on Monday, it would end a 46-day run in which coal has not been used to generate electricity in Britain.
National Grid has suggested that consumers can improve the energy efficiency of air conditioning by changing or cleaning the machine’s reusable filter, closing windows and doors and by shutting curtains to block the sun’s light and heat coming into the home.
Last week, a fault was found on the 1,400 megawatt North Sea Link interconnector which carries power between Norway and the UK, cutting electricity supplies. The power flowing through the 450-mile subsea cable has been reduced by half while the fault, discovered at an onshore facility in Norway, is repaired...
I've emboldened the key part. I am always amazed at the number of houses that in 30c+ weather have all their windows and doors wide open. Particularly in modern houses as soon as the temperature outside is above that inside then everything should be closed up.
I do wonder if for new house builds we should be requiring shutters. They make a massive difference by keeping direct sun from even reaching windows.
Yes, even with a curtain the heat is already in the house. We were thinking of installing some kind of external blind on our sunniest window yesterday. A simple pull down would do the job.
We have a lot of (probably illegal!) greenery on the walls that helps given our 1920s house doesn't have proper cavities. Evaporative cooling is quite effective.
Everything gets shut or opened when internal and external temperatures cross over. There's no reason this couldn't be automated these days.
This has a feel of the Battle of the Bulge to it (one last throw of the dice).
Aleksandr Dugin appears to have entered some kind of delirium suggesting an asymmetric move to respond to the Ukrainian offensive. For instance, he suggests sending new forces to Kharkiv and Odesa. The denial is palpable. https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1668204733335519232
I fully support his proposal that their troops be removed from defending occupied territory and moved elsewhere. 👍
This has a feel of the Battle of the Bulge to it (one last throw of the dice).
Aleksandr Dugin appears to have entered some kind of delirium suggesting an asymmetric move to respond to the Ukrainian offensive. For instance, he suggests sending new forces to Kharkiv and Odesa. The denial is palpable. https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1668204733335519232
My own view is that the political class is pretty awful across the Western world, and that has been the case for most of my lifetime.
But, it's always still worth voting.
Although I've just undermined my own comment, I always say:
Tight marginal, free and fair elections - Get out and vote! Safe seat, free and fair elections - Well, it's not likely, but go and vote anyway. Shame democracy (Russia) and the vote is basically chucked aside - Well, it's a nice evening. Go for a walk and vote anyway. You need the exercise. [1]
[1] I wonder if dictators like Putin or Luka are told the 'real' result, as a way of guaging real support, or if they just ignore it anyway.
This has a feel of the Battle of the Bulge to it (one last throw of the dice).
Aleksandr Dugin appears to have entered some kind of delirium suggesting an asymmetric move to respond to the Ukrainian offensive. For instance, he suggests sending new forces to Kharkiv and Odesa. The denial is palpable. https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1668204733335519232
I fully support his proposal that their troops be removed from defending occupied territory and moved elsewhere. 👍
I thought this was quite telling:
They're going to run out of copium before we run out of popcorn.
In his London Tech Week Q&A, Rishi Sunak went much further, accusing Johnson of trying to do something improper with the honours list. By the standard of what some people say about Johnson, the words may seem almost anodyne. (See 9.53am.) But for Sunak, this was strong stuff. Until now, he has been reluctant to say anything very critical of Johnson in public, conscious that for a significant minority of Tory party members (but a much smaller cohort of Tory MPs), Johnson remains an idol, and a potential saviour.
Sunak’s comment also provides the first on-the-record confirmation as to what the Sunak/Johnson rift over the honours list was all about. Johnson wanted to offer peerages to three MPs particularly close to him: Nadine Dorries, the former culture secretary and his most loyal public defender; Nigel Adams, the former minister who was Johnson’s key backroom fixer; and Alok Sharma, who worked as a junior minister for Johnson when Johnson was foreign secretary and who then chaired the Cop26 conference. (A fourth MP, Alister Jack, the Scottish secretary and a close friend of Johnson’s, was originally on the list too, but ruled himself out.)
But it would not have been possible for the MPs to be named as peers on the resignation honours list but delay taking their seats in the Lords until around time time of the elections, to avoid byelections that would be damaging for the party. A minister confirmed this in the House of Lords in November last year.
Today Sunak confirmed that Johnson wanted him to either over-ruled Holac on this issue, or to give a private assurance that if Dorries, Adams and Sharma were left off the list, they would get a peerage later
This is Mike's site, and he can post what he likes on it. He is a LibDem supporter, and his header is a plug, which he is entitled to make. The LibDems did very poorly in the May council elections in Central Beds, and lost in the Bedford mayoral election, having held the post of elected mayor for 14 years. In Central Beds the independents swept to power, ousting many Tory candidates. They are a well organised group, and Gareth Mackey is a well known, popular and longstanding councillor in Flitwick, which is the largest centre of population in the Mid Beds constituency. He is standing as an independent, and backed by the independent group.
In my opinion, and I live locally, if anyone can beat the Tories it will be the independent candidate. I cannot yet find a betting market, but if I find one, I will be putting my money where my mouth is.
When I was at school in the 90s it was a badly-kept secret that my English and Theory of Knowledge (Philosophy) teacher had done porn. Based on her age, I'd guess in the 70s or 80s.
Obviously @TSE needs to educate you on the various flavours of such entertainment on offer these days.
It would depend on the nature of the porn. If it’s Hot Teacher Seduces Teen Slut, there may be a safeguarding issue.
Would it be an issue for you if the teacher had, in a previous job as an actor, played child-killer Richard III at the RSC?
I'm slightly struggling to see the practical difference in safeguarding terms. They are rather different sorts of acting jobs, but they are acting jobs.
Should unemployed actors be encouraged to do porn by their local jobcentres?
Clearly not, as plenty of people would, perfectly legitimately, have moral reasons not to be prepared to appear in a porn film. There should be no question that they should be required to make themselves available for that sort of work as a condition of receiving unemployment benefits.
But that isn't the debate. The issue is whether legally portraying illegal (or immoral) behaviour as an actor in itself makes you a danger to children. I would suggest not.
At the moment everyone's vote is worth the same. How do you address the problem you describe in a way that doesn't change that?
In theory yes, in practice no.
Look at my profile picture. How much value does my vote have, really? I could vote Labour, but Labour will win anyway, so does it matter if I don't vote. I could vote 'not' Labour, but Labour will still win anyway, so it still doesn't matter.
Of course, the power of your vote is really determined by:
1. The system of voting used (FPTP really does diminish the value of a vote - every vote after the winning one is wasted, and every vote for the losers are wasted too). 2. How many people can be bothered to vote, or not bothered to vote. The less people vote, the more powerful your own vote then becomes. 3. What you are voting for. (ie, are you electing a government, or is it a vote in the Kaiserreich, were the Kaiser simply overrules the 'government' anyway) - this isn't a problem in the UK usually.
The honest answer is: Everyone should vote. Imagine the vast changes in results if the 25% of those who don't vote suddenly did. The system should be fairer to avoid situations like Bootle.
I've no idea how to implement the first. Making it illegal to not vote seems (itself) undemocratic to me. As to the second, scrapping FPTP seems a logical move, but I don't claim to know what is better to replace it with.
AIUI, in Australia, where voting is compulsory, one can put a blank ballot paper into the box or one with everyone voted for. Seems fair enough to me.
At the moment everyone's vote is worth the same. How do you address the problem you describe in a way that doesn't change that?
In theory yes, in practice no.
Look at my profile picture. How much value does my vote have, really? I could vote Labour, but Labour will win anyway, so does it matter if I don't vote. I could vote 'not' Labour, but Labour will still win anyway, so it still doesn't matter.
Of course, the power of your vote is really determined by:
1. The system of voting used (FPTP really does diminish the value of a vote - every vote after the winning one is wasted, and every vote for the losers are wasted too). 2. How many people can be bothered to vote, or not bothered to vote. The less people vote, the more powerful your own vote then becomes. 3. What you are voting for. (ie, are you electing a government, or is it a vote in the Kaiserreich, were the Kaiser simply overrules the 'government' anyway) - this isn't a problem in the UK usually.
The honest answer is: Everyone should vote. Imagine the vast changes in results if the 25% of those who don't vote suddenly did. The system should be fairer to avoid situations like Bootle.
I've no idea how to implement the first. Making it illegal to not vote seems (itself) undemocratic to me. As to the second, scrapping FPTP seems a logical move, but I don't claim to know what is better to replace it with.
AIUI, in Australia, where voting is compulsory, one can put a blank ballot paper into the box or one with everyone voted for. Seems fair enough to me.
Pedant Alert: They have preferential voting, everyone's supposed to be voted for, its just the order that matters.
But yes, nothing unlawful about a deliberately spoilt ballot.
This is Mike's site, and he can post what he likes on it. He is a LibDem supporter, and his header is a plug, which he is entitled to make. The LibDems did very poorly in the May council elections in Central Beds, and lost in the Bedford mayoral election, having held the post of elected mayor for 14 years. In Central Beds the independents swept to power, ousting many Tory candidates. They are a well organised group, and Gareth Mackey is a well known, popular and longstanding councillor in Flitwick, which is the largest centre of population in the Mid Beds constituency. He is standing as an independent, and backed by the independent group.
In my opinion, and I live locally, if anyone can beat the Tories it will be the independent candidate. I cannot yet find a betting market, but if I find one, I will be putting my money where my mouth is.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
While superficially frivolous, it’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
I stick by my odds;
Evens, the tories never again win a majority.
4/1 they cease to be a meaningful electoral force within a decade.
Given I earlier posted a poll with 53% of UK voters backing restoring the cane in schools (even if 10 years ago) yet another example of leftwingers like you underestimating support for rightwing policies
Oh dear!
I suspect part of your Conservative populist soul died alongside Boris Johnson's career on Friday
Good morning
Just logging in after having spent a fantastic 24 hours at Liverpool's waterfront before we leave for the Isle Of Man later and read @HYUFD comment
Utterly luddite, almost shocking, and not acceptable to the vast majority of us
Re your last sentence I suspect far more than part of his populist soul died with the end of the malign and dreadful Johnson
Boris will be a relative liberal moderate compared to the likes of Braverman, Rees Mogg, Patel, Frost and Badenoch who will increasingly come to the fore of the Conservative Party in opposition if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election.
With Silvio's passing left liberals used to think he was a rightwing populist extremist, now the Italian PM is the even more rightwing nationalist Meloni (albeit she is less friendly with Putin than he was)
A lot of people (not just teenagers) don't rate the right to vote much - they correctly judge that they will probably never make an individual difference in their entire lives, plus they think politics is pretty seedy and uninteresting anyway. After all, a "good" turnout is 75%, and I don't believe the other 25% are all dead or incapacitated. Nor are all the 75% really that niterested - it's just something one does.
Not endorsing any of that, of course, but it's sadly reality. Fits with the polls showing large minorities would welcome a Strong Man sorting things out.
A positive spin on this is that we need to explain to teenagers that social media can be very effective in politics, particularly for local elections.
You need to be funny and acerbic, with some good video editing
Vladimir Putin understands this. He found it very useful in 2016.
At the moment everyone's vote is worth the same. How do you address the problem you describe in a way that doesn't change that?
In theory yes, in practice no.
Look at my profile picture. How much value does my vote have, really? I could vote Labour, but Labour will win anyway, so does it matter if I don't vote. I could vote 'not' Labour, but Labour will still win anyway, so it still doesn't matter.
Of course, the power of your vote is really determined by:
1. The system of voting used (FPTP really does diminish the value of a vote - every vote after the winning one is wasted, and every vote for the losers are wasted too). 2. How many people can be bothered to vote, or not bothered to vote. The less people vote, the more powerful your own vote then becomes. 3. What you are voting for. (ie, are you electing a government, or is it a vote in the Kaiserreich, were the Kaiser simply overrules the 'government' anyway) - this isn't a problem in the UK usually.
The honest answer is: Everyone should vote. Imagine the vast changes in results if the 25% of those who don't vote suddenly did. The system should be fairer to avoid situations like Bootle.
I've no idea how to implement the first. Making it illegal to not vote seems (itself) undemocratic to me. As to the second, scrapping FPTP seems a logical move, but I don't claim to know what is better to replace it with.
AIUI, in Australia, where voting is compulsory, one can put a blank ballot paper into the box or one with everyone voted for. Seems fair enough to me.
Pedant Alert: They have preferential voting, everyone's supposed to be voted for, its just the order that matters.
But yes, nothing unlawful about a deliberately spoilt ballot.
Do they list the candidates by party or in alphabetical order? IIRC there’s some evidence that alphabetical order makes a difference in constituencies where they’re more than two candidates to be elected.
This has a feel of the Battle of the Bulge to it (one last throw of the dice).
Aleksandr Dugin appears to have entered some kind of delirium suggesting an asymmetric move to respond to the Ukrainian offensive. For instance, he suggests sending new forces to Kharkiv and Odesa. The denial is palpable. https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1668204733335519232
I fully support his proposal that their troops be removed from defending occupied territory and moved elsewhere. 👍
I thought this was quite telling:
I saw this on AlternativeHistory.com.
It was hilarious. The idea that China will lend 3 million troops to Russia. I'm sure they will.
They'll say, "Look, we'll relieve your troops in the Russian Far East, and use our troops to guard your own border with us. No, no, it'll be fine. Haishenwai will be perfectly safe with our troops....."
Russia - Haishenwai? You mean Vladivostock?
China - Ha ha! Yes. Haishenwai..... perfectly safe. Now off you pop.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
While superficially frivolous, it’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
I stick by my odds;
Evens, the tories never again win a majority.
4/1 they cease to be a meaningful electoral force within a decade.
Given I earlier posted a poll with 53% of UK voters backing restoring the cane in schools (even if 10 years ago) yet another example of leftwingers like you underestimating support for rightwing policies
Oh dear!
I suspect part of your Conservative populist soul died alongside Boris Johnson's career on Friday
Good morning
Just logging in after having spent a fantastic 24 hours at Liverpool's waterfront before we leave for the Isle Of Man later and read @HYUFD comment
Utterly luddite, almost shocking, and not acceptable to the vast majority of us
Re your last sentence I suspect far more than part of his populist soul died with the end of the malign and dreadful Johnson
Boris will be a relative liberal moderate compared to the likes of Braverman, Rees Mogg, Patel, Frost and Badenoch who will increasingly come to the fore of the Conservative Party in opposition if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election.
With Silvio's passing left liberals used to think he was a rightwing populist extremist, now the Italian PM is the even more rightwing nationalist Meloni (albeit she is less friendly with Putin than he was)
Boris is over - get used to it
HY is the last redoubt apologist for a man that most people now realise was wholly unsuited to high office and it is a weakness of our system that he was ever allowed to get to where he did. He has done massive damage to the Conservative brand, more so than Corbyn did to Labour.
This has a feel of the Battle of the Bulge to it (one last throw of the dice).
Aleksandr Dugin appears to have entered some kind of delirium suggesting an asymmetric move to respond to the Ukrainian offensive. For instance, he suggests sending new forces to Kharkiv and Odesa. The denial is palpable. https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1668204733335519232
I fully support his proposal that their troops be removed from defending occupied territory and moved elsewhere. 👍
I thought this was quite telling:
Would they not first have to march through Russia ? What if they stopped half way.
This is Mike's site, and he can post what he likes on it. He is a LibDem supporter, and his header is a plug, which he is entitled to make. The LibDems did very poorly in the May council elections in Central Beds, and lost in the Bedford mayoral election, having held the post of elected mayor for 14 years. In Central Beds the independents swept to power, ousting many Tory candidates. They are a well organised group, and Gareth Mackey is a well known, popular and longstanding councillor in Flitwick, which is the largest centre of population in the Mid Beds constituency. He is standing as an independent, and backed by the independent group.
In my opinion, and I live locally, if anyone can beat the Tories it will be the independent candidate. I cannot yet find a betting market, but if I find one, I will be putting my money where my mouth is.
The Conservatives gaining the Bedford mayoralty was one of the strangest results of the elections.
This is Mike's site, and he can post what he likes on it. He is a LibDem supporter, and his header is a plug, which he is entitled to make. The LibDems did very poorly in the May council elections in Central Beds, and lost in the Bedford mayoral election, having held the post of elected mayor for 14 years. In Central Beds the independents swept to power, ousting many Tory candidates. They are a well organised group, and Gareth Mackey is a well known, popular and longstanding councillor in Flitwick, which is the largest centre of population in the Mid Beds constituency. He is standing as an independent, and backed by the independent group.
In my opinion, and I live locally, if anyone can beat the Tories it will be the independent candidate. I cannot yet find a betting market, but if I find one, I will be putting my money where my mouth is.
This has a feel of the Battle of the Bulge to it (one last throw of the dice).
Aleksandr Dugin appears to have entered some kind of delirium suggesting an asymmetric move to respond to the Ukrainian offensive. For instance, he suggests sending new forces to Kharkiv and Odesa. The denial is palpable. https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1668204733335519232
I fully support his proposal that their troops be removed from defending occupied territory and moved elsewhere. 👍
I thought this was quite telling:
Would they not first have to march through Russia ? What if they stopped half way.
“We decided that the best way to help was to relieve you of the burden of defending all this territory.”
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
While superficially frivolous, it’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
I stick by my odds;
Evens, the tories never again win a majority.
4/1 they cease to be a meaningful electoral force within a decade.
Given I earlier posted a poll with 53% of UK voters backing restoring the cane in schools (even if 10 years ago) yet another example of leftwingers like you underestimating support for rightwing policies
Oh dear!
I suspect part of your Conservative populist soul died alongside Boris Johnson's career on Friday
Good morning
Just logging in after having spent a fantastic 24 hours at Liverpool's waterfront before we leave for the Isle Of Man later and read @HYUFD comment
Utterly luddite, almost shocking, and not acceptable to the vast majority of us
Re your last sentence I suspect far more than part of his populist soul died with the end of the malign and dreadful Johnson
Boris will be a relative liberal moderate compared to the likes of Braverman, Rees Mogg, Patel, Frost and Badenoch who will increasingly come to the fore of the Conservative Party in opposition if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election.
With Silvio's passing left liberals used to think he was a rightwing populist extremist, now the Italian PM is the even more rightwing nationalist Meloni (albeit she is less friendly with Putin than he was)
Boris is over - get used to it
HY is the last redoubt apologist for a man that most people now realise was wholly unsuited to high office and it is a weakness of our system that he was ever allowed to get to where he did. He has done massive damage to the Conservative brand, more so than Corbyn did to Labour.
It is good to see Sunak attacking Johnson
He has nothing to lose and everything to gain by taking a hard-line against Johnson and his sycophants
Comments
I suspect part of your Conservative populist soul died alongside Boris Johnson's career on Friday
There has to be an audit trail to ensure that actions are first identified and then followed up. How else would you have a system which does this.
You seem to be agitating for gut feel and trust.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/canadas-wildfires-air-quality-warnings-connected-climate-change/story?id=99905554#:~:text=Canada has had an epic,than the state of Vermont.
Also distressing impacts on other organisms - we've already seen tens of thousands of dead fish wash ashore in Texas:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/11/us/dead-fish-texas-climate-change.html
It does feel somewhat end of days...
Demagoguery in the U.K.
The nation’s political class lacks intellect and character"
https://www.city-journal.org/article/demagoguery-in-the-u-k
Try getting an audit from HMRC, or the EHO or anyone else and saying "paperwork doesn't matter, I binned it".
Where paperwork is stupid boxticking of meaningless nonsense, then that absolutely should be addressed. However for the paperwork that is necessary, it absolutely has to be done.
One thing I was taught early in my career, and have lived by, is if its not recorded its not been done. That may be irritating, but its how any audit by anyone has to operate.
You don't need to arrest someone either in Scotland or England (and indeed can't arrest them) in order to interview them merely as a witness. You can broadly use the witness evidence they give, not as a suspect but simply as a witness who saw something relevant.
But, if they are under suspicion of a crime, you certainly interview them under caution (i.e. you explain you're interviewing them as a suspect, that the evidence may be used, and certain protections apply). And you'd quite often also arrest them as they cannot then simply walk out of the interview (particularly relevant where there is felt to be a danger they'd walk out to get their story straight with others). These formal steps both protect the suspect and reduce risk that the evidence will be deemed inadmissible at a later date.
Of course the same applies on the left too, the liberal establishment also underestimated the popularity of Corbyn's anti austerity policies pre 2017.
Voters are more fiscally pro higher spending and more socially conservative than the liberal elite consider (see also their shock at the Brexit vote in 2016).
The UK elite are largely socially liberal and fiscally conservative and for them elections should just be about which party is more competent to deliver that, the average voter rather less so
Though not used so much in recent decades, I gather.
But then some of us say "don't talk to strangers" is all one needs. Which conveniently leave out Mr Beak with the cane or tawse.
But unless or until it is you can't just not do it, unless you want to fail the inspection. And if you fail the inspection because you've not done it, then that judgment is completely accurate on the standards set.
The same happened with finance especially in the build-up to Brown's crash, with his reams of box ticking nonsense. But that still doesn't mean you won't fail an audit if you haven't got the paperwork to back yourself up in any industry, not just teaching.
And even if it is, then so what, really. If a school is able to cover up safeguarding issues by ticking the appropriate boxes then how is it better if they have safeguarding issues but don't have to tick any boxes? At least if they tick the boxes and then are found to have lied there is definite redress. Because there is an audit trail.
I would say you are clutching at straws especially given how cheap it is for Yougov to rerun the question yet they never have.
* Only joking. No one should be silenced
When the Conservatives are serious about governance and come back to someone like Cameron, they might be electable again.
Peak at around age 9 (will be around 12 now) then declining.
(Scary to note the male surplus in children there as well. One can draw their own conclusions as to why that might be the case, but I have my thoughts)
One might however note that May was in some respects more progressive than the Tories are now - on trans, recycling, and so on. Some of the current SNP problems arise from UKG suddenly retracting proposals for England in its current war on woke.
Just logging in after having spent a fantastic 24 hours at Liverpool's waterfront before we leave for the Isle Of Man later and read @HYUFD comment
Utterly luddite, almost shocking, and not acceptable to the vast majority of us
Re your last sentence I suspect far more than part of his populist soul died with the end of the malign and dreadful Johnson
Vast, vast advances in computing is the one of them. In 1969 we had basically bugger all except whole rooms of magnetic tape arrays. Now we've got a computer in your pocket that has access to the entire information of the world (and all the lunatic conspiracy theories to boot).
But other advances, in medical science, have also been remarkable (And I know a lot less about that).
So we've achieved plenty, just not necessarily in the same field.
Was originally recorded with a reggae beat, until his reggae hating drummer asked him to change it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7emYqwx6M3E
Pupil to staff ratio is a much better metric.
My kids school is fantastic, I think they're really great. They have 30+ kids per class and its not remotely an issue. They also have 2 adults in the classroom at all times.
When I was at school we only have 20-25 in the class, but there was only one adult. If an unruly child is disrupting the only teacher's attention, then that leaves no support available for any other kids.
Bigger classrooms, with more adults per classroom, seems to me to be to entirely reasonable and can be better than the alternative.
And since private schools have better discipline than state schools, there's less of a reason for that to be an issue there.
*or elsewehere.
"The permanent possibility of demagoguery is the price that must be paid for universal suffrage. Politicians, if they desire office (and few do not desire it), must pander to electorates who may not be very logical, consistent, or well-informed. People want medicines without side effects and laws without unintended consequences, or even foreseeable ones. Demagoguery creates problems, then worsens them with the solutions it proposes to what it has caused in the first place.
Demagoguery thrives in crisis, and there is little doubt that we are going through one. In Britain, food inflation is running at 20 percent and energy prices are soaring. These increases weigh particularly on the poor, though energy costs also affect industry. Government debt is rising fast; last year, the number of migrants in the country was equivalent to nearly 1 percent of the population, and most will require lodging separately amid a housing shortage that is already acute.
What does the political and administrative class have to offer in response to all this? Paralysis and demagoguery. Recently, the government, misnamed conservative, mooted price caps on food, as if no one in history had ever thought to control prices by such measures. By even pondering these steps publicly, the government was trying to demonstrate that it cares—hoping, no doubt, that an expression of benevolent concern will counteract the opprobrium of the disaster it has wrought."
In some countries and some cultures its much more skewed than that.
But the other big contributor must be ocean and atmosphere circulation in the Northern Hemisphere. For a couple of decades from the mid 2000s we had unusually negative Arctic Oscillation and a rapidly warming Arctic with accelerating ice melt. Since around 2018 things have shifted back to more positive AO. Arctic melt has stalled (a good news story, for now) but the heat has to go somewhere and it’s returned to the mid latitudes.
But oceans worldwide are dead hot at the moment. It’s more than a little scary to look at.
Oblivion.
(And I'm not talking about the computer game)
Kakhovka reservoir is emptying and the remains of war dead come to light... that is German war dead from WWII.
Germany's @Volksbund takes collects, identifies and takes care of the remains of German troops.
pic.twitter.com/Q723cIjGvv
https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1667986151758524418
Any unsettled airmass coming from that direction will have higher moisture content so potential for more intense rainfall events.
You need to be funny and acerbic, with some good video editing
https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_POPSOC_590_0001--is-young-adult-excess-mortality-a.htm
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13524-018-0680-9
The ratio of male to female birth has not changed in the past century besides some natural variance.
All the female excess in that chart, was a male excess when they were born too.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/file?uri=/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/datasets/birthsummarytables/2012/birthsummarytables2012finalrev_tcm77-317454.xls
Actually the rate of males born in WWII was higher than it has been in the past decade.
63% of the population are aged 15-64. 19% are over 65. As long as people vote, the votes of the pensioner class are overwhelmed by the votes of those younger. Not voting is decisively acting against your group's and your own interests.
BTW I have lost count of the number of younger voters who supported Remain but could not be bothered to vote.
National Grid asks for Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant to go on standby as Britons cope with 30C temperatures
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/12/uk-heatwave-prompts-order-to-fire-up-coal-plant-to-meet-aircon-demand
...Temperatures broke 30C for the first time this year over the weekend and meteorologists forecast the chance of Britain experiencing a hot summer is now 45% – 2.3 times the typical figure.
The hot weather is expected to push up demand for power, as households and businesses switch on airconditioning systems and units. Air conditioning accounts for about a fifth of the total electricity used in buildings around the world.
The earliest the coal-fired plant would be able to connect to Great Britain’s electricity grid would be 2.25pm and it may not be needed. If it is connected to the network on Monday, it would end a 46-day run in which coal has not been used to generate electricity in Britain.
National Grid has suggested that consumers can improve the energy efficiency of air conditioning by changing or cleaning the machine’s reusable filter, closing windows and doors and by shutting curtains to block the sun’s light and heat coming into the home.
Last week, a fault was found on the 1,400 megawatt North Sea Link interconnector which carries power between Norway and the UK, cutting electricity supplies. The power flowing through the 450-mile subsea cable has been reduced by half while the fault, discovered at an onshore facility in Norway, is repaired...
‘Stay tuned': Miami’s mayor teases possible presidential announcement
“I’m going to be making a big speech in the Reagan Library,” he said.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/11/miami-mayor-suarez-presidential-field-00101429
If there is a demographic issue, then partially that is simply because the battle of ideas hasn't been won yet, but its possible to win it.
Quite frankly, as a "woke" individual who's was young but has just reached middle age, I'd say we're winning the battle of ideas when it comes to social liberalism. The idea of gay marriage was laughed at when I was supporting it at university, now everyone accepts it. On racial matters etc things have come tremendously forward too.
Indeed one thing I find interesting is how an iconic show of my teenage years, Friends, while still funny is now quite dated when looking back at it. It was modern at its time, discussing issues like homosexuality, having a girl-girl kiss etc, but looking back now its extremely dated. Ross's wife being gay is a punchline more than anything else, Chandler's dad being a transvestite is something he's embarrassed by and a joke more than anything else. The cast is all white, with no non-white characters introduced until the 9th season in the 2000s. A show like that was progressive then, but wouldn't get made today.
I completely agree with the problem of the ladder being pulled up, and I was an early advocate here for housing being a major issue and reform needed, before it was popular. There too, I think we're winning the battle for ideas. While plenty of NIMBYs still exist, most people now at least realise ethically its an issue and are at least embarrassed to be a NIMBY which is some small progress.
That Starmer is considering taking on the NIMBYs and may win an election on that platform (and it will be with my vote if he's serious, I don't believe he is yet so he doesn't have it yet) is another sign of progress being made.
Don't give up on democracy.
I do wonder if for new house builds we should be requiring shutters. They make a massive difference by keeping direct sun from even reaching windows.
What is hard is to suggest alternatives, propose better (non unicorn) solutions to difficult problems and so on.
He mentions no political party and elides them all into one ('the political and admin class') as he calls it.
But is it true? Is Sir Keir a demagogue? How? What evidence? Is even Sunak one? Is Mark Drakeford one? A parliamentary process, carried out in a non demagogue like way, has just precipitated yesterday's narcissist out of the HoC. Is the administrative class (civil service) full of demagogues? Is academia and the BBC a set of populist lackeys of right wing demagogues?
TD is being simplistic.
With Silvio's passing left liberals used to think he was a rightwing populist extremist, now the Italian PM is the even more rightwing nationalist Meloni (albeit she is less friendly with Putin than he was)
But, it's always still worth voting.
Aleksandr Dugin appears to have entered some kind of delirium suggesting an asymmetric move to respond to the Ukrainian offensive. For instance, he suggests sending new forces to Kharkiv and Odesa. The denial is palpable.
https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1668204733335519232
Look at my profile picture. How much value does my vote have, really?
I could vote Labour, but Labour will win anyway, so does it matter if I don't vote.
I could vote 'not' Labour, but Labour will still win anyway, so it still doesn't matter.
Of course, the power of your vote is really determined by:
1. The system of voting used (FPTP really does diminish the value of a vote - every vote after the winning one is wasted, and every vote for the losers are wasted too).
2. How many people can be bothered to vote, or not bothered to vote. The less people vote, the more powerful your own vote then becomes.
3. What you are voting for. (ie, are you electing a government, or is it a vote in the Kaiserreich, were the Kaiser simply overrules the 'government' anyway) - this isn't a problem in the UK usually.
The honest answer is:
Everyone should vote. Imagine the vast changes in results if the 25% of those who don't vote suddenly did.
The system should be fairer to avoid situations like Bootle.
I've no idea how to implement the first. Making it illegal to not vote seems (itself) undemocratic to me.
As to the second, scrapping FPTP seems a logical move, but I don't claim to know what is better to replace it with.
We have a lot of (probably illegal!) greenery on the walls that helps given our 1920s house doesn't have proper cavities. Evaporative cooling is quite effective.
Everything gets shut or opened when internal and external temperatures cross over. There's no reason this couldn't be automated these days.
27m
See below statement re Nicola Sturgeon MSP:
https://twitter.com/MichelleThomson/status/1668199640708046849
See below statement re Nicola Sturgeon MSP:
https://twitter.com/MichelleThomson/status/1668199640708046849
Not quite sure why she needs to take a picture of her PC screen for her statement.
Tight marginal, free and fair elections - Get out and vote!
Safe seat, free and fair elections - Well, it's not likely, but go and vote anyway.
Shame democracy (Russia) and the vote is basically chucked aside - Well, it's a nice evening. Go for a walk and vote anyway. You need the exercise. [1]
[1] I wonder if dictators like Putin or Luka are told the 'real' result, as a way of guaging real support, or if they just ignore it anyway.
Sunak’s comment also provides the first on-the-record confirmation as to what the Sunak/Johnson rift over the honours list was all about. Johnson wanted to offer peerages to three MPs particularly close to him: Nadine Dorries, the former culture secretary and his most loyal public defender; Nigel Adams, the former minister who was Johnson’s key backroom fixer; and Alok Sharma, who worked as a junior minister for Johnson when Johnson was foreign secretary and who then chaired the Cop26 conference. (A fourth MP, Alister Jack, the Scottish secretary and a close friend of Johnson’s, was originally on the list too, but ruled himself out.)
But it would not have been possible for the MPs to be named as peers on the resignation honours list but delay taking their seats in the Lords until around time time of the elections, to avoid byelections that would be damaging for the party. A minister confirmed this in the House of Lords in November last year.
Today Sunak confirmed that Johnson wanted him to either over-ruled Holac on this issue, or to give a private assurance that if Dorries, Adams and Sharma were left off the list, they would get a peerage later
The LibDems did very poorly in the May council elections in Central Beds, and lost in the Bedford mayoral election, having held the post of elected mayor for 14 years. In Central Beds the independents swept to power, ousting many Tory candidates. They are a well organised group, and Gareth Mackey is a well known, popular and longstanding councillor in Flitwick, which is the largest centre of population in the Mid Beds constituency. He is standing as an independent, and backed by the independent group.
In my opinion, and I live locally, if anyone can beat the Tories it will be the independent candidate. I cannot yet find a betting market, but if I find one, I will be putting my money where my mouth is.
But that isn't the debate. The issue is whether legally portraying illegal (or immoral) behaviour as an actor in itself makes you a danger to children. I would suggest not.
Seems fair enough to me.
But yes, nothing unlawful about a deliberately spoilt ballot.
Hope you get on before the price goes.
It was hilarious. The idea that China will lend 3 million troops to Russia.
I'm sure they will.
They'll say, "Look, we'll relieve your troops in the Russian Far East, and use our troops to guard your own border with us. No, no, it'll be fine. Haishenwai will be perfectly safe with our troops....."
Russia - Haishenwai? You mean Vladivostock?
China - Ha ha! Yes. Haishenwai..... perfectly safe. Now off you pop.
What if they stopped half way.
He has nothing to lose and everything to gain by taking a hard-line against Johnson and his sycophants