Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
It implies an 11% charge on credit/debit card usage which is illegal in the UK.
Has anyone told the card issuers that? Because they're skimming off getting on for that on a large number of smaller transactions via fixed rates.
Really? Internet suggests merchants pay up to around 3% on each transaction.
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
Trying to cancel my TV licence and get a refund (moving away).
Aggressive warnings about police action if I watch TV
Deliberately misleading about what you can watch without one
You can only cancel it 14 days in advance (convinced this is so people forget)
I have to provide proof that I am moving away (so I'm sending them my visa ?!)
I'm never getting a TV licence again.
They kept sending harassing post after my dad died. I had to send a pretty emphatic letter to tell them to lay off. Even then they said they'd start up again in a year, or something, and they did.
Remember in Scotland the law re TV licensing is different. AIUI it's the PF who decides prosecutions - not the BBC or their commercial thugs. I wonder if their bumf even recognises that?
I very much doubt if the licence fee will make it to 2027. But the BBC are totally unready for any replacement.
If there's an attempt to tax broadband connections to subsidise broadcast TV there will be absolute hell to pay. I can foresee actual rioting. It might of course also lead to the rapid rollout of nationwide 5G.
The smart move is a subscription model, at any rate for overseas customers on iPlayer, but there's no sign the BBC are willing to consider it. If they'd done that 15 years ago they wouldn't be in this mess now.
The single most regressive tax there is, and with some very dubious collection methods.
Does anyone watch live TV any more, apart from sports and the occasional coronation?
Fund the genuine public service broadcasting from taxation, and let the BBC either charge subscriptions or carry advertising on their entertainment channels.
How they haven’t sorted out their licensing for an international iPlayer I have no idea. They should have had most of the archive up there by now, and charging foreigners £10 a month for it would make billions. I’d buy it, or at least alternate it with Netflix.
Yes we watch live TV and don't have any subscription TV (I will be the last on the planet to watch game of thrones). The reason for doing so is I would watch too much TV otherwise so a positive decision. In our holiday home we don't have a TV and battled regarding the payment of a TV licence we don't need. They haven't hassled us for a while now, but that was a bit of a battle.
We’re in the same situation, at least as far as home is concerned; we don’t have a holiday home. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation where I wanted to watch more TV than I do now. NB: it’s off at the moment.
Trying to cancel my TV licence and get a refund (moving away).
Aggressive warnings about police action if I watch TV
Deliberately misleading about what you can watch without one
You can only cancel it 14 days in advance (convinced this is so people forget)
I have to provide proof that I am moving away (so I'm sending them my visa ?!)
I'm never getting a TV licence again.
They kept sending harassing post after my dad died. I had to send a pretty emphatic letter to tell them to lay off. Even then they said they'd start up again in a year, or something, and they did.
Remember in Scotland the law re TV licensing is different. AIUI it's the PF who decides prosecutions - not the BBC or their commercial thugs. I wonder if their bumf even recognises that?
I very much doubt if the licence fee will make it to 2027. But the BBC are totally unready for any replacement.
If there's an attempt to tax broadband connections to subsidise broadcast TV there will be absolute hell to pay. I can foresee actual rioting. It might of course also lead to the rapid rollout of nationwide 5G.
The smart move is a subscription model, at any rate for overseas customers on iPlayer, but there's no sign the BBC are willing to consider it. If they'd done that 15 years ago they wouldn't be in this mess now.
The single most regressive tax there is, and with some very dubious collection methods.
Does anyone watch live TV any more, apart from sports and the occasional coronation?
Fund the genuine public service broadcasting from taxation, and let the BBC either charge subscriptions or carry advertising on their entertainment channels.
How they haven’t sorted out their licensing for an international iPlayer I have no idea. They should have had most of the archive up there by now, and charging foreigners £10 a month for it would make billions. I’d buy it, or at least alternate it with Netflix.
This is completely unrealistic and ignores the very, very real issues with content licencing, residual payment deals for talent and the complexity of international content purchasing/sales. 9/10 times when the BBC procures a TV show it only purchases UK linear and streaming rights which it may then resell to Netflix.
If was going to make a BBC streaming service I'd do £6.99 per month for all non-live content. So no MOTD live or on catchup, but you do get Peaky Blinders and the recent back catalogue and make that available to cord cutters who live in the pure streaming world.
My point was that the BBC should have been working on this for the past decade, given how obvious it was going to be. The big dramas are more difficult, for the reasons you suggest of residual payments and licensing; but the soaps, comedy shows, and all the daytime crap, would be much easier.
Funding pretty much the whole production of something, but leaving out secondary streaming rights, would be a dereliction of duty for a commercial entity in recent times.
MOTD is the one programme that will never be allowed on an international iPlayer though. At least not unless they edit out all of the Premier League content that’s sold abroad separately.
But that's the point, the BBC rarely funds anywhere near the entirety of anything these days. Most of their content is licenced from the big UK players who are funded independently and they then sell domestic and international rights separately. The market has moved on a huge amount since then and taking it back to when everything was centrally approved by the BBC2 controller with BBC budgets would destroy the success of UK TV and movie production.
The BBC don't leave out streaming rights or international streaming rights, they simply can't afford to compete with Netflix and Amazon for them and it being a capitalist industry, there's little regard for sentiment when selling a product, it will go to the highest bidder.
I think we're probably the only country in the world that would produce two competing GDP figures that are wildly different on the same day. Loads of people this morning asking the same question, "is it 0.4% or 0.9%?" I'm going with 0.4% but other people suggest the 0.9% is probably a more accurate reflection of where we are because the monthly index has proved itself better with fewer revisions than the quarterly number.
Er it's 0.2% for q/q growth in Q2, not 0.4% or 0.9%. Not sure what you mean about competing measures either. The monthly and quarterly data are consistent with each other.
YoY, and they aren't consistent.
I don't see how the quarterly and monthly numbers are consistent.
Monthly (By series):
100.3 -> 100.5 -> 100.4 -> 101.0 (Must be 100.95 to realise +0.5% growth in June rather than +0.6%)
Which is consistent with the monthly growth given of
+0.2% (Apr), -0.1% (May), +0.5% (June)
100.349 -> 100.95 is +0.6% That's a chunky difference from +0.2%.
You are quoting the numbers at current price - i.e. assuming that inflation is zero. You need to adjust for that - which the ONS does by calculating the GDP deflator as the relevant inflation rate.
Trying to cancel my TV licence and get a refund (moving away).
Aggressive warnings about police action if I watch TV
Deliberately misleading about what you can watch without one
You can only cancel it 14 days in advance (convinced this is so people forget)
I have to provide proof that I am moving away (so I'm sending them my visa ?!)
I'm never getting a TV licence again.
They kept sending harassing post after my dad died. I had to send a pretty emphatic letter to tell them to lay off. Even then they said they'd start up again in a year, or something, and they did.
Remember in Scotland the law re TV licensing is different. AIUI it's the PF who decides prosecutions - not the BBC or their commercial thugs. I wonder if their bumf even recognises that?
I very much doubt if the licence fee will make it to 2027. But the BBC are totally unready for any replacement.
If there's an attempt to tax broadband connections to subsidise broadcast TV there will be absolute hell to pay. I can foresee actual rioting. It might of course also lead to the rapid rollout of nationwide 5G.
The smart move is a subscription model, at any rate for overseas customers on iPlayer, but there's no sign the BBC are willing to consider it. If they'd done that 15 years ago they wouldn't be in this mess now.
I wouldn't add a new tax to broadband connections to fund the BBC, but I would use the VAT already charged and send that to the BBC instead. Similarly for the VAT paid on Sky/Netflix/etc subscriptions.
When you add in the VAT from new TV sales (didn't one PBer recently pay >> £1,000 in VAT on a new TV?) you can probably get reasonably close to the current license fee income and the BBC is incentivised to collaborate with the subscription services, rather than to try and crush them.
Only problem being that the Treasury have to hand over £bns of VAT receipts. So it was a good idea for the good times, but looks impossible now.
You then also have to have the argument about what is a subscription service. Amazon Prime being a key example. Yes you can stream movies from it, however its mainly about parcel delivery
There are always edge cases in taxation law. See the Jaffa cakes case. I think we can mostly deal with these, rather than them being so hard it makes the whole thing impossible.
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
My barber recently bought a contactless thing (connected to his phone) after HMRC had a word.
HMRC are quite interesting as an organisation. I know someone who does investigations for them and they put a lot of emphasis on being fair and reasonable to encourage people to be honest. An example of that, I suppose.
Bloody hell.
If they were being fair and reasonable over my cousin's estate, I'd hate to see what them being utter dickheads looks like.
(Story - my cousin had a flat in London. Poor condition, sold at auction as stands. Multiple valuations were obtained and an average declared for probate, which was granted after IHT was paid.
It then went for 40% more on the day as two bidders were very keen on it.
Next thing we know, threats of a prosecution for fraud are coming our way.)
It's a chunky uplift from the valuation. There's no way to reduce due IHT AIUI if property or whatever sells for less than the valuation though - which seems a bit unfair to me if you have a relative that dies during a time of declining prices and low volumes.
Not true on the latter. It's entirely possible to revisit the probate valuation for IHT if the actual sale prices are lower.
By the same token, an increase reasonably soon after probate is grounds for paying more IHT. But then you can see if you made any losses on the sale (cost of sale) or on sale of other items.
OK That's good to know, and sounds fair to me.
But one caveat - it may depend on whether the propery is sold from the estate or by the heirs. There are interplays of IHT and CGT and the optimal situation depends on the circs and whether there is a deed of assignment (to make use of the beneficiaries' CGT allowance when this si better than the estate's CGT allowance).
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
To be fair - if someone goes after an anonymous poster here, the first thing will be OGH getting a lawyers letter demanding identifying data for that poster. At that point OGH will need a lawyer.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
I think we're probably the only country in the world that would produce two competing GDP figures that are wildly different on the same day. Loads of people this morning asking the same question, "is it 0.4% or 0.9%?" I'm going with 0.4% but other people suggest the 0.9% is probably a more accurate reflection of where we are because the monthly index has proved itself better with fewer revisions than the quarterly number.
Er it's 0.2% for q/q growth in Q2, not 0.4% or 0.9%. Not sure what you mean about competing measures either. The monthly and quarterly data are consistent with each other.
YoY, and they aren't consistent.
I don't see how the quarterly and monthly numbers are consistent.
Monthly (By series):
100.3 -> 100.5 -> 100.4 -> 101.0 (Must be 100.95 to realise +0.5% growth in June rather than +0.6%)
Which is consistent with the monthly growth given of
+0.2% (Apr), -0.1% (May), +0.5% (June)
100.349 -> 100.95 is +0.6% That's a chunky difference from +0.2%.
You are quoting the numbers at current price - i.e. assuming that inflation is zero. You need to adjust for that - which the ONS does by calculating the GDP deflator as the relevant inflation rate.
Trying to cancel my TV licence and get a refund (moving away).
Aggressive warnings about police action if I watch TV
Deliberately misleading about what you can watch without one
You can only cancel it 14 days in advance (convinced this is so people forget)
I have to provide proof that I am moving away (so I'm sending them my visa ?!)
I'm never getting a TV licence again.
They kept sending harassing post after my dad died. I had to send a pretty emphatic letter to tell them to lay off. Even then they said they'd start up again in a year, or something, and they did.
Remember in Scotland the law re TV licensing is different. AIUI it's the PF who decides prosecutions - not the BBC or their commercial thugs. I wonder if their bumf even recognises that?
I very much doubt if the licence fee will make it to 2027. But the BBC are totally unready for any replacement.
If there's an attempt to tax broadband connections to subsidise broadcast TV there will be absolute hell to pay. I can foresee actual rioting. It might of course also lead to the rapid rollout of nationwide 5G.
The smart move is a subscription model, at any rate for overseas customers on iPlayer, but there's no sign the BBC are willing to consider it. If they'd done that 15 years ago they wouldn't be in this mess now.
The single most regressive tax there is, and with some very dubious collection methods.
Does anyone watch live TV any more, apart from sports and the occasional coronation?
Fund the genuine public service broadcasting from taxation, and let the BBC either charge subscriptions or carry advertising on their entertainment channels.
How they haven’t sorted out their licensing for an international iPlayer I have no idea. They should have had most of the archive up there by now, and charging foreigners £10 a month for it would make billions. I’d buy it, or at least alternate it with Netflix.
This is completely unrealistic and ignores the very, very real issues with content licencing, residual payment deals for talent and the complexity of international content purchasing/sales. 9/10 times when the BBC procures a TV show it only purchases UK linear and streaming rights which it may then resell to Netflix.
If was going to make a BBC streaming service I'd do £6.99 per month for all non-live content. So no MOTD live or on catchup, but you do get Peaky Blinders and the recent back catalogue and make that available to cord cutters who live in the pure streaming world.
My point was that the BBC should have been working on this for the past decade, given how obvious it was going to be. The big dramas are more difficult, for the reasons you suggest of residual payments and licensing; but the soaps, comedy shows, and all the daytime crap, would be much easier.
Funding pretty much the whole production of something, but leaving out secondary streaming rights, would be a dereliction of duty for a commercial entity in recent times.
MOTD is the one programme that will never be allowed on an international iPlayer though. At least not unless they edit out all of the Premier League content that’s sold abroad separately.
But that's the point, the BBC rarely funds anywhere near the entirety of anything these days. Most of their content is licenced from the big UK players who are funded independently and they then sell domestic and international rights separately. The market has moved on a huge amount since then and taking it back to when everything was centrally approved by the BBC2 controller with BBC budgets would destroy the success of UK TV and movie production.
The BBC don't leave out streaming rights or international streaming rights, they simply can't afford to compete with Netflix and Amazon for them and it being a capitalist industry, there's little regard for sentiment when selling a product, it will go to the highest bidder.
I think we’re violently agreeing here. I’m contrasting the approach of the BBC over, say, Disney, who have managed to hold on to the rights for most of their content, and even the older stuff has ended up on their streaming service.
If BBC Worldwide, at the height of Top Gear’s popularity, had launched an international iPlayer with TG as an exclusive, they would likely be successful by now - but instead, they stuck with the old-world view of overseas licensing to TV networks, and they’re now like the guy trying to sell music CDs when everyone else has moved through Napster to Spotify.
Reading between the lines on that story, it’s opponents of DeSantis on school boards deliberately making absurd decisions, to try and gain support for their progressive agenda.
That is the Telegraph's framing of the issue, reading between the lines. (This is the paper that assures us Michelle Obama will be the presidential nominee, remember.)
Reading between the lines on that story, it’s opponents of DeSantis on school boards deliberately making absurd decisions, to try and gain support for their progressive agenda.
That is the Telegraph's framing of the issue, reading between the lines. (This is the paper that assures us Michelle Obama will be the presidential nominee, remember.)
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
To be fair - if someone goes after an anonymous poster here, the first thing will be OGH getting a lawyers letter demanding identifying data for that poster. At that point OGH will need a lawyer.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
To be fair - if someone goes after an anonymous poster here, the first thing will be OGH getting a lawyers letter demanding identifying data for that poster. At that point OGH will need a lawyer.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
Barclays the latest bank annoying their own customers - this time with dramatic reductions in overdraft limits, seemingly with little reasoning, and as usual in a totally opaque manner with no discussion allowed.
Trying to cancel my TV licence and get a refund (moving away).
Aggressive warnings about police action if I watch TV
Deliberately misleading about what you can watch without one
You can only cancel it 14 days in advance (convinced this is so people forget)
I have to provide proof that I am moving away (so I'm sending them my visa ?!)
I'm never getting a TV licence again.
They kept sending harassing post after my dad died. I had to send a pretty emphatic letter to tell them to lay off. Even then they said they'd start up again in a year, or something, and they did.
Remember in Scotland the law re TV licensing is different. AIUI it's the PF who decides prosecutions - not the BBC or their commercial thugs. I wonder if their bumf even recognises that?
I very much doubt if the licence fee will make it to 2027. But the BBC are totally unready for any replacement.
If there's an attempt to tax broadband connections to subsidise broadcast TV there will be absolute hell to pay. I can foresee actual rioting. It might of course also lead to the rapid rollout of nationwide 5G.
The smart move is a subscription model, at any rate for overseas customers on iPlayer, but there's no sign the BBC are willing to consider it. If they'd done that 15 years ago they wouldn't be in this mess now.
The single most regressive tax there is, and with some very dubious collection methods.
Does anyone watch live TV any more, apart from sports and the occasional coronation?
Fund the genuine public service broadcasting from taxation, and let the BBC either charge subscriptions or carry advertising on their entertainment channels.
How they haven’t sorted out their licensing for an international iPlayer I have no idea. They should have had most of the archive up there by now, and charging foreigners £10 a month for it would make billions. I’d buy it, or at least alternate it with Netflix.
This is completely unrealistic and ignores the very, very real issues with content licencing, residual payment deals for talent and the complexity of international content purchasing/sales. 9/10 times when the BBC procures a TV show it only purchases UK linear and streaming rights which it may then resell to Netflix.
If was going to make a BBC streaming service I'd do £6.99 per month for all non-live content. So no MOTD live or on catchup, but you do get Peaky Blinders and the recent back catalogue and make that available to cord cutters who live in the pure streaming world.
My point was that the BBC should have been working on this for the past decade, given how obvious it was going to be. The big dramas are more difficult, for the reasons you suggest of residual payments and licensing; but the soaps, comedy shows, and all the daytime crap, would be much easier.
Funding pretty much the whole production of something, but leaving out secondary streaming rights, would be a dereliction of duty for a commercial entity in recent times.
MOTD is the one programme that will never be allowed on an international iPlayer though. At least not unless they edit out all of the Premier League content that’s sold abroad separately.
But that's the point, the BBC rarely funds anywhere near the entirety of anything these days. Most of their content is licenced from the big UK players who are funded independently and they then sell domestic and international rights separately. The market has moved on a huge amount since then and taking it back to when everything was centrally approved by the BBC2 controller with BBC budgets would destroy the success of UK TV and movie production.
The BBC don't leave out streaming rights or international streaming rights, they simply can't afford to compete with Netflix and Amazon for them and it being a capitalist industry, there's little regard for sentiment when selling a product, it will go to the highest bidder.
I think we’re violently agreeing here. I’m contrasting the approach of the BBC over, say, Disney, who have managed to hold on to the rights for most of their content, and even the older stuff has ended up on their streaming service.
If BBC Worldwide, at the height of Top Gear’s popularity, had launched an international iPlayer with TG as an exclusive, they would likely be successful by now - but instead, they stuck with the old-world view of overseas licensing to TV networks, and they’re now like the guy trying to sell music CDs when everyone else has moved through Napster to Spotify.
One issue with the world wide rights was the following
1) BBC contracts with company to make program 2) Company bills BBC the cost of the program 3) BBC gets the UK rights 4) Company sells program as "BBC programming", worldwide.
According to a chap I know who worked in the licensing dept in the BBC, there was nothing suspicious about how this happened al the time. No Sir. All tickety boo.
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
To be fair - if someone goes after an anonymous poster here, the first thing will be OGH getting a lawyers letter demanding identifying data for that poster. At that point OGH will need a lawyer.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
Has this ever happened, do we know?
Mike said he had communications from The Times, in the early days of their paywall, when people would post huge chunks of their content here.
... On whether enough people continue to pay it, the evasion rate is estimated at well under 10% and has crept up but not that much. The idea that there will be mass disobedience on this within the next few years is pretty fanciful. ...
The comparison with Ireland is interesting. There the evasion rate for the TV license was estimated at 15% in 2020, and this appears to be surging upwards in the wake of recent scandal.
Despite accusations to the contrary, it does seem that in Britain a lot of people are willing to follow the rules simply because they're the rules, and so assumptions that people taking cash will always be fiddling their tax seem a bit unfair to me.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
Yes a bit of both, but also unfortunate geography. The rest of the country is pretty marginal to the economic core of Europe. London is well placed in the far SE, as in principle should be East Anglia and the North Sea coast. The rest is highly marginal.
Other countries have the same issues and either suffer accordingly (Portugal, Greece, Romania, Mezzogiorno etc) or compensate through natural resources (Norway, Iceland), canny tax policies (Ireland) or extremely high levels of education and skills (Sweden, Finland).
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
The flip side argument is that the Uk is now so distant from the prosperity frontier that it has a lot of catch up to do.
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
To be fair - if someone goes after an anonymous poster here, the first thing will be OGH getting a lawyers letter demanding identifying data for that poster. At that point OGH will need a lawyer.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
And it will cost the poster 1000 x as much, which looks to me a more effective deterrent.
Not that anything more is needed in a response to the lawyer than Malmesbury is algernon.beetlejuice5467@pmail.com, that's all i know, now piss off. If OGH wants a more lawyerly wording I am sure one of the many solrs on the site will oblige with a template, pro bono.
Reading between the lines on that story, it’s opponents of DeSantis on school boards deliberately making absurd decisions, to try and gain support for their progressive agenda.
That is the Telegraph's framing of the issue, reading between the lines. (This is the paper that assures us Michelle Obama will be the presidential nominee, remember.)
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
The flip side argument is that the Uk is now so distant from the prosperity frontier that it has a lot of catch up to do.
The rubber duck doctrine. If you push it down into the bath you create the conditions for a surging leap. And the lower it sinks the higher it rises. This could be our game.
... On whether enough people continue to pay it, the evasion rate is estimated at well under 10% and has crept up but not that much. The idea that there will be mass disobedience on this within the next few years is pretty fanciful. ...
The comparison with Ireland is interesting. There the evasion rate for the TV license was estimated at 15% in 2020, and this appears to be surging upwards in the wake of recent scandal.
Despite accusations to the contrary, it does seem that in Britain a lot of people are willing to follow the rules simply because they're the rules, and so assumptions that people taking cash will always be fiddling their tax seem a bit unfair to me.
That's not really a very apt analogy.
It's perfectly obvious why people decide to pay their TV licence fee even if they don't feel it's good value for money - it's to prevent potential prosecution, adverse impact on credit rating and so on.
It isn't obvious why traders offer a larger discount for cash than could reasonably be explained by cost differences. That doesn't mean every trader that does it is evading tax, but the suspicion isn't an unreasonable one.
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
To be fair - if someone goes after an anonymous poster here, the first thing will be OGH getting a lawyers letter demanding identifying data for that poster. At that point OGH will need a lawyer.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
And it will cost the poster 1000 x as much, which looks to me a more effective deterrent.
Not that anything more is needed in a response to the lawyer than Malmesbury is algernon.beetlejuice5467@pmail.com, that's all i know, now piss off. If OGH wants a more lawyerly wording I am sure one of the many solrs on the site will oblige with a template, pro bono.
The response will be - "We want IP addresses, for a start. We know you know them. Court order incoming."
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
Yes a bit of both, but also unfortunate geography. The rest of the country is pretty marginal to the economic core of Europe. London is well placed in the far SE, as in principle should be East Anglia and the North Sea coast. The rest is highly marginal.
Other countries have the same issues and either suffer accordingly (Portugal, Greece, Romania, Mezzogiorno etc) or compensate through natural resources (Norway, Iceland), canny tax policies (Ireland) or extremely high levels of education and skills (Sweden, Finland).
Unfortunate geography can be overcome. See Estonia, Japan, New Zealand, etc.
I’ve been interested in British regional inequality since I first came to the UK in 2000 and, through my job, was sent around the country.
I was astonished at the deprivation and squalor compared with NZ, and thought it demanded explanation.
As we see in the charts above, regional underperformance means Britain is increasingly a poor-ish country, with a successful entrepôt. More “Singapore and Malaysia” than “Singapore-on-Thames”.
... On whether enough people continue to pay it, the evasion rate is estimated at well under 10% and has crept up but not that much. The idea that there will be mass disobedience on this within the next few years is pretty fanciful. ...
The comparison with Ireland is interesting. There the evasion rate for the TV license was estimated at 15% in 2020, and this appears to be surging upwards in the wake of recent scandal.
Despite accusations to the contrary, it does seem that in Britain a lot of people are willing to follow the rules simply because they're the rules, and so assumptions that people taking cash will always be fiddling their tax seem a bit unfair to me.
That's not really a very apt analogy.
It's perfectly obvious why people decide to pay their TV licence fee even if they don't feel it's good value for money - it's to prevent potential prosecution, adverse impact on credit rating and so on.
It isn't obvious why traders offer a larger discount for cash than could reasonably be explained by cost differences. That doesn't mean every trader that does it is evading tax, but the suspicion isn't an unreasonable one.
The cost to the restaurant of not just the card payments, but the time and effort required to reconcile tips paid by card, may well be closer to 10% than you’d think.
The management might just like cash, and not want to be beholden to a very large company who can cancel their ability to do business because the owner once said something someone thought was bad on Twitter. It’s a point of principle.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
Broken beyond be repair is touch of leonic hyperbole but there a quite a few aspects of modern life in the UK that do feel completely fucked and there is a widespread sense that nobody has a clue on how to fix it. The economy, to the minute extent that I understand or am interested in it, definitely feels like it is making heavy going proximate to a leeward and very rocky shore.
Perhaps it's just the pain of adjustment as the UK settles on its new status of a middle income, middle power whose public policy positions are exclusively devised for a notional voter with 9 fingers and 8 teeth who left school at 12 to work in the family scrap metal business.
Trying to cancel my TV licence and get a refund (moving away).
Aggressive warnings about police action if I watch TV
Deliberately misleading about what you can watch without one
You can only cancel it 14 days in advance (convinced this is so people forget)
I have to provide proof that I am moving away (so I'm sending them my visa ?!)
I'm never getting a TV licence again.
They kept sending harassing post after my dad died. I had to send a pretty emphatic letter to tell them to lay off. Even then they said they'd start up again in a year, or something, and they did.
Remember in Scotland the law re TV licensing is different. AIUI it's the PF who decides prosecutions - not the BBC or their commercial thugs. I wonder if their bumf even recognises that?
I very much doubt if the licence fee will make it to 2027. But the BBC are totally unready for any replacement.
If there's an attempt to tax broadband connections to subsidise broadcast TV there will be absolute hell to pay. I can foresee actual rioting. It might of course also lead to the rapid rollout of nationwide 5G.
The smart move is a subscription model, at any rate for overseas customers on iPlayer, but there's no sign the BBC are willing to consider it. If they'd done that 15 years ago they wouldn't be in this mess now.
The single most regressive tax there is, and with some very dubious collection methods.
Does anyone watch live TV any more, apart from sports and the occasional coronation?
Fund the genuine public service broadcasting from taxation, and let the BBC either charge subscriptions or carry advertising on their entertainment channels.
How they haven’t sorted out their licensing for an international iPlayer I have no idea. They should have had most of the archive up there by now, and charging foreigners £10 a month for it would make billions. I’d buy it, or at least alternate it with Netflix.
Instead, they put the archive - which must be among the best in the business even if they did wipe a lot of their earliest programmes - on Britbox, which has not so far as I can see been anything other than a flop.
(By the way, I wonder how ITV feel about Twitter's rebrand given all the effort they put into branding ITVX?)
Yes, they should have realised a decade ago where the market was going, and worked hard to get everything licenced. This will be a pain for the older stuff, made before anyone had the concept of either streaming or overseas sales, but the effort should have been made to do it.
That they have saved themselves a few quid by not licensing streaming on newer productions - so they spend a month on iPlayer and then get sold by the production company to Netflix for a secondary run - is an even bigger failure of BBC management. It shouldn’t be hard to get a lot of the cheap filler programming sorted out though, even if the latest Attenborough documentary or Top Gear take more time.
(I think Twitter have upset a lot of people with the “X” rebrand, it’s ubiquitous in many industries, and there a few few trademarks on it such as Microsoft Xbox).
The BBC could not have afforded to pay lots of money for future licenses that it might or might not be able to exploit. Businesses don't generally splash out on that much speculative expenditure without a clear plan in place.
London and the SE voted Remain. Everywhere else voted Leave, bar Scotland and Northern Ireland, where large parts of the population see their future freed from London, but inside the EU.
Trying to cancel my TV licence and get a refund (moving away).
Aggressive warnings about police action if I watch TV
Deliberately misleading about what you can watch without one
You can only cancel it 14 days in advance (convinced this is so people forget)
I have to provide proof that I am moving away (so I'm sending them my visa ?!)
I'm never getting a TV licence again.
They kept sending harassing post after my dad died. I had to send a pretty emphatic letter to tell them to lay off. Even then they said they'd start up again in a year, or something, and they did.
Remember in Scotland the law re TV licensing is different. AIUI it's the PF who decides prosecutions - not the BBC or their commercial thugs. I wonder if their bumf even recognises that?
I very much doubt if the licence fee will make it to 2027. But the BBC are totally unready for any replacement.
If there's an attempt to tax broadband connections to subsidise broadcast TV there will be absolute hell to pay. I can foresee actual rioting. It might of course also lead to the rapid rollout of nationwide 5G.
The smart move is a subscription model, at any rate for overseas customers on iPlayer, but there's no sign the BBC are willing to consider it. If they'd done that 15 years ago they wouldn't be in this mess now.
The single most regressive tax there is, and with some very dubious collection methods.
Does anyone watch live TV any more, apart from sports and the occasional coronation?
Fund the genuine public service broadcasting from taxation, and let the BBC either charge subscriptions or carry advertising on their entertainment channels.
How they haven’t sorted out their licensing for an international iPlayer I have no idea. They should have had most of the archive up there by now, and charging foreigners £10 a month for it would make billions. I’d buy it, or at least alternate it with Netflix.
Yes we watch live TV and don't have any subscription TV (I will be the last on the planet to watch game of thrones). The reason for doing so is I would watch too much TV otherwise so a positive decision. In our holiday home we don't have a TV and battled regarding the payment of a TV licence we don't need. They haven't hassled us for a while now, but that was a bit of a battle.
We’re in the same situation, at least as far as home is concerned; we don’t have a holiday home. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation where I wanted to watch more TV than I do now. NB: it’s off at the moment.
So as the last two never to have seen it, we can watch Game of Thrones together on the TV in 10 years time on Pick or whatever free channel they put it on.
Barclays the latest bank annoying their own customers - this time with dramatic reductions in overdraft limits, seemingly with little reasoning, and as usual in a totally opaque manner with no discussion allowed.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
The flip side argument is that the Uk is now so distant from the prosperity frontier that it has a lot of catch up to do.
You know the psychiatrist version of the lightbulb joke?
How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?
One, but only if the lightbulb really wants to change.
I wonder if there's a bit of that. Collectively, we know that something's not right. But it's much easier to find something else to flog off, or listen to snake oil salesmen (yes Cummings, Corbyn and Truss, I am looking at you) who tell us that the solution won't put us out at all.
Countries have come back from far worse than this, and remarkably quickly. See Eastern Europe. Question is how bad things have to get before we agree to start on the gradual, initially painful path to sustainable growth.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
What we need to do is create a more level situation. But we shouldn't do that by hitting London, by levelling down London to match elsewhere. What we should do is something like "levelling up" other parts of the country so that they are more economically successful. I vaguely remember the Conservatives talking about doing something similar some years/Prime Minsters ago.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
The flip side argument is that the Uk is now so distant from the prosperity frontier that it has a lot of catch up to do.
International economic comparisons need a whole bunch of footnotes (PPP indices are very dodgy, measurement methodologies differ between countries, the comparison with America is particularly worthless for a number of reasons I've listed several times on here, etc etc). Far more valid are within-country comparisons.
Not that I'm arguing that we're doing well as a country, but the valid comparisons are with our own past through the growth rate, and within country - most regions are doing really badly as they have populations far larger than their economic opportunities can support, and those populations are kept from moving by planning restrictions, moving costs and welfare subsidies. Americans are much more willing to abandon failing regions and towns and move to areas where there is more opportunity, and, as a result, their economy is much more dynamic in this important way.
Barclays the latest bank annoying their own customers - this time with dramatic reductions in overdraft limits, seemingly with little reasoning, and as usual in a totally opaque manner with no discussion allowed.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
The flip side argument is that the Uk is now so distant from the prosperity frontier that it has a lot of catch up to do.
You know the psychiatrist version of the lightbulb joke?
How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?
One, but only if the lightbulb really wants to change.
I wonder if there's a bit of that. Collectively, we know that something's not right. But it's much easier to find something else to flog off, or listen to snake oil salesmen (yes Cummings, Corbyn and Truss, I am looking at you) who tell us that the solution won't put us out at all.
Countries have come back from far worse than this, and remarkably quickly. See Eastern Europe. Question is how bad things have to get before we agree to start on the gradual, initially painful path to sustainable growth.
The Freudian psychoanalyst version is:
How many Freudians does it take to change a lightbulb?
Two. One to actually change the lightbulb, and the other to hold the penis.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
You could equally say without San Francisco, New York city, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and Seattle the USA would be poorer than most of Germany and the Netherlands and poorer than London.
Notice that also omits France, Spain and Italy, all of which would be poorer than the UK overall.
Trying to cancel my TV licence and get a refund (moving away).
Aggressive warnings about police action if I watch TV
Deliberately misleading about what you can watch without one
You can only cancel it 14 days in advance (convinced this is so people forget)
I have to provide proof that I am moving away (so I'm sending them my visa ?!)
I'm never getting a TV licence again.
They kept sending harassing post after my dad died. I had to send a pretty emphatic letter to tell them to lay off. Even then they said they'd start up again in a year, or something, and they did.
Remember in Scotland the law re TV licensing is different. AIUI it's the PF who decides prosecutions - not the BBC or their commercial thugs. I wonder if their bumf even recognises that?
I very much doubt if the licence fee will make it to 2027. But the BBC are totally unready for any replacement.
If there's an attempt to tax broadband connections to subsidise broadcast TV there will be absolute hell to pay. I can foresee actual rioting. It might of course also lead to the rapid rollout of nationwide 5G.
The smart move is a subscription model, at any rate for overseas customers on iPlayer, but there's no sign the BBC are willing to consider it. If they'd done that 15 years ago they wouldn't be in this mess now.
The single most regressive tax there is, and with some very dubious collection methods.
Does anyone watch live TV any more, apart from sports and the occasional coronation?
Fund the genuine public service broadcasting from taxation, and let the BBC either charge subscriptions or carry advertising on their entertainment channels.
How they haven’t sorted out their licensing for an international iPlayer I have no idea. They should have had most of the archive up there by now, and charging foreigners £10 a month for it would make billions. I’d buy it, or at least alternate it with Netflix.
This is completely unrealistic and ignores the very, very real issues with content licencing, residual payment deals for talent and the complexity of international content purchasing/sales. 9/10 times when the BBC procures a TV show it only purchases UK linear and streaming rights which it may then resell to Netflix.
If was going to make a BBC streaming service I'd do £6.99 per month for all non-live content. So no MOTD live or on catchup, but you do get Peaky Blinders and the recent back catalogue and make that available to cord cutters who live in the pure streaming world.
My point was that the BBC should have been working on this for the past decade, given how obvious it was going to be. The big dramas are more difficult, for the reasons you suggest of residual payments and licensing; but the soaps, comedy shows, and all the daytime crap, would be much easier.
Funding pretty much the whole production of something, but leaving out secondary streaming rights, would be a dereliction of duty for a commercial entity in recent times.
MOTD is the one programme that will never be allowed on an international iPlayer though. At least not unless they edit out all of the Premier League content that’s sold abroad separately.
But that's the point, the BBC rarely funds anywhere near the entirety of anything these days. Most of their content is licenced from the big UK players who are funded independently and they then sell domestic and international rights separately. The market has moved on a huge amount since then and taking it back to when everything was centrally approved by the BBC2 controller with BBC budgets would destroy the success of UK TV and movie production.
The BBC don't leave out streaming rights or international streaming rights, they simply can't afford to compete with Netflix and Amazon for them and it being a capitalist industry, there's little regard for sentiment when selling a product, it will go to the highest bidder.
I think we’re violently agreeing here. I’m contrasting the approach of the BBC over, say, Disney, who have managed to hold on to the rights for most of their content, and even the older stuff has ended up on their streaming service.
If BBC Worldwide, at the height of Top Gear’s popularity, had launched an international iPlayer with TG as an exclusive, they would likely be successful by now - but instead, they stuck with the old-world view of overseas licensing to TV networks, and they’re now like the guy trying to sell music CDs when everyone else has moved through Napster to Spotify.
Disney+ is yet to break even. Other parts of Disney are subsidising it.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
Yes a bit of both, but also unfortunate geography. The rest of the country is pretty marginal to the economic core of Europe. London is well placed in the far SE, as in principle should be East Anglia and the North Sea coast. The rest is highly marginal.
Other countries have the same issues and either suffer accordingly (Portugal, Greece, Romania, Mezzogiorno etc) or compensate through natural resources (Norway, Iceland), canny tax policies (Ireland) or extremely high levels of education and skills (Sweden, Finland).
Precisely. London is one end of an arc of prosperity and economic dynamism that runs from Northern Italy up through Switzerland and Germany and into France and the Low Countries. Of course economic and physical geography don't have to coincide perfectly - the UK's aggressive empire building allowed us to bend economic geography to put us at the centre of things in the 19C, but we bancrupted ourselves in two world wars making the Empire non-viable and ensuring that physical geography reasserted itself to our disadvantage, leaving us once again peripheral. In my opinion our response to this challenge should be threefold: Trade - rejoin the EU single market to reduce frictions in our trade with the rest of Europe and allow more of the prosperity to spread beyond London. Encourage more firms to export as a means of boosting productivity. Infrastructure - improve transport and communications links so that physical geography is less of a constraint. Skills - improve our productivity and in particular deal with the long tail of the low skilled and the long tail of poorly managed firms. If we succeed then I believe we can enjoy the same standard of living as Germany or the Netherlands within 20 years. The alternative is a frankly frightening tailspin of national decline, political instability and an accelerating exodus of young skilled people to the US, Asia and the continent - which has already started, anecdotally.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
The flip side argument is that the Uk is now so distant from the prosperity frontier that it has a lot of catch up to do.
International economic comparisons need a whole bunch of footnotes (PPP indices are very dodgy, measurement methodologies differ between countries, the comparison with America is particularly worthless for a number of reasons I've listed several times on here, etc etc). Far more valid are within-country comparisons.
Not that I'm arguing that we're doing well as a country, but the valid comparisons are with our own past through the growth rate, and within country - most regions are doing really badly as they have populations far larger than their economic opportunities can support, and those populations are kept from moving by planning restrictions, moving costs and welfare subsidies. Americans are much more willing to abandon failing regions and towns and move to areas where there is more opportunity, and, as a result, their economy is much more dynamic in this important way.
Brits would probably move around more in search of opportunity if there was any sense of point in doing so.
As it is, there is only one main choice, which is as a young professional, to move to London, get experience, and then flee desperately for cheaper housing in a commutable area once you have kids.
Reading between the lines on that story, it’s opponents of DeSantis on school boards deliberately making absurd decisions, to try and gain support for their progressive agenda.
That is the Telegraph's framing of the issue, reading between the lines. (This is the paper that assures us Michelle Obama will be the presidential nominee, remember.)
And the law piled legal liability on to teachers personally and made it easy for nutters... I mean concerned parents to sue. So of course they're going to err on the side of caution!
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering. Brio
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
Yes a bit of both, but also unfortunate geography. The rest of the country is pretty marginal to the economic core of Europe. London is well placed in the far SE, as in principle should be East Anglia and the North Sea coast. The rest is highly marginal.
Other countries have the same issues and either suffer accordingly (Portugal, Greece, Romania, Mezzogiorno etc) or compensate through natural resources (Norway, Iceland), canny tax policies (Ireland) or extremely high levels of education and skills (Sweden, Finland).
Unfortunate geography can be overcome. See Estonia, Japan, New Zealand, etc.
I’ve been interested in British regional inequality since I first came to the UK in 2000 and, through my job, was sent around the country.
I was astonished at the deprivation and squalor compared with NZ, and thought it demanded explanation.
As we see in the charts above, regional underperformance means Britain is increasingly a poor-ish country, with a successful entrepôt. More “Singapore and Malaysia” than “Singapore-on-Thames”.
Britain is not a poor country, even the North East of England and Wales are wealthier than 80% of countries on earth. Yes it is not the wealthiest western nation but that doesn't make it a poor nation either
... On whether enough people continue to pay it, the evasion rate is estimated at well under 10% and has crept up but not that much. The idea that there will be mass disobedience on this within the next few years is pretty fanciful. ...
The comparison with Ireland is interesting. There the evasion rate for the TV license was estimated at 15% in 2020, and this appears to be surging upwards in the wake of recent scandal.
Despite accusations to the contrary, it does seem that in Britain a lot of people are willing to follow the rules simply because they're the rules, and so assumptions that people taking cash will always be fiddling their tax seem a bit unfair to me.
That's not really a very apt analogy.
It's perfectly obvious why people decide to pay their TV licence fee even if they don't feel it's good value for money - it's to prevent potential prosecution, adverse impact on credit rating and so on.
It isn't obvious why traders offer a larger discount for cash than could reasonably be explained by cost differences. That doesn't mean every trader that does it is evading tax, but the suspicion isn't an unreasonable one.
The cost to the restaurant of not just the card payments, but the time and effort required to reconcile tips paid by card, may well be closer to 10% than you’d think.
The management might just like cash, and not want to be beholden to a very large company who can cancel their ability to do business because the owner once said something someone thought was bad on Twitter. It’s a point of principle.
I'm not a retailer, but it does seem unlikely that the cost of card payments is going to be 10% more than the cost of cash payments for a restaurant that takes both. If you persuade some people to switch to cash you presumably still have to deal with tips paid by cash and by card.
In Sweden recently, I found some places only took Swish and cash, some only Swish and cards, some all 3, and a few places only took Swish. It seems literally everyone in Sweden has Swish on their mobiles.
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
To be fair - if someone goes after an anonymous poster here, the first thing will be OGH getting a lawyers letter demanding identifying data for that poster. At that point OGH will need a lawyer.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
And it will cost the poster 1000 x as much, which looks to me a more effective deterrent.
Not that anything more is needed in a response to the lawyer than Malmesbury is algernon.beetlejuice5467@pmail.com, that's all i know, now piss off. If OGH wants a more lawyerly wording I am sure one of the many solrs on the site will oblige with a template, pro bono.
The response will be - "We want IP addresses, for a start. We know you know them. Court order incoming."
Legal stuff is expensive, and a worry.
I should have added, and he has used the following IP addresses in the past. Not difficult to ask the system for that. All about one tenth the hassle of doing one's annual tax return, and still no need to contribute to a lawyer's coffers.
But my point is the mismatch. If you post something on the lines of the misIDs of other broadcasters as Huw Edwards you can expect to pay your own lawyer £000s for advice that you'd better stump up 20k and an apology, bloody quick. The standard mantra "that'll get OGH into trouble" implies a belief that the poster himself is immune.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
Yes a bit of both, but also unfortunate geography. The rest of the country is pretty marginal to the economic core of Europe. London is well placed in the far SE, as in principle should be East Anglia and the North Sea coast. The rest is highly marginal.
Other countries have the same issues and either suffer accordingly (Portugal, Greece, Romania, Mezzogiorno etc) or compensate through natural resources (Norway, Iceland), canny tax policies (Ireland) or extremely high levels of education and skills (Sweden, Finland).
Precisely. London is one end of an arc of prosperity and economic dynamism that runs from Northern Italy up through Switzerland and Germany and into France and the Low Countries. Of course economic and physical geography don't have to coincide perfectly - the UK's aggressive empire building allowed us to bend economic geography to put us at the centre of things in the 19C, but we bancrupted ourselves in two world wars making the Empire non-viable and ensuring that physical geography reasserted itself to our disadvantage, leaving us once again peripheral. In my opinion our response to this challenge should be threefold: Trade - rejoin the EU single market to reduce frictions in our trade with the rest of Europe and allow more of the prosperity to spread beyond London. Encourage more firms to export as a means of boosting productivity. Infrastructure - improve transport and communications links so that physical geography is less of a constraint. Skills - improve our productivity and in particular deal with the long tail of the low skilled and the long tail of poorly managed firms. If we succeed then I believe we can enjoy the same standard of living as Germany or the Netherlands within 20 years. The alternative is a frankly frightening tailspin of national decline, political instability and an accelerating exodus of young skilled people to the US, Asia and the continent - which has already started, anecdotally.
I agree with this, obviously, but I’d add proper devolution, which itself requires significant tax reform.
It is not possible any more to pretend that Whitehall knows what’s best for the cities and regions.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
This is the flip side of another topic on this thread: the decline of town centres. The answer might be called "levelling up" and should take a new towns approach, even if in places this means large scale refurbishment of old ones. What we must move away from is cramming more and more into an overheated south-east.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering. Brio
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
Yes a bit of both, but also unfortunate geography. The rest of the country is pretty marginal to the economic core of Europe. London is well placed in the far SE, as in principle should be East Anglia and the North Sea coast. The rest is highly marginal.
Other countries have the same issues and either suffer accordingly (Portugal, Greece, Romania, Mezzogiorno etc) or compensate through natural resources (Norway, Iceland), canny tax policies (Ireland) or extremely high levels of education and skills (Sweden, Finland).
Unfortunate geography can be overcome. See Estonia, Japan, New Zealand, etc.
I’ve been interested in British regional inequality since I first came to the UK in 2000 and, through my job, was sent around the country.
I was astonished at the deprivation and squalor compared with NZ, and thought it demanded explanation.
As we see in the charts above, regional underperformance means Britain is increasingly a poor-ish country, with a successful entrepôt. More “Singapore and Malaysia” than “Singapore-on-Thames”.
Britain is not a poor country, even the North East of England and Wales are wealthier than 80% of countries on earth. Yes it is not the wealthiest western nation but that doesn't make it a poor nation either
The question is, is the UK poorer than it needs to be and poorer than it should be? I think the answer is yes.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering. Brio
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
Yes a bit of both, but also unfortunate geography. The rest of the country is pretty marginal to the economic core of Europe. London is well placed in the far SE, as in principle should be East Anglia and the North Sea coast. The rest is highly marginal.
Other countries have the same issues and either suffer accordingly (Portugal, Greece, Romania, Mezzogiorno etc) or compensate through natural resources (Norway, Iceland), canny tax policies (Ireland) or extremely high levels of education and skills (Sweden, Finland).
Unfortunate geography can be overcome. See Estonia, Japan, New Zealand, etc.
I’ve been interested in British regional inequality since I first came to the UK in 2000 and, through my job, was sent around the country.
I was astonished at the deprivation and squalor compared with NZ, and thought it demanded explanation.
As we see in the charts above, regional underperformance means Britain is increasingly a poor-ish country, with a successful entrepôt. More “Singapore and Malaysia” than “Singapore-on-Thames”.
Britain is not a poor country, even the North East of England and Wales are wealthier than 80% of countries on earth. Yes it is not the wealthiest western nation but that doesn't make it a poor nation either
It’s a middle-to-poor country by western standards.
One of the principle problems with NHS waiting lists is the NHS. It has a structure and ethos designed for the 1950s.
Labour will, like they did before, hose money at it from borrowing. The hose will be eagerly and greedily picked up by the BMA who do not think that £120k a year for a job where you can also have an additional private practice is enough for someone in the safest job in the known universe.
What is the answer? An acceptance by the British people that the NHS is not and never has been "the envy of the world" and that it needs substantial reform and that certain aspects of our lives we need to take responsibility for ourselves.
Additionally the medical profession needs to understand that if they want to earn megabucks they need to take some career risks and not expect the taxpayer (where the average person earns £28k year) to feather bed them just because they have the letters Dr in front of their names.
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
To be fair - if someone goes after an anonymous poster here, the first thing will be OGH getting a lawyers letter demanding identifying data for that poster. At that point OGH will need a lawyer.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
And it will cost the poster 1000 x as much, which looks to me a more effective deterrent.
Not that anything more is needed in a response to the lawyer than Malmesbury is algernon.beetlejuice5467@pmail.com, that's all i know, now piss off. If OGH wants a more lawyerly wording I am sure one of the many solrs on the site will oblige with a template, pro bono.
The response will be - "We want IP addresses, for a start. We know you know them. Court order incoming."
Legal stuff is expensive, and a worry.
I should have added, and he has used the following IP addresses in the past. Not difficult to ask the system for that. All about one tenth the hassle of doing one's annual tax return, and still no need to contribute to a lawyer's coffers.
But my point is the mismatch. If you post something on the lines of the misIDs of other broadcasters as Huw Edwards you can expect to pay your own lawyer £000s for advice that you'd better stump up 20k and an apology, bloody quick. The standard mantra "that'll get OGH into trouble" implies a belief that the poster himself is immune.
And if OGH starts handing out confidential information, he could end up with GDPR and related difficulties.
Yes, the poster is in more trouble, but it is a chain of misery and expense that will be created.
Reading between the lines on that story, it’s opponents of DeSantis on school boards deliberately making absurd decisions, to try and gain support for their progressive agenda.
That is the Telegraph's framing of the issue, reading between the lines. (This is the paper that assures us Michelle Obama will be the presidential nominee, remember.)
As You Like It has already been mentioned. I wonder what they would make of The Merchant of Venice?
As for Twelfth Night - but to be fair, banning that would be a public service anyway.
I'd imagine the schools boards do not need to drop plays they were not studying in the first place. Given RDS has also legislated for schools to spend more time on (one approach to) American history, he might even regard not wasting time reading a few old plays as a feature, not a bug.
Trying to cancel my TV licence and get a refund (moving away).
Aggressive warnings about police action if I watch TV
Deliberately misleading about what you can watch without one
You can only cancel it 14 days in advance (convinced this is so people forget)
I have to provide proof that I am moving away (so I'm sending them my visa ?!)
I'm never getting a TV licence again.
They kept sending harassing post after my dad died. I had to send a pretty emphatic letter to tell them to lay off. Even then they said they'd start up again in a year, or something, and they did.
Remember in Scotland the law re TV licensing is different. AIUI it's the PF who decides prosecutions - not the BBC or their commercial thugs. I wonder if their bumf even recognises that?
I very much doubt if the licence fee will make it to 2027. But the BBC are totally unready for any replacement.
If there's an attempt to tax broadband connections to subsidise broadcast TV there will be absolute hell to pay. I can foresee actual rioting. It might of course also lead to the rapid rollout of nationwide 5G.
The smart move is a subscription model, at any rate for overseas customers on iPlayer, but there's no sign the BBC are willing to consider it. If they'd done that 15 years ago they wouldn't be in this mess now.
The single most regressive tax there is, and with some very dubious collection methods.
Does anyone watch live TV any more, apart from sports and the occasional coronation?
Fund the genuine public service broadcasting from taxation, and let the BBC either charge subscriptions or carry advertising on their entertainment channels.
How they haven’t sorted out their licensing for an international iPlayer I have no idea. They should have had most of the archive up there by now, and charging foreigners £10 a month for it would make billions. I’d buy it, or at least alternate it with Netflix.
Instead, they put the archive - which must be among the best in the business even if they did wipe a lot of their earliest programmes - on Britbox, which has not so far as I can see been anything other than a flop.
(By the way, I wonder how ITV feel about Twitter's rebrand given all the effort they put into branding ITVX?)
Yes, they should have realised a decade ago where the market was going, and worked hard to get everything licenced. This will be a pain for the older stuff, made before anyone had the concept of either streaming or overseas sales, but the effort should have been made to do it.
That they have saved themselves a few quid by not licensing streaming on newer productions - so they spend a month on iPlayer and then get sold by the production company to Netflix for a secondary run - is an even bigger failure of BBC management. It shouldn’t be hard to get a lot of the cheap filler programming sorted out though, even if the latest Attenborough documentary or Top Gear take more time.
(I think Twitter have upset a lot of people with the “X” rebrand, it’s ubiquitous in many industries, and there a few few trademarks on it such as Microsoft Xbox).
IIRC the BBC et al did realise which way the market was headed a decade ago. Together with ITV and C4 they set up Project Kangaroo, which was going to be a world-class streaming service with all UK content in one place. The usual muppets at the Competition Commission decided this would be anti-competitive and shut it down. Result: British broadcasters are nowhere in the streaming landscape and, even here in the UK, the market is dominated by US firms.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering. Brio
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
Yes a bit of both, but also unfortunate geography. The rest of the country is pretty marginal to the economic core of Europe. London is well placed in the far SE, as in principle should be East Anglia and the North Sea coast. The rest is highly marginal.
Other countries have the same issues and either suffer accordingly (Portugal, Greece, Romania, Mezzogiorno etc) or compensate through natural resources (Norway, Iceland), canny tax policies (Ireland) or extremely high levels of education and skills (Sweden, Finland).
Unfortunate geography can be overcome. See Estonia, Japan, New Zealand, etc.
I’ve been interested in British regional inequality since I first came to the UK in 2000 and, through my job, was sent around the country.
I was astonished at the deprivation and squalor compared with NZ, and thought it demanded explanation.
As we see in the charts above, regional underperformance means Britain is increasingly a poor-ish country, with a successful entrepôt. More “Singapore and Malaysia” than “Singapore-on-Thames”.
Britain is not a poor country, even the North East of England and Wales are wealthier than 80% of countries on earth. Yes it is not the wealthiest western nation but that doesn't make it a poor nation either
It’s a middle-to-poor country by western standards.
How much could we sell Northern Ireland to Ireland for do you think ?
Tbf £1 (& transfer of liabilities) would represent a bargain.
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
I don't think any country is "beyond repair". Look at Eastern Europe in the 1990's, or even in an extreme example Germany and Japan in the mid 40's, but in all those cases it took a massive shock to the system and some massive investment to get them out of the mess they were in.
Trying to cancel my TV licence and get a refund (moving away).
Aggressive warnings about police action if I watch TV
Deliberately misleading about what you can watch without one
You can only cancel it 14 days in advance (convinced this is so people forget)
I have to provide proof that I am moving away (so I'm sending them my visa ?!)
I'm never getting a TV licence again.
They kept sending harassing post after my dad died. I had to send a pretty emphatic letter to tell them to lay off. Even then they said they'd start up again in a year, or something, and they did.
Remember in Scotland the law re TV licensing is different. AIUI it's the PF who decides prosecutions - not the BBC or their commercial thugs. I wonder if their bumf even recognises that?
I very much doubt if the licence fee will make it to 2027. But the BBC are totally unready for any replacement.
If there's an attempt to tax broadband connections to subsidise broadcast TV there will be absolute hell to pay. I can foresee actual rioting. It might of course also lead to the rapid rollout of nationwide 5G.
The smart move is a subscription model, at any rate for overseas customers on iPlayer, but there's no sign the BBC are willing to consider it. If they'd done that 15 years ago they wouldn't be in this mess now.
The single most regressive tax there is, and with some very dubious collection methods.
Does anyone watch live TV any more, apart from sports and the occasional coronation?
Fund the genuine public service broadcasting from taxation, and let the BBC either charge subscriptions or carry advertising on their entertainment channels.
How they haven’t sorted out their licensing for an international iPlayer I have no idea. They should have had most of the archive up there by now, and charging foreigners £10 a month for it would make billions. I’d buy it, or at least alternate it with Netflix.
Instead, they put the archive - which must be among the best in the business even if they did wipe a lot of their earliest programmes - on Britbox, which has not so far as I can see been anything other than a flop.
(By the way, I wonder how ITV feel about Twitter's rebrand given all the effort they put into branding ITVX?)
Yes, they should have realised a decade ago where the market was going, and worked hard to get everything licenced. This will be a pain for the older stuff, made before anyone had the concept of either streaming or overseas sales, but the effort should have been made to do it.
That they have saved themselves a few quid by not licensing streaming on newer productions - so they spend a month on iPlayer and then get sold by the production company to Netflix for a secondary run - is an even bigger failure of BBC management. It shouldn’t be hard to get a lot of the cheap filler programming sorted out though, even if the latest Attenborough documentary or Top Gear take more time.
(I think Twitter have upset a lot of people with the “X” rebrand, it’s ubiquitous in many industries, and there a few few trademarks on it such as Microsoft Xbox).
IIRC the BBC et al did realise which way the market was headed a decade ago. Together with ITV and C4 they set up Project Kangaroo or Project Caterpillar or whatever it was called, which was going to be a world-class streaming service with all UK content in one place. The usual muppets at Ofcom or wherever decided this would be anti-competitive and shut it down. Result: British broadcasters are nowhere in the streaming landscape and, even here in the UK, the market is dominated by US firms.
What was that about Britain being institutionally broken again?
That was an attempt to create a monopoly for streaming TV in the UK, as opposed to selling UK TV abroad.
The only half-successful thing to come out of it, somewhat ironically, was the Britbox service in the US and Canada.
... On whether enough people continue to pay it, the evasion rate is estimated at well under 10% and has crept up but not that much. The idea that there will be mass disobedience on this within the next few years is pretty fanciful. ...
The comparison with Ireland is interesting. There the evasion rate for the TV license was estimated at 15% in 2020, and this appears to be surging upwards in the wake of recent scandal.
Despite accusations to the contrary, it does seem that in Britain a lot of people are willing to follow the rules simply because they're the rules, and so assumptions that people taking cash will always be fiddling their tax seem a bit unfair to me.
That's not really a very apt analogy.
It's perfectly obvious why people decide to pay their TV licence fee even if they don't feel it's good value for money - it's to prevent potential prosecution, adverse impact on credit rating and so on.
It isn't obvious why traders offer a larger discount for cash than could reasonably be explained by cost differences. That doesn't mean every trader that does it is evading tax, but the suspicion isn't an unreasonable one.
The cost to the restaurant of not just the card payments, but the time and effort required to reconcile tips paid by card, may well be closer to 10% than you’d think.
The management might just like cash, and not want to be beholden to a very large company who can cancel their ability to do business because the owner once said something someone thought was bad on Twitter. It’s a point of principle.
I'm not a retailer, but it does seem unlikely that the cost of card payments is going to be 10% more than the cost of cash payments for a restaurant that takes both. If you persuade some people to switch to cash you presumably still have to deal with tips paid by cash and by card.
In Sweden recently, I found some places only took Swish and cash, some only Swish and cards, some all 3, and a few places only took Swish. It seems literally everyone in Sweden has Swish on their mobiles.
Nor am I a retailer. I suspect some businesses are cash-only because cards used to be too expensive and a small number of business owners have not noticed processing charges have dropped markedly.
One of the principle problems with NHS waiting lists is the NHS. It has a structure and ethos designed for the 1950s.
Labour will, like they did before, hose money at it from borrowing. The hose will be eagerly and greedily picked up by the BMA who do not think that £120k a year for a job where you can also have an additional private practice is enough for someone in the safest job in the known universe.
What is the answer? An acceptance by the British people that the NHS is not and never has been "the envy of the world" and that it needs substantial reform and that certain aspects of our lives we need to take responsibility for ourselves.
Additionally the medical profession needs to understand that if they want to earn megabucks they need to take some career risks and not expect the taxpayer (where the average person earns £28k year) to feather bed them just because they have the letters Dr in front of their names.
The NHS's structure is very different to what it was in the 1950s. The main reason for long waiting lists is that the UK spends less on healthcare than comparable countries.
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
To be fair - if someone goes after an anonymous poster here, the first thing will be OGH getting a lawyers letter demanding identifying data for that poster. At that point OGH will need a lawyer.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
And it will cost the poster 1000 x as much, which looks to me a more effective deterrent.
Not that anything more is needed in a response to the lawyer than Malmesbury is algernon.beetlejuice5467@pmail.com, that's all i know, now piss off. If OGH wants a more lawyerly wording I am sure one of the many solrs on the site will oblige with a template, pro bono.
The response will be - "We want IP addresses, for a start. We know you know them. Court order incoming."
Legal stuff is expensive, and a worry.
I should have added, and he has used the following IP addresses in the past. Not difficult to ask the system for that. All about one tenth the hassle of doing one's annual tax return, and still no need to contribute to a lawyer's coffers.
But my point is the mismatch. If you post something on the lines of the misIDs of other broadcasters as Huw Edwards you can expect to pay your own lawyer £000s for advice that you'd better stump up 20k and an apology, bloody quick. The standard mantra "that'll get OGH into trouble" implies a belief that the poster himself is immune.
And if OGH starts handing out confidential information, he could end up with GDPR and related difficulties.
Yes, the poster is in more trouble, but it is a chain of misery and expense that will be created.
OGH has had had nasty letters from media lawyers in the past AAUI and I don't think risking anything that could cause him similar difficulty is fair to him. I'm one of the many solicitors on the site and, while I am happy to help if OGH gets sued by Mr Eagles or RKS1000 for unfair dismissal, my dabbling in defamation law beyond the most casual opinion is not something anyone is going to thank me for. Nor indeed any of the solicitors, barristers or advocates on the site.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering. Brio
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
Yes a bit of both, but also unfortunate geography. The rest of the country is pretty marginal to the economic core of Europe. London is well placed in the far SE, as in principle should be East Anglia and the North Sea coast. The rest is highly marginal.
Other countries have the same issues and either suffer accordingly (Portugal, Greece, Romania, Mezzogiorno etc) or compensate through natural resources (Norway, Iceland), canny tax policies (Ireland) or extremely high levels of education and skills (Sweden, Finland).
Unfortunate geography can be overcome. See Estonia, Japan, New Zealand, etc.
I’ve been interested in British regional inequality since I first came to the UK in 2000 and, through my job, was sent around the country.
I was astonished at the deprivation and squalor compared with NZ, and thought it demanded explanation.
As we see in the charts above, regional underperformance means Britain is increasingly a poor-ish country, with a successful entrepôt. More “Singapore and Malaysia” than “Singapore-on-Thames”.
Britain is not a poor country, even the North East of England and Wales are wealthier than 80% of countries on earth. Yes it is not the wealthiest western nation but that doesn't make it a poor nation either
It’s a middle-to-poor country by western standards.
No it isn't, the UK has a higher gdp per capita than France, Spain, Italy, the EU average, South Korea and Japan and about level with New Zealand. It is at most a middle income country by western standards.
London of course is a high income region even by western standards (albeit with high expense too).
We also have state healthcare and a more accessible welfare state than say the USA, Americans have to pay privately for healthcare even if they pay less tax
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
It used to bug me when people said that the UK was a shit place to live but I've got to admit that recently it does feel a bit.... shit. Every town I've visited (apart from the obviously wealthy ones) feels run down. Empty shops, litter, crap roads, obesity, mobility scooters, takeaways and barbers and nail bars. Closed pubs. Rarely any public toilets, and the ones there are are grim. Dealing with any kind of authority is a pain in the arse.Trying to get GP appointments is problematic, dont get me started on dentistry. Customer service is wank- I've arranged to view houses and the estate agent has been very late without even phoning me to warn me and on 2 occasions hasn't even turned up. I've been waiting over a month for a quote for some work on my van....it just feels a never ending grind, and I'm usually a happy fucker! Can it be turned around?
Trade - rejoin the EU single market to reduce frictions in our trade with the rest of Europe and allow more of the prosperity to spread beyond London. Encourage more firms to export as a means of boosting productivity.
Rejoin seems to be the only easy lever to pull at the moment which would generate some economic tumescence.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
The flip side argument is that the Uk is now so distant from the prosperity frontier that it has a lot of catch up to do.
International economic comparisons need a whole bunch of footnotes (PPP indices are very dodgy, measurement methodologies differ between countries, the comparison with America is particularly worthless for a number of reasons I've listed several times on here, etc etc). Far more valid are within-country comparisons.
Not that I'm arguing that we're doing well as a country, but the valid comparisons are with our own past through the growth rate, and within country - most regions are doing really badly as they have populations far larger than their economic opportunities can support, and those populations are kept from moving by planning restrictions, moving costs and welfare subsidies. Americans are much more willing to abandon failing regions and towns and move to areas where there is more opportunity, and, as a result, their economy is much more dynamic in this important way.
Brits would probably move around more in search of opportunity if there was any sense of point in doing so.
As it is, there is only one main choice, which is as a young professional, to move to London, get experience, and then flee desperately for cheaper housing in a commutable area once you have kids.
So make housing cheaper (and commuting easier) in and around London by relaxing planning restrictions. That would make it easier for people to stay in London for their whole careers, and reduce the absurd overpopulation of many of the regions.
Also reduce public sector salaries outside London and the south east to take account of the lower cost of living there so there is less of a pull factor and the market is less distorted by a bloated public sector in the regions which takes up 70% of GDP in some of them.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering. Brio
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
Yes a bit of both, but also unfortunate geography. The rest of the country is pretty marginal to the economic core of Europe. London is well placed in the far SE, as in principle should be East Anglia and the North Sea coast. The rest is highly marginal.
Other countries have the same issues and either suffer accordingly (Portugal, Greece, Romania, Mezzogiorno etc) or compensate through natural resources (Norway, Iceland), canny tax policies (Ireland) or extremely high levels of education and skills (Sweden, Finland).
Unfortunate geography can be overcome. See Estonia, Japan, New Zealand, etc.
I’ve been interested in British regional inequality since I first came to the UK in 2000 and, through my job, was sent around the country.
I was astonished at the deprivation and squalor compared with NZ, and thought it demanded explanation.
As we see in the charts above, regional underperformance means Britain is increasingly a poor-ish country, with a successful entrepôt. More “Singapore and Malaysia” than “Singapore-on-Thames”.
Britain is not a poor country, even the North East of England and Wales are wealthier than 80% of countries on earth. Yes it is not the wealthiest western nation but that doesn't make it a poor nation either
The question is, is the UK poorer than it needs to be and poorer than it should be? I think the answer is yes.
Yes but sadly, the polls seem to think that the population believes that the answer to this is to put the Labour Party in power, where all of the front bench wouldn't have the first clue how to create wealth even if they had a gun held to their heads. I am not saying the Tories are not shit, but the alternative bunch who would not rise above lower middle management in a wealth producing private sector business will definitely not fix the problem.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
You could equally say without San Francisco, New York city, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and Seattle the USA would be poorer than most of Germany and the Netherlands and poorer than London.
Notice that also omits France, Spain and Italy, all of which would be poorer than the UK overall.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering. Brio
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
Yes a bit of both, but also unfortunate geography. The rest of the country is pretty marginal to the economic core of Europe. London is well placed in the far SE, as in principle should be East Anglia and the North Sea coast. The rest is highly marginal.
Other countries have the same issues and either suffer accordingly (Portugal, Greece, Romania, Mezzogiorno etc) or compensate through natural resources (Norway, Iceland), canny tax policies (Ireland) or extremely high levels of education and skills (Sweden, Finland).
Unfortunate geography can be overcome. See Estonia, Japan, New Zealand, etc.
I’ve been interested in British regional inequality since I first came to the UK in 2000 and, through my job, was sent around the country.
I was astonished at the deprivation and squalor compared with NZ, and thought it demanded explanation.
As we see in the charts above, regional underperformance means Britain is increasingly a poor-ish country, with a successful entrepôt. More “Singapore and Malaysia” than “Singapore-on-Thames”.
Britain is not a poor country, even the North East of England and Wales are wealthier than 80% of countries on earth. Yes it is not the wealthiest western nation but that doesn't make it a poor nation either
It’s a middle-to-poor country by western standards.
No it isn't, the UK has a higher gdp per capita than France, Spain, Italy, the EU average, South Korea and Japan and about level with New Zealand. It is at most a middle income country by western standards.
London of course is a high income region even by western standards (albeit with high expense too).
We also have state healthcare and a more accessible welfare state than say the USA, Americans have to pay privately for healthcare even if they pay less tax
They also work about 12% longer hours, which accounts for about a third of the difference in GDP/head.
Really, ignore international comparisons. They need so many caveats as to be completely useless.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering. Brio
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
Yes a bit of both, but also unfortunate geography. The rest of the country is pretty marginal to the economic core of Europe. London is well placed in the far SE, as in principle should be East Anglia and the North Sea coast. The rest is highly marginal.
Other countries have the same issues and either suffer accordingly (Portugal, Greece, Romania, Mezzogiorno etc) or compensate through natural resources (Norway, Iceland), canny tax policies (Ireland) or extremely high levels of education and skills (Sweden, Finland).
Unfortunate geography can be overcome. See Estonia, Japan, New Zealand, etc.
I’ve been interested in British regional inequality since I first came to the UK in 2000 and, through my job, was sent around the country.
I was astonished at the deprivation and squalor compared with NZ, and thought it demanded explanation.
As we see in the charts above, regional underperformance means Britain is increasingly a poor-ish country, with a successful entrepôt. More “Singapore and Malaysia” than “Singapore-on-Thames”.
Britain is not a poor country, even the North East of England and Wales are wealthier than 80% of countries on earth. Yes it is not the wealthiest western nation but that doesn't make it a poor nation either
It’s a middle-to-poor country by western standards.
No it isn't, the UK has a higher gdp per capita than France, Spain, Italy, the EU average, South Korea and Japan and about level with New Zealand.
London of course is a high income region even by western standards (albeit with high expense too).
We also have state healthcare and a more accessible welfare state than say the USA, Americans have to pay privately for healthcare even if they pay less tax
You've torpedoed your own point. Yes, the GDP is higher than some countries, but given the outsized influence of London if the rest of the country had kept pace it should be higher than all of them. Your party is going to lose the next election because, despite promises, nothing tangible has been achieved to fix that disparity.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
It used to bug me when people said that the UK was a shit place to live but I've got to admit that recently it does feel a bit.... shit. Every town I've visited (apart from the obviously wealthy ones) feels run down. Empty shops, litter, crap roads, obesity, mobility scooters, takeaways and barbers and nail bars. Closed pubs. Rarely any public toilets, and the ones there are are grim. Dealing with any kind of authority is a pain in the arse.Trying to get GP appointments is problematic, dont get me started on dentistry. Customer service is wank- I've arranged to view houses and the estate agent has been very late without even phoning me to warn me and on 2 occasions hasn't even turned up. I've been waiting over a month for a quote for some work on my van....it just feels a never ending grind, and I'm usually a happy fucker! Can it be turned around?
Trying to cancel my TV licence and get a refund (moving away).
Aggressive warnings about police action if I watch TV
Deliberately misleading about what you can watch without one
You can only cancel it 14 days in advance (convinced this is so people forget)
I have to provide proof that I am moving away (so I'm sending them my visa ?!)
I'm never getting a TV licence again.
They kept sending harassing post after my dad died. I had to send a pretty emphatic letter to tell them to lay off. Even then they said they'd start up again in a year, or something, and they did.
Remember in Scotland the law re TV licensing is different. AIUI it's the PF who decides prosecutions - not the BBC or their commercial thugs. I wonder if their bumf even recognises that?
I very much doubt if the licence fee will make it to 2027. But the BBC are totally unready for any replacement.
If there's an attempt to tax broadband connections to subsidise broadcast TV there will be absolute hell to pay. I can foresee actual rioting. It might of course also lead to the rapid rollout of nationwide 5G.
The smart move is a subscription model, at any rate for overseas customers on iPlayer, but there's no sign the BBC are willing to consider it. If they'd done that 15 years ago they wouldn't be in this mess now.
The single most regressive tax there is, and with some very dubious collection methods.
Does anyone watch live TV any more, apart from sports and the occasional coronation?
Fund the genuine public service broadcasting from taxation, and let the BBC either charge subscriptions or carry advertising on their entertainment channels.
How they haven’t sorted out their licensing for an international iPlayer I have no idea. They should have had most of the archive up there by now, and charging foreigners £10 a month for it would make billions. I’d buy it, or at least alternate it with Netflix.
This is completely unrealistic and ignores the very, very real issues with content licencing, residual payment deals for talent and the complexity of international content purchasing/sales. 9/10 times when the BBC procures a TV show it only purchases UK linear and streaming rights which it may then resell to Netflix.
If was going to make a BBC streaming service I'd do £6.99 per month for all non-live content. So no MOTD live or on catchup, but you do get Peaky Blinders and the recent back catalogue and make that available to cord cutters who live in the pure streaming world.
My point was that the BBC should have been working on this for the past decade, given how obvious it was going to be. The big dramas are more difficult, for the reasons you suggest of residual payments and licensing; but the soaps, comedy shows, and all the daytime crap, would be much easier.
Funding pretty much the whole production of something, but leaving out secondary streaming rights, would be a dereliction of duty for a commercial entity in recent times.
MOTD is the one programme that will never be allowed on an international iPlayer though. At least not unless they edit out all of the Premier League content that’s sold abroad separately.
But that's the point, the BBC rarely funds anywhere near the entirety of anything these days. Most of their content is licenced from the big UK players who are funded independently and they then sell domestic and international rights separately. The market has moved on a huge amount since then and taking it back to when everything was centrally approved by the BBC2 controller with BBC budgets would destroy the success of UK TV and movie production.
The BBC don't leave out streaming rights or international streaming rights, they simply can't afford to compete with Netflix and Amazon for them and it being a capitalist industry, there's little regard for sentiment when selling a product, it will go to the highest bidder.
I think we’re violently agreeing here. I’m contrasting the approach of the BBC over, say, Disney, who have managed to hold on to the rights for most of their content, and even the older stuff has ended up on their streaming service.
If BBC Worldwide, at the height of Top Gear’s popularity, had launched an international iPlayer with TG as an exclusive, they would likely be successful by now - but instead, they stuck with the old-world view of overseas licensing to TV networks, and they’re now like the guy trying to sell music CDs when everyone else has moved through Napster to Spotify.
Disney+ is yet to break even. Other parts of Disney are subsidising it.
Yes, from talking to friends who subscribe to various streaming services, a consolidation would be good for consumers and probably necessary for streamers who might not be profitable. We've seen it even here with PBers detailing their efforts to juggle services in order to watch sport while keeping children onside. It costs too much to subscribe to everything.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering. Brio
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
Yes a bit of both, but also unfortunate geography. The rest of the country is pretty marginal to the economic core of Europe. London is well placed in the far SE, as in principle should be East Anglia and the North Sea coast. The rest is highly marginal.
Other countries have the same issues and either suffer accordingly (Portugal, Greece, Romania, Mezzogiorno etc) or compensate through natural resources (Norway, Iceland), canny tax policies (Ireland) or extremely high levels of education and skills (Sweden, Finland).
Unfortunate geography can be overcome. See Estonia, Japan, New Zealand, etc.
I’ve been interested in British regional inequality since I first came to the UK in 2000 and, through my job, was sent around the country.
I was astonished at the deprivation and squalor compared with NZ, and thought it demanded explanation.
As we see in the charts above, regional underperformance means Britain is increasingly a poor-ish country, with a successful entrepôt. More “Singapore and Malaysia” than “Singapore-on-Thames”.
Britain is not a poor country, even the North East of England and Wales are wealthier than 80% of countries on earth. Yes it is not the wealthiest western nation but that doesn't make it a poor nation either
It’s a middle-to-poor country by western standards.
No it isn't, the UK has a higher gdp per capita than France, Spain, Italy, the EU average, South Korea and Japan and about level with New Zealand. It is at most a middle income country by western standards.
London of course is a high income region even by western standards (albeit with high expense too).
We also have state healthcare and a more accessible welfare state than say the USA, Americans have to pay privately for healthcare even if they pay less tax
They also work about 12% longer hours, which accounts for about a third of the difference in GDP/head.
Really, ignore international comparisons. They need so many caveats as to be completely useless.
This a counsel of complacency though. It allows the idiotic to say, “oh well, stats are bunk, we really are the best in the world”.
No.
There’s a huge waste of human capital in the UK. Millions of people are prevented from realising their potential due to sub-par economic performance.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
I don't think any country is "beyond repair". Look at Eastern Europe in the 1990's, or even in an extreme example Germany and Japan in the mid 40's, but in all those cases it took a massive shock to the system and some massive investment to get them out of the mess they were in.
It's not broken beyond repair but it's broken beyond what the politicians are willing to risk doing wrt to slashing pensioner benefits and healthcare provision for the old and funnelling that money into investment and tax cuts for working age people. That's how the UK shifts back to a path of sustainable growth but no politician, blue or red team, seems brave enough to say it. The UK economy is the emperor with no clothes.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
If you look at London, it is supported by a huge commuter belt that does not exist in the towns you name. Even Liverpool to Manchester is a push and you could probably walk it on a good day. Northern Powerhouse Rail should be revisited, and road links reviewed. We need to convert these cities into regions: the Midlands, Merseyside, South Wales and so on.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering. Brio
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
Yes a bit of both, but also unfortunate geography. The rest of the country is pretty marginal to the economic core of Europe. London is well placed in the far SE, as in principle should be East Anglia and the North Sea coast. The rest is highly marginal.
Other countries have the same issues and either suffer accordingly (Portugal, Greece, Romania, Mezzogiorno etc) or compensate through natural resources (Norway, Iceland), canny tax policies (Ireland) or extremely high levels of education and skills (Sweden, Finland).
Unfortunate geography can be overcome. See Estonia, Japan, New Zealand, etc.
I’ve been interested in British regional inequality since I first came to the UK in 2000 and, through my job, was sent around the country.
I was astonished at the deprivation and squalor compared with NZ, and thought it demanded explanation.
As we see in the charts above, regional underperformance means Britain is increasingly a poor-ish country, with a successful entrepôt. More “Singapore and Malaysia” than “Singapore-on-Thames”.
Britain is not a poor country, even the North East of England and Wales are wealthier than 80% of countries on earth. Yes it is not the wealthiest western nation but that doesn't make it a poor nation either
It’s a middle-to-poor country by western standards.
No it isn't, the UK has a higher gdp per capita than France, Spain, Italy, the EU average, South Korea and Japan and about level with New Zealand. It is at most a middle income country by western standards.
London of course is a high income region even by western standards (albeit with high expense too).
We also have state healthcare and a more accessible welfare state than say the USA, Americans have to pay privately for healthcare even if they pay less tax
They also work about 12% longer hours, which accounts for about a third of the difference in GDP/head.
Really, ignore international comparisons. They need so many caveats as to be completely useless.
This a counsel of complacency though. It allows the idiotic to say, “oh well, stats are bunk, we really are the best in the world”.
No.
There’s a huge waste of human capital in the UK. Millions of people are prevented from realising their potential due to sub-par economic performance.
And a benefits system which incentivises people to work a maximum of 16h or 20h per week. Another thing that neither colour of politician is looking to address.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
I don't think any country is "beyond repair". Look at Eastern Europe in the 1990's, or even in an extreme example Germany and Japan in the mid 40's, but in all those cases it took a massive shock to the system and some massive investment to get them out of the mess they were in.
It's not broken beyond repair but it's broken beyond what the politicians are willing to risk doing wrt to slashing pensioner benefits and healthcare provision for the old and funnelling that money into investment and tax cuts for working age people. That's how the UK shifts back to a path of sustainable growth but no politician, blue or red team, seems brave enough to say it. The UK economy is the emperor with no clothes.
Other Western European countries seem able to care for their elderly and be rich at the same time.
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
If you look at London, it is supported by a huge commuter belt that does not exist in the towns you name. Even Liverpool to Manchester is a push and you could probably walk it on a good day. Northern Powerhouse Rail should be revisited, and road links reviewed. We need to convert these cities into regions: the Midlands, Merseyside, South Wales and so on.
A Manchester-Liverpool underground metro system with 4-5 different lines servicing different parts of the two cities and connecting them together with an under 30 minute journey time. Let's spend the £30-40bn to get it done.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
I don't think any country is "beyond repair". Look at Eastern Europe in the 1990's, or even in an extreme example Germany and Japan in the mid 40's, but in all those cases it took a massive shock to the system and some massive investment to get them out of the mess they were in.
It's not broken beyond repair but it's broken beyond what the politicians are willing to risk doing wrt to slashing pensioner benefits and healthcare provision for the old and funnelling that money into investment and tax cuts for working age people. That's how the UK shifts back to a path of sustainable growth but no politician, blue or red team, seems brave enough to say it. The UK economy is the emperor with no clothes.
Other Western European countries seem able to care for their elderly and be rich at the same time.
Other western countries don't have the same liability of defined benefit pensions as the UK.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering. Brio
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
Yes a bit of both, but also unfortunate geography. The rest of the country is pretty marginal to the economic core of Europe. London is well placed in the far SE, as in principle should be East Anglia and the North Sea coast. The rest is highly marginal.
Other countries have the same issues and either suffer accordingly (Portugal, Greece, Romania, Mezzogiorno etc) or compensate through natural resources (Norway, Iceland), canny tax policies (Ireland) or extremely high levels of education and skills (Sweden, Finland).
Unfortunate geography can be overcome. See Estonia, Japan, New Zealand, etc.
I’ve been interested in British regional inequality since I first came to the UK in 2000 and, through my job, was sent around the country.
I was astonished at the deprivation and squalor compared with NZ, and thought it demanded explanation.
As we see in the charts above, regional underperformance means Britain is increasingly a poor-ish country, with a successful entrepôt. More “Singapore and Malaysia” than “Singapore-on-Thames”.
Britain is not a poor country, even the North East of England and Wales are wealthier than 80% of countries on earth. Yes it is not the wealthiest western nation but that doesn't make it a poor nation either
The question is, is the UK poorer than it needs to be and poorer than it should be? I think the answer is yes.
Yes but sadly, the polls seem to think that the population believes that the answer to this is to put the Labour Party in power, where all of the front bench wouldn't have the first clue how to create wealth even if they had a gun held to their heads. I am not saying the Tories are not shit, but the alternative bunch who would not rise above lower middle management in a wealth producing private sector business will definitely not fix the problem.
There are some good people on the Labour front bench if some dead wood too. I happened to run into some of them at the weekend and I came away optimistic about their intellectual capacity, drive and values. I think you might be pleasantly surprised. Whether they can clean out the Augean stables the Tories will bequeath them is a different matter.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
Yes a bit of both, but also unfortunate geography. The rest of the country is pretty marginal to the economic core of Europe. London is well placed in the far SE, as in principle should be East Anglia and the North Sea coast. The rest is highly marginal.
Other countries have the same issues and either suffer accordingly (Portugal, Greece, Romania, Mezzogiorno etc) or compensate through natural resources (Norway, Iceland), canny tax policies (Ireland) or extremely high levels of education and skills (Sweden, Finland).
Unfortunate geography can be overcome. See Estonia, Japan, New Zealand, etc.
I’ve been interested in British regional inequality since I first came to the UK in 2000 and, through my job, was sent around the country.
I was astonished at the deprivation and squalor compared with NZ, and thought it demanded explanation.
As we see in the charts above, regional underperformance means Britain is increasingly a poor-ish country, with a successful entrepôt. More “Singapore and Malaysia” than “Singapore-on-Thames”.
Postwar, a great deal of business was state owned (including public utilities, and a fair amount of housing). A fair proportion of that was owned by local government. Industries which declined or shut down completely (some privatised along the way) - coal, steel, textiles, shipbuilding etc - were overrepresented in the regions. At the same time there was a process of centralisation - with assets like council housing and local utilities transferred to central government before privatisation; business rates taken out of the hands of local government and remitted directly to the Treasury etc.
Regional finances have been largely in the hands of central government for a long time, and investment is hugely skewed towards London and its immediate hinterland.
Of course there are good reasons for that - it's much easier to demonstrate a business case for investment in the most prosperous part of the country - but it's a vicious spiral, decades long, that would need very determined policy reform to escape.
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering. Brio
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
Yes a bit of both, but also unfortunate geography. The rest of the country is pretty marginal to the economic core of Europe. London is well placed in the far SE, as in principle should be East Anglia and the North Sea coast. The rest is highly marginal.
Other countries have the same issues and either suffer accordingly (Portugal, Greece, Romania, Mezzogiorno etc) or compensate through natural resources (Norway, Iceland), canny tax policies (Ireland) or extremely high levels of education and skills (Sweden, Finland).
Unfortunate geography can be overcome. See Estonia, Japan, New Zealand, etc.
I’ve been interested in British regional inequality since I first came to the UK in 2000 and, through my job, was sent around the country.
I was astonished at the deprivation and squalor compared with NZ, and thought it demanded explanation.
As we see in the charts above, regional underperformance means Britain is increasingly a poor-ish country, with a successful entrepôt. More “Singapore and Malaysia” than “Singapore-on-Thames”.
Britain is not a poor country, even the North East of England and Wales are wealthier than 80% of countries on earth. Yes it is not the wealthiest western nation but that doesn't make it a poor nation either
It’s a middle-to-poor country by western standards.
Unexceptional is the (generous) adjective I believe.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
I don't think any country is "beyond repair". Look at Eastern Europe in the 1990's, or even in an extreme example Germany and Japan in the mid 40's, but in all those cases it took a massive shock to the system and some massive investment to get them out of the mess they were in.
It's not broken beyond repair but it's broken beyond what the politicians are willing to risk doing wrt to slashing pensioner benefits and healthcare provision for the old and funnelling that money into investment and tax cuts for working age people. That's how the UK shifts back to a path of sustainable growth but no politician, blue or red team, seems brave enough to say it. The UK economy is the emperor with no clothes.
Other Western European countries seem able to care for their elderly and be rich at the same time.
Other western countries don't have the same liability of defined benefit pensions as the UK.
@Neil formerly of this parish repeatedly assured me that they were cheaper than DC pensions for the public sector.
One of the principle problems with NHS waiting lists is the NHS. It has a structure and ethos designed for the 1950s.
Labour will, like they did before, hose money at it from borrowing. The hose will be eagerly and greedily picked up by the BMA who do not think that £120k a year for a job where you can also have an additional private practice is enough for someone in the safest job in the known universe.
What is the answer? An acceptance by the British people that the NHS is not and never has been "the envy of the world" and that it needs substantial reform and that certain aspects of our lives we need to take responsibility for ourselves.
Additionally the medical profession needs to understand that if they want to earn megabucks they need to take some career risks and not expect the taxpayer (where the average person earns £28k year) to feather bed them just because they have the letters Dr in front of their names.
The NHS's structure is very different to what it was in the 1950s. The main reason for long waiting lists is that the UK spends less on healthcare than comparable countries.
"The NHS's structure is very different to what it was in the 1950s" No shit Sherlock! The question is as to whether the structures put in place then (such as the generous provisions that allow hospital consultants to also have private practice alongside the security of their NHS contracts), ie legacy issues, still cause problems today. Answer - Yes
On waiting times, yours is a a somewhat simplistic analysis. The UK health spending per capita is 18% below EU average (if this is what you call comparable countries), and this is regrettable in my view, but the relationship to waiting times is very much more complex and a lot of it is structural and due to inefficiencies of the NHS bureaucracy. It is unlikely that without significant reform there would be a great improvement in waiting times.
Incidentally, you will be interested to know, that outside our insular NHS bubble all health systems across Europe are struggling with staffing levels.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
I don't think any country is "beyond repair". Look at Eastern Europe in the 1990's, or even in an extreme example Germany and Japan in the mid 40's, but in all those cases it took a massive shock to the system and some massive investment to get them out of the mess they were in.
Yes as you will note I didn't share my colleague's pessimism. I am one of life's optimists by nature.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
There's a reason Dunelm is doing gangbusters while the likes of Wilko are closing up shop. Shopping in a town centre is a depressing experience, it's universally charity shops that don't pay any rates, nail bars and cafes which are blatantly money laundering fronts and dead fronts.
Whatever it was it seems to be gone now so I shall never know.
Photo of menu of clearly identifiable restaurant giving 10% off for cash, explicitly as part of the save cash campaign. Decidedly imprudent comment by the tweeter.
Its easy to give 10% off for cash, if you aren't registering cash sales for 20% VAT.
See what I mean? Putting OGH at risk.
How does that put OGH at risk? Its a true comment and I never identified any business (indeed I responded after the linked Tweet had been deleted)..
There is a remarkable amount of wilful blindness on this site, of the attitude "don't suggest that cash can be used in a dodgy manner".
For the gazillionth time, posters who put defamatory matter on here primarily put themselves at risk, with OGH and the site several furlongs behind
To be fair - if someone goes after an anonymous poster here, the first thing will be OGH getting a lawyers letter demanding identifying data for that poster. At that point OGH will need a lawyer.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
And it will cost the poster 1000 x as much, which looks to me a more effective deterrent.
Not that anything more is needed in a response to the lawyer than Malmesbury is algernon.beetlejuice5467@pmail.com, that's all i know, now piss off. If OGH wants a more lawyerly wording I am sure one of the many solrs on the site will oblige with a template, pro bono.
The response will be - "We want IP addresses, for a start. We know you know them. Court order incoming."
Legal stuff is expensive, and a worry.
I should have added, and he has used the following IP addresses in the past. Not difficult to ask the system for that. All about one tenth the hassle of doing one's annual tax return, and still no need to contribute to a lawyer's coffers.
But my point is the mismatch. If you post something on the lines of the misIDs of other broadcasters as Huw Edwards you can expect to pay your own lawyer £000s for advice that you'd better stump up 20k and an apology, bloody quick. The standard mantra "that'll get OGH into trouble" implies a belief that the poster himself is immune.
And if OGH starts handing out confidential information, he could end up with GDPR and related difficulties.
Yes, the poster is in more trouble, but it is a chain of misery and expense that will be created.
Naah just ask to see the colour of their subpoena, and you're all good.
It's the differential that I am on about. This is a minor inconvenience to the website vs potentially life-altering misery for the defamer, and I am puzzled that point B never gets star, or indeed any, billing.
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
I don't think any country is "beyond repair". Look at Eastern Europe in the 1990's, or even in an extreme example Germany and Japan in the mid 40's, but in all those cases it took a massive shock to the system and some massive investment to get them out of the mess they were in.
It's not broken beyond repair but it's broken beyond what the politicians are willing to risk doing wrt to slashing pensioner benefits and healthcare provision for the old and funnelling that money into investment and tax cuts for working age people. That's how the UK shifts back to a path of sustainable growth but no politician, blue or red team, seems brave enough to say it. The UK economy is the emperor with no clothes.
Other Western European countries seem able to care for their elderly and be rich at the same time.
Other western countries don't have the same liability of defined benefit pensions as the UK.
@Neil formerly of this parish repeatedly assured me that they were cheaper than DC pensions for the public sector.
Is the Civil Service pension scheme actually funded, or is HMG paying six-figure DB pensions out of current income?
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering. Brio
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
Yes a bit of both, but also unfortunate geography. The rest of the country is pretty marginal to the economic core of Europe. London is well placed in the far SE, as in principle should be East Anglia and the North Sea coast. The rest is highly marginal.
Other countries have the same issues and either suffer accordingly (Portugal, Greece, Romania, Mezzogiorno etc) or compensate through natural resources (Norway, Iceland), canny tax policies (Ireland) or extremely high levels of education and skills (Sweden, Finland).
Unfortunate geography can be overcome. See Estonia, Japan, New Zealand, etc.
I’ve been interested in British regional inequality since I first came to the UK in 2000 and, through my job, was sent around the country.
I was astonished at the deprivation and squalor compared with NZ, and thought it demanded explanation.
As we see in the charts above, regional underperformance means Britain is increasingly a poor-ish country, with a successful entrepôt. More “Singapore and Malaysia” than “Singapore-on-Thames”.
Britain is not a poor country, even the North East of England and Wales are wealthier than 80% of countries on earth. Yes it is not the wealthiest western nation but that doesn't make it a poor nation either
The question is, is the UK poorer than it needs to be and poorer than it should be? I think the answer is yes.
Yes but sadly, the polls seem to think that the population believes that the answer to this is to put the Labour Party in power, where all of the front bench wouldn't have the first clue how to create wealth even if they had a gun held to their heads. I am not saying the Tories are not shit, but the alternative bunch who would not rise above lower middle management in a wealth producing private sector business will definitely not fix the problem.
There are some good people on the Labour front bench if some dead wood too. I happened to run into some of them at the weekend and I came away optimistic about their intellectual capacity, drive and values. I think you might be pleasantly surprised. Whether they can clean out the Augean stables the Tories will bequeath them is a different matter.
I am sure there are some good people. There are in all parties. I was never a fan of Blair, but as a business person I was always impressed that he seemed to "get it" and also understand what he didn't know. I am not convinced by this lot. Hope I am wrong, because it is inevitable that we will have a Labour government. One term I hope before a reformed and properly grown up Conservative Party can rise from the ashes ( I am hoping lol)
Meanwhile, in "a percent either way isn't really the issue" news, the latest infographic from John Burn-Murdoch is sobering.
I guess the question is whether London is saving everyone else's bacon, or the dependence on London tax revenues is what keeps everywhere else poor?
Bit of both but a lot more of the former. Something has gone deeply wrong with this country. I was talking about this with another British colleague this week, I was arguing we could turn it around but he felt the UK was broken beyond repair.
I don't think any country is "beyond repair". Look at Eastern Europe in the 1990's, or even in an extreme example Germany and Japan in the mid 40's, but in all those cases it took a massive shock to the system and some massive investment to get them out of the mess they were in.
It's not broken beyond repair but it's broken beyond what the politicians are willing to risk doing wrt to slashing pensioner benefits and healthcare provision for the old and funnelling that money into investment and tax cuts for working age people. That's how the UK shifts back to a path of sustainable growth but no politician, blue or red team, seems brave enough to say it. The UK economy is the emperor with no clothes.
Other Western European countries seem able to care for their elderly and be rich at the same time.
Other western countries don't have the same liability of defined benefit pensions as the UK.
@Neil formerly of this parish repeatedly assured me that they were cheaper than DC pensions for the public sector.
Iirc that was based on wildly optimistic GDP scenarios where the DB liability tomorrow was smaller than shifting everyone to DC today. It was complete bullshit written by the big public sector unions to prevent DB pension schemes from being closed.
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
There's a reason Dunelm is doing gangbusters while the likes of Wilko are closing up shop. Shopping in a town centre is a depressing experience, it's universally charity shops that don't pay any rates, nail bars and cafes which are blatantly money laundering fronts and dead fronts.
Money laundering aside (I know that happens) cafes, tattoo parlours and salons are staying open because you have to attend them. Clothes shops are about middling because you don't have to attend them, but many like to try on their clothes before they buy. More shops should have business models where benefiting by being there in person is a key part of the offering.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
If you look at London, it is supported by a huge commuter belt that does not exist in the towns you name. Even Liverpool to Manchester is a push and you could probably walk it on a good day. Northern Powerhouse Rail should be revisited, and road links reviewed. We need to convert these cities into regions: the Midlands, Merseyside, South Wales and so on.
A Manchester-Liverpool underground metro system with 4-5 different lines servicing different parts of the two cities and connecting them together with an under 30 minute journey time. Let's spend the £30-40bn to get it done.
HS2 says that by the time government procurement processes and appeals have happened it would cost £240 billion, take 75 years and stop in a random field somewhere near Widnes.
Comments
I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation where I wanted to watch more TV than I do now.
NB: it’s off at the moment.
The BBC don't leave out streaming rights or international streaming rights, they simply can't afford to compete with Netflix and Amazon for them and it being a capitalist industry, there's little regard for sentiment when selling a product, it will go to the highest bidder.
So posting libellous stuff will cause OGH (potentially) expense and a lot of legal worry.
If BBC Worldwide, at the height of Top Gear’s popularity, had launched an international iPlayer with TG as an exclusive, they would likely be successful by now - but instead, they stuck with the old-world view of overseas licensing to TV networks, and they’re now like the guy trying to sell music CDs when everyone else has moved through Napster to Spotify.
(This is the paper that assures us Michelle Obama will be the presidential nominee, remember.)
The reality is that schools don't wish to fall foul of the law, and it's still quite unclear how it applies.
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/shakespeare-gets-caught-floridas-dont-say-gay-laws-rcna98970
As for Twelfth Night - but to be fair, banning that would be a public service anyway.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/personal-banking/savings/barclays-bank-spending-curbs-customers-overdraft/
1) BBC contracts with company to make program
2) Company bills BBC the cost of the program
3) BBC gets the UK rights
4) Company sells program as "BBC programming", worldwide.
According to a chap I know who worked in the licensing dept in the BBC, there was nothing suspicious about how this happened al the time. No Sir. All tickety boo.
https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/press-centre/press-releases/20220705-committee-of-public-accounts-pac-concerned-at-time-taken-to-make-decisions-on-future-of-funding-for-public-service-broadcasting-and-reforms-to-current-tv-licence-system/
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2023/0809/1398948-rte-tv-licence-revenue/
Despite accusations to the contrary, it does seem that in Britain a lot of people are willing to follow the rules simply because they're the rules, and so assumptions that people taking cash will always be fiddling their tax seem a bit unfair to me.
Other countries have the same issues and either suffer accordingly (Portugal, Greece, Romania, Mezzogiorno etc) or compensate through natural resources (Norway, Iceland), canny tax policies (Ireland) or extremely high levels of education and skills (Sweden, Finland).
Not that anything more is needed in a response to the lawyer than Malmesbury is algernon.beetlejuice5467@pmail.com, that's all i know, now piss off. If OGH wants a more lawyerly wording I am sure one of the many solrs on the site will oblige with a template, pro bono.
I doubt they'd get far past the first couple of pages of MoV, if they're even aware it exists.
It's perfectly obvious why people decide to pay their TV licence fee even if they don't feel it's good value for money - it's to prevent potential prosecution, adverse impact on credit rating and so on.
It isn't obvious why traders offer a larger discount for cash than could reasonably be explained by cost differences. That doesn't mean every trader that does it is evading tax, but the suspicion isn't an unreasonable one.
Legal stuff is expensive, and a worry.
See Estonia, Japan, New Zealand, etc.
I’ve been interested in British regional inequality since I first came to the UK in 2000 and, through my job, was sent around the country.
I was astonished at the deprivation and squalor compared with NZ, and thought it demanded explanation.
As we see in the charts above, regional underperformance means Britain is increasingly a poor-ish country, with a successful entrepôt. More “Singapore and Malaysia” than “Singapore-on-Thames”.
The management might just like cash, and not want to be beholden to a very large company who can cancel their ability to do business because the owner once said something someone thought was bad on Twitter. It’s a point of principle.
Perhaps it's just the pain of adjustment as the UK settles on its new status of a middle income, middle power whose public policy positions are exclusively devised for a notional voter with 9 fingers and 8 teeth who left school at 12 to work in the family scrap metal business.
ONS on what issues are important to people. Top 5 all look bad for the Tories.
London and the SE voted Remain.
Everywhere else voted Leave, bar Scotland and Northern Ireland, where large parts of the population see their future freed from London, but inside the EU.
How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?
One, but only if the lightbulb really wants to change.
I wonder if there's a bit of that. Collectively, we know that something's not right. But it's much easier to find something else to flog off, or listen to snake oil salesmen (yes Cummings, Corbyn and Truss, I am looking at you) who tell us that the solution won't put us out at all.
Countries have come back from far worse than this, and remarkably quickly. See Eastern Europe. Question is how bad things have to get before we agree to start on the gradual, initially painful path to sustainable growth.
Not that I'm arguing that we're doing well as a country, but the valid comparisons are with our own past through the growth rate, and within country - most regions are doing really badly as they have populations far larger than their economic opportunities can support, and those populations are kept from moving by planning restrictions, moving costs and welfare subsidies. Americans are much more willing to abandon failing regions and towns and move to areas where there is more opportunity, and, as a result, their economy is much more dynamic in this important way.
Unused overdrafts generate zero* revenue. Unused overdrafts generate compliance costs. So they dont want to offer unused overdrafts.
* Possibly some through customer retention, but not tangibly linked to the overdraft provision when it is never used.
How many Freudians does it take to change a lightbulb?
Two. One to actually change the lightbulb, and the other to hold the penis.
EDIT: Sorry, stepladder, I meant stepladder.
Notice that also omits France, Spain and Italy, all of which would be poorer than the UK overall.
In my opinion our response to this challenge should be threefold:
Trade - rejoin the EU single market to reduce frictions in our trade with the rest of Europe and allow more of the prosperity to spread beyond London. Encourage more firms to export as a means of boosting productivity.
Infrastructure - improve transport and communications links so that physical geography is less of a constraint.
Skills - improve our productivity and in particular deal with the long tail of the low skilled and the long tail of poorly managed firms.
If we succeed then I believe we can enjoy the same standard of living as Germany or the Netherlands within 20 years. The alternative is a frankly frightening tailspin of national decline, political instability and an accelerating exodus of young skilled people to the US, Asia and the continent - which has already started, anecdotally.
As it is, there is only one main choice, which is as a young professional, to move to London, get experience, and then flee desperately for cheaper housing in a commutable area once you have kids.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
In Sweden recently, I found some places only took Swish and cash, some only Swish and cards, some all 3, and a few places only took Swish. It seems literally everyone in Sweden has Swish on their mobiles.
But my point is the mismatch. If you post something on the lines of the misIDs of other broadcasters as Huw Edwards you can expect to pay your own lawyer £000s for advice that you'd better stump up 20k and an apology, bloody quick. The standard mantra "that'll get OGH into trouble" implies a belief that the poster himself is immune.
It is not possible any more to pretend that Whitehall knows what’s best for the cities and regions.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Labour will, like they did before, hose money at it from borrowing. The hose will be eagerly and greedily picked up by the BMA who do not think that £120k a year for a job where you can also have an additional private practice is enough for someone in the safest job in the known universe.
What is the answer? An acceptance by the British people that the NHS is not and never has been "the envy of the world" and that it needs substantial reform and that certain aspects of our lives we need to take responsibility for ourselves.
Additionally the medical profession needs to understand that if they want to earn megabucks they need to take some career risks and not expect the taxpayer (where the average person earns £28k year) to feather bed them just because they have the letters Dr in front of their names.
Yes, the poster is in more trouble, but it is a chain of misery and expense that will be created.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_(video_on_demand)
What was that about Britain being institutionally broken again?
Tbf £1 (& transfer of liabilities) would represent a bargain.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The only half-successful thing to come out of it, somewhat ironically, was the Britbox service in the US and Canada.
London of course is a high income region even by western standards (albeit with high expense too).
We also have state healthcare and a more accessible welfare state than say the USA, Americans have to pay privately for healthcare even if they pay less tax
is problematic, dont get me started on dentistry. Customer service is wank- I've arranged to view houses and the estate agent has been very late without even phoning me to warn me and on 2 occasions hasn't even turned up. I've been waiting over a month for a quote for some work on my van....it just feels a never ending grind, and I'm usually a happy fucker!
Can it be turned around?
Also reduce public sector salaries outside London and the south east to take account of the lower cost of living there so there is less of a pull factor and the market is less distorted by a bloated public sector in the regions which takes up 70% of GDP in some of them.
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPPC@WEO/OEMDC/ADVEC/WEOWORLD
France now has a higher GDP (PPP) per capita ($58.83k) than the UK ($56.47k). Italy isn't far behind ($54.22k)
Really, ignore international comparisons. They need so many caveats as to be completely useless.
It allows the idiotic to say, “oh well, stats are bunk, we really are the best in the world”.
No.
There’s a huge waste of human capital in the UK.
Millions of people are prevented from realising their potential due to sub-par economic performance.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
Industries which declined or shut down completely (some privatised along the way) - coal, steel, textiles, shipbuilding etc - were overrepresented in the regions.
At the same time there was a process of centralisation - with assets like council housing and local utilities transferred to central government before privatisation; business rates taken out of the hands of local government and remitted directly to the Treasury etc.
Regional finances have been largely in the hands of central government for a long time, and investment is hugely skewed towards London and its immediate hinterland.
Of course there are good reasons for that - it's much easier to demonstrate a business case for investment in the most prosperous part of the country - but it's a vicious spiral, decades long, that would need very determined policy reform to escape.
On waiting times, yours is a a somewhat simplistic analysis. The UK health spending per capita is 18% below EU average (if this is what you call comparable countries), and this is regrettable in my view, but the relationship to waiting times is very much more complex and a lot of it is structural and due to inefficiencies of the NHS bureaucracy. It is unlikely that without significant reform there would be a great improvement in waiting times.
Incidentally, you will be interested to know, that outside our insular NHS bubble all health systems across Europe are struggling with staffing levels.
https://www.skyscrapercity.com/threads/1960s-birmingham-how-whitehall-destroyed-a-booming-town.1578795/
It's the differential that I am on about. This is a minor inconvenience to the website vs potentially life-altering misery for the defamer, and I am puzzled that point B never gets star, or indeed any, billing.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/pensions-retirement/news/surge-retired-civil-servants-pensions-paying-100000/