The BBC is running another front page article today about how rents are going up at the "fastest rate since 2016", at 5.3%. The media narrative is continuing everywhere it seems that this is in part the fault of interest rates and landlords leaving the market.
There's somewhat of a flaw in this analysis. Inflation to July is 6.8%. Wages (to June so not directly comparable to inflation) are going up by 7.8%.
Can any of our innumerate journalists ever consider if 5.3% is more or less than 6.8%? Or more or less than 7.8%?
For one of the only times in decades real rents, and real house prices, are both falling. Both in real terms prices, and relative to income.
In 2016 by contrast rent rises were higher than today in nominal terms, while inflation was supposedly only 1.6% and wage growth was only 2.2%. So that was a massive price rise in both real terms and as a proportion of income.
For the past two decades rents like house prices have typically risen faster than both inflation and house prices. It's baby steps but excellent news that the opposite is happening today and ideally long may that continue.
We need to build massively more houses still in order to further reduce the real cost of housing in both absolute prices for those buying, and rent for those who can't.
Developers are scaling back their activities at the moment. IE:
Unsuprisingly there isn't a great will to build houses for sale in a falling market. Developers are also complaining about the new rule that you have to build two firefighting staircases and four lifts in every building over 18 metres high - this reduces significantly the space per floor, increases build costs, and all the layouts need revising .
It is funny to hear from so many commentors that we need a massive 'housebuilding drive' to house the masses - could we not just try removing some of the mountain of restrictions preventing the industry from meeting the demand? Ludicrous EU rules (which should have been disapplied by now) concerning additives going into rivers is another one - currently preventing 100,000 houses from being built.
There is pressure to add more regulation on to the building industry from every lobby group imaginable. If they were all accepted then no house would ever be built. What has happened now is that the Conservatives have no policy on housing. In this vacuum they now seem to add in every single new regulation any vaguely favoured group demands. It is a complete reversal of where they started in 2012/2013, when they got rid of regulations to facilitate new housebuilding - although this approach abruptly ended with the Grenfell fire. I suspect that this cycle will just basically repeat itself again several times over my lifetime.
I'm just too cynical - I just don't think they have any intention whatsoever of helping housing supply meet the demand. I'd suggest the opposite in fact. Probably a Davos thing. We are meant to 'own nothing and be happy about it' in a few year's time as the infamous quotation goes.
You think that UK building regulations are part of the "Davos agenda"?
You didn't attend that seminar at Davos?
I think it clashed with the 'Ending the use of cash to empower the Davos elite' seminar I was attending.
I find it very odd that such an obviously intelligent poster is in thrall to these conspiracy theories.
There's another friend of mine on Facebook* who posts conspiracy stuff all the time, about how the UN is about to do [x] or [y], and even though these things never come to pass, he still posts conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory.
* Again, an incredibly bright guy
I have a similar friend.
This isn't a humblebrag but you and I have been near the levers of power, we know people who control the levers of power.
I think we get to see 99.99% of mistakes are cockups/hubris/arrogance/ignorance, not conspiracy made by people like you and I.
I would like it noted in the Great PB Almanack of Wankpiffle that I never once got excited by this, despite many expecting me too, and asking me too, and others hyperventilating
I can sense bullshit stories
Oh FFS. We all.need a new irony meter after that post!
I think that people should be taxed on their average hourly income, rather than their annual income
People (like me) working masses of overtime in low paid jobs shouldn't suddenly be taxed at a higher rate because we've worked so hard
People that earn hundreds of pounds an hour shouldn't be taxed at a low rate because they only do a few hours of work a week
Interesting concept, hard to implement. You'd presumably have to tax all unearned income at the maximum rate, which is unlikely to encourage saving.
How about adding unearned income to earned income, in two ways. If regular, then divided by your hours worked over the payment period, and taxed at the appropriate hourly rate. If a one off payment, then then divided by the number of hours you’ve worked over the last year
For retired people, tax people either as if they’re working full time for their income. Or maybe tax it as if they’d worked their average number of hours through their working lives
The real problem with this would be the self-employed, who’d claim to have worked eighteen hours a day for fifty years
And the rich lazy fuckers living off their inherited wealth.
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
The real question is what happens next with the SNP finance story.
I honestly can't think of an explanation that makes sense of the facts we know.
Hmm, the reality is that the £600k was treated as party funds and was spent. That was probably ok in the context of the SNP=independence. Proving that there was a more detailed fiduciary obligation in respect of that money is problematic.
The bigger problem is that Nicola and her husband seem to have been operating 2 sets of accounts. The "official" version and the unofficial version where funds that they had had donated to them was a sort of amorphous slush fund into which the party, and Nicola and her husband in particular, could dip as and when this matched the greater good. That was a breach of various provisions of the Political Parties Act which is designed to ensure we can see where the funds have come from and what influence, if any, the donors then had. That, in my totally uninformed view, is where the charges will come.
It’s the crazy nature of what was going on.
Denying access to the accounts to people with a legal right of access?
The camper van - ok, maybe it was temporary accommodation, given it was parked on driveway and never moved. But surely buying a flat would have been easier, less conspicuous and would be an asset going up in value rather than down?
Maybe I have the wrong mindset. But this stuff could never end well, could it?
It was supposedly going to end with Independence and all be swept under the carpet in an means and ends argument. But Nicola never seemed to really mean that she wanted a second referendum because she couldn't see a way to win. She was right, of course, but inevitably the more delusional supporters are very, very unhappy with her. It's so sad.
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are getting
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker is paid slightly more than the average private sector worker
I'm so old I remember when you and Boris Johnson (and other PBers) were cheering above inflation pay increases in 2021 as a benefit of Brexit.
Some of us did warn that inflation would be back and is rather difficult to get rid off, the herpes of economics.
And yet when bankers, directors and professionals pig out on salaries its somehow ok.
How does that work ?
We're worth every penny.
The irony is I received a large bonus and pay increase thanks to Brexit as my preparations made sure my firm was ready for the disaster that was Boris Johnson's Brexit deal which spent more time on bloody fish than it did on financial services.
Guess which one contributes 0.0001% of GDP and which one is the largest contributor to the Exchequer?
Most of the Remainers I know are doing well out of Brexit. I cant understand what youre all moaning about.
Because we care about others and hate to see them struggle.
ROFL. I take it this is a new thing since Brexit.
When we were in the EU Finance and professionals imported all the ladies at the dockside and wouldnt pay the locals.
I've always been a part of the One Nation wing of the Tory (Thatcherite edition.)
It is why Ken Clarke was always Thatcher's go to guy when she needed major reform.
The BBC is running another front page article today about how rents are going up at the "fastest rate since 2016", at 5.3%. The media narrative is continuing everywhere it seems that this is in part the fault of interest rates and landlords leaving the market.
There's somewhat of a flaw in this analysis. Inflation to July is 6.8%. Wages (to June so not directly comparable to inflation) are going up by 7.8%.
Can any of our innumerate journalists ever consider if 5.3% is more or less than 6.8%? Or more or less than 7.8%?
For one of the only times in decades real rents, and real house prices, are both falling. Both in real terms prices, and relative to income.
In 2016 by contrast rent rises were higher than today in nominal terms, while inflation was supposedly only 1.6% and wage growth was only 2.2%. So that was a massive price rise in both real terms and as a proportion of income.
For the past two decades rents like house prices have typically risen faster than both inflation and house prices. It's baby steps but excellent news that the opposite is happening today and ideally long may that continue.
We need to build massively more houses still in order to further reduce the real cost of housing in both absolute prices for those buying, and rent for those who can't.
Developers are scaling back their activities at the moment. IE:
Unsuprisingly there isn't a great will to build houses for sale in a falling market. Developers are also complaining about the new rule that you have to build two firefighting staircases and four lifts in every building over 18 metres high - this reduces significantly the space per floor, increases build costs, and all the layouts need revising .
It is funny to hear from so many commentors that we need a massive 'housebuilding drive' to house the masses - could we not just try removing some of the mountain of restrictions preventing the industry from meeting the demand? Ludicrous EU rules (which should have been disapplied by now) concerning additives going into rivers is another one - currently preventing 100,000 houses from being built.
There is pressure to add more regulation on to the building industry from every lobby group imaginable. If they were all accepted then no house would ever be built. What has happened now is that the Conservatives have no policy on housing. In this vacuum they now seem to add in every single new regulation any vaguely favoured group demands. It is a complete reversal of where they started in 2012/2013, when they got rid of regulations to facilitate new housebuilding - although this approach abruptly ended with the Grenfell fire. I suspect that this cycle will just basically repeat itself again several times over my lifetime.
I'm just too cynical - I just don't think they have any intention whatsoever of helping housing supply meet the demand. I'd suggest the opposite in fact. Probably a Davos thing. We are meant to 'own nothing and be happy about it' in a few year's time as the infamous quotation goes.
You think that UK building regulations are part of the "Davos agenda"?
You didn't attend that seminar at Davos?
I think it clashed with the 'Ending the use of cash to empower the Davos elite' seminar I was attending.
I find it very odd that such an obviously intelligent poster is in thrall to these conspiracy theories.
There's another friend of mine on Facebook* who posts conspiracy stuff all the time, about how the UN is about to do [x] or [y], and even though these things never come to pass, he still posts conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory.
* Again, an incredibly bright guy
I have a similar friend.
This isn't a humblebrag but you and I have been near the levers of power, we know people who control the levers of power.
I think we get to see 99.99% of mistakes are cockups/hubris/arrogance/ignorance, not conspiracy made by people like you and I.
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors I agree
How do you trhink your voters will get their bums wiped, the way the Tories have been slashing local government and piling social care on them?
I am due to give a talk on using the new 'AI' APi's etc to our IT teams. I'd given some example scripts to someone who works in 'the real world' (I'm in H.E) and asked them if it was ok to share.
---
* 8 part-time staff (3 FTE) in a month produced 300 'outputs'. Script has produced 3 million of equal accuracy/quality in a couple of weeks. * GPT/local models have transformed our insights output from several large reports a month, to as many as we can/want to spend. bottleneck completely removed. * our lead times with clients were usually weeks, now they're minutes * we used to pay $120k/year on infra, now we pay $120/mo * we've had our most profitable quarter ever, and it's not even the end of our quarter * I have way more ideas than I have time. * our KPIs are all meaningless now
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Indeed. I thought HYUFD was a Conservative who believed in the free market. (No, not really, I don't.)
I would like it noted in the Great PB Almanack of Wankpiffle that I never once got excited by this, despite many expecting me too, and asking me too, and others hyperventilating
I can sense bullshit stories
Oh FFS. We all.need a new irony meter after that post!
S'true tho, innit?
What mad conspiracy/radical theories have I embraced?
1. The flap over aliens shows that something TRULY weird is happening in Washington: PROVED
2. The leak came from the lab: almost certainly PROVED
3. We are on the cusp of true AGI: pretty fucking CLOSE to being PROVED now
I would like it noted in the Great PB Almanack of Wankpiffle that I never once got excited by this, despite many expecting me too, and asking me too, and others hyperventilating
I can sense bullshit stories
Oh FFS. We all.need a new irony meter after that post!
S'true tho, innit?
What mad conspiracy/radical theories have I embraced?
1. The flap over aliens shows that something TRULY weird is happening in Washington: PROVED
2. The leak came from the lab: almost certainly PROVED
3. We are on the cusp of true AGI: pretty fucking CLOSE to being PROVED now
4. What3words: OK LET'S JUST FORGET THAT ONE
5) You thought Liz Truss would surprise on the upside as PM and that Starmer would be cowering in free.
6) Last autumn you were shitting your kecks that Putin was going to use nukes.
If those junior doctors in England want higher pay, they might consider these two American states: "We already knew that the highest-earning lawyers, like other elite white-collar professionals, live in high-cost, high-income metropoli such as New York and D.C. But here’s the weird part: That’s not true of doctors. They earn the most in rural states.
The best-paid doctors in America work in the Dakotas, where they averaged $524,000 (South) and $468,000 (North) in 2017 in their prime earning years, including business income and capital gains. That’s well above the already astonishing $405,000 the average U.S. doctor made in the prime earning years, defined here as 40 to 55." source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/11/doctor-pay-geography/
Living costs and taxes in the Dakotas are lower than the average for the US, too.
As I do from time to time, I am not defending any of the many American health care systems -- even though I benefit from the largest.
(Yes, that finding came as a surprise to me, too. But it does help explain why dentists in this much more expensive area are so competitive.)
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors I agree
How do you trhink your voters will get their bums wiped, the way the Tories have been slashing local government and piling social care on them?
"contractors"
I do foresee an interesting conundrum for a future government. If they do the logical thing, and recruit enough staff for the NHS to end the agency stuff, there will be some immediate pressure for wages to go up.
Because many of the staff are using agency work to top up their salaries. If the opportunity goes away, that’s less money coming in…
I would like it noted in the Great PB Almanack of Wankpiffle that I never once got excited by this, despite many expecting me too, and asking me too, and others hyperventilating
I can sense bullshit stories
Oh FFS. We all.need a new irony meter after that post!
S'true tho, innit?
What mad conspiracy/radical theories have I embraced?
1. The flap over aliens shows that something TRULY weird is happening in Washington: PROVED
2. The leak came from the lab: almost certainly PROVED
3. We are on the cusp of true AGI: pretty fucking CLOSE to being PROVED now
4. What3words: OK LET'S JUST FORGET THAT ONE
1. Not proven. 2. Not proven. 3. You may be onto something. 4. Hmm.
I would like it noted in the Great PB Almanack of Wankpiffle that I never once got excited by this, despite many expecting me too, and asking me too, and others hyperventilating
I can sense bullshit stories
Oh FFS. We all.need a new irony meter after that post!
S'true tho, innit?
What mad conspiracy/radical theories have I embraced?
1. The flap over aliens shows that something TRULY weird is happening in Washington: PROVED
2. The leak came from the lab: almost certainly PROVED
3. We are on the cusp of true AGI: pretty fucking CLOSE to being PROVED now
4. What3words: OK LET'S JUST FORGET THAT ONE
5) You thought Liz Truss would surprise on the upside as PM and that Starmer would be cowering in free.
6) Last autumn you were shitting your kecks that Putin was going to use nukes.
Did Sadiq Khan really think the homophobic murders in Clapham were most likely stoked by gender-critical feminism rather than some more "traditional" beliefs typically found in BAME communities? or was he just being a showboating Woke micro-twat as always?
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Wages have risen above inflation for the overwhelming majority of the past 100 years.
That's how you have real living standards improve.
If the state can't afford real pay rises, then it should be treating people reasonably across the board. Especially since the state spends more on welfare* than it does on wages, yet its increasing welfare by double digits while capping wages. And has the audacity to call itself "Conservative" while doing so.
* which does not mean for the poor, most welfare nowadays does not go to the poor, which is why the poor are struggling and the state is broke.
What you're both groping for is the following set of equations (these should really be set out using logarithms or Fisher equations but I can't be bothered):
Therefore, if wage inflation rises, holding other factors constant, retail inflation will indeed increase, unless productivity growth also increases which it shows no sign of doing.
Wages have only risen faster than prices over the last century because productivity has soared. Unfortunately, for a large number of reasons, that is no longer the case, so real wage increases are highly likely to be inflationary over the medium term.
Yet again: We have full employment.
Wages should be rising and if unproductive businesses complain they can't afford it, they go out of business. Their labour, capital, customers and land can be used by other, more productive firms instead.
Productivity rises. Pay rises. The system works.
Trying to depress pay depresses productivity.
Wage Inflation is a problem when its divorced from full employment, when you have mass unemployment and wages are going up anyway because of politics not economics.
Where that gets trickier is that productivity increases don't happen smoothly year on year, or uniformly across the whole economy. They tend to be huge localised surges in specific tasks at specific times.
And, whilst it would be theoretically tidy to get rid of unproductive things, that's not necessarily a good thing. On that metric, schools ought to go by the wayside; most of the time, it's a teacher with a class, the only way to increase productivity is to put more kids in the class. There are incremental gains on the marginal stuff, not anything fundamental.
Actually, it's worse than that, because the educated staff you need to make schools happen get more expensive, because they can go and do other stuff in other sectors. So productivity goes down, not up. And, despite what our friend in Essex thinks, you can't cut salaries to match, because recruitment is a mare as it is.
There's no such thing as a fair price, except one that the buyer and seller agree on. And the holes in public sector staff structures say that the price of staff is higher than the government is currently willing to pay. So they will have to go without.
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors I agree
How do you trhink your voters will get their bums wiped, the way the Tories have been slashing local government and piling social care on them?
"contractors"
Did you see my post earlier regarding the tweet in the thread?
The figures in the tweet are correct for Westminster VI but YouGov used the wrong graphic.
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors I agree
How do you trhink your voters will get their bums wiped, the way the Tories have been slashing local government and piling social care on them?
"contractors"
You don’t need highly paid contractors to work as carers in care homes
Discrimination is against protected classes that you can't control.
People who choose to pay extra by using an inferior, insecure and more expensive medium are responsible for paying for their own choices. If you make a choice, take responsibility for your own choices.
My Mum is 75, and gets horribly frustrated by newfangled parking meters. Don’t underestimate the effect of these changes on groups like the elderly.
We've spent the last month living the easy life around Dorset and the New Forest. Probably spent 100-120 quid on parking. It's effing expensive, but the place is rammed so no real alternative. What's bugged me is the inconsistencies and sheer hard work involved in payment methods. Cash/card/phone app. A few times I've had no cash, only to find the parking is cash only, other times I've had a crap signal so app wont work and no cash, or not enough cash but the phone app isn't working and the machine doesn't like my card. Royal pain in the arse!
Speaking as a 'young pensioner', it's a complete pain to have to download an App for parking (and for lots of other things now). Those who have weaker phone skills must find it virtually impossible. It's worth remembering that poor eyesight is a feature of the elderly as well, making it even harder when out and about. Where I live, it seems to have fuelled an increase in the (probably illegitimate) use of disabled parking badges.
Parking anywhere should offer a choice of cash, or card tap. We could all manage one of those.
Card/ApplePay tap only would suffice, as you don’t need a signal for that.
I am due to give a talk on using the new 'AI' APi's etc to our IT teams. I'd given some example scripts to someone who works in 'the real world' (I'm in H.E) and asked them if it was ok to share.
---
* 8 part-time staff (3 FTE) in a month produced 300 'outputs'. Script has produced 3 million of equal accuracy/quality in a couple of weeks. * GPT/local models have transformed our insights output from several large reports a month, to as many as we can/want to spend. bottleneck completely removed. * our lead times with clients were usually weeks, now they're minutes * we used to pay $120k/year on infra, now we pay $120/mo * we've had our most profitable quarter ever, and it's not even the end of our quarter * I have way more ideas than I have time. * our KPIs are all meaningless now
What on earth were you spending £120k / year on? Platinum plated computers?
Did Sadiq Khan really think the homophobic murders in Clapham were most likely stoked by gender-critical feminism rather than some more "traditional" beliefs typically found in BAME communities? or was he just being a showboating Woke micro-twat as always?
Answers on a non-existent postcard
Murders?
I see your eye for detail is improving.
A bit like that roaster SeanT after the Glasgow bin lorry incident who wanted to deport every Muslim to Madagascar.
The real question is what happens next with the SNP finance story.
I honestly can't think of an explanation that makes sense of the facts we know.
Hmm, the reality is that the £600k was treated as party funds and was spent. That was probably ok in the context of the SNP=independence. Proving that there was a more detailed fiduciary obligation in respect of that money is problematic.
The bigger problem is that Nicola and her husband seem to have been operating 2 sets of accounts. The "official" version and the unofficial version where funds that they had had donated to them was a sort of amorphous slush fund into which the party, and Nicola and her husband in particular, could dip as and when this matched the greater good. That was a breach of various provisions of the Political Parties Act which is designed to ensure we can see where the funds have come from and what influence, if any, the donors then had. That, in my totally uninformed view, is where the charges will come.
It’s the crazy nature of what was going on.
Denying access to the accounts to people with a legal right of access?
The camper van - ok, maybe it was temporary accommodation, given it was parked on driveway and never moved. But surely buying a flat would have been easier, less conspicuous and would be an asset going up in value rather than down?
Maybe I have the wrong mindset. But this stuff could never end well, could it?
The only way that the whole camper van story makes sense, is if they intended it to be some sort of election month battle bus, and they figured it was cheaper to buy one than rent one over five or six years. The bit they missed, is that they require constant maintenance and depreciate like crazy. Leaving one parked up for most of the year totally kills it.
All other explanations revolve around nefarious reasons for diverting money from the party funds.
I would like it noted in the Great PB Almanack of Wankpiffle that I never once got excited by this, despite many expecting me too, and asking me too, and others hyperventilating
I can sense bullshit stories
Oh FFS. We all.need a new irony meter after that post!
S'true tho, innit?
What mad conspiracy/radical theories have I embraced?
1. The flap over aliens shows that something TRULY weird is happening in Washington: PROVED
2. The leak came from the lab: almost certainly PROVED
3. We are on the cusp of true AGI: pretty fucking CLOSE to being PROVED now
4. What3words: OK LET'S JUST FORGET THAT ONE
1. Not proven. 2. Not proven. 3. You may be onto something. 4. Hmm.
We've had actual Congressional Hearings where Senators and witnesses calmly discussed the retrieval of alien spacecraft, I think 1 is PROVED beyond question
Of course 2 is true, no one sane believes otherwise, any more
3. Well, derr
4. Was just me having fun or something, I was probably drunk for a week, or on meth, you can't blame me for that
I think that people should be taxed on their average hourly income, rather than their annual income
People (like me) working masses of overtime in low paid jobs shouldn't suddenly be taxed at a higher rate because we've worked so hard
People that earn hundreds of pounds an hour shouldn't be taxed at a low rate because they only do a few hours of work a week
Interesting concept, hard to implement. You'd presumably have to tax all unearned income at the maximum rate, which is unlikely to encourage saving.
How about adding unearned income to earned income, in two ways. If regular, then divided by your hours worked over the payment period, and taxed at the appropriate hourly rate. If a one off payment, then then divided by the number of hours you’ve worked over the last year
For retired people, tax people either as if they’re working full time for their income. Or maybe tax it as if they’d worked their average number of hours through their working lives
The real problem with this would be the self-employed, who’d claim to have worked eighteen hours a day for fifty years
And the rich lazy fuckers living off their inherited wealth.
This is an interesting idea. All the people on higher salaries at my office work 4 days weeks because of this, which reduces our tax contribution and depresses our productivity (at least by £ per hour measurement), because the people on lower salaries work a full week.
The BBC is running another front page article today about how rents are going up at the "fastest rate since 2016", at 5.3%. The media narrative is continuing everywhere it seems that this is in part the fault of interest rates and landlords leaving the market.
There's somewhat of a flaw in this analysis. Inflation to July is 6.8%. Wages (to June so not directly comparable to inflation) are going up by 7.8%.
Can any of our innumerate journalists ever consider if 5.3% is more or less than 6.8%? Or more or less than 7.8%?
For one of the only times in decades real rents, and real house prices, are both falling. Both in real terms prices, and relative to income.
In 2016 by contrast rent rises were higher than today in nominal terms, while inflation was supposedly only 1.6% and wage growth was only 2.2%. So that was a massive price rise in both real terms and as a proportion of income.
For the past two decades rents like house prices have typically risen faster than both inflation and house prices. It's baby steps but excellent news that the opposite is happening today and ideally long may that continue.
We need to build massively more houses still in order to further reduce the real cost of housing in both absolute prices for those buying, and rent for those who can't.
Developers are scaling back their activities at the moment. IE:
Unsuprisingly there isn't a great will to build houses for sale in a falling market. Developers are also complaining about the new rule that you have to build two firefighting staircases and four lifts in every building over 18 metres high - this reduces significantly the space per floor, increases build costs, and all the layouts need revising .
It is funny to hear from so many commentors that we need a massive 'housebuilding drive' to house the masses - could we not just try removing some of the mountain of restrictions preventing the industry from meeting the demand? Ludicrous EU rules (which should have been disapplied by now) concerning additives going into rivers is another one - currently preventing 100,000 houses from being built.
Yes, what the country needs is jerry built, poorly insulated, energy inefficient, back to back slums built on flood plains. If they were good enough for our great-grandparents...
How is banning homes being built due to people who will shit in the toliets there, when those same people are already shitting in other toilets, so exactly the same pollution is occurring, preventing any of those things from happening?
Congratulations on not addressing any of the barbs in my post and making up an imaginary one. What rhetorical power you have!
If those junior doctors in England want higher pay, they might consider these two American states: "We already knew that the highest-earning lawyers, like other elite white-collar professionals, live in high-cost, high-income metropoli such as New York and D.C. But here’s the weird part: That’s not true of doctors. They earn the most in rural states.
The best-paid doctors in America work in the Dakotas, where they averaged $524,000 (South) and $468,000 (North) in 2017 in their prime earning years, including business income and capital gains. That’s well above the already astonishing $405,000 the average U.S. doctor made in the prime earning years, defined here as 40 to 55." source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/11/doctor-pay-geography/
Living costs and taxes in the Dakotas are lower than the average for the US, too.
As I do from time to time, I am not defending any of the many American health care systems -- even though I benefit from the largest.
(Yes, that finding came as a surprise to me, too. But it does help explain why dentists in this much more expensive area are so competitive.)
Mainly paid for by private sector health insurance companies and private sector hospitals not the state of course
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors I agree
How do you trhink your voters will get their bums wiped, the way the Tories have been slashing local government and piling social care on them?
"contractors"
You don’t need highly paid contractors to work as carers in care homes
Who do you think works in care now? (And as teaching assistants, in the NHS, local government, etc.) And how are they paid relative to permanent staff do you think?
I am due to give a talk on using the new 'AI' APi's etc to our IT teams. I'd given some example scripts to someone who works in 'the real world' (I'm in H.E) and asked them if it was ok to share.
---
* 8 part-time staff (3 FTE) in a month produced 300 'outputs'. Script has produced 3 million of equal accuracy/quality in a couple of weeks. * GPT/local models have transformed our insights output from several large reports a month, to as many as we can/want to spend. bottleneck completely removed. * our lead times with clients were usually weeks, now they're minutes * we used to pay $120k/year on infra, now we pay $120/mo * we've had our most profitable quarter ever, and it's not even the end of our quarter * I have way more ideas than I have time. * our KPIs are all meaningless now
What on earth were you spending £120k / year on? Platinum plated computers?
I have no idea. I am in the cosy world of H.E. The real world is a mystery.
The BBC is running another front page article today about how rents are going up at the "fastest rate since 2016", at 5.3%. The media narrative is continuing everywhere it seems that this is in part the fault of interest rates and landlords leaving the market.
There's somewhat of a flaw in this analysis. Inflation to July is 6.8%. Wages (to June so not directly comparable to inflation) are going up by 7.8%.
Can any of our innumerate journalists ever consider if 5.3% is more or less than 6.8%? Or more or less than 7.8%?
For one of the only times in decades real rents, and real house prices, are both falling. Both in real terms prices, and relative to income.
In 2016 by contrast rent rises were higher than today in nominal terms, while inflation was supposedly only 1.6% and wage growth was only 2.2%. So that was a massive price rise in both real terms and as a proportion of income.
For the past two decades rents like house prices have typically risen faster than both inflation and house prices. It's baby steps but excellent news that the opposite is happening today and ideally long may that continue.
We need to build massively more houses still in order to further reduce the real cost of housing in both absolute prices for those buying, and rent for those who can't.
Developers are scaling back their activities at the moment. IE:
Unsuprisingly there isn't a great will to build houses for sale in a falling market. Developers are also complaining about the new rule that you have to build two firefighting staircases and four lifts in every building over 18 metres high - this reduces significantly the space per floor, increases build costs, and all the layouts need revising .
It is funny to hear from so many commentors that we need a massive 'housebuilding drive' to house the masses - could we not just try removing some of the mountain of restrictions preventing the industry from meeting the demand? Ludicrous EU rules (which should have been disapplied by now) concerning additives going into rivers is another one - currently preventing 100,000 houses from being built.
There is pressure to add more regulation on to the building industry from every lobby group imaginable. If they were all accepted then no house would ever be built. What has happened now is that the Conservatives have no policy on housing. In this vacuum they now seem to add in every single new regulation any vaguely favoured group demands. It is a complete reversal of where they started in 2012/2013, when they got rid of regulations to facilitate new housebuilding - although this approach abruptly ended with the Grenfell fire. I suspect that this cycle will just basically repeat itself again several times over my lifetime.
I'm just too cynical - I just don't think they have any intention whatsoever of helping housing supply meet the demand. I'd suggest the opposite in fact. Probably a Davos thing. We are meant to 'own nothing and be happy about it' in a few year's time as the infamous quotation goes.
You think that UK building regulations are part of the "Davos agenda"?
You didn't attend that seminar at Davos?
I think it clashed with the 'Ending the use of cash to empower the Davos elite' seminar I was attending.
I find it very odd that such an obviously intelligent poster is in thrall to these conspiracy theories.
There's another friend of mine on Facebook* who posts conspiracy stuff all the time, about how the UN is about to do [x] or [y], and even though these things never come to pass, he still posts conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory.
* Again, an incredibly bright guy
I have a similar friend.
This isn't a humblebrag but you and I have been near the levers of power, we know people who control the levers of power.
I think we get to see 99.99% of mistakes are cockups/hubris/arrogance/ignorance, not conspiracy made by people like you and I.
I have a smart friend who rates Jordan Peterson and RFK Jr, and who also thinks Scottish Indy will only happen with Salmond at the forefront.
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Wages have risen above inflation for the overwhelming majority of the past 100 years.
That's how you have real living standards improve.
If the state can't afford real pay rises, then it should be treating people reasonably across the board. Especially since the state spends more on welfare* than it does on wages, yet its increasing welfare by double digits while capping wages. And has the audacity to call itself "Conservative" while doing so.
* which does not mean for the poor, most welfare nowadays does not go to the poor, which is why the poor are struggling and the state is broke.
What you're both groping for is the following set of equations (these should really be set out using logarithms or Fisher equations but I can't be bothered):
Therefore, if wage inflation rises, holding other factors constant, retail inflation will indeed increase, unless productivity growth also increases which it shows no sign of doing.
Wages have only risen faster than prices over the last century because productivity has soared. Unfortunately, for a large number of reasons, that is no longer the case, so real wage increases are highly likely to be inflationary over the medium term.
Yet again: We have full employment.
Wages should be rising and if unproductive businesses complain they can't afford it, they go out of business. Their labour, capital, customers and land can be used by other, more productive firms instead.
Productivity rises. Pay rises. The system works.
Trying to depress pay depresses productivity.
Wage Inflation is a problem when its divorced from full employment, when you have mass unemployment and wages are going up anyway because of politics not economics.
Where that gets trickier is that productivity increases don't happen smoothly year on year, or uniformly across the whole economy. They tend to be huge localised surges in specific tasks at specific times.
And, whilst it would be theoretically tidy to get rid of unproductive things, that's not necessarily a good thing. On that metric, schools ought to go by the wayside; most of the time, it's a teacher with a class, the only way to increase productivity is to put more kids in the class. There are incremental gains on the marginal stuff, not anything fundamental.
Actually, it's worse than that, because the educated staff you need to make schools happen get more expensive, because they can go and do other stuff in other sectors. So productivity goes down, not up. And, despite what our friend in Essex thinks, you can't cut salaries to match, because recruitment is a mare as it is.
There's no such thing as a fair price, except one that the buyer and seller agree on. And the holes in public sector staff structures say that the price of staff is higher than the government is currently willing to pay. So they will have to go without.
Sorry.
But teachers productivity is increasing over time.
Over time our economy has become better educated and better paid. That is in large part because of teachers. The better pay workers are making compared to the past enables better pay for teachers too. There's plenty of economic work and names for this concept.
If teachers are teaching pupils who can end up in well paid professional jobs, when teachers of the past were only teaching pupils who ended up in manual, poorly paid jobs, then that is a boost in productivity and makes good education more valuable, not less.
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Indeed. I thought HYUFD was a Conservative who believed in the free market. (No, not really, I don't.)
If we had a pure free market there would be no NHS at all, patients would pay their doctor or surgeon direct or private health insurance companies they belong to do or they don’t get healthcare at all if they can’t afford it.
If your goal is to maximise your income then if you are highly skilled you will always earn more in the private sector as wages are set by supply and demand. If you are less skilled though you will earn more in the public sector normally for the same reason
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors I agree
How do you trhink your voters will get their bums wiped, the way the Tories have been slashing local government and piling social care on them?
"contractors"
You don’t need highly paid contractors to work as carers in care homes
Can you explain what you actually mean by that post? I have an idea, but I am not quite sure.
Discrimination is against protected classes that you can't control.
People who choose to pay extra by using an inferior, insecure and more expensive medium are responsible for paying for their own choices. If you make a choice, take responsibility for your own choices.
My Mum is 75, and gets horribly frustrated by newfangled parking meters. Don’t underestimate the effect of these changes on groups like the elderly.
We've spent the last month living the easy life around Dorset and the New Forest. Probably spent 100-120 quid on parking. It's effing expensive, but the place is rammed so no real alternative. What's bugged me is the inconsistencies and sheer hard work involved in payment methods. Cash/card/phone app. A few times I've had no cash, only to find the parking is cash only, other times I've had a crap signal so app wont work and no cash, or not enough cash but the phone app isn't working and the machine doesn't like my card. Royal pain in the arse!
Speaking as a 'young pensioner', it's a complete pain to have to download an App for parking (and for lots of other things now). Those who have weaker phone skills must find it virtually impossible. It's worth remembering that poor eyesight is a feature of the elderly as well, making it even harder when out and about. Where I live, it seems to have fuelled an increase in the (probably illegitimate) use of disabled parking badges.
Parking anywhere should offer a choice of cash, or card tap. We could all manage one of those.
Point of order - having a disabled parking badge (I've got one) rarely exempts you from carpark parking charges these days. For me the big plus is a parking space wide enough to get in and out of the car from a wheelchair.
The point about apps and eyesight is a good one. Since disability is a protected characteristic someone might want to take a council to court for discriminating based on a hard to use app.
I think I have four apps for parking, and they are all horrible to use, even for someone with decent eyesight (and a familiarity with apps, given my age). Why don't they just use contactless, which has the benefit of working when you don't have signal?
When they don't work, I just message the offending council on twitter and let them know my registration plate. They usually apologise and appreciate the message. The worse ones are for hillwalking, and you spend the whole day wondering if your car will still be there at the end.
The one advantage of a well-designed parking app is one where you can pay for additional parking time in the app, if you happen to be enjoying yourself wherever you are for longer than expected, saving you the trouble of dashing back to the car park to buy another ticket to stick on the dashboard of the car.
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are getting
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker is paid slightly more than the average private sector worker
I'm so old I remember when you and Boris Johnson (and other PBers) were cheering above inflation pay increases in 2021 as a benefit of Brexit.
Some of us did warn that inflation would be back and is rather difficult to get rid off, the herpes of economics.
Last time I was in Copenhagen I irritated many of you by moaning about the inconvenience of the non EU passport queue and the gentle micro-aggression of being quizzed on my intentions in the country.
Well this evening things are much more exciting. The man in front of me has been undergoing interrogation (annoyingly at the cubicle not in a side room) for 15 minutes. I’m in a position where I can’t move out of the queue and join another one. I don’t know what immigration faux pas he’s committed but it is certainly causing the border officer much consternation.
If those junior doctors in England want higher pay, they might consider these two American states: "We already knew that the highest-earning lawyers, like other elite white-collar professionals, live in high-cost, high-income metropoli such as New York and D.C. But here’s the weird part: That’s not true of doctors. They earn the most in rural states.
The best-paid doctors in America work in the Dakotas, where they averaged $524,000 (South) and $468,000 (North) in 2017 in their prime earning years, including business income and capital gains. That’s well above the already astonishing $405,000 the average U.S. doctor made in the prime earning years, defined here as 40 to 55." source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/11/doctor-pay-geography/
Living costs and taxes in the Dakotas are lower than the average for the US, too.
As I do from time to time, I am not defending any of the many American health care systems -- even though I benefit from the largest.
(Yes, that finding came as a surprise to me, too. But it does help explain why dentists in this much more expensive area are so competitive.)
It's broadly the same reason that in most African countries half or more of the doctors work in the capitol. University educated people want to enjoy the pleasures they acquired the taste for. They don't want to talk about hog prices, they want fine dining, live theatre, that sort of thing.
You get the same effect in the UK. So it is hard to recruit good medical staff on the Lincs Coast despite cheap housing etc.
The real question is what happens next with the SNP finance story.
I honestly can't think of an explanation that makes sense of the facts we know.
Hmm, the reality is that the £600k was treated as party funds and was spent. That was probably ok in the context of the SNP=independence. Proving that there was a more detailed fiduciary obligation in respect of that money is problematic.
The bigger problem is that Nicola and her husband seem to have been operating 2 sets of accounts. The "official" version and the unofficial version where funds that they had had donated to them was a sort of amorphous slush fund into which the party, and Nicola and her husband in particular, could dip as and when this matched the greater good. That was a breach of various provisions of the Political Parties Act which is designed to ensure we can see where the funds have come from and what influence, if any, the donors then had. That, in my totally uninformed view, is where the charges will come.
It’s the crazy nature of what was going on.
Denying access to the accounts to people with a legal right of access?
The camper van - ok, maybe it was temporary accommodation, given it was parked on driveway and never moved. But surely buying a flat would have been easier, less conspicuous and would be an asset going up in value rather than down?
Maybe I have the wrong mindset. But this stuff could never end well, could it?
The only way that the whole camper van story makes sense, is if they intended it to be some sort of election month battle bus, and they figured it was cheaper to buy one than rent one over five or six years. The bit they missed, is that they require constant maintenance and depreciate like crazy. Leaving one parked up for most of the year totally kills it.
All other explanations revolve around nefarious reasons for diverting money from the party funds.
Unless they were planning on campaigning non stop this makes no sense. Which is why campaign buses are rented for the few weeks every few years that they are needed.
I think that people should be taxed on their average hourly income, rather than their annual income
People (like me) working masses of overtime in low paid jobs shouldn't suddenly be taxed at a higher rate because we've worked so hard
People that earn hundreds of pounds an hour shouldn't be taxed at a low rate because they only do a few hours of work a week
Interesting concept, hard to implement. You'd presumably have to tax all unearned income at the maximum rate, which is unlikely to encourage saving.
How about adding unearned income to earned income, in two ways. If regular, then divided by your hours worked over the payment period, and taxed at the appropriate hourly rate. If a one off payment, then then divided by the number of hours you’ve worked over the last year
For retired people, tax people either as if they’re working full time for their income. Or maybe tax it as if they’d worked their average number of hours through their working lives
The real problem with this would be the self-employed, who’d claim to have worked eighteen hours a day for fifty years
And the rich lazy fuckers living off their inherited wealth.
This is an interesting idea. All the people on higher salaries at my office work 4 days weeks because of this, which reduces our tax contribution and depresses our productivity (at least by £ per hour measurement), because the people on lower salaries work a full week.
Combination of the personal allowance clawback at £100k, and the pension pot limits? Yes, taxing people at nearly 70% makes them want to work less.
I remember bumping into what I assume is the issue @BlancheLivermore was alluding to earlier, of working so much overtime that the marginal tax rate went from 20% to 40%. Funnily enough, I monitored the overtime after that.
I am due to give a talk on using the new 'AI' APi's etc to our IT teams. I'd given some example scripts to someone who works in 'the real world' (I'm in H.E) and asked them if it was ok to share.
---
* 8 part-time staff (3 FTE) in a month produced 300 'outputs'. Script has produced 3 million of equal accuracy/quality in a couple of weeks. * GPT/local models have transformed our insights output from several large reports a month, to as many as we can/want to spend. bottleneck completely removed. * our lead times with clients were usually weeks, now they're minutes * we used to pay $120k/year on infra, now we pay $120/mo * we've had our most profitable quarter ever, and it's not even the end of our quarter * I have way more ideas than I have time. * our KPIs are all meaningless now
Being pedantic, but there's a little point in that anecdote that throws up warning signs in my mind. It is this:
"Script has produced 3 million of equal accuracy/quality"
How do you know the 3 million are of equal accuracy/quality? Have they all been checked, and if so, how? Were only a small sample checked, in which case how cure can you be of the overall quality?
Things like 'three million' are really large and impressive numbers in this context. They should also be treated with scepticism. It doesn't mean they're wrong, but I'm always wary.
Also, the clients get results in minutes. That indicates that the AI's output is *not* being human-checked. I ight suggest that there are certain dangers in that, especially if the dataset sitting under the AI changes.
From the WaPo article I linked to, earlier: "The government also influences physician pay directly through Medicare, perhaps the biggest spigot of health-care cash on Planet Earth. Typically, people in low-income areas can’t spend as much and merchants tend to earn less. But that’s not the case for health care, in large part because Medicare ensures that retirement-age Americans — by far the biggest health-care consumers — can afford about as much in South Dakota as they can in South Beach. Which means doctors work in one of the few industries where demand is not necessarily determined by disposable income." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)
US Medicare covers about 65 million people. In 2022, total spending for the program "topped $900 billion".
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Indeed. I thought HYUFD was a Conservative who believed in the free market. (No, not really, I don't.)
If we had a pure free market there would be no NHS at all, patients would pay their doctor or surgeon direct or private health insurance companies they belong to do or they don’t get healthcare at all if they can’t afford it.
If your goal is to maximise your income then if you are highly skilled you will always earn more in the private sector as wages are set by supply and demand. If you are less skilled though you will earn more in the public sector normally for the same reason
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Wages have risen above inflation for the overwhelming majority of the past 100 years.
That's how you have real living standards improve.
If the state can't afford real pay rises, then it should be treating people reasonably across the board. Especially since the state spends more on welfare* than it does on wages, yet its increasing welfare by double digits while capping wages. And has the audacity to call itself "Conservative" while doing so.
* which does not mean for the poor, most welfare nowadays does not go to the poor, which is why the poor are struggling and the state is broke.
What you're both groping for is the following set of equations (these should really be set out using logarithms or Fisher equations but I can't be bothered):
Therefore, if wage inflation rises, holding other factors constant, retail inflation will indeed increase, unless productivity growth also increases which it shows no sign of doing.
Wages have only risen faster than prices over the last century because productivity has soared. Unfortunately, for a large number of reasons, that is no longer the case, so real wage increases are highly likely to be inflationary over the medium term.
Yet again: We have full employment.
Wages should be rising and if unproductive businesses complain they can't afford it, they go out of business. Their labour, capital, customers and land can be used by other, more productive firms instead.
Productivity rises. Pay rises. The system works.
Trying to depress pay depresses productivity.
Wage Inflation is a problem when its divorced from full employment, when you have mass unemployment and wages are going up anyway because of politics not economics.
Where that gets trickier is that productivity increases don't happen smoothly year on year, or uniformly across the whole economy. They tend to be huge localised surges in specific tasks at specific times.
And, whilst it would be theoretically tidy to get rid of unproductive things, that's not necessarily a good thing. On that metric, schools ought to go by the wayside; most of the time, it's a teacher with a class, the only way to increase productivity is to put more kids in the class. There are incremental gains on the marginal stuff, not anything fundamental.
Actually, it's worse than that, because the educated staff you need to make schools happen get more expensive, because they can go and do other stuff in other sectors. So productivity goes down, not up. And, despite what our friend in Essex thinks, you can't cut salaries to match, because recruitment is a mare as it is.
There's no such thing as a fair price, except one that the buyer and seller agree on. And the holes in public sector staff structures say that the price of staff is higher than the government is currently willing to pay. So they will have to go without.
Sorry.
But teachers productivity is increasing over time.
Over time our economy has become better educated and better paid. That is in large part because of teachers. The better pay workers are making compared to the past enables better pay for teachers too. There's plenty of economic work and names for this concept.
If teachers are teaching pupils who can end up in well paid professional jobs, when teachers of the past were only teaching pupils who ended up in manual, poorly paid jobs, then that is a boost in productivity and makes good education more valuable, not less.
Errr, public sector education productivity has been flat been flat since 2007.
I think that people should be taxed on their average hourly income, rather than their annual income
People (like me) working masses of overtime in low paid jobs shouldn't suddenly be taxed at a higher rate because we've worked so hard
People that earn hundreds of pounds an hour shouldn't be taxed at a low rate because they only do a few hours of work a week
That's an interesting idea, but it provides a tax incentive for low productivity, which I don't think is a good idea.
There's currently a tax disincentive against me working more hours
In what universe does that make sense?
Well, no, there isn't. The tax code charges you the same based on your earnings, regardless of how many hours you worked to earn them. It charges you more if you earn more, on the basis that of you earn more you have already paid for the essentials and so can afford to pay a higher rate of tax - broader shoulders and all that.
The real question is what happens next with the SNP finance story.
I honestly can't think of an explanation that makes sense of the facts we know.
Hmm, the reality is that the £600k was treated as party funds and was spent. That was probably ok in the context of the SNP=independence. Proving that there was a more detailed fiduciary obligation in respect of that money is problematic.
The bigger problem is that Nicola and her husband seem to have been operating 2 sets of accounts. The "official" version and the unofficial version where funds that they had had donated to them was a sort of amorphous slush fund into which the party, and Nicola and her husband in particular, could dip as and when this matched the greater good. That was a breach of various provisions of the Political Parties Act which is designed to ensure we can see where the funds have come from and what influence, if any, the donors then had. That, in my totally uninformed view, is where the charges will come.
It’s the crazy nature of what was going on.
Denying access to the accounts to people with a legal right of access?
The camper van - ok, maybe it was temporary accommodation, given it was parked on driveway and never moved. But surely buying a flat would have been easier, less conspicuous and would be an asset going up in value rather than down?
Maybe I have the wrong mindset. But this stuff could never end well, could it?
The only way that the whole camper van story makes sense, is if they intended it to be some sort of election month battle bus, and they figured it was cheaper to buy one than rent one over five or six years. The bit they missed, is that they require constant maintenance and depreciate like crazy. Leaving one parked up for most of the year totally kills it.
All other explanations revolve around nefarious reasons for diverting money from the party funds.
Unless they were planning on campaigning non stop this makes no sense. Which is why campaign buses are rented for the few weeks every few years that they are needed.
But all of the political parties want to rent the busses at the same time, so they’re paying peak rental rates. I bet that some young squirt figured it was cheaper to buy a bus pay top dollar to rent them.
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
The average private sector wage is also not rising anywhere near 12% and actually the average public sector worker is paid slightly more than the average private sector worker
I'm so old I remember when you and Boris Johnson (and other PBers) were cheering above inflation pay increases in 2021 as a benefit of Brexit.
Some of us did warn that inflation would be back and is rather difficult to get rid off, the herpes of economics.
So you're saying Boris should have wore a condom?
Can't say I disagree.
But it's like wearing a welly in the shower.
I'm intrigued.
Why do you wear a single welly in the shower?
Because two would be silly
I'm wondering in light of TSE's other posts if it was a signal conspiracy was a foot.
The BBC is running another front page article today about how rents are going up at the "fastest rate since 2016", at 5.3%. The media narrative is continuing everywhere it seems that this is in part the fault of interest rates and landlords leaving the market.
There's somewhat of a flaw in this analysis. Inflation to July is 6.8%. Wages (to June so not directly comparable to inflation) are going up by 7.8%.
Can any of our innumerate journalists ever consider if 5.3% is more or less than 6.8%? Or more or less than 7.8%?
For one of the only times in decades real rents, and real house prices, are both falling. Both in real terms prices, and relative to income.
In 2016 by contrast rent rises were higher than today in nominal terms, while inflation was supposedly only 1.6% and wage growth was only 2.2%. So that was a massive price rise in both real terms and as a proportion of income.
For the past two decades rents like house prices have typically risen faster than both inflation and house prices. It's baby steps but excellent news that the opposite is happening today and ideally long may that continue.
We need to build massively more houses still in order to further reduce the real cost of housing in both absolute prices for those buying, and rent for those who can't.
Developers are scaling back their activities at the moment. IE:
Unsuprisingly there isn't a great will to build houses for sale in a falling market. Developers are also complaining about the new rule that you have to build two firefighting staircases and four lifts in every building over 18 metres high - this reduces significantly the space per floor, increases build costs, and all the layouts need revising .
It is funny to hear from so many commentors that we need a massive 'housebuilding drive' to house the masses - could we not just try removing some of the mountain of restrictions preventing the industry from meeting the demand? Ludicrous EU rules (which should have been disapplied by now) concerning additives going into rivers is another one - currently preventing 100,000 houses from being built.
There is pressure to add more regulation on to the building industry from every lobby group imaginable. If they were all accepted then no house would ever be built. What has happened now is that the Conservatives have no policy on housing. In this vacuum they now seem to add in every single new regulation any vaguely favoured group demands. It is a complete reversal of where they started in 2012/2013, when they got rid of regulations to facilitate new housebuilding - although this approach abruptly ended with the Grenfell fire. I suspect that this cycle will just basically repeat itself again several times over my lifetime.
I'm just too cynical - I just don't think they have any intention whatsoever of helping housing supply meet the demand. I'd suggest the opposite in fact. Probably a Davos thing. We are meant to 'own nothing and be happy about it' in a few year's time as the infamous quotation goes.
You think that UK building regulations are part of the "Davos agenda"?
You didn't attend that seminar at Davos?
I think it clashed with the 'Ending the use of cash to empower the Davos elite' seminar I was attending.
I find it very odd that such an obviously intelligent poster is in thrall to these conspiracy theories.
There's another friend of mine on Facebook* who posts conspiracy stuff all the time, about how the UN is about to do [x] or [y], and even though these things never come to pass, he still posts conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory.
* Again, an incredibly bright guy
I have a similar friend.
This isn't a humblebrag but you and I have been near the levers of power, we know people who control the levers of power.
I think we get to see 99.99% of mistakes are cockups/hubris/arrogance/ignorance, not conspiracy made by people like you and I.
I have a smart friend who rates Jordan Peterson and RFK Jr, and who also thinks Scottish Indy will only happen with Salmond at the forefront.
He’s Canadian which is probably some explanation.
I would have thought they had had enough with Quebec Nationalists
Last time I was in Copenhagen I irritated many of you by moaning about the inconvenience of the non EU passport queue and the gentle micro-aggression of being quizzed on my intentions in the country.
Well this evening things are much more exciting. The man in front of me has been undergoing interrogation (annoyingly at the cubicle not in a side room) for 15 minutes. I’m in a position where I can’t move out of the queue and join another one. I don’t know what immigration faux pas he’s committed but it is certainly causing the border officer much consternation.
By contrast when I went through passport control while entering a foreign country a couple of weeks ago it was a breeze.
It kind of reminded me of self-service tills (done well) at a supermarket.
The room had an array of self-service machines (dozens of them) which we walked up to a free one of. There were about 2 staff available on the floor to help anyone having an issue with the machines, but they looked pretty idle as the machines were really easy to use.
The machine scanned our passports, took a photo in turn of myself and my wife (not the children) and asked questions after which it printed a receipt with a barcode. Then went to the desk, handed over our receipt, which was scanned, the light lit green and we were waved through. All done in about three minutes from entering the queue for passport control to being through it.
If countries have a problem handling passport control, they should fix it.
Yes, didn't you flee to somewhere remote demanding the government lock us all down.
A few years later you wanted people like Fauci hung for introducing lockdowns.
You can't pin that one on Leon, that was a guy called Eadric. Although Eadric like Leon seemed to have some sort of romantic relationship with that guy from the Speccie.
I think that people should be taxed on their average hourly income, rather than their annual income
People (like me) working masses of overtime in low paid jobs shouldn't suddenly be taxed at a higher rate because we've worked so hard
People that earn hundreds of pounds an hour shouldn't be taxed at a low rate because they only do a few hours of work a week
Interesting concept, hard to implement. You'd presumably have to tax all unearned income at the maximum rate, which is unlikely to encourage saving.
How about adding unearned income to earned income, in two ways. If regular, then divided by your hours worked over the payment period, and taxed at the appropriate hourly rate. If a one off payment, then then divided by the number of hours you’ve worked over the last year
For retired people, tax people either as if they’re working full time for their income. Or maybe tax it as if they’d worked their average number of hours through their working lives
The real problem with this would be the self-employed, who’d claim to have worked eighteen hours a day for fifty years
And the rich lazy fuckers living off their inherited wealth.
This is an interesting idea. All the people on higher salaries at my office work 4 days weeks because of this, which reduces our tax contribution and depresses our productivity (at least by £ per hour measurement), because the people on lower salaries work a full week.
Combination of the personal allowance clawback at £100k, and the pension pot limits? Yes, taxing people at nearly 70% makes them want to work less.
I remember bumping into what I assume is the issue @BlancheLivermore was alluding to earlier, of working so much overtime that the marginal tax rate went from 20% to 40%. Funnily enough, I monitored the overtime after that.
My overtime was unpaid. I was subsequently awarded a significant settlement for being under the minimum wage.
The BBC is running another front page article today about how rents are going up at the "fastest rate since 2016", at 5.3%. The media narrative is continuing everywhere it seems that this is in part the fault of interest rates and landlords leaving the market.
There's somewhat of a flaw in this analysis. Inflation to July is 6.8%. Wages (to June so not directly comparable to inflation) are going up by 7.8%.
Can any of our innumerate journalists ever consider if 5.3% is more or less than 6.8%? Or more or less than 7.8%?
For one of the only times in decades real rents, and real house prices, are both falling. Both in real terms prices, and relative to income.
In 2016 by contrast rent rises were higher than today in nominal terms, while inflation was supposedly only 1.6% and wage growth was only 2.2%. So that was a massive price rise in both real terms and as a proportion of income.
For the past two decades rents like house prices have typically risen faster than both inflation and house prices. It's baby steps but excellent news that the opposite is happening today and ideally long may that continue.
We need to build massively more houses still in order to further reduce the real cost of housing in both absolute prices for those buying, and rent for those who can't.
Developers are scaling back their activities at the moment. IE:
Unsuprisingly there isn't a great will to build houses for sale in a falling market. Developers are also complaining about the new rule that you have to build two firefighting staircases and four lifts in every building over 18 metres high - this reduces significantly the space per floor, increases build costs, and all the layouts need revising .
It is funny to hear from so many commentors that we need a massive 'housebuilding drive' to house the masses - could we not just try removing some of the mountain of restrictions preventing the industry from meeting the demand? Ludicrous EU rules (which should have been disapplied by now) concerning additives going into rivers is another one - currently preventing 100,000 houses from being built.
There is pressure to add more regulation on to the building industry from every lobby group imaginable. If they were all accepted then no house would ever be built. What has happened now is that the Conservatives have no policy on housing. In this vacuum they now seem to add in every single new regulation any vaguely favoured group demands. It is a complete reversal of where they started in 2012/2013, when they got rid of regulations to facilitate new housebuilding - although this approach abruptly ended with the Grenfell fire. I suspect that this cycle will just basically repeat itself again several times over my lifetime.
I'm just too cynical - I just don't think they have any intention whatsoever of helping housing supply meet the demand. I'd suggest the opposite in fact. Probably a Davos thing. We are meant to 'own nothing and be happy about it' in a few year's time as the infamous quotation goes.
You think that UK building regulations are part of the "Davos agenda"?
You didn't attend that seminar at Davos?
I think it clashed with the 'Ending the use of cash to empower the Davos elite' seminar I was attending.
I find it very odd that such an obviously intelligent poster is in thrall to these conspiracy theories.
There's another friend of mine on Facebook* who posts conspiracy stuff all the time, about how the UN is about to do [x] or [y], and even though these things never come to pass, he still posts conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory.
* Again, an incredibly bright guy
I have a similar friend.
This isn't a humblebrag but you and I have been near the levers of power, we know people who control the levers of power.
I think we get to see 99.99% of mistakes are cockups/hubris/arrogance/ignorance, not conspiracy made by people like you and I.
I have a smart friend who rates Jordan Peterson and RFK Jr, and who also thinks Scottish Indy will only happen with Salmond at the forefront.
He’s Canadian which is probably some explanation.
I used to have a really intelligent friend, absolute expert in his field of history, who lived in rural England, his social media posts generally consisted of
1) Complaining about poor broadband and mobile coverage in rural UK saying it was causing a left behind society
2) Complaining about mobile masts causing cancer and being an eyesore in rural England
3) Proud that he had put in an objection to masts being erected or roads being dug up for fibre cables.
Did Sadiq Khan really think the homophobic murders in Clapham were most likely stoked by gender-critical feminism rather than some more "traditional" beliefs typically found in BAME communities? or was he just being a showboating Woke micro-twat as always?
Answers on a non-existent postcard
I think he meant anti trans rhetoric not gender critical feminism. These aren't the same thing. And you know the difference when you see it.
Last time I was in Copenhagen I irritated many of you by moaning about the inconvenience of the non EU passport queue and the gentle micro-aggression of being quizzed on my intentions in the country.
Well this evening things are much more exciting. The man in front of me has been undergoing interrogation (annoyingly at the cubicle not in a side room) for 15 minutes. I’m in a position where I can’t move out of the queue and join another one. I don’t know what immigration faux pas he’s committed but it is certainly causing the border officer much consternation.
By contrast when I went through passport control while entering a foreign country a couple of weeks ago it was a breeze.
It kind of reminded me of self-service tills (done well) at a supermarket.
The room had an array of self-service machines (dozens of them) which we walked up to a free one of. There were about 2 staff available on the floor to help anyone having an issue with the machines, but they looked pretty idle as the machines were really easy to use.
The machine scanned our passports, took a photo in turn of myself and my wife (not the children) and asked questions after which it printed a receipt with a barcode. Then went to the desk, handed over our receipt, which was scanned, the light lit green and we were waved through. All done in about three minutes from entering the queue for passport control to being through it.
If countries have a problem handling passport control, they should fix it.
If entering Shenghen zone you need a stamp to prove date of entry as now restricted to 90 days.
Did Sadiq Khan really think the homophobic murders in Clapham were most likely stoked by gender-critical feminism rather than some more "traditional" beliefs typically found in BAME communities? or was he just being a showboating Woke micro-twat as always?
Answers on a non-existent postcard
I think he meant anti trans rhetoric not gender critical feminism. These aren't the same thing. And you know the difference when you see it.
Does that guy in the photo look like J K Rowling? Really? @kinabalu?
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are getting
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Wages have risen above inflation for the overwhelming majority of the past 100 years.
That's how you have real living standards improve.
If the state can't afford real pay rises, then it should be treating people reasonably across the board. Especially since the state spends more on welfare* than it does on wages, yet its increasing welfare by double digits while capping wages. And has the audacity to call itself "Conservative" while doing so.
* which does not mean for the poor, most welfare nowadays does not go to the poor, which is why the poor are struggling and the state is broke.
What you're both groping for is the following set of equations (these should really be set out using logarithms or Fisher equations but I can't be bothered):
Therefore, if wage inflation rises, holding other factors constant, retail inflation will indeed increase, unless productivity growth also increases which it shows no sign of doing.
Wages have only risen faster than prices over the last century because productivity has soared. Unfortunately, for a large number of reasons, that is no longer the case, so real wage increases are highly likely to be inflationary over the medium term.
Yet again: We have full employment.
Wages should be rising and if unproductive businesses complain they can't afford it, they go out of business. Their labour, capital, customers and land can be used by other, more productive firms instead.
Productivity rises. Pay rises. The system works.
Trying to depress pay depresses productivity.
Wage Inflation is a problem when its divorced from full employment, when you have mass unemployment and wages are going up anyway because of politics not economics.
Where that gets trickier is that productivity increases don't happen smoothly year on year, or uniformly across the whole economy. They tend to be huge localised surges in specific tasks at specific times.
And, whilst it would be theoretically tidy to get rid of unproductive things, that's not necessarily a good thing. On that metric, schools ought to go by the wayside; most of the time, it's a teacher with a class, the only way to increase productivity is to put more kids in the class. There are incremental gains on the marginal stuff, not anything fundamental.
Actually, it's worse than that, because the educated staff you need to make schools happen get more expensive, because they can go and do other stuff in other sectors. So productivity goes down, not up. And, despite what our friend in Essex thinks, you can't cut salaries to match, because recruitment is a mare as it is.
There's no such thing as a fair price, except one that the buyer and seller agree on. And the holes in public sector staff structures say that the price of staff is higher than the government is currently willing to pay. So they will have to go without.
Sorry.
But teachers productivity is increasing over time.
Over time our economy has become better educated and better paid. That is in large part because of teachers. The better pay workers are making compared to the past enables better pay for teachers too. There's plenty of economic work and names for this concept.
If teachers are teaching pupils who can end up in well paid professional jobs, when teachers of the past were only teaching pupils who ended up in manual, poorly paid jobs, then that is a boost in productivity and makes good education more valuable, not less.
Errr, public sector education productivity has been flat been flat since 2007.
Edit: apologies, education productivity has actually decreased since 1997.
Did you misread what I wrote?
Productivity may not directly increase in education, but it increases in society which is fuelled by education and that pays for pay rises for teachers.
If people learn well at school and gets a well paid job as a lawyer or banker or software engineer or anything else then they will pay taxes accordingly. Which can pay teachers. Which can improve education, which leads to better paid workers of the future, which leads to economic growth, which leads to taxes, which leads to being able to pay more wages.
Is an educated software engineer's productivity all due to the software industry? Or is some of it due to being educated which enabled them to become a software engineer in the first place?
Yes, didn't you flee to somewhere remote demanding the government lock us all down.
A few years later you wanted people like Fauci hung for introducing lockdowns.
No, I want Fauci tried - and potentially put in jail for many years - for trying to cover-up the Lab Leak. Which he did. Because he personally funded the laboratory in question to do gain-of-function research into novel bat coronaviruses. Which he did
Yes, didn't you flee to somewhere remote demanding the government lock us all down.
A few years later you wanted people like Fauci hung for introducing lockdowns.
You can't pin that one on Leon, that was a guy called Eadric. Although Eadric like Leon seemed to have some sort of romantic relationship with that guy from the Speccie.
I have this image of a huge lardy-white coil of writhing sweaty bodies: Leon, Eadric, LadyG, all sliding past and into each other, like a greasy antiwoke ouroborous at the bottom of its pit.
Pause
The ticket collector who was looking over my shoulder as I composed that sentence hurried away hurriedly.
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are getting
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.
Yes, didn't you flee to somewhere remote demanding the government lock us all down.
A few years later you wanted people like Fauci hung for introducing lockdowns.
No, I want Fauci tried - and potentially put in jail for many years - for trying to cover-up the Lab Leak. Which he did. Because he personally funded the laboratory in question to do gain-of-function research into novel bat coronaviruses. Which he did
Blimey, you're really in danger of going full Plato.
Last time I was in Copenhagen I irritated many of you by moaning about the inconvenience of the non EU passport queue and the gentle micro-aggression of being quizzed on my intentions in the country.
Well this evening things are much more exciting. The man in front of me has been undergoing interrogation (annoyingly at the cubicle not in a side room) for 15 minutes. I’m in a position where I can’t move out of the queue and join another one. I don’t know what immigration faux pas he’s committed but it is certainly causing the border officer much consternation.
She finally waved him through. Indian passport I think. Then on to me: “why are you here?” “Um, for a business meeting” (Leafing through passport) “you come here often.” “Er yes” (am i being chatted up by the border guard?) “You know about the 90 day rule?” “Yes, I’m nowhere near” (Dismissive wave from my border guard friend of the hand and off I toddle).
And it then strikes me that working out how many days someone has spent in the last 12 months based on passport stamps would be quite an exercise. Thankfully not been subjected to that yet.
Last time I was in Copenhagen I irritated many of you by moaning about the inconvenience of the non EU passport queue and the gentle micro-aggression of being quizzed on my intentions in the country.
Well this evening things are much more exciting. The man in front of me has been undergoing interrogation (annoyingly at the cubicle not in a side room) for 15 minutes. I’m in a position where I can’t move out of the queue and join another one. I don’t know what immigration faux pas he’s committed but it is certainly causing the border officer much consternation.
In my experience, at least in Amsterdam and Stockholm, if you tell them that you are going on to another country, then thats it, end of questions. They only carry out an interrogation if you tell them that you are staying in the country you have landed at. It is starting to get really annoying though. At Helsinki I had to wait 45 minutes. Such a contrast with the UK where people from the EU can just go through automated gates in a few minutes, same as British citizens.
Did Sadiq Khan really think the homophobic murders in Clapham were most likely stoked by gender-critical feminism rather than some more "traditional" beliefs typically found in BAME communities? or was he just being a showboating Woke micro-twat as always?
Answers on a non-existent postcard
I think he meant anti trans rhetoric not gender critical feminism. These aren't the same thing. And you know the difference when you see it.
Does that guy in the photo look like J K Rowling? Really? @kinabalu?
Does he??
So, you have a problem with Khan being strong on anti Trans hate crime rather than feeling some solidarity with a dark skinned suspect? You think that a bad thing? 🤔
Yes, didn't you flee to somewhere remote demanding the government lock us all down.
A few years later you wanted people like Fauci hung for introducing lockdowns.
No, I want Fauci tried - and potentially put in jail for many years - for trying to cover-up the Lab Leak. Which he did. Because he personally funded the laboratory in question to do gain-of-function research into novel bat coronaviruses. Which he did
Blimey, you're really in danger of going full Plato.
Possibly not the best comparison, given the circs... ☹️
Last time I was in Copenhagen I irritated many of you by moaning about the inconvenience of the non EU passport queue and the gentle micro-aggression of being quizzed on my intentions in the country.
Well this evening things are much more exciting. The man in front of me has been undergoing interrogation (annoyingly at the cubicle not in a side room) for 15 minutes. I’m in a position where I can’t move out of the queue and join another one. I don’t know what immigration faux pas he’s committed but it is certainly causing the border officer much consternation.
By contrast when I went through passport control while entering a foreign country a couple of weeks ago it was a breeze.
It kind of reminded me of self-service tills (done well) at a supermarket.
The room had an array of self-service machines (dozens of them) which we walked up to a free one of. There were about 2 staff available on the floor to help anyone having an issue with the machines, but they looked pretty idle as the machines were really easy to use.
The machine scanned our passports, took a photo in turn of myself and my wife (not the children) and asked questions after which it printed a receipt with a barcode. Then went to the desk, handed over our receipt, which was scanned, the light lit green and we were waved through. All done in about three minutes from entering the queue for passport control to being through it.
If countries have a problem handling passport control, they should fix it.
If entering Shenghen zone you need a stamp to prove date of entry as now restricted to 90 days.
Which is their choice, and they can handle it how they choose. If its causing issues, they should fix it if they want to.
The country I visited has a days limit on how long people can be there too (for UK passport holders its six months typically), but there's no stamp its all computerised and electronically recorded which is what the machine dealt with when going through in a breeze.
Personally I think its a shame we don't get stamps anymore. It was good to be able to collect stamps and look back at stamps in your book.
Did Sadiq Khan really think the homophobic murders in Clapham were most likely stoked by gender-critical feminism rather than some more "traditional" beliefs typically found in BAME communities? or was he just being a showboating Woke micro-twat as always?
Answers on a non-existent postcard
I think he meant anti trans rhetoric not gender critical feminism. These aren't the same thing. And you know the difference when you see it.
Does that guy in the photo look like J K Rowling? Really? @kinabalu?
Does he??
So, you have a problem with Khan being strong on anti Trans hate crime rather than feeling some solidarity with a dark skinned suspect? You think that a bad thing? 🤔
Unlike the mayor, I would have waited at least an hour before jumping to blame the Clapham atrocities on the "Tories and Terfs" for stoking the "culture wars"
Last time I was in Copenhagen I irritated many of you by moaning about the inconvenience of the non EU passport queue and the gentle micro-aggression of being quizzed on my intentions in the country.
Well this evening things are much more exciting. The man in front of me has been undergoing interrogation (annoyingly at the cubicle not in a side room) for 15 minutes. I’m in a position where I can’t move out of the queue and join another one. I don’t know what immigration faux pas he’s committed but it is certainly causing the border officer much consternation.
She finally waved him through. Indian passport I think. Then on to me: “why are you here?” “Um, for a business meeting” (Leafing through passport) “you come here often.” “Er yes” (am i being chatted up by the border guard?) “You know about the 90 day rule?” “Yes, I’m nowhere near” (Dismissive wave from my border guard friend of the hand and off I toddle).
And it then strikes me that working out how many days someone has spent in the last 12 months based on passport stamps would be quite an exercise. Thankfully not been subjected to that yet.
Just to clarify its actually 90 days out of 180. This (along with the interrogations) will hopefully be resolved when the new ETIAS system is rolled out, all the information will be collected automatically. But the ETIAS system is always just about to be introduced and keeps getting put back - has been the case for the past few years and the latest estimate is 'after the paris olympics'.
Discrimination is against protected classes that you can't control.
People who choose to pay extra by using an inferior, insecure and more expensive medium are responsible for paying for their own choices. If you make a choice, take responsibility for your own choices.
My Mum is 75, and gets horribly frustrated by newfangled parking meters. Don’t underestimate the effect of these changes on groups like the elderly.
We've spent the last month living the easy life around Dorset and the New Forest. Probably spent 100-120 quid on parking. It's effing expensive, but the place is rammed so no real alternative. What's bugged me is the inconsistencies and sheer hard work involved in payment methods. Cash/card/phone app. A few times I've had no cash, only to find the parking is cash only, other times I've had a crap signal so app wont work and no cash, or not enough cash but the phone app isn't working and the machine doesn't like my card. Royal pain in the arse!
Speaking as a 'young pensioner', it's a complete pain to have to download an App for parking (and for lots of other things now). Those who have weaker phone skills must find it virtually impossible. It's worth remembering that poor eyesight is a feature of the elderly as well, making it even harder when out and about. Where I live, it seems to have fuelled an increase in the (probably illegitimate) use of disabled parking badges.
Parking anywhere should offer a choice of cash, or card tap. We could all manage one of those.
Point of order - having a disabled parking badge (I've got one) rarely exempts you from carpark parking charges these days. For me the big plus is a parking space wide enough to get in and out of the car from a wheelchair.
The point about apps and eyesight is a good one. Since disability is a protected characteristic someone might want to take a council to court for discriminating based on a hard to use app.
I think I have four apps for parking, and they are all horrible to use, even for someone with decent eyesight (and a familiarity with apps, given my age). Why don't they just use contactless, which has the benefit of working when you don't have signal?
When they don't work, I just message the offending council on twitter and let them know my registration plate. They usually apologise and appreciate the message. The worse ones are for hillwalking, and you spend the whole day wondering if your car will still be there at the end.
The one advantage of a well-designed parking app is one where you can pay for additional parking time in the app, if you happen to be enjoying yourself wherever you are for longer than expected, saving you the trouble of dashing back to the car park to buy another ticket to stick on the dashboard of the car.
This is an area where one world government is required. One UN-mandated app called “global park” applying to all paid parking on the planet. Ideally the same app could be used to book public transport, pay road tolls and organise babysitters.
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are getting
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insurance
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Wages have risen above inflation for the overwhelming majority of the past 100 years.
That's how you have real living standards improve.
If the state can't afford real pay rises, then it should be treating people reasonably across the board. Especially since the state spends more on welfare* than it does on wages, yet its increasing welfare by double digits while capping wages. And has the audacity to call itself "Conservative" while doing so.
* which does not mean for the poor, most welfare nowadays does not go to the poor, which is why the poor are struggling and the state is broke.
What you're both groping for is the following set of equations (these should really be set out using logarithms or Fisher equations but I can't be bothered):
Therefore, if wage inflation rises, holding other factors constant, retail inflation will indeed increase, unless productivity growth also increases which it shows no sign of doing.
Wages have only risen faster than prices over the last century because productivity has soared. Unfortunately, for a large number of reasons, that is no longer the case, so real wage increases are highly likely to be inflationary over the medium term.
Yet again: We have full employment.
Wages should be rising and if unproductive businesses complain they can't afford it, they go out of business. Their labour, capital, customers and land can be used by other, more productive firms instead.
Productivity rises. Pay rises. The system works.
Trying to depress pay depresses productivity.
Wage Inflation is a problem when its divorced from full employment, when you have mass unemployment and wages are going up anyway because of politics not economics.
Where that gets trickier is that productivity increases don't happen smoothly year on year, or uniformly across the whole economy. They tend to be huge localised surges in specific tasks at specific times.
And, whilst it would be theoretically tidy to get rid of unproductive things, that's not necessarily a good thing. On that metric, schools ought to go by the wayside; most of the time, it's a teacher with a class, the only way to increase productivity is to put more kids in the class. There are incremental gains on the marginal stuff, not anything fundamental.
Actually, it's worse than that, because the educated staff you need to make schools happen get more expensive, because they can go and do other stuff in other sectors. So productivity goes down, not up. And, despite what our friend in Essex thinks, you can't cut salaries to match, because recruitment is a mare as it is.
There's no such thing as a fair price, except one that the buyer and seller agree on. And the holes in public sector staff structures say that the price of staff is higher than the government is currently willing to pay. So they will have to go without.
Sorry.
But teachers productivity is increasing over time.
Over time our economy has become better educated and better paid. That is in large part because of teachers. The better pay workers are making compared to the past enables better pay for teachers too. There's plenty of economic work and names for this concept.
If teachers are teaching pupils who can end up in well paid professional jobs, when teachers of the past were only teaching pupils who ended up in manual, poorly paid jobs, then that is a boost in productivity and makes good education more valuable, not less.
Errr, public sector education productivity has been flat been flat since 2007.
Edit: apologies, education productivity has actually decreased since 1997.
Did you misread what I wrote?
Productivity may not directly increase in education, but it increases in society which is fuelled by education and that pays for pay rises for teachers.
If people learn well at school and gets a well paid job as a lawyer or banker or software engineer or anything else then they will pay taxes accordingly. Which can pay teachers. Which can improve education, which leads to better paid workers of the future, which leads to economic growth, which leads to taxes, which leads to being able to pay more wages.
Is an educated software engineer's productivity all due to the software industry? Or is some of it due to being educated which enabled them to become a software engineer in the first place?
You said that teacher productivity was increasing. You suggested that the economy has become better educated and more productive because of that. The data does not support your assumption.
I appreciate you like to come here and pontificate on all topics, but when myself and others respond with data or evidence that helps the debate along, you shouldn't dismiss it out of hand.
However, I appreciate that you have pivoted away from your original view and now describe the Baumol effect (sort of). My experience of software engineers is they gain all their knowledge from Monster Energy drinks.
Yes, didn't you flee to somewhere remote demanding the government lock us all down.
A few years later you wanted people like Fauci hung for introducing lockdowns.
No, I want Fauci tried - and potentially put in jail for many years - for trying to cover-up the Lab Leak. Which he did. Because he personally funded the laboratory in question to do gain-of-function research into novel bat coronaviruses. Which he did
Blimey, you're really in danger of going full Plato.
All those are true, unlike many of the beliefs adopted by dear old Plato (RIP)
"In Major Shift, NIH Admits Funding Risky Virus Research in Wuhan
A spokesman for Dr. Fauci says he has been “entirely truthful,” but a new letter belatedly acknowledging the National Institutes of Health’s support for virus-enhancing research adds more heat to the ongoing debate over whether a lab leak could have sparked the pandemic."
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are getting
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insurance
That's precisely what they are doing. There is a market for doctors and nurses, and the Australians are paying the going rate.
Incidentally while it took us about three minutes from start to finish to get through passport control in our recent flight, it took someone we were travelling with less time, since the questions we answered on a machine they'd pre-answered on an app, so they just had to get their photo taken and it was done.
I wasn't aware of the app.
Countries struggling with passport control should sort it out, that's on them. Its not rocket science to do it well.
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are getting
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insurance
That's precisely what they are doing. There is a market for doctors and nurses, and the Australians are paying the going rate.
Yes as Australia has more private healthcare, especially amongst high earners, than we do and the private sector pays more than the public sector at the top end and always will
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Wages have risen above inflation for the overwhelming majority of the past 100 years.
That's how you have real living standards improve.
If the state can't afford real pay rises, then it should be treating people reasonably across the board. Especially since the state spends more on welfare* than it does on wages, yet its increasing welfare by double digits while capping wages. And has the audacity to call itself "Conservative" while doing so.
* which does not mean for the poor, most welfare nowadays does not go to the poor, which is why the poor are struggling and the state is broke.
What you're both groping for is the following set of equations (these should really be set out using logarithms or Fisher equations but I can't be bothered):
Therefore, if wage inflation rises, holding other factors constant, retail inflation will indeed increase, unless productivity growth also increases which it shows no sign of doing.
Wages have only risen faster than prices over the last century because productivity has soared. Unfortunately, for a large number of reasons, that is no longer the case, so real wage increases are highly likely to be inflationary over the medium term.
Yet again: We have full employment.
Wages should be rising and if unproductive businesses complain they can't afford it, they go out of business. Their labour, capital, customers and land can be used by other, more productive firms instead.
Productivity rises. Pay rises. The system works.
Trying to depress pay depresses productivity.
Wage Inflation is a problem when its divorced from full employment, when you have mass unemployment and wages are going up anyway because of politics not economics.
Where that gets trickier is that productivity increases don't happen smoothly year on year, or uniformly across the whole economy. They tend to be huge localised surges in specific tasks at specific times.
And, whilst it would be theoretically tidy to get rid of unproductive things, that's not necessarily a good thing. On that metric, schools ought to go by the wayside; most of the time, it's a teacher with a class, the only way to increase productivity is to put more kids in the class. There are incremental gains on the marginal stuff, not anything fundamental.
Actually, it's worse than that, because the educated staff you need to make schools happen get more expensive, because they can go and do other stuff in other sectors. So productivity goes down, not up. And, despite what our friend in Essex thinks, you can't cut salaries to match, because recruitment is a mare as it is.
There's no such thing as a fair price, except one that the buyer and seller agree on. And the holes in public sector staff structures say that the price of staff is higher than the government is currently willing to pay. So they will have to go without.
Sorry.
But teachers productivity is increasing over time.
Over time our economy has become better educated and better paid. That is in large part because of teachers. The better pay workers are making compared to the past enables better pay for teachers too. There's plenty of economic work and names for this concept.
If teachers are teaching pupils who can end up in well paid professional jobs, when teachers of the past were only teaching pupils who ended up in manual, poorly paid jobs, then that is a boost in productivity and makes good education more valuable, not less.
Errr, public sector education productivity has been flat been flat since 2007.
Edit: apologies, education productivity has actually decreased since 1997.
Did you misread what I wrote?
Productivity may not directly increase in education, but it increases in society which is fuelled by education and that pays for pay rises for teachers.
If people learn well at school and gets a well paid job as a lawyer or banker or software engineer or anything else then they will pay taxes accordingly. Which can pay teachers. Which can improve education, which leads to better paid workers of the future, which leads to economic growth, which leads to taxes, which leads to being able to pay more wages.
Is an educated software engineer's productivity all due to the software industry? Or is some of it due to being educated which enabled them to become a software engineer in the first place?
You said that teacher productivity was increasing. You suggested that the economy has become better educated and more productive because of that. The data does not support your assumption.
I appreciate you like to come here and pontificate on all topics, but when myself and others respond with data or evidence that helps the debate along, you shouldn't dismiss it out of hand.
However, I appreciate that you have pivoted away from your original view and now describe the Baumol effect (sort of). My experience of software engineers is they gain all their knowledge from Monster Energy drinks.
I was suggesting that teacher productivity should not just be considered as teacher productivity itself as it gets measured as that's lies, damned lies and statistics; but as societal productivity overall as without education all the rest of the well paid productive jobs wouldn't exist either.
Yes I was also describing the Baumol effect and I'm sorry if I wasn't clear.
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are getting
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insurance
That's precisely what they are doing. There is a market for doctors and nurses, and the Australians are paying the going rate.
Yes as Australia has more private healthcare, especially amongst high earners, than we do and the private sector pays more than the public sector at the top end and always will
Right. But the public sector in the UK also operates in a labour market. There isn't a special button on the top of a public servant's head that turns off all responses to incentives.
The sense of duty (or whatever) is worth about £15,000, in my experience. Look how the armed forces are having to incentivise people at the moment.
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are getting
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insurance
A Tory who doesn't claim to love the NHS and believes the pre1948 health system was better. Fair play.
Last time I was in Copenhagen I irritated many of you by moaning about the inconvenience of the non EU passport queue and the gentle micro-aggression of being quizzed on my intentions in the country.
Well this evening things are much more exciting. The man in front of me has been undergoing interrogation (annoyingly at the cubicle not in a side room) for 15 minutes. I’m in a position where I can’t move out of the queue and join another one. I don’t know what immigration faux pas he’s committed but it is certainly causing the border officer much consternation.
In my experience, at least in Amsterdam and Stockholm, if you tell them that you are going on to another country, then thats it, end of questions. They only carry out an interrogation if you tell them that you are staying in the country you have landed at. It is starting to get really annoying though. At Helsinki I had to wait 45 minutes. Such a contrast with the UK where people from the EU can just go through automated gates in a few minutes, same as British citizens.
One of a number of hopefully quick wins for Starmer:
- Make the Schengen travel limit 182 days in 365 rather than 90 in 180, to allow for seasonal work in skiing or summer holiday resorts. Reciprocal for UK so a win-win - Ease up the rules for travelling musicians as was originally offered - Allow ID cards at Uk border again, so the school trips come back - Join the EEA and customs Union - Rejoin EU - Join Schengen - join the Euro - Form an EU army Etc
Did Sadiq Khan really think the homophobic murders in Clapham were most likely stoked by gender-critical feminism rather than some more "traditional" beliefs typically found in BAME communities? or was he just being a showboating Woke micro-twat as always?
Answers on a non-existent postcard
I think he meant anti trans rhetoric not gender critical feminism. These aren't the same thing. And you know the difference when you see it.
Does that guy in the photo look like J K Rowling? Really? @kinabalu?
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are getting
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insurance
It's not a pure market, but equally it's not pure command economy either. I mean, the government could introduce a kind of National Service, but I doubt it would be popular, except with people who wouldn't have to do it.
Bottom line is simple. There are lots of sectors where the government is responsible and potential employees are saying "at those rates, you're having a laugh".
How far do you think crossing your arms and saying "you simply shouldn't demand more money" is going to get you?
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are getting
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insurance
A Tory who doesn't claim to love the NHS and believes the pre1948 health system was better. Fair play.
No I support some state healthcare, especially for low and average earners. I am not myself a pure free marketeer
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors I agree
How do you trhink your voters will get their bums wiped, the way the Tories have been slashing local government and piling social care on them?
"contractors"
Did you see my post earlier regarding the tweet in the thread?
The figures in the tweet are correct for Westminster VI but YouGov used the wrong graphic.
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are getting
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insurance
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are getting
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insurance
You are correct re the market between patients and Providers. However Providers need to buy goods and services,
No one (I hope) disagrees that there’s a free market for Trust to purchase (say) bin bags. Given the shortage of medical staff most Trusts have to hire agency nurses and locum medics at well above AfC rates.
Demand exceeds supply for clinicians and this is the market referred to above.
To reduce prices, you need to increase supply which is hard for nurses and very hard for doctors.
(The population of the Spokane metropolitan area is almost 600 K, of which the city itself has about a third.)
The English government is planning to address this in a particularly cack-handed way via Foundation Job allocations (equivalent of a 2 year internship in USA), by taking out both the Situational Judgement Test, and of academic achievement from the allocation process. This means that expressed preference of the applicant is the only thing that matters in allocating those jobs.
So applicants from Lincoln University get an equal chance of getting that professorial job at Imperial as the student who did a PhD with that Prof. Equally the Bright Young Thing gets an equal chance of being sent to Boston Lincs.
Not surprisingly the reaction is likely to be no thanks, and emigration.
Last time I was in Copenhagen I irritated many of you by moaning about the inconvenience of the non EU passport queue and the gentle micro-aggression of being quizzed on my intentions in the country.
Well this evening things are much more exciting. The man in front of me has been undergoing interrogation (annoyingly at the cubicle not in a side room) for 15 minutes. I’m in a position where I can’t move out of the queue and join another one. I don’t know what immigration faux pas he’s committed but it is certainly causing the border officer much consternation.
In my experience, at least in Amsterdam and Stockholm, if you tell them that you are going on to another country, then thats it, end of questions. They only carry out an interrogation if you tell them that you are staying in the country you have landed at. It is starting to get really annoying though. At Helsinki I had to wait 45 minutes. Such a contrast with the UK where people from the EU can just go through automated gates in a few minutes, same as British citizens.
One of a number of hopefully quick wins for Starmer:
- Make the Schengen travel limit 182 days in 365 rather than 90 in 180, to allow for seasonal work in skiing or summer holiday resorts. Reciprocal for UK so a win-win - Ease up the rules for travelling musicians as was originally offered - Allow ID cards at Uk border again, so the school trips come back - Join the EEA and customs Union - Rejoin EU - Join Schengen - join the Euro - Form an EU army Etc
Aye, fuck it. Might as well join Schengen and the Euro now, for the lolz. Who cares what currency we are in anyway when nobody in their right mind uses pointless slips of paper and stupid shards of metal to pay for stuff anymore?
Did Sadiq Khan really think the homophobic murders in Clapham were most likely stoked by gender-critical feminism rather than some more "traditional" beliefs typically found in BAME communities? or was he just being a showboating Woke micro-twat as always?
Answers on a non-existent postcard
I think he meant anti trans rhetoric not gender critical feminism. These aren't the same thing. And you know the difference when you see it.
Does that guy in the photo look like J K Rowling? Really? @kinabalu?
Does he??
You've lost me, I'm afraid.
OK, let's make it simpler for you
Do you think it was wise for the Mayor of London, following the Clapham attacks, to leap into the Twitter about 2 hours later and blame them on people who "stoke the culture wars against LGBTQ people" (ie Tories and Terfs, because who else did he mean) when a moment's thought might have given him pause, to consider that there are surely other, equally likely or likelier suspects with very different reasons?
Do you agree that this was 1 ill advised and 2 typically wanky of people like him?
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are getting
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insurance
It's not a pure market, but equally it's not pure command economy either. I mean, the government could introduce a kind of National Service, but I doubt it would be popular, except with people who wouldn't have to do it.
Bottom line is simple. There are lots of sectors where the government is responsible and potential employees are saying "at those rates, you're having a laugh".
How far do you think crossing your arms and saying "you simply shouldn't demand more money" is going to get you?
The irony is that the government has now spent a billion on NHS medical strike cover and related expenses, which exceeds the cost of settling, and shows no sign of settling.
It would have been less inflationary to have settled...
Did Sadiq Khan really think the homophobic murders in Clapham were most likely stoked by gender-critical feminism rather than some more "traditional" beliefs typically found in BAME communities? or was he just being a showboating Woke micro-twat as always?
Answers on a non-existent postcard
I think he meant anti trans rhetoric not gender critical feminism. These aren't the same thing. And you know the difference when you see it.
Does that guy in the photo look like J K Rowling? Really? @kinabalu?
Does he??
You've lost me, I'm afraid.
He doesn’t look like Joanna Cherry either, so that’s two Jo’s he looks unlike
I expect a similar offer in England would stop the strikes. Barclay needs to negotiate.
Absolutely not.
This government has shown fiscal discipline to get inflation down to just under 8% this week from over 11% last year. If the Scottish government wants to be fiscally irresponsible and award massively above inflation pay rises not tied to longer worker hours and improved productivity leading to an inflationary wage spiral in Scotland that is their basis, the UK government should have no part in it. The Scottish government can increase Scottish taxes to pay for it too.
If nurses, physios and porters and ambulance workers in England can accept a 5% pay deal when they earn much less than doctors and surgeons already, so can junior doctors!
At some point it will surely sink in to the blinkered Conservative mindset that it is not a good idea to control inflation by cutting the salaries of public sector workers, particularly public sector workers who can walk out and go in to a higher paying private sector job or return as a contractor getting 3x salary. This is not sensible or prudent, it is just reckless and irresponsible.
No it won't, because unlike economic illiterates like it seems you we know that pushing wages above inflation leads to inflation surging further, as well as higher interest rates hitting mortgage holders and borrowers as well as hitting savers.
Yeah but the problem is that it is against a backdrop of pay not following inflation for a decade, so it is actually year on year of pay cut. I earned £38k per year in London as a local government employee in 2013. The same job now pays about £42k, had pay followed inflation according to the bank of england, it should be £50k. Unsuprisingly no one is happy with this and there is no one applies for these jobs when they are advertised, so the Council has to pay the same people £45 per hour plus 10% agency fee to do the job as a contractor, about £80k. This process in itself is inflationary, even if it is not tracked in the pay stats because the employee gets recategorised.
£38k is above the UK average salary let alone £42k,I expect many would gladly work for that
Yeah but so what? This is completely irrelevant. Because of supply and demand you can walk out and back in the next day doubling your money, working as a contractor. This is what happens when you try and control inflation by freezing public sector salaries when there is a skilled labour shortage.
Local authorities should also slash the number of contractors they use I agree. Average earners should not be paying higher council tax to give public sector workers a higher percentage pay rise than they are getting
OK so your policy is basically that Councils are going to have to employ highly skilled people at a fraction of what they can earn in the private sector. And then they will also be banned from using contractors, and presumably also outsourcing firms.
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
No you just pay the most skilled jobs in the public sector an above average salary but not private sector equivalent salary.
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
"Should" doesn't cut it. The labour market isn't values based. It's a market.
Healthcare isn’t, if it was there would be no state healthcare and patients would pay the going rate for drugs and surgery either themselves or via private health insurance
A Tory who doesn't claim to love the NHS and believes the pre1948 health system was better. Fair play.
No I support some state healthcare, especially for low and average earners. I am not myself a pure free marketeer
That's only because you are desperate to justify the regressive income tax laughingly called "National Insurance Class 1" and stop it being applied to pensioners to avoid damaging your voters' finances and inheritances.
You know, the one you pretend is actually insurance and a subscription to the NHS.
Comments
This isn't a humblebrag but you and I have been near the levers of power, we know people who control the levers of power.
I think we get to see 99.99% of mistakes are cockups/hubris/arrogance/ignorance, not conspiracy made by people like you and I.
It is why Ken Clarke was always Thatcher's go to guy when she needed major reform.
"contractors"
---
* 8 part-time staff (3 FTE) in a month produced 300 'outputs'. Script has produced 3 million of equal accuracy/quality in a couple of weeks.
* GPT/local models have transformed our insights output from several large reports a month, to as many as we can/want to spend. bottleneck completely removed.
* our lead times with clients were usually weeks, now they're minutes
* we used to pay $120k/year on infra, now we pay $120/mo
* we've had our most profitable quarter ever, and it's not even the end of our quarter
* I have way more ideas than I have time.
* our KPIs are all meaningless now
What mad conspiracy/radical theories have I embraced?
1. The flap over aliens shows that something TRULY weird is happening in Washington: PROVED
2. The leak came from the lab: almost certainly PROVED
3. We are on the cusp of true AGI: pretty fucking CLOSE to being PROVED now
4. What3words: OK LET'S JUST FORGET THAT ONE
6) Last autumn you were shitting your kecks that Putin was going to use nukes.
The best-paid doctors in America work in the Dakotas, where they averaged $524,000 (South) and $468,000 (North) in 2017 in their prime earning years, including business income and capital gains. That’s well above the already astonishing $405,000 the average U.S. doctor made in the prime earning years, defined here as 40 to 55."
source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/11/doctor-pay-geography/
Living costs and taxes in the Dakotas are lower than the average for the US, too.
As I do from time to time, I am not defending any of the many American health care systems -- even though I benefit from the largest.
(Yes, that finding came as a surprise to me, too. But it does help explain why dentists in this much more expensive area are so competitive.)
Because many of the staff are using agency work to top up their salaries. If the opportunity goes away, that’s less money coming in…
2. Not proven.
3. You may be onto something.
4. Hmm.
Answers on a non-existent postcard
And, whilst it would be theoretically tidy to get rid of unproductive things, that's not necessarily a good thing. On that metric, schools ought to go by the wayside; most of the time, it's a teacher with a class, the only way to increase productivity is to put more kids in the class. There are incremental gains on the marginal stuff, not anything fundamental.
Actually, it's worse than that, because the educated staff you need to make schools happen get more expensive, because they can go and do other stuff in other sectors. So productivity goes down, not up. And, despite what our friend in Essex thinks, you can't cut salaries to match, because recruitment is a mare as it is.
There's no such thing as a fair price, except one that the buyer and seller agree on. And the holes in public sector staff structures say that the price of staff is higher than the government is currently willing to pay. So they will have to go without.
Sorry.
The figures in the tweet are correct for Westminster VI but YouGov used the wrong graphic.
I see your eye for detail is improving.
A bit like that roaster SeanT after the Glasgow bin lorry incident who wanted to deport every Muslim to Madagascar.
All other explanations revolve around nefarious reasons for diverting money from the party funds.
Of course 2 is true, no one sane believes otherwise, any more
3. Well, derr
4. Was just me having fun or something, I was probably drunk for a week, or on meth, you can't blame me for that
ME: Er, guys, there's a pandemic coming
PB: Shut up, we're talking about wood-burners
A few years later you wanted people like Fauci hung for introducing lockdowns.
And how are they paid relative to permanent staff do you think?
He’s Canadian which is probably some explanation.
Over time our economy has become better educated and better paid. That is in large part because of teachers. The better pay workers are making compared to the past enables better pay for teachers too. There's plenty of economic work and names for this concept.
If teachers are teaching pupils who can end up in well paid professional jobs, when teachers of the past were only teaching pupils who ended up in manual, poorly paid jobs, then that is a boost in productivity and makes good education more valuable, not less.
If your goal is to maximise your income then if you are highly skilled you will always earn more in the private sector as wages are set by supply and demand. If you are less skilled though you will earn more in the public sector normally for the same reason
The only way that this can work is if you completely crash the economy and wipe out the private sector, creating a skill surplus rather than a skill shortage, at which point employment in local government or the civil service may become an attractive proposition again. Well, that may well be what happens, the way things are going.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p0fvmzmy/henpocalypse
Well this evening things are much more exciting. The man in front of me has been undergoing interrogation (annoyingly at the cubicle not in a side room) for 15 minutes. I’m in a position where I can’t move out of the queue and join another one. I don’t know what immigration faux pas he’s committed but it is certainly causing the border officer much consternation.
You get the same effect in the UK. So it is hard to recruit good medical staff on the Lincs Coast despite cheap housing etc.
I remember bumping into what I assume is the issue @BlancheLivermore was alluding to earlier, of working so much overtime that the marginal tax rate went from 20% to 40%. Funnily enough, I monitored the overtime after that.
"Script has produced 3 million of equal accuracy/quality"
How do you know the 3 million are of equal accuracy/quality? Have they all been checked, and if so, how? Were only a small sample checked, in which case how cure can you be of the overall quality?
Things like 'three million' are really large and impressive numbers in this context. They should also be treated with scepticism. It doesn't mean they're wrong, but I'm always wary.
Also, the clients get results in minutes. That indicates that the AI's output is *not* being human-checked. I ight suggest that there are certain dangers in that, especially if the dataset sitting under the AI changes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)
US Medicare covers about 65 million people. In 2022, total spending for the program "topped $900 billion".
Real wage increases != productivity gains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
Edit: apologies, education productivity has actually decreased since 1997.
That, or something nefarious.
It kind of reminded me of self-service tills (done well) at a supermarket.
The room had an array of self-service machines (dozens of them) which we walked up to a free one of. There were about 2 staff available on the floor to help anyone having an issue with the machines, but they looked pretty idle as the machines were really easy to use.
The machine scanned our passports, took a photo in turn of myself and my wife (not the children) and asked questions after which it printed a receipt with a barcode. Then went to the desk, handed over our receipt, which was scanned, the light lit green and we were waved through. All done in about three minutes from entering the queue for passport control to being through it.
If countries have a problem handling passport control, they should fix it.
1) Complaining about poor broadband and mobile coverage in rural UK saying it was causing a left behind society
2) Complaining about mobile masts causing cancer and being an eyesore in rural England
3) Proud that he had put in an objection to masts being erected or roads being dug up for fibre cables.
4) Posting outlandish conspiracy theories.
Does he??
Average earners should not be paying higher taxes so public sector professional workers and managers can be paid private sector wages
Productivity may not directly increase in education, but it increases in society which is fuelled by education and that pays for pay rises for teachers.
If people learn well at school and gets a well paid job as a lawyer or banker or software engineer or anything else then they will pay taxes accordingly. Which can pay teachers. Which can improve education, which leads to better paid workers of the future, which leads to economic growth, which leads to taxes, which leads to being able to pay more wages.
Is an educated software engineer's productivity all due to the software industry? Or is some of it due to being educated which enabled them to become a software engineer in the first place?
Pause
The ticket collector who was looking over my shoulder as I composed that sentence hurried away hurriedly.
“why are you here?”
“Um, for a business meeting”
(Leafing through passport) “you come here often.”
“Er yes” (am i being chatted up by the border guard?)
“You know about the 90 day rule?”
“Yes, I’m nowhere near”
(Dismissive wave from my border guard friend of the hand and off I toddle).
And it then strikes me that working out how many days someone has spent in the last 12 months based on passport stamps would be quite an exercise. Thankfully not been subjected to that yet.
In my home state, Washington State University is expanding its own medical school, which is located at the eastern end of the state. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2023/aug/11/wsu-spokanes-new-school-of-medicine-building-is-re/
(The population of the Spokane metropolitan area is almost 600 K, of which the city itself has about a third.)
The country I visited has a days limit on how long people can be there too (for UK passport holders its six months typically), but there's no stamp its all computerised and electronically recorded which is what the machine dealt with when going through in a breeze.
Personally I think its a shame we don't get stamps anymore. It was good to be able to collect stamps and look back at stamps in your book.
I appreciate you like to come here and pontificate on all topics, but when myself and others respond with data or evidence that helps the debate along, you shouldn't dismiss it out of hand.
However, I appreciate that you have pivoted away from your original view and now describe the Baumol effect (sort of). My experience of software engineers is they gain all their knowledge from Monster Energy drinks.
"In Major Shift, NIH Admits Funding Risky Virus Research in Wuhan
A spokesman for Dr. Fauci says he has been “entirely truthful,” but a new letter belatedly acknowledging the National Institutes of Health’s support for virus-enhancing research adds more heat to the ongoing debate over whether a lab leak could have sparked the pandemic."
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-risky-virus-research-in-wuhan
I wasn't aware of the app.
Countries struggling with passport control should sort it out, that's on them. Its not rocket science to do it well.
Yes I was also describing the Baumol effect and I'm sorry if I wasn't clear.
LOL @ Monster Energy drinks. That's true too. 🤣
The sense of duty (or whatever) is worth about £15,000, in my experience. Look how the armed forces are having to incentivise people at the moment.
- Make the Schengen travel limit 182 days in 365 rather than 90 in 180, to allow for seasonal work in skiing or summer holiday resorts. Reciprocal for UK so a win-win
- Ease up the rules for travelling musicians as was originally offered
- Allow ID cards at Uk border again, so the school trips come back
- Join the EEA and customs Union
- Rejoin EU
- Join Schengen
- join the Euro
- Form an EU army
Etc
Bottom line is simple. There are lots of sectors where the government is responsible and potential employees are saying "at those rates, you're having a laugh".
How far do you think crossing your arms and saying "you simply shouldn't demand more money" is going to get you?
No one (I hope) disagrees that there’s a free market for Trust to purchase (say) bin bags. Given the shortage of medical staff most Trusts have to hire agency nurses and locum medics at well above AfC rates.
Demand exceeds supply for clinicians and this is the market referred to above.
To reduce prices, you need to increase supply which is hard for nurses and very hard for doctors.
So applicants from Lincoln University get an equal chance of getting that professorial job at Imperial as the student who did a PhD with that Prof. Equally the Bright Young Thing gets an equal chance of being sent to Boston Lincs.
Not surprisingly the reaction is likely to be no thanks, and emigration.
Do you think it was wise for the Mayor of London, following the Clapham attacks, to leap into the Twitter about 2 hours later and blame them on people who "stoke the culture wars against LGBTQ people" (ie Tories and Terfs, because who else did he mean) when a moment's thought might have given him pause, to consider that there are surely other, equally likely or likelier suspects with very different reasons?
Do you agree that this was 1 ill advised and 2 typically wanky of people like him?
It would have been less inflationary to have settled...
(Yes, I’m as lost as you are)
You know, the one you pretend is actually insurance and a subscription to the NHS.