Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
No, and that might be a problem if, as the American tech firms discovered, it turns out the best future lawyers and accountants did not come from where they had been hiring from. A problem for the City firms and for the country as a whole.
As an aside, almost all accountants and most lawyers have not done vocational degrees anyway so what the hiring firms are effectively doing is subcontracting their hiring decisions to university admissions tutors. It is not totally absurd because at least the candidate has got through one admissions process but it's not wholly rational either.
Most top US law firms will also mainly hire from the Ivy League and other top US colleges and those with well above average SAT scores
Northern Ireland's water industry was never privatised and still works off government funding. Its miles behind Britain on capacity and environmental and nobody is investing in it. The Republic isnt much better.
I don't know much about NI, but the issue about nationalisation of utilities is that if voters think they are badly run (overpricing, sewage, power cuts, whatever) and attach great importance to it, they can vote out the Government responsible. Nationalisation is by no means a guarantee of good service, but you know whom to blame for poor service and can influence choices of priority by the usual means (writing to MPs etc.). If I want to influence how Thames Water is run, I wouldn't know where to start.
The counter-argument that competition works wonders is clearly true for something like breakfast cereals where competition provides real choice (who needs an official British Rice Krispies?) but nearly always false for natural monopolies (utilities, trains).
Trains aren't a natural monopoly since in the field of transportation you have multiple options you can take. You can drive, get a taxi, get a train or tram if the latter exist, a bus or flight, ride a bike. Really you're only limited by your imagination.
That is part of the reason why train passenger numbers changed dramatically post-privatisation.
The privatisation setup was similar to the old [edit: pre-1947] companies - hardly any competition at all in the trains unless for certain journeys eg Edinburgh-London where you could go on two different routes. Even today there is only limited choice, though obviously LNER is a much better bet than TransPennine for say Edinburgh to Durham.
BR were makign excellent progress in competition from other modes eg car, plane vs new trains Edin-London when privatisation happened, and a lot of the supposed credit for privatisation was actually inherited from BR.s work.
Yes and no. BR was very efficient (yes, really), but it was managing a reducing network. 'Rationalisation' was the buzzword through the 1970s and 1980s, with everything possible being done to reduce running costs, even if it hurt current and future traffic. Examples are dualling of four-track lines, and singling of double-track ones. BR in the 1980s had some excellent managers, partially because the government let them get on with it as long as it was pretty much cost-neutral or the cost-benefits were clear (e.g. electrification schemes).
Privatisation changed the mindset of the management, from one of managed decline to one of expansion. At least for passengers; freight has suffered due to the decline in trainload coal and the DfT's dead hand.
Not just rationalisation, also ruthless cost cutting, including skimping on maintenance. Wasn't it Bob Reid Mk II who referred to 'the crumbling edge of quality?'
The truth is most of the trouble with infrastructure that scuppered Railtrack was deferred from years of state complacency and light usage. That wasn't helped by poor management and an inefficient system but for example, Hatfield and Potters' Bar would have happened anyway.
A good point: just look at all the fatal accidents that occurred whilst the railways were nationalised in the 1970s and 1980s.
But be careful about trying to make a political point about that, as some people soon get onto a "But deaths under nationalisation don't matter!" line...:(
OTOH that ignores the secular trend towards improved safety - planes and cars too do it but they haven't been privatised in the relevant period (apart from BA in 1987, sort of). So some of the credit goes to that.
Hatfield was very specifically linked to breakup of the system and the use of contractors by the privatised railway.
Yes - but the same arguments can be made for many accidents under BR. People don't realise that BR was split many ways: from the different operating sectors (regional before the 1980s, sectors afterwards); the track infrastructure, civil engineering, S&T, property, etc, etc. These different groups often didn't work well together. And in some cases, hated each other as much as the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
No, and that might be a problem if, as the American tech firms discovered, it turns out the best future lawyers and accountants did not come from where they had been hiring from. A problem for the City firms and for the country as a whole.
As an aside, almost all accountants and most lawyers have not done vocational degrees anyway so what the hiring firms are effectively doing is subcontracting their hiring decisions to university admissions tutors. It is not totally absurd because at least the candidate has got through one admissions process but it's not wholly rational either.
Most top US law firms will also mainly hire from the Ivy League and other top US colleges and those with well above average SAT scores
Tech firms. It was tech firms not law firms that crunched the numbers and found they'd been fishing in the wrong talent pools because it turned out that their best engineers did not come from the top colleges.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
And I fear that politicians are often asked questions that they could not really be expected to know answers to, and then get accused of dissembling when they say they don't know, or stumble out a non-answer. If a question is designed to be a trap, the answer should be ignored.
Olena Duma, the former deputy head of the Chernihiv Oblast State Administration, has won the contest to head ARMA, receiving 6 out of 8 votes of the competition commission. However, Duma’s victory is being castigated by Ukrainian experts, with corruption watchdog Transparency International Ukraine stating that her appointment “may bury ARMA.”
The anti-corruption experts believe Duma’s appointment carries significant reputational risks for the country and for the work of an independent and effective anti-corruption ecosystem and law enforcement agencies. “Olena Duma has over 22 years of experience in state bodies, and during this time she was very active in anti-corruption and trade union organizations, organized and participated in various rallies. Olena Duma’s experience is not related to work in the field related to criminal justice, nor is it related to asset management or search. And this raises doubts,” the report states.
Transparency International Ukraine also points to Duma’s “close political connections,” as in 2019, she directly participated in campaigning for sitting president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and discrediting then-incumbent Petro Poroshenko. This indicates the political engagement of the winner of the contest for the Head of ARMA, which could potentially affect her work in this position, Transparency International notes.
Transparency International Ukraine calls on members of the Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers not to vote for the appointment of the winner of the contest to this extremely important position for the country.
Apart from her proximity to Zelenskyy circles, Olena Duma is connected to Rudy Giuliani, a former New York mayor and former US President Donald Trump’s longtime adviser who pressured Ukraine to investigate baseless conspiracies about Joe Biden and his son in 2019 and is currently under investigation in the USA.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
And I fear that politicians are often asked questions that they could not really be expected to know answers to, and then get accused of dissembling when they say they don't know, or stumble out a non-answer. If a question is designed to be a trap, the answer should be ignored.
Questions like "what is your favourite biscuit?", "which football team do you support?" and "how much is a loaf of bread?"
Thatcher is lauded on here as having transformed Britain for the better after the inertia of the "Post-War Concensus", creating a privatised model to envy the world. Yet some of her keystones like the selling off of public sector housing and the privatisation of utilities are birds that seem to be coming home to roost forty years on.
She applied solutions to the 1980s that enabled Britain to work in that era. But that era has gone and those solutions are now problems and we have to fix them. We don't know how. Boris knew vaguely, but Boris self-destructed. Power will now alternate between Cons and Lab or somebody else until somebody works it out and then they will be in power for a long while
So back to the 1970s then
Hopefully back to the SDP's plans of 1982, and before the Falklands War, in terms of economic plans.
And back to 1976 socially, in terms of the highest ever year of recorded British happiness, and much higher overall social cohesion and equality ( except, though and notably, racism ).
I made a modest contribution to the aura of national happiness by quitting my post as a junior civil servant to become a full-time hippy squatter, which was much more in keeping with my tastes and abilities. This was followed in short order by the longest, hottest summer on record, so my new career choice appeared to receive immediate divine approval. The spirit of the age was captured by Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell) in her psychological thriller A Fatal Inversion. Recommended to anyone who either missed it or would care to relive it.
A wonderful story there.
I'm now somehow imagining Neil, from the Young Ones, throwing away his Monty Python's civil servant bowler hat, and stretching out by a lake near Glastonbury in the midsummer's sun.
Uncannily accurate. The lake in question was the pool in Bath between Pulteney Bridge and the weir which was popular (and perfectly safe) for wild swimming at the time. Last time I looked you couldn't get near it.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
I wanted to like because it made be laugh, but that could have so been me doing that. I will anyway.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
And I fear that politicians are often asked questions that they could not really be expected to know answers to, and then get accused of dissembling when they say they don't know, or stumble out a non-answer. If a question is designed to be a trap, the answer should be ignored.
Questions like "what is your favourite biscuit?", "which football team do you support?" and "how much is a loaf of bread?"
I would get crucified if I truthfully answered: "which football team do you support?" My answer would be "None. I think football is a corrupt sport from top to bottom."
And my answer to "how much is a loaf of bread?" would be: I'm lucky enough not to need to care much.
Thatcher is lauded on here as having transformed Britain for the better after the inertia of the "Post-War Concensus", creating a privatised model to envy the world. Yet some of her keystones like the selling off of public sector housing and the privatisation of utilities are birds that seem to be coming home to roost forty years on.
She applied solutions to the 1980s that enabled Britain to work in that era. But that era has gone and those solutions are now problems and we have to fix them. We don't know how. Boris knew vaguely, but Boris self-destructed. Power will now alternate between Cons and Lab or somebody else until somebody works it out and then they will be in power for a long while
So back to the 1970s then
Hopefully back to the SDP's plans of 1982, and before the Falklands War, in terms of economic plans.
And back to 1976 socially, in terms of the highest ever year of recorded British happiness, and much higher overall social cohesion and equality ( except, though and notably, racism ).
I made a modest contribution to the aura of national happiness by quitting my post as a junior civil servant to become a full-time hippy squatter, which was much more in keeping with my tastes and abilities. This was followed in short order by the longest, hottest summer on record, so my new career choice appeared to receive immediate divine approval. The spirit of the age was captured by Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell) in her psychological thriller A Fatal Inversion. Recommended to anyone who either missed it or would care to relive it.
A wonderful story there.
I'm now somehow imagining Neil, from the Young Ones, throwing away his Monty Python's civil servant bowler hat, and stretching out by a lake near Glastonbury in the midsummer's sun.
Uncannily accurate. The lake in question was the pool in Bath between Pulteney Bridge and the weir which was popular (and perfectly safe) for wild swimming at the time. Last time I looked you couldn't get near it.
Northern Ireland's water industry was never privatised and still works off government funding. Its miles behind Britain on capacity and environmental and nobody is investing in it. The Republic isnt much better.
I don't know much about NI, but the issue about nationalisation of utilities is that if voters think they are badly run (overpricing, sewage, power cuts, whatever) and attach great importance to it, they can vote out the Government responsible. Nationalisation is by no means a guarantee of good service, but you know whom to blame for poor service and can influence choices of priority by the usual means (writing to MPs etc.). If I want to influence how Thames Water is run, I wouldn't know where to start.
The counter-argument that competition works wonders is clearly true for something like breakfast cereals where competition provides real choice (who needs an official British Rice Krispies?) but nearly always false for natural monopolies (utilities, trains).
Trains aren't a natural monopoly since in the field of transportation you have multiple options you can take. You can drive, get a taxi, get a train or tram if the latter exist, a bus or flight, ride a bike. Really you're only limited by your imagination.
That is part of the reason why train passenger numbers changed dramatically post-privatisation.
The privatisation setup was similar to the old [edit: pre-1947] companies - hardly any competition at all in the trains unless for certain journeys eg Edinburgh-London where you could go on two different routes. Even today there is only limited choice, though obviously LNER is a much better bet than TransPennine for say Edinburgh to Durham.
BR were makign excellent progress in competition from other modes eg car, plane vs new trains Edin-London when privatisation happened, and a lot of the supposed credit for privatisation was actually inherited from BR.s work.
Yes and no. BR was very efficient (yes, really), but it was managing a reducing network. 'Rationalisation' was the buzzword through the 1970s and 1980s, with everything possible being done to reduce running costs, even if it hurt current and future traffic. Examples are dualling of four-track lines, and singling of double-track ones. BR in the 1980s had some excellent managers, partially because the government let them get on with it as long as it was pretty much cost-neutral or the cost-benefits were clear (e.g. electrification schemes).
Privatisation changed the mindset of the management, from one of managed decline to one of expansion. At least for passengers; freight has suffered due to the decline in trainload coal and the DfT's dead hand.
Not just rationalisation, also ruthless cost cutting, including skimping on maintenance. Wasn't it Bob Reid Mk II who referred to 'the crumbling edge of quality?'
The truth is most of the trouble with infrastructure that scuppered Railtrack was deferred from years of state complacency and light usage. That wasn't helped by poor management and an inefficient system but for example, Hatfield and Potters' Bar would have happened anyway.
A good point: just look at all the fatal accidents that occurred whilst the railways were nationalised in the 1970s and 1980s.
But be careful about trying to make a political point about that, as some people soon get onto a "But deaths under nationalisation don't matter!" line...:(
OTOH that ignores the secular trend towards improved safety - planes and cars too do it but they haven't been privatised in the relevant period (apart from BA in 1987, sort of). So some of the credit goes to that.
Hatfield was very specifically linked to breakup of the system and the use of contractors by the privatised railway.
Yes - but the same arguments can be made for many accidents under BR. People don't realise that BR was split many ways: from the different operating sectors (regional before the 1980s, sectors afterwards); the track infrastructure, civil engineering, S&T, property, etc, etc. These different groups often didn't work well together. And in some cases, hated each other as much as the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy.
But that's not the same sort of positively mandated fragmentation demanded by HMG as caused Hatfield. The trend was the other way - for instance, as various areas of operations fell out of use, and as network-wide solutions were introduced.
The initial incompatibilities did of course stem in part from the nature of regional privatisation before 1947, too.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
True. But in the exception to the rule, I worked with a professor (an oxbridge graduate) whose experiences of students at her alma mater/the college itself were such that she took a pretty dim view of anyone who had gone there. Still very willing to interview if good on paper, but she assumed they'd be tossers. On the interviews I was involved with, she was right.
I academia, I've seen a clear bias towards applicants who have worked with the 'right people' - e.g. "X did PhD/pot-doc under Y, must be pretty good" - but not biased towards institutions as a whole.
I see from the last thread that Sadiq Khan is being accused of doing nothing as well as of introducing an unprecedented assault on the rights of drivers of really dirty old cars. It really can't be both. Within the narrow confines of the Mayor of London job, and the deliberately mean financial constraints imposed by central government, Khan is doing a good job. He's certainly out-performing his utterly useless and corrupt predecessor. He's not thrown money away on a pointless garden bridge to nowhere, he's not thrown money at a too expensive to run retro bus design, and unlike Johnson who cancelled a crucial Thames river crossing in the east he is building one. Oh, and he's overseen the biggest expansion in council housing since the 1970s as well as bravely taking on vested interests to improve London's fatally bad air quality. And is pushing forward with the Bakerloo Line extension. And deals with threats to his life from various extremists that mean he needs 24hr police protection while being the leading Muslim politician in Europe. He gets my vote.
Absolutely. He's not very flashy, but I don't care about that. Incidentlaly, I have a 2015 Fiesta and it's ULEZ-compliant - how ancient does a car have to be to be a problem? I wo der if voters realise they eill mostly be unaffect.
Does whether it's petrol or diesel matter?
Also: the majority of older cars are driven by people who cannot afford newer ones. It's alright people who are reasonably well-off saying their vehicles meet it; it will badly affect many others who are less well-off.
I don't believe my VW Passat (2012) meets the requirement.
Having said all that; it's probably a good idea. But you cannot ignore its negative consequences when talking about the positives.
It’s something that can be useful in dense central London, with a lot of traffic and good public transport - but totally inappropriate in a more rural area with low-density housing and non-existant or unreliable public transport, that describes a lof of the area between the M25 and N/S circular roads.
In particular, including Heathrow just inside the new zone, comes across as being set up to catch out large numbers of occasional visitors.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
And I fear that politicians are often asked questions that they could not really be expected to know answers to, and then get accused of dissembling when they say they don't know, or stumble out a non-answer. If a question is designed to be a trap, the answer should be ignored.
Questions like "what is your favourite biscuit?", "which football team do you support?" and "how much is a loaf of bread?"
I would get crucified if I truthfully answered: "which football team do you support?" My answer would be "None. I think football is a corrupt sport from top to bottom."
And my answer to "how much is a loaf of bread?" would be: I'm lucky enough not to need to care much.
I wouldn't make a good politician...
IIRC David Cameron, as LotO and PM, got a weekly briefing from Andy Coulson that contained, among other things, a list of prices for everyday items journalists ask of politicians - bread, milk, petrol etc. also anything that was attracting tabloid coverage that the broadsheets didn’t cover.
Sadiq Khan is right to fear "Susan", whoever she is. She looks utterly terrifying. "You are safer with Susan" is presumably a threat, not reassurance.
She backed Boris and Brexit, shilled for Trump and hailed the Truss budget. I am not sure you could find someone more out of step with majority opinion in London. It would be an interesting choice, to say the least. But given how the party has hollowed out and moved to the right since 2019, she probably represents what a lot of Tory candidates are going to be like in the coming years.
She will win Havering and Bexley and Harrow, where she led the council in 2013, by a landslide but yes isn't going to have the reach beyond there to the broader London suburbs and West London she needs to have a chance of beating Khan.
She is now surely odds on favourite to be Conservative candidate for Mayor though
Yes, although some have called for CCHQ to reopen the nomination process.
It was absurd London MP Paul Scully and London AM Andrew Boff did not get through the interview stage to get on the approved list of Conservative Mayoral candidates and the final 3 to be put to London Members. Either would have had a better chance than the 3, now 2, that are left of winning.
Korski says he mentioned the alleged incident he has faced with with CCHQ but they let him through
When did Korski mention the incident to CCHQ? How can he have known anything about the allegation before it was made… unless it’s true, which he denies?
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
My wife’s list for me would hit the word limit.
My practical skills or lack of are legendary. Worse still there are a whole host of things I know how to do and can't.
Sadiq Khan is right to fear "Susan", whoever she is. She looks utterly terrifying. "You are safer with Susan" is presumably a threat, not reassurance.
She backed Boris and Brexit, shilled for Trump and hailed the Truss budget. I am not sure you could find someone more out of step with majority opinion in London. It would be an interesting choice, to say the least. But given how the party has hollowed out and moved to the right since 2019, she probably represents what a lot of Tory candidates are going to be like in the coming years.
She will win Havering and Bexley and Harrow, where she led the council in 2013, by a landslide but yes isn't going to have the reach beyond there to the broader London suburbs and West London she needs to have a chance of beating Khan.
She is now surely odds on favourite to be Conservative candidate for Mayor though
Yes, although some have called for CCHQ to reopen the nomination process.
It was absurd London MP Paul Scully and London AM Andrew Boff did not get through the interview stage to get on the approved list of Conservative Mayoral candidates and the final 3 to be put to London Members. Either would have had a better chance than the 3, now 2, that are left of winning.
Korski says he mentioned the alleged incident he has faced with with CCHQ but they let him through
When did Korski mention the incident to CCHQ? How can he have known anything about the allegation before it was made… unless it’s true, which he denies?
'Mr Korski said he had told the Conservative Party about the allegation before putting himself forward for the mayoral candidacy.
He told TalkTV: “During the process, I was asked about if there were any outstanding issues the party may be aware of. And I said to the party, seven years ago, there was a story. I was never named in the story. As far as I know, there was no investigation. But I did mention this to the party.”'
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
Some people think skills are transferable.
Take Jonathan Sumption.
Excellent jurist but terrible on epidemiology.
We have a few on here - Flint knappers who think that makes them experts on geolocating start-ups and pandemic origins.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
My wife’s list for me would hit the word limit.
My practical skills or lack of are legendary. Worse still there are a whole host of things I know how to do and can't.
Einsteins letters to Sidney Hook revealed a man who, on some subjects, was deeply stupid and contemptible.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
But also research funding only provides about 75% of the cost of doing research. The standard government funding pays 80% of the full economic cost, and charity funding pays less. So research-intensive universities need teaching to subsidise the research they do.
You're a scientist, I think?
In the fields I was working in it (notably cultural history) tended to be the other way around. A research grant normally covered about twice the cost of the research project, and it was accepted that was one way of keeping unis afloat.
This was one reason why a lot of senior professors never did any teaching. They were getting the money in to subsidise their colleagues.
But in any case, my answer would be that if teaching is needed to subsidise research, the Russell Group needs to take it a lot more seriously.
Yes, am in science, which of course is where most of the research money is. (Personally, I’d like to see more spent on things like cultural history.) It’s interesting what you say about the grant funding in your context.
And, yes, the Russell Group needs to take teaching more seriously, and I think they are (if perhaps still not enough). But, more generally, as happens often, a system has evolved over time with odd incentives, but no-one wants to address that because it’s difficult and expensive.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
Some people think skills are transferable.
Take Jonathan Sumption.
Excellent jurist but terrible on epidemiology.
Everything he said about the pandemic was 100% right. Lockdowns were a mistake, apart from the first one.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
Some people think skills are transferable.
Take Jonathan Sumption.
Excellent jurist but terrible on epidemiology.
We have a few on here - Flint knappers who think that makes them experts on geolocating start-ups and pandemic origins.
Sadiq Khan is right to fear "Susan", whoever she is. She looks utterly terrifying. "You are safer with Susan" is presumably a threat, not reassurance.
She backed Boris and Brexit, shilled for Trump and hailed the Truss budget. I am not sure you could find someone more out of step with majority opinion in London. It would be an interesting choice, to say the least. But given how the party has hollowed out and moved to the right since 2019, she probably represents what a lot of Tory candidates are going to be like in the coming years.
She will win Havering and Bexley and Harrow, where she led the council in 2013, by a landslide but yes isn't going to have the reach beyond there to the broader London suburbs and West London she needs to have a chance of beating Khan.
She is now surely odds on favourite to be Conservative candidate for Mayor though
Yes, although some have called for CCHQ to reopen the nomination process.
It was absurd London MP Paul Scully and London AM Andrew Boff did not get through the interview stage to get on the approved list of Conservative Mayoral candidates and the final 3 to be put to London Members. Either would have had a better chance than the 3, now 2, that are left of winning.
Korski says he mentioned the alleged incident he has faced with with CCHQ but they let him through
When did Korski mention the incident to CCHQ? How can he have known anything about the allegation before it was made… unless it’s true, which he denies?
The allegation was made without quoting him a few years ago. He may either have put the pieces together with a different interpretation, or been informally told it was about him, or it could have been true.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
Some people think skills are transferable.
Take Jonathan Sumption.
Excellent jurist but terrible on epidemiology.
Everything he said about the pandemic was 100% right. Lockdowns were a mistake, apart from the first one.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
Some people think skills are transferable.
Take Jonathan Sumption.
Excellent jurist but terrible on epidemiology.
Everything he said about the pandemic was 100% right. Lockdowns were a mistake, apart from the first one.
I doubt that. I believe he subscribed to the view in May 2020 that most people in the UK had already had covid and thus we were at herd immunity.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
And I fear that politicians are often asked questions that they could not really be expected to know answers to, and then get accused of dissembling when they say they don't know, or stumble out a non-answer. If a question is designed to be a trap, the answer should be ignored.
Questions like "what is your favourite biscuit?", "which football team do you support?" and "how much is a loaf of bread?"
I would get crucified if I truthfully answered: "which football team do you support?" My answer would be "None. I think football is a corrupt sport from top to bottom."
And my answer to "how much is a loaf of bread?" would be: I'm lucky enough not to need to care much.
I wouldn't make a good politician...
Football is not corrupt from top to bottom. The bottom is where the actual fun and interest lies. Local Sunday leagues, pub teams, women's football at village level. People who pay to play; partners who wash kit and make cucumber sandwiches. Local fork lift truck companies who sponsor. May they always be there.
Sherlock Holmes:
"My ramifications stretch out into many sections of society, but never, I am happy to say, into amateur sport, which is the best and soundest thing in England."
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
Some people think skills are transferable.
Take Jonathan Sumption.
Excellent jurist but terrible on epidemiology.
Everything he said about the pandemic was 100% right. Lockdowns were a mistake, apart from the first one.
A good job there is no priviliges committe on here with posts like that.....
Northern Ireland's water industry was never privatised and still works off government funding. Its miles behind Britain on capacity and environmental and nobody is investing in it. The Republic isnt much better.
I don't know much about NI, but the issue about nationalisation of utilities is that if voters think they are badly run (overpricing, sewage, power cuts, whatever) and attach great importance to it, they can vote out the Government responsible. Nationalisation is by no means a guarantee of good service, but you know whom to blame for poor service and can influence choices of priority by the usual means (writing to MPs etc.). If I want to influence how Thames Water is run, I wouldn't know where to start.
The counter-argument that competition works wonders is clearly true for something like breakfast cereals where competition provides real choice (who needs an official British Rice Krispies?) but nearly always false for natural monopolies (utilities, trains).
Trains aren't a natural monopoly since in the field of transportation you have multiple options you can take. You can drive, get a taxi, get a train or tram if the latter exist, a bus or flight, ride a bike. Really you're only limited by your imagination.
That is part of the reason why train passenger numbers changed dramatically post-privatisation.
The privatisation setup was similar to the old [edit: pre-1947] companies - hardly any competition at all in the trains unless for certain journeys eg Edinburgh-London where you could go on two different routes. Even today there is only limited choice, though obviously LNER is a much better bet than TransPennine for say Edinburgh to Durham.
BR were makign excellent progress in competition from other modes eg car, plane vs new trains Edin-London when privatisation happened, and a lot of the supposed credit for privatisation was actually inherited from BR.s work.
Yes and no. BR was very efficient (yes, really), but it was managing a reducing network. 'Rationalisation' was the buzzword through the 1970s and 1980s, with everything possible being done to reduce running costs, even if it hurt current and future traffic. Examples are dualling of four-track lines, and singling of double-track ones. BR in the 1980s had some excellent managers, partially because the government let them get on with it as long as it was pretty much cost-neutral or the cost-benefits were clear (e.g. electrification schemes).
Privatisation changed the mindset of the management, from one of managed decline to one of expansion. At least for passengers; freight has suffered due to the decline in trainload coal and the DfT's dead hand.
Not just rationalisation, also ruthless cost cutting, including skimping on maintenance. Wasn't it Bob Reid Mk II who referred to 'the crumbling edge of quality?'
The truth is most of the trouble with infrastructure that scuppered Railtrack was deferred from years of state complacency and light usage. That wasn't helped by poor management and an inefficient system but for example, Hatfield and Potters' Bar would have happened anyway.
A good point: just look at all the fatal accidents that occurred whilst the railways were nationalised in the 1970s and 1980s.
But be careful about trying to make a political point about that, as some people soon get onto a "But deaths under nationalisation don't matter!" line...:(
OTOH that ignores the secular trend towards improved safety - planes and cars too do it but they haven't been privatised in the relevant period (apart from BA in 1987, sort of). So some of the credit goes to that.
Hatfield was very specifically linked to breakup of the system and the use of contractors by the privatised railway.
Yes - but the same arguments can be made for many accidents under BR. People don't realise that BR was split many ways: from the different operating sectors (regional before the 1980s, sectors afterwards); the track infrastructure, civil engineering, S&T, property, etc, etc. These different groups often didn't work well together. And in some cases, hated each other as much as the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy.
But that's not the same sort of positively mandated fragmentation demanded by HMG as caused Hatfield. The trend was the other way - for instance, as various areas of operations fell out of use, and as network-wide solutions were introduced.
The initial incompatibilities did of course stem in part from the nature of regional privatisation before 1947, too.
I actually disagree with that; the incompatibilities were much wider than the old grouped Big Four companies, and even pre-existed them - I've read somewhere that the LMS had massive problems keeping their design centres in Derby and Crewe from killing each other.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
But also research funding only provides about 75% of the cost of doing research. The standard government funding pays 80% of the full economic cost, and charity funding pays less. So research-intensive universities need teaching to subsidise the research they do.
You're a scientist, I think?
In the fields I was working in it (notably cultural history) tended to be the other way around. A research grant normally covered about twice the cost of the research project, and it was accepted that was one way of keeping unis afloat.
This was one reason why a lot of senior professors never did any teaching. They were getting the money in to subsidise their colleagues.
But in any case, my answer would be that if teaching is needed to subsidise research, the Russell Group needs to take it a lot more seriously.
Yes, am in science, which of course is where most of the research money is. (Personally, I’d like to see more spent on things like cultural history.) It’s interesting what you say about the grant funding in your context.
And, yes, the Russell Group needs to take teaching more seriously, and I think they are (if perhaps still not enough). But, more generally, as happens often, a system has evolved over time with odd incentives, but no-one wants to address that because it’s difficult and expensive.
Our university finance chiefs claim that we lose money, on average, on home students. The clear conclusion is that we must make teaching as bad as possible to reduce intakes
More seriously, it was an interesting analysis. Only looked at teaching costs versus fees, of course, neglecting income from students being at the university - accommodation, food, entertainment etc.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
And I fear that politicians are often asked questions that they could not really be expected to know answers to, and then get accused of dissembling when they say they don't know, or stumble out a non-answer. If a question is designed to be a trap, the answer should be ignored.
Questions like "what is your favourite biscuit?", "which football team do you support?" and "how much is a loaf of bread?"
I would get crucified if I truthfully answered: "which football team do you support?" My answer would be "None. I think football is a corrupt sport from top to bottom."
And my answer to "how much is a loaf of bread?" would be: I'm lucky enough not to need to care much.
I wouldn't make a good politician...
IIRC David Cameron, as LotO and PM, got a weekly briefing from Andy Coulson that contained, among other things, a list of prices for everyday items journalists ask of politicians - bread, milk, petrol etc. also anything that was attracting tabloid coverage that the broadsheets didn’t cover.
The price of bread, the price of milk, and there is more than one football team that plays in claret and blue. Hence the Cameron derby.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
And I fear that politicians are often asked questions that they could not really be expected to know answers to, and then get accused of dissembling when they say they don't know, or stumble out a non-answer. If a question is designed to be a trap, the answer should be ignored.
Questions like "what is your favourite biscuit?", "which football team do you support?" and "how much is a loaf of bread?"
I would get crucified if I truthfully answered: "which football team do you support?" My answer would be "None. I think football is a corrupt sport from top to bottom."
And my answer to "how much is a loaf of bread?" would be: I'm lucky enough not to need to care much.
I wouldn't make a good politician...
IIRC David Cameron, as LotO and PM, got a weekly briefing from Andy Coulson that contained, among other things, a list of prices for everyday items journalists ask of politicians - bread, milk, petrol etc. also anything that was attracting tabloid coverage that the broadsheets didn’t cover.
There was, early on in Cameron's time as opposition leader, a comic moment when a journalist tried the price of bread thing. Cameron reeled off a bunch of prices for various levels of supermarket bread.
IIRC there was an attempt to spin this against Cameron as "over prepared" and "fake".
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
And I fear that politicians are often asked questions that they could not really be expected to know answers to, and then get accused of dissembling when they say they don't know, or stumble out a non-answer. If a question is designed to be a trap, the answer should be ignored.
Questions like "what is your favourite biscuit?", "which football team do you support?" and "how much is a loaf of bread?"
Are you implying the politicians professing their love of West Ham Villa is not authentic?
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
And I fear that politicians are often asked questions that they could not really be expected to know answers to, and then get accused of dissembling when they say they don't know, or stumble out a non-answer. If a question is designed to be a trap, the answer should be ignored.
Questions like "what is your favourite biscuit?", "which football team do you support?" and "how much is a loaf of bread?"
I would get crucified if I truthfully answered: "which football team do you support?" My answer would be "None. I think football is a corrupt sport from top to bottom."
And my answer to "how much is a loaf of bread?" would be: I'm lucky enough not to need to care much.
I wouldn't make a good politician...
Football is not corrupt from top to bottom. The bottom is where the actual fun and interest lies. Local Sunday leagues, pub teams, women's football at village level. People who pay to play; partners who wash kit and make cucumber sandwiches. Local fork lift truck companies who sponsor. May they always be there.
Sherlock Holmes:
"My ramifications stretch out into many sections of society, but never, I am happy to say, into amateur sport, which is the best and soundest thing in England."
The corruption is where the money is, of course.
The Victorians, who are often castigated for trying to drive money out of sport, did so as a response to corruption.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
True. But in the exception to the rule, I worked with a professor (an oxbridge graduate) whose experiences of students at her alma mater/the college itself were such that she took a pretty dim view of anyone who had gone there. Still very willing to interview if good on paper, but she assumed they'd be tossers. On the interviews I was involved with, she was right.
I academia, I've seen a clear bias towards applicants who have worked with the 'right people' - e.g. "X did PhD/pot-doc under Y, must be pretty good" - but not biased towards institutions as a whole.
Malcolm Gladwell has shown pretty comprehensively that the top students at second tier universities become far more successful academics than mid students at top universities.
As someone that regularly interviews the top graduates from the top universities, it is clear they do have more of the top talent that will succeed from the get-go. But I also think there are a lot more rough diamonds from the next tier down. You just have to sift more to find them and coach them up more.
Sadiq Khan is right to fear "Susan", whoever she is. She looks utterly terrifying. "You are safer with Susan" is presumably a threat, not reassurance.
She backed Boris and Brexit, shilled for Trump and hailed the Truss budget. I am not sure you could find someone more out of step with majority opinion in London. It would be an interesting choice, to say the least. But given how the party has hollowed out and moved to the right since 2019, she probably represents what a lot of Tory candidates are going to be like in the coming years.
She will win Havering and Bexley and Harrow, where she led the council in 2013, by a landslide but yes isn't going to have the reach beyond there to the broader London suburbs and West London she needs to have a chance of beating Khan.
She is now surely odds on favourite to be Conservative candidate for Mayor though
Yes, although some have called for CCHQ to reopen the nomination process.
It was absurd London MP Paul Scully and London AM Andrew Boff did not get through the interview stage to get on the approved list of Conservative Mayoral candidates and the final 3 to be put to London Members. Either would have had a better chance than the 3, now 2, that are left of winning.
Korski says he mentioned the alleged incident he has faced with with CCHQ but they let him through
When did Korski mention the incident to CCHQ? How can he have known anything about the allegation before it was made… unless it’s true, which he denies?
'Mr Korski said he had told the Conservative Party about the allegation before putting himself forward for the mayoral candidacy.
He told TalkTV: “During the process, I was asked about if there were any outstanding issues the party may be aware of. And I said to the party, seven years ago, there was a story. I was never named in the story. As far as I know, there was no investigation. But I did mention this to the party.”'
If Daisy Goodwin told a story about being sexually assaulted and I knew I hadn’t sexually assaulted her, why would I think that story had anything to do with me? I’d be, like, that story sounds a bit like the time I met Daisy Goodwin, but clearly it can’t be. She’s probably just changing some details so as not to identify the wrongdoer.
Thatcher is lauded on here as having transformed Britain for the better after the inertia of the "Post-War Concensus", creating a privatised model to envy the world. Yet some of her keystones like the selling off of public sector housing and the privatisation of utilities are birds that seem to be coming home to roost forty years on.
She applied solutions to the 1980s that enabled Britain to work in that era. But that era has gone and those solutions are now problems and we have to fix them. We don't know how. Boris knew vaguely, but Boris self-destructed. Power will now alternate between Cons and Lab or somebody else until somebody works it out and then they will be in power for a long while
The seeds of those problems were apparent even at the time.
Much discussion at the time of privatisation about the crumbling nature of a lot of the victorian sewer infrastructure, for example.
And certainly the idea that councils would lose most of the proceeds of housing sales was widely condemned at the time.
Indeed.
I remember all the nonsense that only the private sector could fix this ageing infrastructure. Nationalised industries = old. And then water, and other utility investment fell off a cliff in the mid-'nineties.
Northern Ireland's water industry was never privatised and still works off government funding. Its miles behind Britain on capacity and environmental and nobody is investing in it. The Republic isnt much better.
Curious how that is possible considering Scottish water was never privatised, so never nationalised, in the first place?
As I note below, techjnically water supply began as local government usually - for instance Loch Katrine was a Glasgow Corporation scheme. So it did get nationalised eventually!
Technically true I suppose, but stretches the meaning of the phrase beyond how we're using it to refer to a reorganisation from one branch of government to another branch of government as "nationalisation".
Technically my arse, there were different local publicly owned water companies that were turned into a National publicly owned water company, not hard to understand.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
And I fear that politicians are often asked questions that they could not really be expected to know answers to, and then get accused of dissembling when they say they don't know, or stumble out a non-answer. If a question is designed to be a trap, the answer should be ignored.
Questions like "what is your favourite biscuit?", "which football team do you support?" and "how much is a loaf of bread?"
Are you implying the politicians professing their love of West Ham Villa is not authentic?
Anyone else remember the interview with Mandelson, concerning his love and detailed knowledge of football?
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
And I fear that politicians are often asked questions that they could not really be expected to know answers to, and then get accused of dissembling when they say they don't know, or stumble out a non-answer. If a question is designed to be a trap, the answer should be ignored.
Questions like "what is your favourite biscuit?", "which football team do you support?" and "how much is a loaf of bread?"
I would get crucified if I truthfully answered: "which football team do you support?" My answer would be "None. I think football is a corrupt sport from top to bottom."
And my answer to "how much is a loaf of bread?" would be: I'm lucky enough not to need to care much.
I wouldn't make a good politician...
IIRC David Cameron, as LotO and PM, got a weekly briefing from Andy Coulson that contained, among other things, a list of prices for everyday items journalists ask of politicians - bread, milk, petrol etc. also anything that was attracting tabloid coverage that the broadsheets didn’t cover.
I wouldn't have a clue on any of those by several 100 percent. I would be crucified. One of many reasons I have never gone into frontline politics.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
But also research funding only provides about 75% of the cost of doing research. The standard government funding pays 80% of the full economic cost, and charity funding pays less. So research-intensive universities need teaching to subsidise the research they do.
You're a scientist, I think?
In the fields I was working in it (notably cultural history) tended to be the other way around. A research grant normally covered about twice the cost of the research project, and it was accepted that was one way of keeping unis afloat.
This was one reason why a lot of senior professors never did any teaching. They were getting the money in to subsidise their colleagues.
But in any case, my answer would be that if teaching is needed to subsidise research, the Russell Group needs to take it a lot more seriously.
Yes, am in science, which of course is where most of the research money is. (Personally, I’d like to see more spent on things like cultural history.) It’s interesting what you say about the grant funding in your context.
And, yes, the Russell Group needs to take teaching more seriously, and I think they are (if perhaps still not enough). But, more generally, as happens often, a system has evolved over time with odd incentives, but no-one wants to address that because it’s difficult and expensive.
Our university finance chiefs claim that we lose money, on average, on home students. The clear conclusion is that we must make teaching as bad as possible to reduce intakes
More seriously, it was an interesting analysis. Only looked at teaching costs versus fees, of course, neglecting income from students being at the university - accommodation, food, entertainment etc.
When I joined Bath in 2005 our course had around 20% overseas students, at a time when the differential was much greater in how much they brought in. We were, at the time, the golden department.
Later government changed the rules for overseas pharmacists working (effectively they were priced out of doing the essential pre-registration year as they were not paid enough) and our overseas numbers crashed.
Did the centre recall the golden days? We were insulated from the wrath of the VC as the department income plummeted? No - we were not. Despite many years of surplus, as soon as things turned south we came under existential threat (closure).
One new poll out today, showing a distinct narrowing here in Spain. A PP/VOX majority on a knife edge if this is part of a trend.
Most of the polls have been predicting ever since the election was called that PP/VOX would only win a slim majority, so that wouldn't be a change.
Yes but this poll shows a definite narrowing of the lead compared to their previous one. If others follow suit then a right wing majority could be off the table.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
And I fear that politicians are often asked questions that they could not really be expected to know answers to, and then get accused of dissembling when they say they don't know, or stumble out a non-answer. If a question is designed to be a trap, the answer should be ignored.
Questions like "what is your favourite biscuit?", "which football team do you support?" and "how much is a loaf of bread?"
Are you implying the politicians professing their love of West Ham Villa is not authentic?
Anyone else remember the interview with Mandelson, concerning his love and detailed knowledge of football?
Does he support Plymouth, given their guacamole coloured kit?
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
And I fear that politicians are often asked questions that they could not really be expected to know answers to, and then get accused of dissembling when they say they don't know, or stumble out a non-answer. If a question is designed to be a trap, the answer should be ignored.
Questions like "what is your favourite biscuit?", "which football team do you support?" and "how much is a loaf of bread?"
Are you implying the politicians professing their love of West Ham Villa is not authentic?
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
And I fear that politicians are often asked questions that they could not really be expected to know answers to, and then get accused of dissembling when they say they don't know, or stumble out a non-answer. If a question is designed to be a trap, the answer should be ignored.
Questions like "what is your favourite biscuit?", "which football team do you support?" and "how much is a loaf of bread?"
I would get crucified if I truthfully answered: "which football team do you support?" My answer would be "None. I think football is a corrupt sport from top to bottom."
And my answer to "how much is a loaf of bread?" would be: I'm lucky enough not to need to care much.
I wouldn't make a good politician...
IIRC David Cameron, as LotO and PM, got a weekly briefing from Andy Coulson that contained, among other things, a list of prices for everyday items journalists ask of politicians - bread, milk, petrol etc. also anything that was attracting tabloid coverage that the broadsheets didn’t cover.
There was, early on in Cameron's time as opposition leader, a comic moment when a journalist tried the price of bread thing. Cameron reeled off a bunch of prices for various levels of supermarket bread.
IIRC there was an attempt to spin this against Cameron as "over prepared" and "fake".
Someone nicked his bike while he was busy doing his homework:
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
And I fear that politicians are often asked questions that they could not really be expected to know answers to, and then get accused of dissembling when they say they don't know, or stumble out a non-answer. If a question is designed to be a trap, the answer should be ignored.
Questions like "what is your favourite biscuit?", "which football team do you support?" and "how much is a loaf of bread?"
I would get crucified if I truthfully answered: "which football team do you support?" My answer would be "None. I think football is a corrupt sport from top to bottom."
And my answer to "how much is a loaf of bread?" would be: I'm lucky enough not to need to care much.
I wouldn't make a good politician...
IIRC David Cameron, as LotO and PM, got a weekly briefing from Andy Coulson that contained, among other things, a list of prices for everyday items journalists ask of politicians - bread, milk, petrol etc. also anything that was attracting tabloid coverage that the broadsheets didn’t cover.
I wouldn't have a clue on any of those by several 100 percent. I would be crucified. One of many reasons I have never gone into frontline politics.
Sadiq Khan is right to fear "Susan", whoever she is. She looks utterly terrifying. "You are safer with Susan" is presumably a threat, not reassurance.
She backed Boris and Brexit, shilled for Trump and hailed the Truss budget. I am not sure you could find someone more out of step with majority opinion in London. It would be an interesting choice, to say the least. But given how the party has hollowed out and moved to the right since 2019, she probably represents what a lot of Tory candidates are going to be like in the coming years.
She will win Havering and Bexley and Harrow, where she led the council in 2013, by a landslide but yes isn't going to have the reach beyond there to the broader London suburbs and West London she needs to have a chance of beating Khan.
She is now surely odds on favourite to be Conservative candidate for Mayor though
Yes, although some have called for CCHQ to reopen the nomination process.
It was absurd London MP Paul Scully and London AM Andrew Boff did not get through the interview stage to get on the approved list of Conservative Mayoral candidates and the final 3 to be put to London Members. Either would have had a better chance than the 3, now 2, that are left of winning.
Korski says he mentioned the alleged incident he has faced with with CCHQ but they let him through
When did Korski mention the incident to CCHQ? How can he have known anything about the allegation before it was made… unless it’s true, which he denies?
'Mr Korski said he had told the Conservative Party about the allegation before putting himself forward for the mayoral candidacy.
He told TalkTV: “During the process, I was asked about if there were any outstanding issues the party may be aware of. And I said to the party, seven years ago, there was a story. I was never named in the story. As far as I know, there was no investigation. But I did mention this to the party.”'
If Daisy Goodwin told a story about being sexually assaulted and I knew I hadn’t sexually assaulted her, why would I think that story had anything to do with me? I’d be, like, that story sounds a bit like the time I met Daisy Goodwin, but clearly it can’t be. She’s probably just changing some details so as not to identify the wrongdoer.
As posted yesterday, Korski had a “reputation”. Widely known.
Sadiq Khan is right to fear "Susan", whoever she is. She looks utterly terrifying. "You are safer with Susan" is presumably a threat, not reassurance.
She backed Boris and Brexit, shilled for Trump and hailed the Truss budget. I am not sure you could find someone more out of step with majority opinion in London. It would be an interesting choice, to say the least. But given how the party has hollowed out and moved to the right since 2019, she probably represents what a lot of Tory candidates are going to be like in the coming years.
She will win Havering and Bexley and Harrow, where she led the council in 2013, by a landslide but yes isn't going to have the reach beyond there to the broader London suburbs and West London she needs to have a chance of beating Khan.
She is now surely odds on favourite to be Conservative candidate for Mayor though
Yes, although some have called for CCHQ to reopen the nomination process.
It was absurd London MP Paul Scully and London AM Andrew Boff did not get through the interview stage to get on the approved list of Conservative Mayoral candidates and the final 3 to be put to London Members. Either would have had a better chance than the 3, now 2, that are left of winning.
Korski says he mentioned the alleged incident he has faced with with CCHQ but they let him through
When did Korski mention the incident to CCHQ? How can he have known anything about the allegation before it was made… unless it’s true, which he denies?
'Mr Korski said he had told the Conservative Party about the allegation before putting himself forward for the mayoral candidacy.
He told TalkTV: “During the process, I was asked about if there were any outstanding issues the party may be aware of. And I said to the party, seven years ago, there was a story. I was never named in the story. As far as I know, there was no investigation. But I did mention this to the party.”'
If Daisy Goodwin told a story about being sexually assaulted and I knew I hadn’t sexually assaulted her, why would I think that story had anything to do with me? I’d be, like, that story sounds a bit like the time I met Daisy Goodwin, but clearly it can’t be. She’s probably just changing some details so as not to identify the wrongdoer.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
And I fear that politicians are often asked questions that they could not really be expected to know answers to, and then get accused of dissembling when they say they don't know, or stumble out a non-answer. If a question is designed to be a trap, the answer should be ignored.
Questions like "what is your favourite biscuit?", "which football team do you support?" and "how much is a loaf of bread?"
I would get crucified if I truthfully answered: "which football team do you support?" My answer would be "None. I think football is a corrupt sport from top to bottom."
And my answer to "how much is a loaf of bread?" would be: I'm lucky enough not to need to care much.
I wouldn't make a good politician...
IIRC David Cameron, as LotO and PM, got a weekly briefing from Andy Coulson that contained, among other things, a list of prices for everyday items journalists ask of politicians - bread, milk, petrol etc. also anything that was attracting tabloid coverage that the broadsheets didn’t cover.
There was, early on in Cameron's time as opposition leader, a comic moment when a journalist tried the price of bread thing. Cameron reeled off a bunch of prices for various levels of supermarket bread.
IIRC there was an attempt to spin this against Cameron as "over prepared" and "fake".
There was good reason he hired Coulson, and stood by him for longer than he probably should have.
Sunak badly needs a Coulson right now, someone who really understands average people. The difference is that Cameron was much more self-aware of his privilege.
'........A year ago we had the second best army in the world...'
'....... then the second best army in Ukraine....'
'........and now the second best army in Russia .....'
To be fair, they had the third best army in Ukraine.
Which will be, when Wagner Group departs, the second best army in Ukraine.
Some of the Vatniks claim that Wagner soldiers being forced into the Russian army will improve the effectiveness of the Russian army. I am unconvinced. Apparently one of the major reasons that Wagner did well was that their command structure was different from the Russian army, with the junior officers (not the prisoner cannon-fodder) having a much more western-style ability to react to events directly. Unless the Russian army changes to a more western style, those junior officers will lose their ability to use their initiative, and will hate the experience.
Northern Ireland's water industry was never privatised and still works off government funding. Its miles behind Britain on capacity and environmental and nobody is investing in it. The Republic isnt much better.
I don't know much about NI, but the issue about nationalisation of utilities is that if voters think they are badly run (overpricing, sewage, power cuts, whatever) and attach great importance to it, they can vote out the Government responsible. Nationalisation is by no means a guarantee of good service, but you know whom to blame for poor service and can influence choices of priority by the usual means (writing to MPs etc.). If I want to influence how Thames Water is run, I wouldn't know where to start.
The counter-argument that competition works wonders is clearly true for something like breakfast cereals where competition provides real choice (who needs an official British Rice Krispies?) but nearly always false for natural monopolies (utilities, trains).
Trains aren't a natural monopoly since in the field of transportation you have multiple options you can take. You can drive, get a taxi, get a train or tram if the latter exist, a bus or flight, ride a bike. Really you're only limited by your imagination.
That is part of the reason why train passenger numbers changed dramatically post-privatisation.
The privatisation setup was similar to the old [edit: pre-1947] companies - hardly any competition at all in the trains unless for certain journeys eg Edinburgh-London where you could go on two different routes. Even today there is only limited choice, though obviously LNER is a much better bet than TransPennine for say Edinburgh to Durham.
BR were makign excellent progress in competition from other modes eg car, plane vs new trains Edin-London when privatisation happened, and a lot of the supposed credit for privatisation was actually inherited from BR.s work.
Yes and no. BR was very efficient (yes, really), but it was managing a reducing network. 'Rationalisation' was the buzzword through the 1970s and 1980s, with everything possible being done to reduce running costs, even if it hurt current and future traffic. Examples are dualling of four-track lines, and singling of double-track ones. BR in the 1980s had some excellent managers, partially because the government let them get on with it as long as it was pretty much cost-neutral or the cost-benefits were clear (e.g. electrification schemes).
Privatisation changed the mindset of the management, from one of managed decline to one of expansion. At least for passengers; freight has suffered due to the decline in trainload coal and the DfT's dead hand.
Not just rationalisation, also ruthless cost cutting, including skimping on maintenance. Wasn't it Bob Reid Mk II who referred to 'the crumbling edge of quality?'
The truth is most of the trouble with infrastructure that scuppered Railtrack was deferred from years of state complacency and light usage. That wasn't helped by poor management and an inefficient system but for example, Hatfield and Potters' Bar would have happened anyway.
A good point: just look at all the fatal accidents that occurred whilst the railways were nationalised in the 1970s and 1980s.
But be careful about trying to make a political point about that, as some people soon get onto a "But deaths under nationalisation don't matter!" line...:(
OTOH that ignores the secular trend towards improved safety - planes and cars too do it but they haven't been privatised in the relevant period (apart from BA in 1987, sort of). So some of the credit goes to that.
Hatfield was very specifically linked to breakup of the system and the use of contractors by the privatised railway.
Yes - but the same arguments can be made for many accidents under BR. People don't realise that BR was split many ways: from the different operating sectors (regional before the 1980s, sectors afterwards); the track infrastructure, civil engineering, S&T, property, etc, etc. These different groups often didn't work well together. And in some cases, hated each other as much as the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy.
But that's not the same sort of positively mandated fragmentation demanded by HMG as caused Hatfield. The trend was the other way - for instance, as various areas of operations fell out of use, and as network-wide solutions were introduced.
The initial incompatibilities did of course stem in part from the nature of regional privatisation before 1947, too.
I actually disagree with that; the incompatibilities were much wider than the old grouped Big Four companies, and even pre-existed them - I've read somewhere that the LMS had massive problems keeping their design centres in Derby and Crewe from killing each other.
But those were also privatisation issues arising from the primary laisser-faire policy of UKGs passim, hence the different safety equipment, loading and track gauges ... LMS did make progress in uniform desigh under Stanier and BR followed on with that - the Classes such as the 5 and 9F. Not going the other direction.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
And I fear that politicians are often asked questions that they could not really be expected to know answers to, and then get accused of dissembling when they say they don't know, or stumble out a non-answer. If a question is designed to be a trap, the answer should be ignored.
Questions like "what is your favourite biscuit?", "which football team do you support?" and "how much is a loaf of bread?"
"Do you pray together?" was my favourite. Blair didn't have a clue how to deal with it.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
And I fear that politicians are often asked questions that they could not really be expected to know answers to, and then get accused of dissembling when they say they don't know, or stumble out a non-answer. If a question is designed to be a trap, the answer should be ignored.
Questions like "what is your favourite biscuit?", "which football team do you support?" and "how much is a loaf of bread?"
Are you implying the politicians professing their love of West Ham Villa is not authentic?
Anyone else remember the interview with Mandelson, concerning his love and detailed knowledge of football?
Does he support Plymouth, given their guacamole coloured kit?
The guacamole thing was always a myth. It was an American intern of his who actually said it.
This is the problem with "fact checking" websites, is that some of the "facts" are very much disputable.
On claim one, the "underlying cause" from death certificates was for a long time significantly higher than the excess deaths. Not sure if that's still the case or not, but its certainly debatable if someone on death's door in a care home for instance who gets covid and dies died from covid, with covid or would have died either way.
On claim two the argument for the decade is based upon an analysis based on age and sex of those who died, but that is simplistic. We know for instance that a very significant proportion of deaths occurred for instance from care homes. A random 80 year old male might have a life expectancy of another decade, but an 80 year old male in a care home does not. By its very nature, care homes get the sickest and least able to survive of the population and mean life expectancy upon entering a care home is on average less than 12 months.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
And I fear that politicians are often asked questions that they could not really be expected to know answers to, and then get accused of dissembling when they say they don't know, or stumble out a non-answer. If a question is designed to be a trap, the answer should be ignored.
Questions like "what is your favourite biscuit?", "which football team do you support?" and "how much is a loaf of bread?"
Are you implying the politicians professing their love of West Ham Villa is not authentic?
Well the Tories have certainly spent seemingly forever blowing the asset bubble?
"Pumping water out of the ground for drinking and farming redistributed such a large mass that the Earth’s tilt moved by 31.5 inches to the east, toward Iceland, between 1993 and 2010."
'toward Iceland'? What the hell does that mean - is Iceland defined as the East Pole or something? I haven't looked up the paper (which sounds interesting) but I suspect this must be Telegraphese! I mean, there's the whole issue with 'tilting to the East' where east and west are only defined on the rotating body and depend even there on point of reference, but the Iceland thing is something else. Surely 'the axis has moved away from the poles' (while itselft also problematic as that only refers to where the axis crosses the surface) would be simple enough and better?
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
But also research funding only provides about 75% of the cost of doing research. The standard government funding pays 80% of the full economic cost, and charity funding pays less. So research-intensive universities need teaching to subsidise the research they do.
You're a scientist, I think?
In the fields I was working in it (notably cultural history) tended to be the other way around. A research grant normally covered about twice the cost of the research project, and it was accepted that was one way of keeping unis afloat.
This was one reason why a lot of senior professors never did any teaching. They were getting the money in to subsidise their colleagues.
But in any case, my answer would be that if teaching is needed to subsidise research, the Russell Group needs to take it a lot more seriously.
Yes, am in science, which of course is where most of the research money is. (Personally, I’d like to see more spent on things like cultural history.) It’s interesting what you say about the grant funding in your context.
And, yes, the Russell Group needs to take teaching more seriously, and I think they are (if perhaps still not enough). But, more generally, as happens often, a system has evolved over time with odd incentives, but no-one wants to address that because it’s difficult and expensive.
Our university finance chiefs claim that we lose money, on average, on home students. The clear conclusion is that we must make teaching as bad as possible to reduce intakes
More seriously, it was an interesting analysis. Only looked at teaching costs versus fees, of course, neglecting income from students being at the university - accommodation, food, entertainment etc.
I was looking at some HEFCE figures from a few years ago. The return for home student teaching (averaged over the whole sector and all courses) was 102%, so breaking even with a tiny profit… but the situation has probably worsened since then. Research was 75%, so a big loss on research activity. Overseas students was 139% IIRC — that’s subsidising everything else. “Other” activities (which includes consultancy for industry) was also producing some profit.
This is the problem with "fact checking" websites, is that some of the "facts" are very much disputable.
On claim one, the "underlying cause" from death certificates was for a long time significantly higher than the excess deaths. Not sure if that's still the case or not, but its certainly debatable if someone on death's door in a care home for instance who gets covid and dies died from covid, with covid or would have died either way.
On claim two the argument for the decade is based upon an analysis based on age and sex of those who died, but that is simplistic. We know for instance that a very significant proportion of deaths occurred for instance from care homes. A random 80 year old male might have a life expectancy of another decade, but an 80 year old male in a care home does not. By its very nature, care homes get the sickest and least able to survive of the population and mean life expectancy upon entering a care home is on average less than 12 months.
We all die eventually. An elderly, frail person contracting covid in a care home and dying is still a person dying of covid. Thats how most diseases like this kill - they take the elderly and infirm. The mortality vs age charts for flu are similar in shape to covid (no surprise), but flu is generally less severe, so that for every age you are less likely to die. Widespread vaccination has changed the odds for covid, but it will still skew heavily to the elderly and infirm as those who are most likely to die.
Northern Ireland's water industry was never privatised and still works off government funding. Its miles behind Britain on capacity and environmental and nobody is investing in it. The Republic isnt much better.
I don't know much about NI, but the issue about nationalisation of utilities is that if voters think they are badly run (overpricing, sewage, power cuts, whatever) and attach great importance to it, they can vote out the Government responsible. Nationalisation is by no means a guarantee of good service, but you know whom to blame for poor service and can influence choices of priority by the usual means (writing to MPs etc.). If I want to influence how Thames Water is run, I wouldn't know where to start.
The counter-argument that competition works wonders is clearly true for something like breakfast cereals where competition provides real choice (who needs an official British Rice Krispies?) but nearly always false for natural monopolies (utilities, trains).
Trains aren't a natural monopoly since in the field of transportation you have multiple options you can take. You can drive, get a taxi, get a train or tram if the latter exist, a bus or flight, ride a bike. Really you're only limited by your imagination.
That is part of the reason why train passenger numbers changed dramatically post-privatisation.
The privatisation setup was similar to the old [edit: pre-1947] companies - hardly any competition at all in the trains unless for certain journeys eg Edinburgh-London where you could go on two different routes. Even today there is only limited choice, though obviously LNER is a much better bet than TransPennine for say Edinburgh to Durham.
BR were makign excellent progress in competition from other modes eg car, plane vs new trains Edin-London when privatisation happened, and a lot of the supposed credit for privatisation was actually inherited from BR.s work.
Yes and no. BR was very efficient (yes, really), but it was managing a reducing network. 'Rationalisation' was the buzzword through the 1970s and 1980s, with everything possible being done to reduce running costs, even if it hurt current and future traffic. Examples are dualling of four-track lines, and singling of double-track ones. BR in the 1980s had some excellent managers, partially because the government let them get on with it as long as it was pretty much cost-neutral or the cost-benefits were clear (e.g. electrification schemes).
Privatisation changed the mindset of the management, from one of managed decline to one of expansion. At least for passengers; freight has suffered due to the decline in trainload coal and the DfT's dead hand.
Not just rationalisation, also ruthless cost cutting, including skimping on maintenance. Wasn't it Bob Reid Mk II who referred to 'the crumbling edge of quality?'
The truth is most of the trouble with infrastructure that scuppered Railtrack was deferred from years of state complacency and light usage. That wasn't helped by poor management and an inefficient system but for example, Hatfield and Potters' Bar would have happened anyway.
A good point: just look at all the fatal accidents that occurred whilst the railways were nationalised in the 1970s and 1980s.
But be careful about trying to make a political point about that, as some people soon get onto a "But deaths under nationalisation don't matter!" line...:(
OTOH that ignores the secular trend towards improved safety - planes and cars too do it but they haven't been privatised in the relevant period (apart from BA in 1987, sort of). So some of the credit goes to that.
Hatfield was very specifically linked to breakup of the system and the use of contractors by the privatised railway.
Yes - but the same arguments can be made for many accidents under BR. People don't realise that BR was split many ways: from the different operating sectors (regional before the 1980s, sectors afterwards); the track infrastructure, civil engineering, S&T, property, etc, etc. These different groups often didn't work well together. And in some cases, hated each other as much as the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy.
But that's not the same sort of positively mandated fragmentation demanded by HMG as caused Hatfield. The trend was the other way - for instance, as various areas of operations fell out of use, and as network-wide solutions were introduced.
The initial incompatibilities did of course stem in part from the nature of regional privatisation before 1947, too.
I actually disagree with that; the incompatibilities were much wider than the old grouped Big Four companies, and even pre-existed them - I've read somewhere that the LMS had massive problems keeping their design centres in Derby and Crewe from killing each other.
But those were also privatisation issues arising from the primary laisser-faire policy of UKGs passim, hence the different safety equipment, loading and track gauges ... LMS did make progress in uniform desigh under Stanier and BR followed on with that - the Classes such as the 5 and 9F. Not going the other direction.
IANAE, but IMV the uniform design was not BR's doing - it was the war. The various 'austerity' classes developed in the 1940s broke down a load of the Big Four's conservatism, and showed that cheaper, easier-to-maintain locomotives could be effective. They were heading that way anyway.
Sadiq Khan is right to fear "Susan", whoever she is. She looks utterly terrifying. "You are safer with Susan" is presumably a threat, not reassurance.
She backed Boris and Brexit, shilled for Trump and hailed the Truss budget. I am not sure you could find someone more out of step with majority opinion in London. It would be an interesting choice, to say the least. But given how the party has hollowed out and moved to the right since 2019, she probably represents what a lot of Tory candidates are going to be like in the coming years.
She will win Havering and Bexley and Harrow, where she led the council in 2013, by a landslide but yes isn't going to have the reach beyond there to the broader London suburbs and West London she needs to have a chance of beating Khan.
She is now surely odds on favourite to be Conservative candidate for Mayor though
Yes, although some have called for CCHQ to reopen the nomination process.
It was absurd London MP Paul Scully and London AM Andrew Boff did not get through the interview stage to get on the approved list of Conservative Mayoral candidates and the final 3 to be put to London Members. Either would have had a better chance than the 3, now 2, that are left of winning.
Korski says he mentioned the alleged incident he has faced with with CCHQ but they let him through
When did Korski mention the incident to CCHQ? How can he have known anything about the allegation before it was made… unless it’s true, which he denies?
'Mr Korski said he had told the Conservative Party about the allegation before putting himself forward for the mayoral candidacy.
He told TalkTV: “During the process, I was asked about if there were any outstanding issues the party may be aware of. And I said to the party, seven years ago, there was a story. I was never named in the story. As far as I know, there was no investigation. But I did mention this to the party.”'
If Daisy Goodwin told a story about being sexually assaulted and I knew I hadn’t sexually assaulted her, why would I think that story had anything to do with me? I’d be, like, that story sounds a bit like the time I met Daisy Goodwin, but clearly it can’t be. She’s probably just changing some details so as not to identify the wrongdoer.
As posted yesterday, Korski had a “reputation”. Widely known.
CCHQs entire choice of candidates for the London Mayoral election is a WTF decision..
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
But also research funding only provides about 75% of the cost of doing research. The standard government funding pays 80% of the full economic cost, and charity funding pays less. So research-intensive universities need teaching to subsidise the research they do.
You're a scientist, I think?
In the fields I was working in it (notably cultural history) tended to be the other way around. A research grant normally covered about twice the cost of the research project, and it was accepted that was one way of keeping unis afloat.
This was one reason why a lot of senior professors never did any teaching. They were getting the money in to subsidise their colleagues.
But in any case, my answer would be that if teaching is needed to subsidise research, the Russell Group needs to take it a lot more seriously.
Yes, am in science, which of course is where most of the research money is. (Personally, I’d like to see more spent on things like cultural history.) It’s interesting what you say about the grant funding in your context.
And, yes, the Russell Group needs to take teaching more seriously, and I think they are (if perhaps still not enough). But, more generally, as happens often, a system has evolved over time with odd incentives, but no-one wants to address that because it’s difficult and expensive.
Our university finance chiefs claim that we lose money, on average, on home students. The clear conclusion is that we must make teaching as bad as possible to reduce intakes
More seriously, it was an interesting analysis. Only looked at teaching costs versus fees, of course, neglecting income from students being at the university - accommodation, food, entertainment etc.
When I joined Bath in 2005 our course had around 20% overseas students, at a time when the differential was much greater in how much they brought in. We were, at the time, the golden department.
Later government changed the rules for overseas pharmacists working (effectively they were priced out of doing the essential pre-registration year as they were not paid enough) and our overseas numbers crashed.
Did the centre recall the golden days? We were insulated from the wrath of the VC as the department income plummeted? No - we were not. Despite many years of surplus, as soon as things turned south we came under existential threat (closure).
Uni's can be utterly ruthless.
I recently needed to speak to someone at a university so called and pressed the relevant buttons on the automated system to speak to whom I needed to talk to - and the number then just rang and rang without answer.
After a few days of this I tried a different tack. Tried again, pressed the button to speak to admissions, pressed the button to speak to international admissions and lo and behold the phone was answered immediately.
Unsurprisingly they were unable to help with my query, but were able to get the person I needed to talk to on the line immediately.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
And I fear that politicians are often asked questions that they could not really be expected to know answers to, and then get accused of dissembling when they say they don't know, or stumble out a non-answer. If a question is designed to be a trap, the answer should be ignored.
Questions like "what is your favourite biscuit?", "which football team do you support?" and "how much is a loaf of bread?"
I would get crucified if I truthfully answered: "which football team do you support?" My answer would be "None. I think football is a corrupt sport from top to bottom."
And my answer to "how much is a loaf of bread?" would be: I'm lucky enough not to need to care much.
I wouldn't make a good politician...
IIRC David Cameron, as LotO and PM, got a weekly briefing from Andy Coulson that contained, among other things, a list of prices for everyday items journalists ask of politicians - bread, milk, petrol etc. also anything that was attracting tabloid coverage that the broadsheets didn’t cover.
There was, early on in Cameron's time as opposition leader, a comic moment when a journalist tried the price of bread thing. Cameron reeled off a bunch of prices for various levels of supermarket bread.
IIRC there was an attempt to spin this against Cameron as "over prepared" and "fake".
There was good reason he hired Coulson, and stood by him for longer than he probably should have.
Sunak badly needs a Coulson right now, someone who really understands average people. The difference is that Cameron was much more self-aware of his privilege.
Problem for Sunak in the focus groups is his Green card and his non dom wife.
It’s a bit citizens of nowhere.
Labour won’t attack him on it so the Tories cannot defend him.
Labour realise how bad it would look calling a brown dude a citizen of nowhere.
"Pumping water out of the ground for drinking and farming redistributed such a large mass that the Earth’s tilt moved by 31.5 inches to the east, toward Iceland, between 1993 and 2010."
'toward Iceland'? What the hell does that mean - is Iceland defined as the East Pole or something? I haven't looked up the paper (which sounds interesting) but I suspect this must be Telegraphese! I mean, there's the whole issue with 'tilting to the East' where east and west are only defined on the rotating body and depend even there on point of reference, but the Iceland thing is something else. Surely 'the axis has moved away from the poles' (while itselft also problematic as that only refers to where the axis crosses the surface) would be simple enough and better?
I'd question this somewhat - how on earth can such a degree of accuracy be determined? Thats less than a yard.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
I work at a top 100 law firm with a 2.2 and no A* grades at A-Level.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
But also research funding only provides about 75% of the cost of doing research. The standard government funding pays 80% of the full economic cost, and charity funding pays less. So research-intensive universities need teaching to subsidise the research they do.
You're a scientist, I think?
In the fields I was working in it (notably cultural history) tended to be the other way around. A research grant normally covered about twice the cost of the research project, and it was accepted that was one way of keeping unis afloat.
This was one reason why a lot of senior professors never did any teaching. They were getting the money in to subsidise their colleagues.
But in any case, my answer would be that if teaching is needed to subsidise research, the Russell Group needs to take it a lot more seriously.
Yes, am in science, which of course is where most of the research money is. (Personally, I’d like to see more spent on things like cultural history.) It’s interesting what you say about the grant funding in your context.
And, yes, the Russell Group needs to take teaching more seriously, and I think they are (if perhaps still not enough). But, more generally, as happens often, a system has evolved over time with odd incentives, but no-one wants to address that because it’s difficult and expensive.
Our university finance chiefs claim that we lose money, on average, on home students. The clear conclusion is that we must make teaching as bad as possible to reduce intakes
More seriously, it was an interesting analysis. Only looked at teaching costs versus fees, of course, neglecting income from students being at the university - accommodation, food, entertainment etc.
When I joined Bath in 2005 our course had around 20% overseas students, at a time when the differential was much greater in how much they brought in. We were, at the time, the golden department.
Later government changed the rules for overseas pharmacists working (effectively they were priced out of doing the essential pre-registration year as they were not paid enough) and our overseas numbers crashed.
Did the centre recall the golden days? We were insulated from the wrath of the VC as the department income plummeted? No - we were not. Despite many years of surplus, as soon as things turned south we came under existential threat (closure).
Uni's can be utterly ruthless.
I recently needed to speak to someone at a university so called and pressed the relevant buttons on the automated system to speak to whom I needed to talk to - and the number then just rang and rang without answer.
After a few days of this I tried a different tack. Tried again, pressed the button to speak to admissions, pressed the button to speak to international admissions and lo and behold the phone was answered immediately.
Unsurprisingly they were unable to help with my query, but were able to get the person I needed to talk to on the line immediately.
Like many other industries the pandemic induced WFH culture has infested Uni's. Its probably mostly a good thing, but I'd argue too often support staff are WFH, and hard to reach. The ability to put the washing out while still at work is great, but not so good when Mr Roberts is calling with an admissions query.
Last week I had to visit our placements team with a query. An office with 5 desks was occupied by just one member of staff, and the one I needed was WFH and not replying to my emails (which were urgent).
That said, email to such services usually generates a better response as it starts a 'ticket' - an audited trail.
This is the problem with "fact checking" websites, is that some of the "facts" are very much disputable.
On claim one, the "underlying cause" from death certificates was for a long time significantly higher than the excess deaths. Not sure if that's still the case or not, but its certainly debatable if someone on death's door in a care home for instance who gets covid and dies died from covid, with covid or would have died either way.
On claim two the argument for the decade is based upon an analysis based on age and sex of those who died, but that is simplistic. We know for instance that a very significant proportion of deaths occurred for instance from care homes. A random 80 year old male might have a life expectancy of another decade, but an 80 year old male in a care home does not. By its very nature, care homes get the sickest and least able to survive of the population and mean life expectancy upon entering a care home is on average less than 12 months.
We all die eventually. An elderly, frail person contracting covid in a care home and dying is still a person dying of covid. Thats how most diseases like this kill - they take the elderly and infirm. The mortality vs age charts for flu are similar in shape to covid (no surprise), but flu is generally less severe, so that for every age you are less likely to die. Widespread vaccination has changed the odds for covid, but it will still skew heavily to the elderly and infirm as those who are most likely to die.
Indeed, they are still a person dying of covid, but that doesn't mean they had a decade of life remaining had they not died from covid.
There is a world of difference between the life expectancy of a fit and healthy 80 year old living at home, and a frail and vulnerable 80 year old with dementia in a nursing home.
Yes either way its a death, but as you say it is taking the infirm but the statistical analysis based on age that found the decade claim is not controlling for this.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
True. But in the exception to the rule, I worked with a professor (an oxbridge graduate) whose experiences of students at her alma mater/the college itself were such that she took a pretty dim view of anyone who had gone there. Still very willing to interview if good on paper, but she assumed they'd be tossers. On the interviews I was involved with, she was right.
I academia, I've seen a clear bias towards applicants who have worked with the 'right people' - e.g. "X did PhD/pot-doc under Y, must be pretty good" - but not biased towards institutions as a whole.
In postgraduate medical training we don't look at or score where they trained, so Lincoln medical school counts the same as Oxford or Imperial. In our national appointments process we are rarely appointing for our own region.
At Consultant level we are much more interested in their postgraduate experience and aptitude, so once again doesn't matter.
The national appointments system has its flaws, but the process is pretty effective at snuffing out prejudice, snobbery and patronage. Quite different to my day 3 decades ago when these were key to medical careers.
"Pumping water out of the ground for drinking and farming redistributed such a large mass that the Earth’s tilt moved by 31.5 inches to the east, toward Iceland, between 1993 and 2010."
'toward Iceland'? What the hell does that mean - is Iceland defined as the East Pole or something? I haven't looked up the paper (which sounds interesting) but I suspect this must be Telegraphese! I mean, there's the whole issue with 'tilting to the East' where east and west are only defined on the rotating body and depend even there on point of reference, but the Iceland thing is something else. Surely 'the axis has moved away from the poles' (while itselft also problematic as that only refers to where the axis crosses the surface) would be simple enough and better?
I'd question this somewhat - how on earth can such a degree of accuracy be determined? Thats less than a yard.
Physics, dear boy. Anyway, might not have been 'on earth', could have used space based measurements
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
Some people think skills are transferable.
Take Jonathan Sumption.
Excellent jurist but terrible on epidemiology.
Everything he said about the pandemic was 100% right. Lockdowns were a mistake, apart from the first one.
The ghosts of all those people who died as a result of Johnson's late lockdowns in September and December 2020 say hello.
Fears are growing for four more water firms as Thames Water teeters on the brink of collapse with contingency plans reportedly being made to nationalise swathes of Britain's water industry.
Ministers have looked to allay fears around the impact of Thames Water potentially going under as the regulator vowed to work with the sector to deal with its debt levels.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said there were 'contingency plans in place for any eventuality' as Thames Water battles to finance the £14 billion of debt on its books following interest rate rises.
It comes as several reports suggested concerns about Thames Water's finances had now broadened to other firms in the industry.
The financial health of up to four other English water companies is being monitored, according to reports.
These include Southern Water which serves 2.6million people and Yorkshire Water with 5million customers, it is understood.
The Times cited a Whitehall source as saying: 'A lot of these companies are highly geared and struggling.
'There is a worst case scenario where other companies end up in the same place as Thames Water.'
It's not particularly easy to get a good picture of the extent of the problems as the most recent published Ofwat financial stability report is for 2021/22, before the interest rate hit.
Presumably the water utilities are not the only zombie companies loaded with debt that they will struggle to finance at higher interest rates.
This zombie government too, for that matter.
There’s going to be an awful lot of companies and organisations who are over-leveraged or over-indebted, and are going to be screwed by rising interest rates. The only real surprise, is that it’s taken so long for them to come into view.
Yes, this very much includes the £2trn national debt, as governments of all colours havn’t run a budget surplus for more than two decades. If government ends up paying say 5% average on that £2trn, that’s £100bn a year in debt interest!
As for Thames Water, if they can’t refinance their debts for a sensible amount, then the bondholders will have no choice but to enforce a bankruptcy and take over management themselves, wiping out the existing shareholders.
Let’s not forget also, that many of these shareholders are pension funds, who saw utilities as a stable source of dividend payments over the years, and didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the management of the companies.
I'd put Universities in that too. I think we're going to see a Post-92 hit the wall in the short-medium term.
Although TBF that is as much as anything due to regulatory failure.
Post 92s are struggling because Russell Group unis are essentially taking every undergraduate going, due to the mad idea that they are the best place to do an undergraduate degree because they are better at research. Nobody disputes the latter as a general point (although some research focused unis, e.g. Bath, are outside) but that doesn't mean they're any good at teaching. A lot of them are not, pushing it on to their PhD students while the lecturers write books.
In a sane world, it would have been the other way around - post 92 unis have no cap, and could therefore charge whatever fee they wanted. Russell Group fees could be regulated for undergraduates and therefore they had a cap on numbers.
And that would have meant people going to post 92 unis for undergrad, which could actually have worked quite well given their focus on teaching, and the ablest would have done postgrad at Russell Group.
But - Gove was in hock to the VCs and didn't understand they were out to line their own pockets.
Oxbridge and Russell Group unis should have no cap on fees, certainly for STEM subjects and medicine and economics and MBAs and law which will earn the highest in the workplace on average post grauation, even if a cap on numbers.
Post 92s should have a cap on fees, ideally to half the amount they currently charge given the debts their graduates end up with but yes could be allowed unlimited students, at least in theory if they can run cheap courses with lots of demand
Given how crap Russell Groiup and Oxbridge can be in some subjects, and how good the redbricks and post-polys in some, how on earth do you think that helps improve the quality of educastion and teaching? Your proposed solution serves only to cement poshness and elitism still further.
Given the (big generalisation, but I think to some extent true) newer universities tend to employ people who can teach while the RG tend to employ people who can bring in research funding, it's quite possible that the better education, in general, at UG level is to be had in the newer unis. Some researchers are very bad teachers.
If you want to make a really big generalisation, you could argue that what the Russell Group are actually selling to undergraduates isn’t the education itself, but the scarcity and the networking opportunities that come with admission.
It's not even that - it's the fact that coming from a Russell Group university you may have slightly more chance of getting on a Graduate scheme as many companies are biased against post 92 unis...
Got to say that in the case of English at Leeds Uni it's remarkable how similar next years course is to the one Beckett was teaching 2 years ago...
And Beckett has permanent English lecturers, At Uni they all seem to be on temporary contracts...
That's right about employment. Employers' bias towards Oxbridge, Russell Group and the hiring manager's alma mater needs to be addressed for all our sakes.
Magic circle law firms and top banks and accountancy firms are not going to higher someone with C grades at A Level, average gcses and a 2.1 or even a 1st in law from a 92 university over someone with A* grades at A Level and top gcses and a 2.1 in law from Oxbridge or the Russell group
Although it's not a guarantee of quality. Why, some people with excellent a-levels and a Russell Group degree can't even spell 'hire.'
What puzzles me is how it is that some people with good degrees from fine universities can turn out to be utterly stupid.
My own view: we are all utterly stupid *in some things*. The key thing is for us to realise this, and not to expose that stupidity to everyone else. A task I frequently fail to achieve...
Yes, that makes sense. I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, when it comes to law or military history.
But, I'd be a fool to advise someone how to install a boiler, or rewire an office.
Some people think skills are transferable.
Take Jonathan Sumption.
Excellent jurist but terrible on epidemiology.
Everything he said about the pandemic was 100% right. Lockdowns were a mistake, apart from the first one.
The ghosts of all those people who died as a result of Johnson's late lockdowns in September and December 2020 say hello.
There should never have been a lockdown, let alone it being late.
Comments
Hopefully by the time the next meeting finishes, England will be batting!
https://euromaidanpress.com/2023/06/29/ukraines-asset-confiscation-agencys-new-head-castigated-by-civil-society-transparency-international/
ARMA, a Ukrainian agency that is meant to handle confiscated Russian assets, has received a new head. However, her appointment would “bury” the crucial agency, which deals with assets derived from corruption and crimes, says watchdog Transparency International.
Olena Duma, the former deputy head of the Chernihiv Oblast State Administration, has won the contest to head ARMA, receiving 6 out of 8 votes of the competition commission. However, Duma’s victory is being castigated by Ukrainian experts, with corruption watchdog Transparency International Ukraine stating that her appointment “may bury ARMA.”
The anti-corruption experts believe Duma’s appointment carries significant reputational risks for the country and for the work of an independent and effective anti-corruption ecosystem and law enforcement agencies. “Olena Duma has over 22 years of experience in state bodies, and during this time she was very active in anti-corruption and trade union organizations, organized and participated in various rallies. Olena Duma’s experience is not related to work in the field related to criminal justice, nor is it related to asset management or search. And this raises doubts,” the report states.
Transparency International Ukraine also points to Duma’s “close political connections,” as in 2019, she directly participated in campaigning for sitting president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and discrediting then-incumbent Petro Poroshenko. This indicates the political engagement of the winner of the contest for the Head of ARMA, which could potentially affect her work in this position, Transparency International notes.
Transparency International Ukraine calls on members of the Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers not to vote for the appointment of the winner of the contest to this extremely important position for the country.
Apart from her proximity to Zelenskyy circles, Olena Duma is connected to Rudy Giuliani, a former New York mayor and former US President Donald Trump’s longtime adviser who pressured Ukraine to investigate baseless conspiracies about Joe Biden and his son in 2019 and is currently under investigation in the USA.
..
And my answer to "how much is a loaf of bread?" would be: I'm lucky enough not to need to care much.
I wouldn't make a good politician...
Another utter wasteland of sport being inflicted on PB
Later peeps!
The state of our lakes and rivers is sad.
The initial incompatibilities did of course stem in part from the nature of regional privatisation before 1947, too.
I academia, I've seen a clear bias towards applicants who have worked with the 'right people' - e.g. "X did PhD/pot-doc under Y, must be pretty good" - but not biased towards institutions as a whole.
Take Jonathan Sumption.
Excellent jurist but terrible on epidemiology.
He told TalkTV: “During the process, I was asked about if there were any outstanding issues the party may be aware of. And I said to the party, seven years ago, there was a story. I was never named in the story. As far as I know, there was no investigation. But I did mention this to the party.”'
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/06/27/dan-korski-accused-groping-not-investigated-conservatives/
And, yes, the Russell Group needs to take teaching more seriously, and I think they are (if perhaps still not enough). But, more generally, as happens often, a system has evolved over time with odd incentives, but no-one wants to address that because it’s difficult and expensive.
Sherlock Holmes:
"My ramifications stretch out into many sections of society, but never, I am happy to say, into amateur sport, which is the best and soundest thing in England."
More seriously, it was an interesting analysis. Only looked at teaching costs versus fees, of course, neglecting income from students being at the university - accommodation, food, entertainment etc.
'........A year ago we had the second best army in the world...'
'....... then the second best army in Ukraine....'
'........and now the second best army in Russia .....'
In the past you've have put big money on England being 60-5 shortly.
IIRC there was an attempt to spin this against Cameron as "over prepared" and "fake".
This feels like about the worst possible conditions for Bazball batting.
The Victorians, who are often castigated for trying to drive money out of sport, did so as a response to corruption.
Could still see Aussie batting again tonight.
Finished for the day now though, heading back home. Let’s see if we can be better with the bat than the ball.
https://fullfact.org/health/lord-sumption-covid-errors/
Which will be, when Wagner Group departs, the second best army in Ukraine.
As someone that regularly interviews the top graduates from the top universities, it is clear they do have more of the top talent that will succeed from the get-go. But I also think there are a lot more rough diamonds from the next tier down. You just have to sift more to find them and coach them up more.
If Daisy Goodwin told a story about being sexually assaulted and I knew I hadn’t sexually assaulted her, why would I think that story had anything to do with me? I’d be, like, that story sounds a bit like the time I met Daisy Goodwin, but clearly it can’t be. She’s probably just changing some details so as not to identify the wrongdoer.
Later government changed the rules for overseas pharmacists working (effectively they were priced out of doing the essential pre-registration year as they were not paid enough) and our overseas numbers crashed.
Did the centre recall the golden days? We were insulated from the wrath of the VC as the department income plummeted? No - we were not. Despite many years of surplus, as soon as things turned south we came under existential threat (closure).
Uni's can be utterly ruthless.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/david-cameron-s-bike-stolen-while-he-shopped-876200.html
He'd 'locked' it to a 3ft high bollard!
Widely known.
Pumping excessive amounts of water for farming over two decades has caused the planet to tilt more to the east, study says
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/28/earth-axis-tilt-shift-groundwater-pumped-farming-science/ (£££)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F6kA4jgtsk
Sunak badly needs a Coulson right now, someone who really understands average people. The difference is that Cameron was much more self-aware of his privilege.
Ok, I get he is scraping every “barnacle” off his boat, but it’s depressing anyway.
On claim one, the "underlying cause" from death certificates was for a long time significantly higher than the excess deaths. Not sure if that's still the case or not, but its certainly debatable if someone on death's door in a care home for instance who gets covid and dies died from covid, with covid or would have died either way.
On claim two the argument for the decade is based upon an analysis based on age and sex of those who died, but that is simplistic. We know for instance that a very significant proportion of deaths occurred for instance from care homes. A random 80 year old male might have a life expectancy of another decade, but an 80 year old male in a care home does not. By its very nature, care homes get the sickest and least able to survive of the population and mean life expectancy upon entering a care home is on average less than 12 months.
'toward Iceland'? What the hell does that mean - is Iceland defined as the East Pole or something? I haven't looked up the paper (which sounds interesting) but I suspect this must be Telegraphese! I mean, there's the whole issue with 'tilting to the East' where east and west are only defined on the rotating body and depend even there on point of reference, but the Iceland thing is something else. Surely 'the axis has moved away from the poles' (while itselft also problematic as that only refers to where the axis crosses the surface) would be simple enough and better?
After a few days of this I tried a different tack. Tried again, pressed the button to speak to admissions, pressed the button to speak to international admissions and lo and behold the phone was answered immediately.
Unsurprisingly they were unable to help with my query, but were able to get the person I needed to talk to on the line immediately.
It’s a bit citizens of nowhere.
Labour won’t attack him on it so the Tories cannot defend him.
Labour realise how bad it would look calling a brown dude a citizen of nowhere.
Last week I had to visit our placements team with a query. An office with 5 desks was occupied by just one member of staff, and the one I needed was WFH and not replying to my emails (which were urgent).
That said, email to such services usually generates a better response as it starts a 'ticket' - an audited trail.
There is a world of difference between the life expectancy of a fit and healthy 80 year old living at home, and a frail and vulnerable 80 year old with dementia in a nursing home.
Yes either way its a death, but as you say it is taking the infirm but the statistical analysis based on age that found the decade claim is not controlling for this.
At Consultant level we are much more interested in their postgraduate experience and aptitude, so once again doesn't matter.
The national appointments system has its flaws, but the process is pretty effective at snuffing out prejudice, snobbery and patronage. Quite different to my day 3 decades ago when these were key to medical careers.
I’m getting depressed by a lot of Starmer’s backing off’s. Can hardly call him ‘radical’!