"The new book from Rachel Reeves cuts and pastes from Wikipedia, The Guardian, a fellow MP and other unacknowledged sources in at least 20 examples of apparent plagiarism. Scoop from @SoumayaKeynes, @GeorgeWParker, @rafeuddin_, @EuanHealy, @stephistacey"
Embarrassing. Hard to see it changing a single vote.
Agree. Reeves has a great backstory, and a cracking CV and knows which way is up, economically.
I might disagree with the way she will choose to employ that knowledge but you can't fault her credentials.
Did she cut and paste from other sources for her book? Who knows but I can't believe anyone would care, really.
Whats your call then ? Is she a reformer or a complicator ?
Given that pressure on housing and pressure for both parents to work in order to pay for housing is one of the key factors in the lower numbers of kids people have, if we didn't keep filling in the gaps with immigration, wouldn't this be somewhat self correcting?
The price of not having a large enough replacement rate was discussed in fiction in the film "Children of Men"...
TLDR: if you don't have enough children you end up with not enough young people to look after the old people. So yes it does self-correct, but not in a way you would like.
If the city of London is to compete with NYC, Singapore etc at the top level of the financial sector it needed to end the cap on bankers' bonuses. Bonuses also ensure reward based on performance rather than banks having to set aside larger fixed costs for salary.
If you are strongly opposed to big bankers' bonuses and will vote accordingly you will be voting Labour anyway, as the poll figures show while most Labour and to a lesser extent LD voters oppose removing the cap on the bonuses most Conservative voters don't
I am very glad to see the government realise the importance of pay in retention of skilled personnel.
I am sure that a similar approach to the renewed talks with the BMA will be welcomed by the Tory faithful.
That is funded by higher taxes, not the private sector as bankers bonuses now are (except for private doctors salaries)
Same issue of staff retention...
Well we could also have a bigger private health sector like Australia with more private health insurance and higher doctors salaries
Basically, the problem is not having enough babies and everyone living longer - it makes both the tax base and services demands harder and harder to reconcile every year.
I'm not sure what the solution is other than people have to pay in more and expect less.
Maybe AI could be a massive gamechanger but that could go so many different ways.
essentially if there's more people living longer and fewer people working there's less money to spend on health. it's going to get worse for a lot of countries. for example the uk has a fertility rate of 1.56 babies per woman. this results in only 78 children or 60 grandchildren from every 100 people.
it's worse for China whose fertility rate is 1.16 which results in 58 children per 100 people and 33 grandchildren worst of all is South Korea whose fertility rate is 0.88 resulting in 44 children per 100 people and only 19 grandchildren.
long term that decline in working aged people has historically (in the UK) been made up of immigrants. (the UK's fertility rate was last above 2 in the 1970's)
Given that pressure on housing and pressure for both parents to work in order to pay for housing is one of the key factors in the lower numbers of kids people have, if we didn't keep filling in the gaps with immigration, wouldn't this be somewhat self correcting? At 1.56, pressure on housing (and lots of other infrastructure - e.g. schools) would collapse fairly quickly.
This would both free up resources (e.g. fewer builders and primary teachers needed) which would end up directed at care for the elderly, but also make having kids much cheaper (if housing cost 50% of what it does now, most families could live comfortably on one income, rather than requiring two) so people are more likely to start have families earlier, which should start to shift the replacement rate up?
I am unconvinced by this argument, while I don't doubt cost is an issue for some and that some might have more children due to it, many don't have kids because they really just don't want to.
While anecdotal, my son got married this year. He and his new wife have no plans for kids and actively don't want any. Nor do most of the couples they are friends with. Nothing to do with cost whatsoever. They have brought a house and they could live quite happily with one wage. The reasons they give for no kids is items such as they like their current lifestyle and they think having children is abusive given they have bought heavily into the world is doomed due to climate change.
The other major change is plenty of young people actively don't want a life partner, they are content living alone and hooking up with each other for bedroom activities as and when desired. They see no reason to indulge in the compromises that living jointly entails
Interesting the personal groups that people live in - the younger people know want to have children but are worried about accommodation and costs.
Several people I know from the older generation actively regret that they didn't have children.
It is true we all live in our own groups and my son and his friends all tend to have good jobs, stable lives housing wise, could afford to have kids. However they prefer to keep their nice cars, holidays and being able to eat out.
Maybe you have therefore two groups, one which has a relatively nice life with no worries particularly about money which prefers not to have kids to keep that lifestyle and a second group living paycheck to paycheck and don't have kids because it would push them underwater financially and so don't have kids.
On top of that I suspect a lot of them also from both groups have bought into the world is coming to an end for humans due to the shrill climate catastrophism being promulgated by the climate evangelists (for avoidance of doubt yes I believe climate change is happening, I merely don't think it will lead to human extinction)
The cynic of human nature might suggest that the combination of "It would muck up my lifestyle@ and "Its the virtuous thing to do"....
I can also remember some friends who, when they were about 34. were stating that they never wanted children etc. The wedding invites & baptism invites followed within a couple of years....
Perhaps the most hilarious example was one the local GPs - when the subject of future maternity leave came up, she was adamant that she had no plans and regarded the whole thing as an offensive question.
Two years later, she was married with two children (twins). Plus another on the way. She still hasn't come back to medicine...
I wanted to have children for as long as I can remember, luckily my wife felt the same and we have three beautiful children. I don't really get people who don't want kids, but my brother and his partner are in that camp, I think for them it's just never been something either of them has wanted. There may be lifestyle and global considerations in there somewhere, but I think it's less logical and attributable than that - it's more just a feeling they have just as my feeling is the opposite. IMHO children are the greatest joy and blessing one an have, in a world that can be lacking in both a lot of the time.
Given the scale of destruction in Gaza it seem that Hamas were everywhere . How does the IDF get the intelligence to target these buildings . Is it just those where rockets have been fired from . There must have been an awful lot of rockets given the amount of buildings destroyed or damaged !
And why is Israel hitting south Gaza when it specifically told civilians to evacuate there ?
If the city of London is to compete with NYC, Singapore etc at the top level of the financial sector it needed to end the cap on bankers' bonuses. Bonuses also ensure reward based on performance rather than banks having to set aside larger fixed costs for salary.
If you are strongly opposed to big bankers' bonuses and will vote accordingly you will be voting Labour anyway, as the poll figures show while most Labour and to a lesser extent LD voters oppose removing the cap on the bonuses most Conservative voters don't
I am very glad to see the government realise the importance of pay in retention of skilled personnel.
I am sure that a similar approach to the renewed talks with the BMA will be welcomed by the Tory faithful.
That is funded by higher taxes, not the private sector as bankers bonuses now are (except for private doctors salaries)
Same issue of staff retention...
Well we could also have a bigger private health sector like Australia with more private health insurance and higher doctors salaries
Basically, the problem is not having enough babies and everyone living longer - it makes both the tax base and services demands harder and harder to reconcile every year.
I'm not sure what the solution is other than people have to pay in more and expect less.
Maybe AI could be a massive gamechanger but that could go so many different ways.
essentially if there's more people living longer and fewer people working there's less money to spend on health. it's going to get worse for a lot of countries. for example the uk has a fertility rate of 1.56 babies per woman. this results in only 78 children or 60 grandchildren from every 100 people.
it's worse for China whose fertility rate is 1.16 which results in 58 children per 100 people and 33 grandchildren worst of all is South Korea whose fertility rate is 0.88 resulting in 44 children per 100 people and only 19 grandchildren.
long term that decline in working aged people has historically (in the UK) been made up of immigrants. (the UK's fertility rate was last above 2 in the 1970's)
Given that pressure on housing and pressure for both parents to work in order to pay for housing is one of the key factors in the lower numbers of kids people have, if we didn't keep filling in the gaps with immigration, wouldn't this be somewhat self correcting? At 1.56, pressure on housing (and lots of other infrastructure - e.g. schools) would collapse fairly quickly.
This would both free up resources (e.g. fewer builders and primary teachers needed) which would end up directed at care for the elderly, but also make having kids much cheaper (if housing cost 50% of what it does now, most families could live comfortably on one income, rather than requiring two) so people are more likely to start have families earlier, which should start to shift the replacement rate up?
But who does the work and pays the taxes in the meantime? Your plan requires at least 2 decades before you get any replacement workforce even if everyone reacts to the announcement by immediately holding a great big orgy.
Great question, and hard to answer beyond saying it will be painful.
My general point is that UK governments current operate (and have done for at least 50 years) what is a fundamentally a population Ponzi scheme. The only way they can see for sufficient workers/tax to go round is to keep increasing the population. But this will have to stop somewhere - the UK might be able to manage to sustain a population of say 100 million, but 150million? 200 million? At some point we will have to learn to live with a stable or declining population. It will be painful, but the longer we leave it, the worse the problem gets.
Currently we have a lot of "head-in-sandism" about this reality. The harsh truth is that at some point we will have a generation who are taxed out to the max (where pretty much there now), and at the same time the budget for health-care etc. will be stretched. There's not much we can do about this, other than picking the "when" part of the equation. And the politicians always want to can kick, so they do. But it doesn't solve the problem - it just saves it for later.
The al-Guard’ian is enraged that most British people can’t name any famous historical black Britons. This is an actual quote
“She [the angry author of a book about famous black Britons] would have expected people to name figures such as Quintus Lollius Urbicus, who became governor of Roman Britain; the formerly enslaved Olaudah Equiano, who became an abolitionist and writer”
Yes, I think I may have smudged the facts together. In the Bridgerton universe, Queen Charlotte is explicity black and the acknowledgement leads to greater acceptance in society: cue many gowns, fans and stately gavotting. In our universe she wasn't and the gavotting went ungavotted.
A new book by Rachel Reeves, shadow chancellor, has been found to contain examples of apparent plagiarism, including entire sentences and paragraphs lifted from other sources without acknowledgment.
The book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, included reproduced material from online blogs, Wikipedia, The Guardian and a report foreword by Labour MP Hilary Benn without acknowledging the sources.
"The new book from Rachel Reeves cuts and pastes from Wikipedia, The Guardian, a fellow MP and other unacknowledged sources in at least 20 examples of apparent plagiarism. Scoop from @SoumayaKeynes, @GeorgeWParker, @rafeuddin_, @EuanHealy, @stephistacey"
Embarrassing. Hard to see it changing a single vote.
Agree. Reeves has a great backstory, and a cracking CV and knows which way is up, economically.
I might disagree with the way she will choose to employ that knowledge but you can't fault her credentials.
Did she cut and paste from other sources for her book? Who knows but I can't believe anyone would care, really.
Well, it's more likely it was ghostwritten. Which isn't really a scandal. She should ask for her money back, though.
Should one no longer expect a senior politician to write their own book?
She isn’t a gormless reality TV star, she wants to be the next Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The city of London is one of our key industries and one of the few that is internationally competitive. The restriction on bonuses is a silly idea introduced by the EU at the insistence of those who don’t have such an industry. The really surprising thing is that the government has taken so little to abolish a measure that they always opposed.
Of course it won’t win any votes but if it enhances London as a place for financial services it will help improve our tax base.
We will get a little bit of extra tax each year sure. But lets not pretend it doesn't also increase our potential liabilities in a future bank bailout too.
One of the scenarios where the governance and the politics ought to be considered separately.
From a governance point of view, there's tax revenues that come from the City, the UK needs them and this move might unlock some more. (Whether it's in the UK's medium term interests to court the sort of financial behaviours that bonus culture rewards, I dunno. Suburban science master and all that. But they do seem a bit unreliable. Famine and feast and all that.)
From a politics point of view, it's an insane thing to do- see the polling in the header. And given that, as far as the electorate are concerned, Rishi is a rich banker (I know there are subspecies there, but most voters have more sense than to dive into those), he's exactly the wrong PM to be doing this.
Has 'rebalancing away from the City' gone into the 'too hard' basket?
Capping bankers' bonuses isn't going to make shoe factories reopen in Northampton.
It'll just boost remuneration in an already bloated and over-remunerated sector.
Do you mean that it will boost tax receipts to the Treasury from the top 1%?
Is that necessarily a good thing though?
Partly because of the increased decoupling of where tax comes from and who votes.
But mostly because it doesn't seem like a reliably stable source of tax. Wasn't the size of the City one of the reasons the 2008 crash hit UK finances so hard?
And we can be sure that there will be will be another crash.
Having recently attended a talk by Tom Holland on his new book, Pax, about, er, Pax or the Pax Romana I am quite well up on 2nd century AD folk in Britain.
Unaccountably while enumerating the various emperors and discussing Hadrian he completely neglected to tell us whether they were "white" or "black" thinking, preposterously, that "Caesar" would suffice.
Bloody good multitasking by Tom Holland, doing that and being a teenage superhero from Queens as well. Did he bring Zendaya?
Zendaya would have brought the average age of the audience down by some degree.
Although there were some earnest, informed question-asking what must have been students there so it was a fairly mixed bunch.
"The new book from Rachel Reeves cuts and pastes from Wikipedia, The Guardian, a fellow MP and other unacknowledged sources in at least 20 examples of apparent plagiarism. Scoop from @SoumayaKeynes, @GeorgeWParker, @rafeuddin_, @EuanHealy, @stephistacey"
Embarrassing. Hard to see it changing a single vote.
Agree. Reeves has a great backstory, and a cracking CV and knows which way is up, economically.
I might disagree with the way she will choose to employ that knowledge but you can't fault her credentials.
Did she cut and paste from other sources for her book? Who knows but I can't believe anyone would care, really.
Whats your call then ? Is she a reformer or a complicator ?
I think any Lab CotE is (pressurised to be) a complicator.
"The new book from Rachel Reeves cuts and pastes from Wikipedia, The Guardian, a fellow MP and other unacknowledged sources in at least 20 examples of apparent plagiarism. Scoop from @SoumayaKeynes, @GeorgeWParker, @rafeuddin_, @EuanHealy, @stephistacey"
Embarrassing. Hard to see it changing a single vote.
Agree. Reeves has a great backstory, and a cracking CV and knows which way is up, economically.
I might disagree with the way she will choose to employ that knowledge but you can't fault her credentials.
Did she cut and paste from other sources for her book? Who knows but I can't believe anyone would care, really.
Whats your call then ? Is she a reformer or a complicator ?
I think any Lab CotE is (pressurised to be) a complicator.
Given the scale of destruction in Gaza it seem that Hamas were everywhere . How does the IDF get the intelligence to target these buildings . Is it just those where rockets have been fired from . There must have been an awful lot of rockets given the amount of buildings destroyed or damaged !
And why is Israel hitting south Gaza when it specifically told civilians to evacuate there ?
Hamas targets were 1,300 Israelis, mostly civilians and including large numbers of women and children, brutally raped and murdered for the crime of being Jewish.
"The new book from Rachel Reeves cuts and pastes from Wikipedia, The Guardian, a fellow MP and other unacknowledged sources in at least 20 examples of apparent plagiarism. Scoop from @SoumayaKeynes, @GeorgeWParker, @rafeuddin_, @EuanHealy, @stephistacey"
Embarrassing. Hard to see it changing a single vote.
Agree. Reeves has a great backstory, and a cracking CV and knows which way is up, economically.
I might disagree with the way she will choose to employ that knowledge but you can't fault her credentials.
Did she cut and paste from other sources for her book? Who knows but I can't believe anyone would care, really.
Well, it's more likely it was ghostwritten. Which isn't really a scandal. She should ask for her money back, though.
What is idiotic, is that in the age of eBooks, complete with Google search functionality, doing plagiarism checks isn't part of the publishing process. To protect celebrity authors.
The comedy in Germany with a number of politician's academic work comes to mind.
Given the scale of destruction in Gaza it seem that Hamas were everywhere . How does the IDF get the intelligence to target these buildings . Is it just those where rockets have been fired from . There must have been an awful lot of rockets given the amount of buildings destroyed or damaged !
And why is Israel hitting south Gaza when it specifically told civilians to evacuate there ?
Hamas targets were 1,300 Israelis, mostly civilians and including large numbers of women and children, brutally raped and murdered for the crime of being Jewish.
I think you've taken the question and answered a different one.
Off topic. Have any of you come across Peter Zeiden, American geopolitical analyst? Presumably loads of you. More importantly is his analysis on the money? If it is
a) Trump is a shoo-in for the GOP nomination given the level of his core support and the way the GOP nominee election process works. Trump 1.29 to be nominee on the Exchange.
b) Given a) then Biden is a shoo-in for 2024 POTUS given the hostility towards Trump shown by Independents in the midterm elections which will be replicated in the POTUS election. Biden 3.0 to be POTUS on the Exchange.
North Carolina’s new GOP gerrymander could flip four House seats https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/25/north-carolina-congressional-map-gop-gerrymander-00123574 ...North Carolina’s new map, which was approved Wednesday by the state legislature, is particularly efficient at securing a GOP advantage in a state that’s closely divided for many statewide races — setting off a scramble among Republicans for the opportunity to run in the newly safe seats. The map packs as many Democratic voters as possible into three blue districts, while distributing Republicans across the remaining districts to make sure they remain largely out of reach for Democrats. The maps were drawn so Republicans would hold a strong majority of the state’s seats even in particularly bad years for the GOP.
The new map will remake the state’s delegation from an even split of seven Democrats and seven Republicans to one that would likely lock in 10 Republicans and three Democrats, with one competitive battleground seat that Democratic Rep. Don Davis currently holds...
Nothing to stop Democrats doing the same in their safe states and they often do
Give me a couple of examples then where 51% of the vote gives them 70% of the seats.
Also in which Democratic governed states can seats be redistricted by a bare majority in the state legislature without a power of veto for the governor ?
In the 1960s the Democrats even counted the dead for votes in Illinois around Chicago, the fact is both parties have done it for decades, there is no Federal electoral commission in the US like here that draws boundaries and checks voter rolls
So your answer is basically no, you can't give such examples, and resort to your usual tactic in such casesof answering a different question that you've asked yourself.
Out of the ten most gerrymandered states, only one is Democratic.
I think the simple truth is that Republicans aren't interested in democracy, they're interested in power. Once you go down that path it's hard to find a way back because your positions drift ever further from the median voter and you have to engage in ever more extreme distortions of the democratic process to win. Making non-competitive seats is especially dangerous as it makes politicians focus on primary voters not the electorate as a whole. The US is moving away from its democratic roots and heading somewhere dangerous.
I'm impressed that the caucus has finally found someone who The Master is prepared to accept as The Annointed One. Spoils my fun in actually having Trump do the Speaker job, but Trump is clearly happy with their choice.
Someone who is God-obsessed, openly believes the 2020 election was fraudulent and acted to overturn it, is a gay and women oppressing "Christian" climate change denying lunatic who wants to axe healthcare and social security.
All hail proto-Gilead. Blessed Day.
The slightly scary thing is that with all that many regard him as a moderate.
He isn't as extreme as the Gaetz wing of the party only in the way that he speaks. His ideas and policies are basically the same. And if America reelects Trump and hands power over to MAGA, that will be the end of even the pretence that it is a democracy.
George W Bush was widely ridiculed as a moron - despite those people who met and worked with him pointing out that much of his folksey thing was an act. And yet he was the very last sane Republican politician. Will there be another?
His two successors as Republican presidential candidates, John McCain and Mitt Romney , were both eminently sane and both loathed Trump. The MAGA takeover is a tragedy and Murdoch surely is as responsible for it as anyone through Fox News etc. The apparent destruction of old style American conservatism with its respect for the constitution and institutions is a disaster.
If only we had some control over our country and were able to put policies in place to change things. Colonies are always poorer and have worse outcomes.
"The new book from Rachel Reeves cuts and pastes from Wikipedia, The Guardian, a fellow MP and other unacknowledged sources in at least 20 examples of apparent plagiarism. Scoop from @SoumayaKeynes, @GeorgeWParker, @rafeuddin_, @EuanHealy, @stephistacey"
Embarrassing. Hard to see it changing a single vote.
Agree. Reeves has a great backstory, and a cracking CV and knows which way is up, economically.
I might disagree with the way she will choose to employ that knowledge but you can't fault her credentials.
Did she cut and paste from other sources for her book? Who knows but I can't believe anyone would care, really.
Well, it's more likely it was ghostwritten. Which isn't really a scandal. She should ask for her money back, though.
Should one no longer expect a senior politician to write their own book?
She isn’t a gormless reality TV star, she wants to be the next Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The al-Guard’ian is enraged that most British people can’t name any famous historical black Britons. This is an actual quote
“She [the angry author of a book about famous black Britons] would have expected people to name figures such as Quintus Lollius Urbicus, who became governor of Roman Britain; the formerly enslaved Olaudah Equiano, who became an abolitionist and writer”
Surely the conclusion to be drawn from that is quite different and blindingly obvious. Not that people are ignorant, but that there were so few significant black figures in Britain before the 19th century - which of course does say something about British society then, but doesn't tell us anything at all about British society now.
The author did cite two other figures, who I had heard of. But I doubt I should have heard of Mary Seacole if not for her involvement in the debate on precisely this subject. And the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor had barely started his career before the 20th century. Obviously a lot more black Britons achieved prominence in the 20th century.
I think this is bang on the money, however it runs counter to a developing narrative that there have been loads of black Britons forever, as exposed by modern TV drama, and a recent rash of rather desperate books. The narrative is utter revisionist nonsense of course. I have no beef with colourblind casting in drama (though it should go in all directions) but it’s ahistorical to show Victorian London, say, which large numbers of black characters if one is trying to portray reality.
Obviously it's difficult to estimate accurately what the black population was historically. I suspect that for London the answer is more than one might think but less than portrayed in Doctor Who. English Heritage quotes an estimate of 10,000 in London around 1800, which would be about 1% of the population. Though Wikipedia also quotes a contemporary estimate of as many as 20,000 in 1764, which would be more like 2.5%.
Which probably means a lot of Britons have a black ancestor without knowing it, especially those with roots in port cities like London or Liverpool. Referring back to the original article, there is a rather lovely statue of Equiano made by schoolchildren in our local park. I could have named him, Seacole and the young aristocratic woman, Belle, they made a film about - I can't remember her surname though, probably no other pre-20C black Britons.
Wikipedia reminded me of another 19th-century Black Briton who most people will have heard of but without knowing he was black or even a real person - the circus owner Pablo Fanque.
Jack Perkins first black captain in the Royal Navy - 1800
Given the scale of destruction in Gaza it seem that Hamas were everywhere . How does the IDF get the intelligence to target these buildings . Is it just those where rockets have been fired from . There must have been an awful lot of rockets given the amount of buildings destroyed or damaged !
And why is Israel hitting south Gaza when it specifically told civilians to evacuate there ?
Hamas targets were 1,300 Israelis, mostly civilians and including large numbers of women and children, brutally raped and murdered for the crime of being Jewish.
I think it’s a perfectly acceptable question to ask ?
To many the amount of destruction in Gaza seems a result of just lobbing in loads of missiles in an indiscriminate fashion .
I am sure this is what the Red Wall voted for in 2016 and 2019
They voted for control of Eastern European migration and extra spending on the NHS.
Both of which they've received.
They've also got the combination of full employment, pay rises and affordable housing for the first time since the Ogdens moved into Coronation Street.
If only we had some control over our country and were able to put policies in place to change things. Colonies are always poorer and have worse outcomes.
It's up to you, Malc. Independence isn't given, it's taken. Scotland had a real chance in 2014 and for various reasons muffed it. It still hasn't worked out how to achieve independence and you're hardly a fan of the present SNP administration. How should independence be achieved, how should the population of Scotland be convinced to support it, and who will do it? When you're worked that out get back to us. But blaming the English is just displacement activity.
Given the scale of destruction in Gaza it seem that Hamas were everywhere . How does the IDF get the intelligence to target these buildings . Is it just those where rockets have been fired from . There must have been an awful lot of rockets given the amount of buildings destroyed or damaged !
And why is Israel hitting south Gaza when it specifically told civilians to evacuate there ?
Considering that:
1) Hamas has a anthill of secret tunnels, often around or under civilian buildings.
2) The IDF had a major intelligence failure on Oct 7th.
I think it really quite unlikely that the IDF knows where Hamas assets are, or how to target them. Hence the indiscriminate bombing and siege, and delays to a ground invasion.
Off topic. Have any of you come across Peter Zeiden, American geopolitical analyst? Presumably loads of you. More importantly is his analysis on the money? If it is
a) Trump is a shoo-in for the GOP nomination given the level of his core support and the way the GOP nominee election process works. Trump 1.29 to be nominee on the Exchange.
b) Given a) then Biden is a shoo-in for 2024 POTUS given the hostility towards Trump shown by Independents in the midterm elections which will be replicated in the POTUS election. Biden 3.0 to be POTUS on the Exchange.
That is basically how I see things. The reason I'm not piling in is that neither Trump nor Biden is a young man and age-related health issues could strike their candidacies and my bets down.
I am sure this is what the Red Wall voted for in 2016 and 2019
They voted for control of Eastern European migration and extra spending on the NHS.
Both of which they've received.
The Government has arranged things so that legal net inward migration is between 500K and 1m per year. Sunak just cancelled a major rail upgrade to the North for fun and lied about it. I think they've got the message.
The al-Guard’ian is enraged that most British people can’t name any famous historical black Britons. This is an actual quote
“She [the angry author of a book about famous black Britons] would have expected people to name figures such as Quintus Lollius Urbicus, who became governor of Roman Britain; the formerly enslaved Olaudah Equiano, who became an abolitionist and writer”
Surely the conclusion to be drawn from that is quite different and blindingly obvious. Not that people are ignorant, but that there were so few significant black figures in Britain before the 19th century - which of course does say something about British society then, but doesn't tell us anything at all about British society now.
The author did cite two other figures, who I had heard of. But I doubt I should have heard of Mary Seacole if not for her involvement in the debate on precisely this subject. And the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor had barely started his career before the 20th century. Obviously a lot more black Britons achieved prominence in the 20th century.
I think this is bang on the money, however it runs counter to a developing narrative that there have been loads of black Britons forever, as exposed by modern TV drama, and a recent rash of rather desperate books. The narrative is utter revisionist nonsense of course. I have no beef with colourblind casting in drama (though it should go in all directions) but it’s ahistorical to show Victorian London, say, which large numbers of black characters if one is trying to portray reality.
Obviously it's difficult to estimate accurately what the black population was historically. I suspect that for London the answer is more than one might think but less than portrayed in Doctor Who. English Heritage quotes an estimate of 10,000 in London around 1800, which would be about 1% of the population. Though Wikipedia also quotes a contemporary estimate of as many as 20,000 in 1764, which would be more like 2.5%.
Which probably means a lot of Britons have a black ancestor without knowing it, especially those with roots in port cities like London or Liverpool. Referring back to the original article, there is a rather lovely statue of Equiano made by schoolchildren in our local park. I could have named him, Seacole and the young aristocratic woman, Belle, they made a film about - I can't remember her surname though, probably no other pre-20C black Britons.
Wikipedia reminded me of another 19th-century Black Briton who most people will have heard of but without knowing he was black or even a real person - the circus owner Pablo Fanque.
Jack Perkins first black captain in the Royal Navy - 1800
Auberon Waugh, when writing his column in Private Eye, delighted in describing Lord Gowrie as Britain's first black cabinet minister.
Apparently Gowrie, who had a swarthy complexion, and Waugh were love rivals in their youth.
(Bron's other obsession, as I recall, was bats which he accused of representing an existential threat to the country by bringing rabies over the Channel.)
I am sure this is what the Red Wall voted for in 2016 and 2019
They voted for control of Eastern European migration and extra spending on the NHS.
Both of which they've received.
The Government has arranged things so that legal net inward migration is between 500K and 1m per year. Sunak just cancelled a major rail upgrade to the North for fun and lied about it. I think they've got the message.
People in the Red Wall use roads not railways.
As to immigration its not all the same.
Immigrants from the third world moving to cities is different in its appearance and effect to Eastern Europeans moving to northern industrial towns.
The Red Wall has received what it voted for and if the Conservatives had any sense they would be saying so.
The combination of full employment and affordable housing that much of northern England currently has should be hailed as the ideal instead of the unaffordability, inequality and congestion of London and the Waitrose belt.
Having recently attended a talk by Tom Holland on his new book, Pax, about, er, Pax or the Pax Romana I am quite well up on 2nd century AD folk in Britain.
Unaccountably while enumerating the various emperors and discussing Hadrian he completely neglected to tell us whether they were "white" or "black" thinking, preposterously, that "Caesar" would suffice.
Bloody good multitasking by Tom Holland, doing that and being a teenage superhero from Queens as well. Did he bring Zendaya?
Zendaya would have brought the average age of the audience down by some degree.
Although there were some earnest, informed question-asking what must have been students there so it was a fairly mixed bunch.
Given the scale of destruction in Gaza it seem that Hamas were everywhere . How does the IDF get the intelligence to target these buildings . Is it just those where rockets have been fired from . There must have been an awful lot of rockets given the amount of buildings destroyed or damaged !
And why is Israel hitting south Gaza when it specifically told civilians to evacuate there ?
Considering that:
1) Hamas has a anthill of secret tunnels, often around or under civilian buildings.
2) The IDF had a major intelligence failure on Oct 7th.
I think it really quite unlikely that the IDF knows where Hamas assets are, or how to target them. Hence the indiscriminate bombing and siege, and delays to a ground invasion.
Israeli soldiers will just end up sitting targets if they go down those tunnels and hostage situation complicates things . Ordinarily if they found a tunnel they could just lob a few grenades into it . Now they’d effectively end up killing hostages if they do that .
It’s for this reason Hamas took the hostages . There really are no good choices here .
Given the scale of destruction in Gaza it seem that Hamas were everywhere . How does the IDF get the intelligence to target these buildings . Is it just those where rockets have been fired from . There must have been an awful lot of rockets given the amount of buildings destroyed or damaged !
And why is Israel hitting south Gaza when it specifically told civilians to evacuate there ?
Considering that:
1) Hamas has a anthill of secret tunnels, often around or under civilian buildings.
2) The IDF had a major intelligence failure on Oct 7th.
I think it really quite unlikely that the IDF knows where Hamas assets are, or how to target them. Hence the indiscriminate bombing and siege, and delays to a ground invasion.
Israeli soldiers will just end up sitting targets if they go down those tunnels and hostage situation complicates things . Ordinarily if they found a tunnel they could just lob a few grenades into it . Now they’d effectively end up killing hostages if they do that .
It’s for this reason Hamas took the hostages . There really are no good choices here .
Taking hostages and murderering civilians deliberately, in a targeted attack and in cold blood, was a choice that the Hamas terrorists made.
Off topic. Have any of you come across Peter Zeiden, American geopolitical analyst? Presumably loads of you. More importantly is his analysis on the money? If it is
a) Trump is a shoo-in for the GOP nomination given the level of his core support and the way the GOP nominee election process works. Trump 1.29 to be nominee on the Exchange.
b) Given a) then Biden is a shoo-in for 2024 POTUS given the hostility towards Trump shown by Independents in the midterm elections which will be replicated in the POTUS election. Biden 3.0 to be POTUS on the Exchange.
Big fan and I quote him often. I discussed his Presidential prediction earlier this year.
Given the scale of destruction in Gaza it seem that Hamas were everywhere . How does the IDF get the intelligence to target these buildings . Is it just those where rockets have been fired from . There must have been an awful lot of rockets given the amount of buildings destroyed or damaged !
And why is Israel hitting south Gaza when it specifically told civilians to evacuate there ?
Considering that:
1) Hamas has a anthill of secret tunnels, often around or under civilian buildings.
2) The IDF had a major intelligence failure on Oct 7th.
I think it really quite unlikely that the IDF knows where Hamas assets are, or how to target them. Hence the indiscriminate bombing and siege, and delays to a ground invasion.
Israeli soldiers will just end up sitting targets if they go down those tunnels and hostage situation complicates things . Ordinarily if they found a tunnel they could just lob a few grenades into it . Now they’d effectively end up killing hostages if they do that .
It’s for this reason Hamas took the hostages . There really are no good choices here .
Given the scale of destruction in Gaza it seem that Hamas were everywhere . How does the IDF get the intelligence to target these buildings . Is it just those where rockets have been fired from . There must have been an awful lot of rockets given the amount of buildings destroyed or damaged !
And why is Israel hitting south Gaza when it specifically told civilians to evacuate there ?
Considering that:
1) Hamas has a anthill of secret tunnels, often around or under civilian buildings.
2) The IDF had a major intelligence failure on Oct 7th.
I think it really quite unlikely that the IDF knows where Hamas assets are, or how to target them. Hence the indiscriminate bombing and siege, and delays to a ground invasion.
Israeli soldiers will just end up sitting targets if they go down those tunnels and hostage situation complicates things . Ordinarily if they found a tunnel they could just lob a few grenades into it . Now they’d effectively end up killing hostages if they do that .
It’s for this reason Hamas took the hostages . There really are no good choices here .
If the city of London is to compete with NYC, Singapore etc at the top level of the financial sector it needed to end the cap on bankers' bonuses. Bonuses also ensure reward based on performance rather than banks having to set aside larger fixed costs for salary.
If you are strongly opposed to big bankers' bonuses and will vote accordingly you will be voting Labour anyway, as the poll figures show while most Labour and to a lesser extent LD voters oppose removing the cap on the bonuses most Conservative voters don't
I am very glad to see the government realise the importance of pay in retention of skilled personnel.
I am sure that a similar approach to the renewed talks with the BMA will be welcomed by the Tory faithful.
That is funded by higher taxes, not the private sector as bankers bonuses now are (except for private doctors salaries)
Same issue of staff retention...
Well we could also have a bigger private health sector like Australia with more private health insurance and higher doctors salaries
Basically, the problem is not having enough babies and everyone living longer - it makes both the tax base and services demands harder and harder to reconcile every year.
I'm not sure what the solution is other than people have to pay in more and expect less.
Maybe AI could be a massive gamechanger but that could go so many different ways.
essentially if there's more people living longer and fewer people working there's less money to spend on health. it's going to get worse for a lot of countries. for example the uk has a fertility rate of 1.56 babies per woman. this results in only 78 children or 60 grandchildren from every 100 people.
it's worse for China whose fertility rate is 1.16 which results in 58 children per 100 people and 33 grandchildren worst of all is South Korea whose fertility rate is 0.88 resulting in 44 children per 100 people and only 19 grandchildren.
long term that decline in working aged people has historically (in the UK) been made up of immigrants. (the UK's fertility rate was last above 2 in the 1970's)
Given that pressure on housing and pressure for both parents to work in order to pay for housing is one of the key factors in the lower numbers of kids people have, if we didn't keep filling in the gaps with immigration, wouldn't this be somewhat self correcting? At 1.56, pressure on housing (and lots of other infrastructure - e.g. schools) would collapse fairly quickly.
This would both free up resources (e.g. fewer builders and primary teachers needed) which would end up directed at care for the elderly, but also make having kids much cheaper (if housing cost 50% of what it does now, most families could live comfortably on one income, rather than requiring two) so people are more likely to start have families earlier, which should start to shift the replacement rate up?
The other major change is plenty of young people actively don't want a life partner, they are content living alone and hooking up with each other for bedroom activities as and when desired. They see no reason to indulge in the compromises that living jointly entails
If that's true (and I'm not sure that's entirely true, at least based on my observations of friends, co-workers, etc), that's a lot of people setting themselves up for a remarkably miserable existence, particularly as they get older.
I got married last year. Leaving the bedroom sports out of it, I've found it's got so many other advantages which essentially come from pooling resources. I get home after a hard day in a physical job, and there is a decent healthy meal waiting for me. She has an evening feeling rough and the kitchen magically clears itself up and puts all the dirty stuff in the dishwasher. A car fails it's MOT, and because we've two cars, and two drivers, all the usual dramas around getting it dropped off at a garage and getting to work evaporate. She never has to worry about wood for the logburner, it just appears in the living room every night. Meanwhile there's always milk in the fridge without me having bought any for months.
And that's before considering the financials which mean that we are now paying for one house, one electric bill, one lot of heating etc. so we've massively better off than we used to be. It's also before considering what happens when we age - I don't know if I'll have to care for her, or she will be looking after me, or perhaps a bit of both, but more likely, than not, one of us will have to support the other through the hard times which come from age and infirmity.
If people want to all live insular lives on their own, they can, but they need to accept that with that comes tougher and poorer lives too. Particularly when they're old - no spouse, no children - do would really want to only have the state looking out for you then?
Having recently attended a talk by Tom Holland on his new book, Pax, about, er, Pax or the Pax Romana I am quite well up on 2nd century AD folk in Britain.
Unaccountably while enumerating the various emperors and discussing Hadrian he completely neglected to tell us whether they were "white" or "black" thinking, preposterously, that "Caesar" would suffice.
Bloody good multitasking by Tom Holland, doing that and being a teenage superhero from Queens as well. Did he bring Zendaya?
Zendaya would have brought the average age of the audience down by some degree.
Although there were some earnest, informed question-asking what must have been students there so it was a fairly mixed bunch.
North Carolina’s new GOP gerrymander could flip four House seats https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/25/north-carolina-congressional-map-gop-gerrymander-00123574 ...North Carolina’s new map, which was approved Wednesday by the state legislature, is particularly efficient at securing a GOP advantage in a state that’s closely divided for many statewide races — setting off a scramble among Republicans for the opportunity to run in the newly safe seats. The map packs as many Democratic voters as possible into three blue districts, while distributing Republicans across the remaining districts to make sure they remain largely out of reach for Democrats. The maps were drawn so Republicans would hold a strong majority of the state’s seats even in particularly bad years for the GOP.
The new map will remake the state’s delegation from an even split of seven Democrats and seven Republicans to one that would likely lock in 10 Republicans and three Democrats, with one competitive battleground seat that Democratic Rep. Don Davis currently holds...
Nothing to stop Democrats doing the same in their safe states and they often do
Give me a couple of examples then where 51% of the vote gives them 70% of the seats.
Also in which Democratic governed states can seats be redistricted by a bare majority in the state legislature without a power of veto for the governor ?
In the 1960s the Democrats even counted the dead for votes in Illinois around Chicago, the fact is both parties have done it for decades, there is no Federal electoral commission in the US like here that draws boundaries and checks voter rolls
So your answer is basically no, you can't give such examples, and resort to your usual tactic in such casesof answering a different question that you've asked yourself.
Out of the ten most gerrymandered states, only one is Democratic.
I think the simple truth is that Republicans aren't interested in democracy, they're interested in power. Once you go down that path it's hard to find a way back because your positions drift ever further from the median voter and you have to engage in ever more extreme distortions of the democratic process to win. Making non-competitive seats is especially dangerous as it makes politicians focus on primary voters not the electorate as a whole. The US is moving away from its democratic roots and heading somewhere dangerous.
I'm impressed that the caucus has finally found someone who The Master is prepared to accept as The Annointed One. Spoils my fun in actually having Trump do the Speaker job, but Trump is clearly happy with their choice.
Someone who is God-obsessed, openly believes the 2020 election was fraudulent and acted to overturn it, is a gay and women oppressing "Christian" climate change denying lunatic who wants to axe healthcare and social security.
All hail proto-Gilead. Blessed Day.
The slightly scary thing is that with all that many regard him as a moderate.
He isn't as extreme as the Gaetz wing of the party only in the way that he speaks. His ideas and policies are basically the same. And if America reelects Trump and hands power over to MAGA, that will be the end of even the pretence that it is a democracy.
George W Bush was widely ridiculed as a moron - despite those people who met and worked with him pointing out that much of his folksey thing was an act. And yet he was the very last sane Republican politician. Will there be another?
His two successors as Republican presidential candidates, John McCain and Mitt Romney , were both eminently sane and both loathed Trump. The MAGA takeover is a tragedy and Murdoch surely is as responsible for it as anyone through Fox News etc. The apparent destruction of old style American conservatism with its respect for the constitution and institutions is a disaster.
I largely agree with you, but wouldn't really describe John McCain as "eminently sane". His reputation as a "maverick" was partly due to his being very inconsistent in his views on issues, and very hot-tempered. Not saying he was a bad man at all, but he wasn't an especially steady one.
Having recently attended a talk by Tom Holland on his new book, Pax, about, er, Pax or the Pax Romana I am quite well up on 2nd century AD folk in Britain.
Unaccountably while enumerating the various emperors and discussing Hadrian he completely neglected to tell us whether they were "white" or "black" thinking, preposterously, that "Caesar" would suffice.
Bloody good multitasking by Tom Holland, doing that and being a teenage superhero from Queens as well. Did he bring Zendaya?
Zendaya would have brought the average age of the audience down by some degree.
Although there were some earnest, informed question-asking what must have been students there so it was a fairly mixed bunch.
The city of London is one of our key industries and one of the few that is internationally competitive. The restriction on bonuses is a silly idea introduced by the EU at the insistence of those who don’t have such an industry. The really surprising thing is that the government has taken so little to abolish a measure that they always opposed.
Of course it won’t win any votes but if it enhances London as a place for financial services it will help improve our tax base.
We will get a little bit of extra tax each year sure. But lets not pretend it doesn't also increase our potential liabilities in a future bank bailout too.
One of the scenarios where the governance and the politics ought to be considered separately.
From a governance point of view, there's tax revenues that come from the City, the UK needs them and this move might unlock some more. (Whether it's in the UK's medium term interests to court the sort of financial behaviours that bonus culture rewards, I dunno. Suburban science master and all that. But they do seem a bit unreliable. Famine and feast and all that.)
From a politics point of view, it's an insane thing to do- see the polling in the header. And given that, as far as the electorate are concerned, Rishi is a rich banker (I know there are subspecies there, but most voters have more sense than to dive into those), he's exactly the wrong PM to be doing this.
Has 'rebalancing away from the City' gone into the 'too hard' basket?
Capping bankers' bonuses isn't going to make shoe factories reopen in Northampton.
It'll just boost remuneration in an already bloated and over-remunerated sector.
No it won't.
It will too! But enough, I'm not a panto fan.
Pay in City jobs is an interesting topic. There's no question it's absurdly high by any rational measure. A mid-ranking front office employee will typically be paid similar to the FD of a sizeable company or a partner in a prof services firm. Yet the intellectual and emotional demands, and the responsibility, are far less. It's like factory work in many ways, just with a phone and a keyboard. You have to be brighter than average, numerate, literate, judicious, handle a bit of pressure, not insist on 9 to 5 with regular tea breaks. That's about it.
You'd have thought the market would produce a more appropriate (lower) pay level since the supply of bright (enough) young people to enter and be trained up to do the sort of work you do there, and who'd also want to to do it, is far greater than the 'slots' available. Yet this doesn't happen. It's odd.
I think it's to do with how the City overall earns its corn. It's essentially a skimming machine. Gigantic sums flow through it 24/7/52 and what the sector does is skim off just a small slice, small as a percentage, that is, but it amounts to an awful lot of money relative to the number of people required to generate it (since the IT infrastructure and the balance sheet capital are actually doing most of the heavy lifting). The place being awash with moolah like this, so used to it, its smell, its taste, money itself being the product as it were, this means you don't get the usual disciplines on the remuneration of the people in it.
I am sure this is what the Red Wall voted for in 2016 and 2019
They voted for control of Eastern European migration and extra spending on the NHS.
Both of which they've received.
The Government has arranged things so that legal net inward migration is between 500K and 1m per year. Sunak just cancelled a major rail upgrade to the North for fun and lied about it. I think they've got the message.
People in the Red Wall use roads not railways.
As to immigration its not all the same.
Immigrants from the third world moving to cities is different in its appearance and effect to Eastern Europeans moving to northern industrial towns.
The Red Wall has received what it voted for and if the Conservatives had any sense they would be saying so.
The combination of full employment and affordable housing that much of northern England currently has should be hailed as the ideal instead of the unaffordability, inequality and congestion of London and the Waitrose belt.
May I remind you of yesterday's "Red Wall" polling?
Not a walkover for Sunak...
Labour 48% (+3) Conservative 32% (+1) Liberal Democrat 7% (+1) Reform UK 6% (-4) Green 4% (-2) Plaid Cymru 1% (–) Other 2% (+1)
(Note the REFUK to Lab swing)
And on the issues:
I therefore submit that your analysis of the Red Wall is not grounded in polling reality. Armageddon for the Tories gets closer each day.
If the city of London is to compete with NYC, Singapore etc at the top level of the financial sector it needed to end the cap on bankers' bonuses. Bonuses also ensure reward based on performance rather than banks having to set aside larger fixed costs for salary.
If you are strongly opposed to big bankers' bonuses and will vote accordingly you will be voting Labour anyway, as the poll figures show while most Labour and to a lesser extent LD voters oppose removing the cap on the bonuses most Conservative voters don't
I am very glad to see the government realise the importance of pay in retention of skilled personnel.
I am sure that a similar approach to the renewed talks with the BMA will be welcomed by the Tory faithful.
That is funded by higher taxes, not the private sector as bankers bonuses now are (except for private doctors salaries)
Same issue of staff retention...
Well we could also have a bigger private health sector like Australia with more private health insurance and higher doctors salaries
Basically, the problem is not having enough babies and everyone living longer - it makes both the tax base and services demands harder and harder to reconcile every year.
I'm not sure what the solution is other than people have to pay in more and expect less.
Maybe AI could be a massive gamechanger but that could go so many different ways.
essentially if there's more people living longer and fewer people working there's less money to spend on health. it's going to get worse for a lot of countries. for example the uk has a fertility rate of 1.56 babies per woman. this results in only 78 children or 60 grandchildren from every 100 people.
it's worse for China whose fertility rate is 1.16 which results in 58 children per 100 people and 33 grandchildren worst of all is South Korea whose fertility rate is 0.88 resulting in 44 children per 100 people and only 19 grandchildren.
long term that decline in working aged people has historically (in the UK) been made up of immigrants. (the UK's fertility rate was last above 2 in the 1970's)
Given that pressure on housing and pressure for both parents to work in order to pay for housing is one of the key factors in the lower numbers of kids people have, if we didn't keep filling in the gaps with immigration, wouldn't this be somewhat self correcting? At 1.56, pressure on housing (and lots of other infrastructure - e.g. schools) would collapse fairly quickly.
This would both free up resources (e.g. fewer builders and primary teachers needed) which would end up directed at care for the elderly, but also make having kids much cheaper (if housing cost 50% of what it does now, most families could live comfortably on one income, rather than requiring two) so people are more likely to start have families earlier, which should start to shift the replacement rate up?
The other major change is plenty of young people actively don't want a life partner, they are content living alone and hooking up with each other for bedroom activities as and when desired. They see no reason to indulge in the compromises that living jointly entails
If that's true (and I'm not sure that's entirely true, at least based on my observations of friends, co-workers, etc), that's a lot of people setting themselves up for a remarkably miserable existence, particularly as they get older.
I got married last year. Leaving the bedroom sports out of it, I've found it's got so many other advantages which essentially come from pooling resources. I get home after a hard day in a physical job, and there is a decent healthy meal waiting for me. She has an evening feeling rough and the kitchen magically clears itself up and puts all the dirty stuff in the dishwasher. A car fails it's MOT, and because we've two cars, and two drivers, all the usual dramas around getting it dropped off at a garage and getting to work evaporate. She never has to worry about wood for the logburner, it just appears in the living room every night. Meanwhile there's always milk in the fridge without me having bought any for months.
And that's before considering the financials which mean that we are now paying for one house, one electric bill, one lot of heating etc. so we've massively better off than we used to be. It's also before considering what happens when we age - I don't know if I'll have to care for her, or she will be looking after me, or perhaps a bit of both, but more likely, than not, one of us will have to support the other through the hard times which come from age and infirmity.
If people want to all live insular lives on their own, they can, but they need to accept that with that comes tougher and poorer lives too. Particularly when they're old - no spouse, no children - do would really want to only have the state looking out for you then?
If the city of London is to compete with NYC, Singapore etc at the top level of the financial sector it needed to end the cap on bankers' bonuses. Bonuses also ensure reward based on performance rather than banks having to set aside larger fixed costs for salary.
If you are strongly opposed to big bankers' bonuses and will vote accordingly you will be voting Labour anyway, as the poll figures show while most Labour and to a lesser extent LD voters oppose removing the cap on the bonuses most Conservative voters don't
I am very glad to see the government realise the importance of pay in retention of skilled personnel.
I am sure that a similar approach to the renewed talks with the BMA will be welcomed by the Tory faithful.
That is funded by higher taxes, not the private sector as bankers bonuses now are (except for private doctors salaries)
Same issue of staff retention...
Well we could also have a bigger private health sector like Australia with more private health insurance and higher doctors salaries
Basically, the problem is not having enough babies and everyone living longer - it makes both the tax base and services demands harder and harder to reconcile every year.
I'm not sure what the solution is other than people have to pay in more and expect less.
Maybe AI could be a massive gamechanger but that could go so many different ways.
essentially if there's more people living longer and fewer people working there's less money to spend on health. it's going to get worse for a lot of countries. for example the uk has a fertility rate of 1.56 babies per woman. this results in only 78 children or 60 grandchildren from every 100 people.
it's worse for China whose fertility rate is 1.16 which results in 58 children per 100 people and 33 grandchildren worst of all is South Korea whose fertility rate is 0.88 resulting in 44 children per 100 people and only 19 grandchildren.
long term that decline in working aged people has historically (in the UK) been made up of immigrants. (the UK's fertility rate was last above 2 in the 1970's)
Given that pressure on housing and pressure for both parents to work in order to pay for housing is one of the key factors in the lower numbers of kids people have, if we didn't keep filling in the gaps with immigration, wouldn't this be somewhat self correcting? At 1.56, pressure on housing (and lots of other infrastructure - e.g. schools) would collapse fairly quickly.
This would both free up resources (e.g. fewer builders and primary teachers needed) which would end up directed at care for the elderly, but also make having kids much cheaper (if housing cost 50% of what it does now, most families could live comfortably on one income, rather than requiring two) so people are more likely to start have families earlier, which should start to shift the replacement rate up?
The other major change is plenty of young people actively don't want a life partner, they are content living alone and hooking up with each other for bedroom activities as and when desired. They see no reason to indulge in the compromises that living jointly entails
If that's true (and I'm not sure that's entirely true, at least based on my observations of friends, co-workers, etc), that's a lot of people setting themselves up for a remarkably miserable existence, particularly as they get older.
I got married last year. Leaving the bedroom sports out of it, I've found it's got so many other advantages which essentially come from pooling resources. I get home after a hard day in a physical job, and there is a decent healthy meal waiting for me. She has an evening feeling rough and the kitchen magically clears itself up and puts all the dirty stuff in the dishwasher. A car fails it's MOT, and because we've two cars, and two drivers, all the usual dramas around getting it dropped off at a garage and getting to work evaporate. She never has to worry about wood for the logburner, it just appears in the living room every night. Meanwhile there's always milk in the fridge without me having bought any for months.
And that's before considering the financials which mean that we are now paying for one house, one electric bill, one lot of heating etc. so we've massively better off than we used to be. It's also before considering what happens when we age - I don't know if I'll have to care for her, or she will be looking after me, or perhaps a bit of both, but more likely, than not, one of us will have to support the other through the hard times which come from age and infirmity.
If people want to all live insular lives on their own, they can, but they need to accept that with that comes tougher and poorer lives too. Particularly when they're old - no spouse, no children - do would really want to only have the state looking out for you then?
History is popular, but the number of people who have more than a very superficial knowledge of even our own history can be no more than a few million. The number who are really knowledgeable about any given period must number in the tens of thousands.
The number who would be knowledgeable about the history of Black Britons, pre 20th century would be vanishingly small, because its quite an esoteric subject.
A humid afternoon in the silent, sleep Jewish quarter of Ortygia. This place is a hypnotising maze of troubled memories. It’s like W G Sebald designed his own urban peninsula
For anyone complaining about weather, the first storm of the year just arrived in the sandpit. Wind and rain and sandstorms.
Dont drive theres no drainage there
The story is that after the first storm of the year, they work out which drains need the sand to be cleared out of them.
How’s about clearing all the drains of sand before the winter starts! The bigger problem is the people who forget how to drive in the rain. I’m happily home now, holding a glass of wine and laughing at the view out of the window, very un-happily watching the cricket.
If the city of London is to compete with NYC, Singapore etc at the top level of the financial sector it needed to end the cap on bankers' bonuses. Bonuses also ensure reward based on performance rather than banks having to set aside larger fixed costs for salary.
If you are strongly opposed to big bankers' bonuses and will vote accordingly you will be voting Labour anyway, as the poll figures show while most Labour and to a lesser extent LD voters oppose removing the cap on the bonuses most Conservative voters don't
I am very glad to see the government realise the importance of pay in retention of skilled personnel.
I am sure that a similar approach to the renewed talks with the BMA will be welcomed by the Tory faithful.
That is funded by higher taxes, not the private sector as bankers bonuses now are (except for private doctors salaries)
Same issue of staff retention...
Well we could also have a bigger private health sector like Australia with more private health insurance and higher doctors salaries
Basically, the problem is not having enough babies and everyone living longer - it makes both the tax base and services demands harder and harder to reconcile every year.
I'm not sure what the solution is other than people have to pay in more and expect less.
Maybe AI could be a massive gamechanger but that could go so many different ways.
essentially if there's more people living longer and fewer people working there's less money to spend on health. it's going to get worse for a lot of countries. for example the uk has a fertility rate of 1.56 babies per woman. this results in only 78 children or 60 grandchildren from every 100 people.
it's worse for China whose fertility rate is 1.16 which results in 58 children per 100 people and 33 grandchildren worst of all is South Korea whose fertility rate is 0.88 resulting in 44 children per 100 people and only 19 grandchildren.
long term that decline in working aged people has historically (in the UK) been made up of immigrants. (the UK's fertility rate was last above 2 in the 1970's)
Given that pressure on housing and pressure for both parents to work in order to pay for housing is one of the key factors in the lower numbers of kids people have, if we didn't keep filling in the gaps with immigration, wouldn't this be somewhat self correcting? At 1.56, pressure on housing (and lots of other infrastructure - e.g. schools) would collapse fairly quickly.
This would both free up resources (e.g. fewer builders and primary teachers needed) which would end up directed at care for the elderly, but also make having kids much cheaper (if housing cost 50% of what it does now, most families could live comfortably on one income, rather than requiring two) so people are more likely to start have families earlier, which should start to shift the replacement rate up?
But who does the work and pays the taxes in the meantime? Your plan requires at least 2 decades before you get any replacement workforce even if everyone reacts to the announcement by immediately holding a great big orgy.
Great question, and hard to answer beyond saying it will be painful.
My general point is that UK governments current operate (and have done for at least 50 years) what is a fundamentally a population Ponzi scheme. The only way they can see for sufficient workers/tax to go round is to keep increasing the population. But this will have to stop somewhere - the UK might be able to manage to sustain a population of say 100 million, but 150million? 200 million? At some point we will have to learn to live with a stable or declining population. It will be painful, but the longer we leave it, the worse the problem gets.
Currently we have a lot of "head-in-sandism" about this reality. The harsh truth is that at some point we will have a generation who are taxed out to the max (where pretty much there now), and at the same time the budget for health-care etc. will be stretched. There's not much we can do about this, other than picking the "when" part of the equation. And the politicians always want to can kick, so they do. But it doesn't solve the problem - it just saves it for later.
Short-termism seems to be an inherent flaw in democracy. I can’t think of a better system however.
If the city of London is to compete with NYC, Singapore etc at the top level of the financial sector it needed to end the cap on bankers' bonuses. Bonuses also ensure reward based on performance rather than banks having to set aside larger fixed costs for salary.
If you are strongly opposed to big bankers' bonuses and will vote accordingly you will be voting Labour anyway, as the poll figures show while most Labour and to a lesser extent LD voters oppose removing the cap on the bonuses most Conservative voters don't
I am very glad to see the government realise the importance of pay in retention of skilled personnel.
I am sure that a similar approach to the renewed talks with the BMA will be welcomed by the Tory faithful.
That is funded by higher taxes, not the private sector as bankers bonuses now are (except for private doctors salaries)
Same issue of staff retention...
Well we could also have a bigger private health sector like Australia with more private health insurance and higher doctors salaries
Basically, the problem is not having enough babies and everyone living longer - it makes both the tax base and services demands harder and harder to reconcile every year.
I'm not sure what the solution is other than people have to pay in more and expect less.
Maybe AI could be a massive gamechanger but that could go so many different ways.
essentially if there's more people living longer and fewer people working there's less money to spend on health. it's going to get worse for a lot of countries. for example the uk has a fertility rate of 1.56 babies per woman. this results in only 78 children or 60 grandchildren from every 100 people.
it's worse for China whose fertility rate is 1.16 which results in 58 children per 100 people and 33 grandchildren worst of all is South Korea whose fertility rate is 0.88 resulting in 44 children per 100 people and only 19 grandchildren.
long term that decline in working aged people has historically (in the UK) been made up of immigrants. (the UK's fertility rate was last above 2 in the 1970's)
Given that pressure on housing and pressure for both parents to work in order to pay for housing is one of the key factors in the lower numbers of kids people have, if we didn't keep filling in the gaps with immigration, wouldn't this be somewhat self correcting? At 1.56, pressure on housing (and lots of other infrastructure - e.g. schools) would collapse fairly quickly.
This would both free up resources (e.g. fewer builders and primary teachers needed) which would end up directed at care for the elderly, but also make having kids much cheaper (if housing cost 50% of what it does now, most families could live comfortably on one income, rather than requiring two) so people are more likely to start have families earlier, which should start to shift the replacement rate up?
But who does the work and pays the taxes in the meantime? Your plan requires at least 2 decades before you get any replacement workforce even if everyone reacts to the announcement by immediately holding a great big orgy.
Great question, and hard to answer beyond saying it will be painful.
My general point is that UK governments current operate (and have done for at least 50 years) what is a fundamentally a population Ponzi scheme. The only way they can see for sufficient workers/tax to go round is to keep increasing the population. But this will have to stop somewhere - the UK might be able to manage to sustain a population of say 100 million, but 150million? 200 million? At some point we will have to learn to live with a stable or declining population. It will be painful, but the longer we leave it, the worse the problem gets.
Currently we have a lot of "head-in-sandism" about this reality. The harsh truth is that at some point we will have a generation who are taxed out to the max (where pretty much there now), and at the same time the budget for health-care etc. will be stretched. There's not much we can do about this, other than picking the "when" part of the equation. And the politicians always want to can kick, so they do. But it doesn't solve the problem - it just saves it for later.
Short-termism seems to be an inherent flaw in democracy. I can’t think of a better system however.
A directly elected dictator with terms of 14 years.
If the city of London is to compete with NYC, Singapore etc at the top level of the financial sector it needed to end the cap on bankers' bonuses. Bonuses also ensure reward based on performance rather than banks having to set aside larger fixed costs for salary.
If you are strongly opposed to big bankers' bonuses and will vote accordingly you will be voting Labour anyway, as the poll figures show while most Labour and to a lesser extent LD voters oppose removing the cap on the bonuses most Conservative voters don't
I am very glad to see the government realise the importance of pay in retention of skilled personnel.
I am sure that a similar approach to the renewed talks with the BMA will be welcomed by the Tory faithful.
That is funded by higher taxes, not the private sector as bankers bonuses now are (except for private doctors salaries)
Same issue of staff retention...
Well we could also have a bigger private health sector like Australia with more private health insurance and higher doctors salaries
Basically, the problem is not having enough babies and everyone living longer - it makes both the tax base and services demands harder and harder to reconcile every year.
I'm not sure what the solution is other than people have to pay in more and expect less.
Maybe AI could be a massive gamechanger but that could go so many different ways.
essentially if there's more people living longer and fewer people working there's less money to spend on health. it's going to get worse for a lot of countries. for example the uk has a fertility rate of 1.56 babies per woman. this results in only 78 children or 60 grandchildren from every 100 people.
it's worse for China whose fertility rate is 1.16 which results in 58 children per 100 people and 33 grandchildren worst of all is South Korea whose fertility rate is 0.88 resulting in 44 children per 100 people and only 19 grandchildren.
long term that decline in working aged people has historically (in the UK) been made up of immigrants. (the UK's fertility rate was last above 2 in the 1970's)
Given that pressure on housing and pressure for both parents to work in order to pay for housing is one of the key factors in the lower numbers of kids people have, if we didn't keep filling in the gaps with immigration, wouldn't this be somewhat self correcting? At 1.56, pressure on housing (and lots of other infrastructure - e.g. schools) would collapse fairly quickly.
This would both free up resources (e.g. fewer builders and primary teachers needed) which would end up directed at care for the elderly, but also make having kids much cheaper (if housing cost 50% of what it does now, most families could live comfortably on one income, rather than requiring two) so people are more likely to start have families earlier, which should start to shift the replacement rate up?
But who does the work and pays the taxes in the meantime? Your plan requires at least 2 decades before you get any replacement workforce even if everyone reacts to the announcement by immediately holding a great big orgy.
Great question, and hard to answer beyond saying it will be painful.
My general point is that UK governments current operate (and have done for at least 50 years) what is a fundamentally a population Ponzi scheme. The only way they can see for sufficient workers/tax to go round is to keep increasing the population. But this will have to stop somewhere - the UK might be able to manage to sustain a population of say 100 million, but 150million? 200 million? At some point we will have to learn to live with a stable or declining population. It will be painful, but the longer we leave it, the worse the problem gets.
Currently we have a lot of "head-in-sandism" about this reality. The harsh truth is that at some point we will have a generation who are taxed out to the max (where pretty much there now), and at the same time the budget for health-care etc. will be stretched. There's not much we can do about this, other than picking the "when" part of the equation. And the politicians always want to can kick, so they do. But it doesn't solve the problem - it just saves it for later.
Any attempt to limit the population is, of course, WAAAAAACIST.
If you shout that loud enough, the issue you mention can't happen.
If the city of London is to compete with NYC, Singapore etc at the top level of the financial sector it needed to end the cap on bankers' bonuses. Bonuses also ensure reward based on performance rather than banks having to set aside larger fixed costs for salary.
If you are strongly opposed to big bankers' bonuses and will vote accordingly you will be voting Labour anyway, as the poll figures show while most Labour and to a lesser extent LD voters oppose removing the cap on the bonuses most Conservative voters don't
I am very glad to see the government realise the importance of pay in retention of skilled personnel.
I am sure that a similar approach to the renewed talks with the BMA will be welcomed by the Tory faithful.
That is funded by higher taxes, not the private sector as bankers bonuses now are (except for private doctors salaries)
Same issue of staff retention...
Well we could also have a bigger private health sector like Australia with more private health insurance and higher doctors salaries
Basically, the problem is not having enough babies and everyone living longer - it makes both the tax base and services demands harder and harder to reconcile every year.
I'm not sure what the solution is other than people have to pay in more and expect less.
Maybe AI could be a massive gamechanger but that could go so many different ways.
essentially if there's more people living longer and fewer people working there's less money to spend on health. it's going to get worse for a lot of countries. for example the uk has a fertility rate of 1.56 babies per woman. this results in only 78 children or 60 grandchildren from every 100 people.
it's worse for China whose fertility rate is 1.16 which results in 58 children per 100 people and 33 grandchildren worst of all is South Korea whose fertility rate is 0.88 resulting in 44 children per 100 people and only 19 grandchildren.
long term that decline in working aged people has historically (in the UK) been made up of immigrants. (the UK's fertility rate was last above 2 in the 1970's)
Given that pressure on housing and pressure for both parents to work in order to pay for housing is one of the key factors in the lower numbers of kids people have, if we didn't keep filling in the gaps with immigration, wouldn't this be somewhat self correcting? At 1.56, pressure on housing (and lots of other infrastructure - e.g. schools) would collapse fairly quickly.
This would both free up resources (e.g. fewer builders and primary teachers needed) which would end up directed at care for the elderly, but also make having kids much cheaper (if housing cost 50% of what it does now, most families could live comfortably on one income, rather than requiring two) so people are more likely to start have families earlier, which should start to shift the replacement rate up?
The other major change is plenty of young people actively don't want a life partner, they are content living alone and hooking up with each other for bedroom activities as and when desired. They see no reason to indulge in the compromises that living jointly entails
If that's true (and I'm not sure that's entirely true, at least based on my observations of friends, co-workers, etc), that's a lot of people setting themselves up for a remarkably miserable existence, particularly as they get older.
I got married last year. Leaving the bedroom sports out of it, I've found it's got so many other advantages which essentially come from pooling resources. I get home after a hard day in a physical job, and there is a decent healthy meal waiting for me. She has an evening feeling rough and the kitchen magically clears itself up and puts all the dirty stuff in the dishwasher. A car fails it's MOT, and because we've two cars, and two drivers, all the usual dramas around getting it dropped off at a garage and getting to work evaporate. She never has to worry about wood for the logburner, it just appears in the living room every night. Meanwhile there's always milk in the fridge without me having bought any for months.
And that's before considering the financials which mean that we are now paying for one house, one electric bill, one lot of heating etc. so we've massively better off than we used to be. It's also before considering what happens when we age - I don't know if I'll have to care for her, or she will be looking after me, or perhaps a bit of both, but more likely, than not, one of us will have to support the other through the hard times which come from age and infirmity.
If people want to all live insular lives on their own, they can, but they need to accept that with that comes tougher and poorer lives too. Particularly when they're old - no spouse, no children - do would really want to only have the state looking out for you then?
Several friends who didn't get married, lived the perpetual holiday life style etc, are now talking about forming a group living thing for old age - no kids to come and see them, so someone to make sure that the cats don't eat the corpse. It sounds a bit grim, to be honest.
If the city of London is to compete with NYC, Singapore etc at the top level of the financial sector it needed to end the cap on bankers' bonuses. Bonuses also ensure reward based on performance rather than banks having to set aside larger fixed costs for salary.
If you are strongly opposed to big bankers' bonuses and will vote accordingly you will be voting Labour anyway, as the poll figures show while most Labour and to a lesser extent LD voters oppose removing the cap on the bonuses most Conservative voters don't
I am very glad to see the government realise the importance of pay in retention of skilled personnel.
I am sure that a similar approach to the renewed talks with the BMA will be welcomed by the Tory faithful.
That is funded by higher taxes, not the private sector as bankers bonuses now are (except for private doctors salaries)
Same issue of staff retention...
Well we could also have a bigger private health sector like Australia with more private health insurance and higher doctors salaries
Basically, the problem is not having enough babies and everyone living longer - it makes both the tax base and services demands harder and harder to reconcile every year.
I'm not sure what the solution is other than people have to pay in more and expect less.
Maybe AI could be a massive gamechanger but that could go so many different ways.
essentially if there's more people living longer and fewer people working there's less money to spend on health. it's going to get worse for a lot of countries. for example the uk has a fertility rate of 1.56 babies per woman. this results in only 78 children or 60 grandchildren from every 100 people.
it's worse for China whose fertility rate is 1.16 which results in 58 children per 100 people and 33 grandchildren worst of all is South Korea whose fertility rate is 0.88 resulting in 44 children per 100 people and only 19 grandchildren.
long term that decline in working aged people has historically (in the UK) been made up of immigrants. (the UK's fertility rate was last above 2 in the 1970's)
Given that pressure on housing and pressure for both parents to work in order to pay for housing is one of the key factors in the lower numbers of kids people have, if we didn't keep filling in the gaps with immigration, wouldn't this be somewhat self correcting? At 1.56, pressure on housing (and lots of other infrastructure - e.g. schools) would collapse fairly quickly.
This would both free up resources (e.g. fewer builders and primary teachers needed) which would end up directed at care for the elderly, but also make having kids much cheaper (if housing cost 50% of what it does now, most families could live comfortably on one income, rather than requiring two) so people are more likely to start have families earlier, which should start to shift the replacement rate up?
The other major change is plenty of young people actively don't want a life partner, they are content living alone and hooking up with each other for bedroom activities as and when desired. They see no reason to indulge in the compromises that living jointly entails
If that's true (and I'm not sure that's entirely true, at least based on my observations of friends, co-workers, etc), that's a lot of people setting themselves up for a remarkably miserable existence, particularly as they get older.
I got married last year. Leaving the bedroom sports out of it, I've found it's got so many other advantages which essentially come from pooling resources. I get home after a hard day in a physical job, and there is a decent healthy meal waiting for me. She has an evening feeling rough and the kitchen magically clears itself up and puts all the dirty stuff in the dishwasher. A car fails it's MOT, and because we've two cars, and two drivers, all the usual dramas around getting it dropped off at a garage and getting to work evaporate. She never has to worry about wood for the logburner, it just appears in the living room every night. Meanwhile there's always milk in the fridge without me having bought any for months.
And that's before considering the financials which mean that we are now paying for one house, one electric bill, one lot of heating etc. so we've massively better off than we used to be. It's also before considering what happens when we age - I don't know if I'll have to care for her, or she will be looking after me, or perhaps a bit of both, but more likely, than not, one of us will have to support the other through the hard times which come from age and infirmity.
If people want to all live insular lives on their own, they can, but they need to accept that with that comes tougher and poorer lives too. Particularly when they're old - no spouse, no children - do would really want to only have the state looking out for you then?
Several friends who didn't get married, lived the perpetual holiday life style etc, are now talking about forming a group living thing for old age - no kids to come and see them, so someone to make sure that the cats don't eat the corpse. It sounds a bit grim, to be honest.
It's of very little consequence to the corpse, though not ideal for the cat.
For anyone complaining about weather, the first storm of the year just arrived in the sandpit. Wind and rain and sandstorms.
Dont drive theres no drainage there
The story is that after the first storm of the year, they work out which drains need the sand to be cleared out of them.
How’s about clearing all the drains of sand before the winter starts! The bigger problem is the people who forget how to drive in the rain. I’m happily home now, holding a glass of wine and laughing at the view out of the window, very un-happily watching the cricket.
How can they have sandstorms if it's raining? Or is the rain just very gritty, or the sand come in wet splatters?
For anyone complaining about weather, the first storm of the year just arrived in the sandpit. Wind and rain and sandstorms.
Dont drive theres no drainage there
The story is that after the first storm of the year, they work out which drains need the sand to be cleared out of them.
How’s about clearing all the drains of sand before the winter starts! The bigger problem is the people who forget how to drive in the rain. I’m happily home now, holding a glass of wine and laughing at the view out of the window, very un-happily watching the cricket.
How can they have sandstorms if it's raining? Or is the rain just very gritty, or the sand come in wet splatters?
North Carolina’s new GOP gerrymander could flip four House seats https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/25/north-carolina-congressional-map-gop-gerrymander-00123574 ...North Carolina’s new map, which was approved Wednesday by the state legislature, is particularly efficient at securing a GOP advantage in a state that’s closely divided for many statewide races — setting off a scramble among Republicans for the opportunity to run in the newly safe seats. The map packs as many Democratic voters as possible into three blue districts, while distributing Republicans across the remaining districts to make sure they remain largely out of reach for Democrats. The maps were drawn so Republicans would hold a strong majority of the state’s seats even in particularly bad years for the GOP.
The new map will remake the state’s delegation from an even split of seven Democrats and seven Republicans to one that would likely lock in 10 Republicans and three Democrats, with one competitive battleground seat that Democratic Rep. Don Davis currently holds...
Nothing to stop Democrats doing the same in their safe states and they often do
Give me a couple of examples then where 51% of the vote gives them 70% of the seats.
Also in which Democratic governed states can seats be redistricted by a bare majority in the state legislature without a power of veto for the governor ?
In the 1960s the Democrats even counted the dead for votes in Illinois around Chicago, the fact is both parties have done it for decades, there is no Federal electoral commission in the US like here that draws boundaries and checks voter rolls
So your answer is basically no, you can't give such examples, and resort to your usual tactic in such casesof answering a different question that you've asked yourself.
Out of the ten most gerrymandered states, only one is Democratic.
I think the simple truth is that Republicans aren't interested in democracy, they're interested in power. Once you go down that path it's hard to find a way back because your positions drift ever further from the median voter and you have to engage in ever more extreme distortions of the democratic process to win. Making non-competitive seats is especially dangerous as it makes politicians focus on primary voters not the electorate as a whole. The US is moving away from its democratic roots and heading somewhere dangerous.
I'm impressed that the caucus has finally found someone who The Master is prepared to accept as The Annointed One. Spoils my fun in actually having Trump do the Speaker job, but Trump is clearly happy with their choice.
Someone who is God-obsessed, openly believes the 2020 election was fraudulent and acted to overturn it, is a gay and women oppressing "Christian" climate change denying lunatic who wants to axe healthcare and social security.
All hail proto-Gilead. Blessed Day.
The slightly scary thing is that with all that many regard him as a moderate.
He isn't as extreme as the Gaetz wing of the party only in the way that he speaks. His ideas and policies are basically the same. And if America reelects Trump and hands power over to MAGA, that will be the end of even the pretence that it is a democracy.
George W Bush was widely ridiculed as a moron - despite those people who met and worked with him pointing out that much of his folksey thing was an act. And yet he was the very last sane Republican politician. Will there be another?
His two successors as Republican presidential candidates, John McCain and Mitt Romney , were both eminently sane and both loathed Trump. The MAGA takeover is a tragedy and Murdoch surely is as responsible for it as anyone through Fox News etc. The apparent destruction of old style American conservatism with its respect for the constitution and institutions is a disaster.
I largely agree with you, but wouldn't really describe John McCain as "eminently sane". His reputation as a "maverick" was partly due to his being very inconsistent in his views on issues, and very hot-tempered. Not saying he was a bad man at all, but he wasn't an especially steady one.
More that he sometimes refused to Go Along With How Things Are.
Back when ULA were importing Russian rocket engines for space launches, there was a company in Florida, which imported them, and then passed them onto an actual rocket engine company for various work. Apparently the whole import thing was so difficult that a huge markup was required to stamp some papers.
The company was part owned by some Russian oligarchs - this is why the engines kept coming despite worsening Russia/US relations. The profits/kickbacks ended up with Putin (in part), so he was literally invested in the import of the Russian engines into the US.
McCain kept on digging, despite people telling him to shut up. Eventually he made enough noise that the ending of the reliance on the Russian engines was bought forward. And hence the Vulcan rocket....
If the city of London is to compete with NYC, Singapore etc at the top level of the financial sector it needed to end the cap on bankers' bonuses. Bonuses also ensure reward based on performance rather than banks having to set aside larger fixed costs for salary.
If you are strongly opposed to big bankers' bonuses and will vote accordingly you will be voting Labour anyway, as the poll figures show while most Labour and to a lesser extent LD voters oppose removing the cap on the bonuses most Conservative voters don't
I am very glad to see the government realise the importance of pay in retention of skilled personnel.
I am sure that a similar approach to the renewed talks with the BMA will be welcomed by the Tory faithful.
That is funded by higher taxes, not the private sector as bankers bonuses now are (except for private doctors salaries)
Same issue of staff retention...
Well we could also have a bigger private health sector like Australia with more private health insurance and higher doctors salaries
Basically, the problem is not having enough babies and everyone living longer - it makes both the tax base and services demands harder and harder to reconcile every year.
I'm not sure what the solution is other than people have to pay in more and expect less.
Maybe AI could be a massive gamechanger but that could go so many different ways.
essentially if there's more people living longer and fewer people working there's less money to spend on health. it's going to get worse for a lot of countries. for example the uk has a fertility rate of 1.56 babies per woman. this results in only 78 children or 60 grandchildren from every 100 people.
it's worse for China whose fertility rate is 1.16 which results in 58 children per 100 people and 33 grandchildren worst of all is South Korea whose fertility rate is 0.88 resulting in 44 children per 100 people and only 19 grandchildren.
long term that decline in working aged people has historically (in the UK) been made up of immigrants. (the UK's fertility rate was last above 2 in the 1970's)
Given that pressure on housing and pressure for both parents to work in order to pay for housing is one of the key factors in the lower numbers of kids people have, if we didn't keep filling in the gaps with immigration, wouldn't this be somewhat self correcting? At 1.56, pressure on housing (and lots of other infrastructure - e.g. schools) would collapse fairly quickly.
This would both free up resources (e.g. fewer builders and primary teachers needed) which would end up directed at care for the elderly, but also make having kids much cheaper (if housing cost 50% of what it does now, most families could live comfortably on one income, rather than requiring two) so people are more likely to start have families earlier, which should start to shift the replacement rate up?
The other major change is plenty of young people actively don't want a life partner, they are content living alone and hooking up with each other for bedroom activities as and when desired. They see no reason to indulge in the compromises that living jointly entails
If that's true (and I'm not sure that's entirely true, at least based on my observations of friends, co-workers, etc), that's a lot of people setting themselves up for a remarkably miserable existence, particularly as they get older.
I got married last year. Leaving the bedroom sports out of it, I've found it's got so many other advantages which essentially come from pooling resources. I get home after a hard day in a physical job, and there is a decent healthy meal waiting for me. She has an evening feeling rough and the kitchen magically clears itself up and puts all the dirty stuff in the dishwasher. A car fails it's MOT, and because we've two cars, and two drivers, all the usual dramas around getting it dropped off at a garage and getting to work evaporate. She never has to worry about wood for the logburner, it just appears in the living room every night. Meanwhile there's always milk in the fridge without me having bought any for months.
And that's before considering the financials which mean that we are now paying for one house, one electric bill, one lot of heating etc. so we've massively better off than we used to be. It's also before considering what happens when we age - I don't know if I'll have to care for her, or she will be looking after me, or perhaps a bit of both, but more likely, than not, one of us will have to support the other through the hard times which come from age and infirmity.
If people want to all live insular lives on their own, they can, but they need to accept that with that comes tougher and poorer lives too. Particularly when they're old - no spouse, no children - do would really want to only have the state looking out for you then?
Several friends who didn't get married, lived the perpetual holiday life style etc, are now talking about forming a group living thing for old age - no kids to come and see them, so someone to make sure that the cats don't eat the corpse. It sounds a bit grim, to be honest.
Sounds quite good fun if they don’t have children. Like going back to boarding school but without the rules. I’ve always thought a chain of almshouses would be nice, something like the Chelsea hospital or St Cross for old people who were still relatively healthy. Nice communal eating and pastimes but not a stuffy care home.
The other option is that they let their godchildren know they have a lot of money to leave in their will and suddenly they might be interested in visits and sucking up.
For anyone complaining about weather, the first storm of the year just arrived in the sandpit. Wind and rain and sandstorms.
Dont drive theres no drainage there
The story is that after the first storm of the year, they work out which drains need the sand to be cleared out of them.
How’s about clearing all the drains of sand before the winter starts! The bigger problem is the people who forget how to drive in the rain. I’m happily home now, holding a glass of wine and laughing at the view out of the window, very un-happily watching the cricket.
How can they have sandstorms if it's raining? Or is the rain just very gritty, or the sand come in wet splatters?
The rain’s full of sand, as occasionally happens in the UK.
I don’t want to see what my car looks like tomorrow morning. Once the spell of weather has passed, it’ll need a damn good wash and polish.
If the city of London is to compete with NYC, Singapore etc at the top level of the financial sector it needed to end the cap on bankers' bonuses. Bonuses also ensure reward based on performance rather than banks having to set aside larger fixed costs for salary.
If you are strongly opposed to big bankers' bonuses and will vote accordingly you will be voting Labour anyway, as the poll figures show while most Labour and to a lesser extent LD voters oppose removing the cap on the bonuses most Conservative voters don't
I am very glad to see the government realise the importance of pay in retention of skilled personnel.
I am sure that a similar approach to the renewed talks with the BMA will be welcomed by the Tory faithful.
That is funded by higher taxes, not the private sector as bankers bonuses now are (except for private doctors salaries)
Same issue of staff retention...
Well we could also have a bigger private health sector like Australia with more private health insurance and higher doctors salaries
Basically, the problem is not having enough babies and everyone living longer - it makes both the tax base and services demands harder and harder to reconcile every year.
I'm not sure what the solution is other than people have to pay in more and expect less.
Maybe AI could be a massive gamechanger but that could go so many different ways.
essentially if there's more people living longer and fewer people working there's less money to spend on health. it's going to get worse for a lot of countries. for example the uk has a fertility rate of 1.56 babies per woman. this results in only 78 children or 60 grandchildren from every 100 people.
it's worse for China whose fertility rate is 1.16 which results in 58 children per 100 people and 33 grandchildren worst of all is South Korea whose fertility rate is 0.88 resulting in 44 children per 100 people and only 19 grandchildren.
long term that decline in working aged people has historically (in the UK) been made up of immigrants. (the UK's fertility rate was last above 2 in the 1970's)
Given that pressure on housing and pressure for both parents to work in order to pay for housing is one of the key factors in the lower numbers of kids people have, if we didn't keep filling in the gaps with immigration, wouldn't this be somewhat self correcting? At 1.56, pressure on housing (and lots of other infrastructure - e.g. schools) would collapse fairly quickly.
This would both free up resources (e.g. fewer builders and primary teachers needed) which would end up directed at care for the elderly, but also make having kids much cheaper (if housing cost 50% of what it does now, most families could live comfortably on one income, rather than requiring two) so people are more likely to start have families earlier, which should start to shift the replacement rate up?
But who does the work and pays the taxes in the meantime? Your plan requires at least 2 decades before you get any replacement workforce even if everyone reacts to the announcement by immediately holding a great big orgy.
Great question, and hard to answer beyond saying it will be painful.
My general point is that UK governments current operate (and have done for at least 50 years) what is a fundamentally a population Ponzi scheme. The only way they can see for sufficient workers/tax to go round is to keep increasing the population. But this will have to stop somewhere - the UK might be able to manage to sustain a population of say 100 million, but 150million? 200 million? At some point we will have to learn to live with a stable or declining population. It will be painful, but the longer we leave it, the worse the problem gets.
Currently we have a lot of "head-in-sandism" about this reality. The harsh truth is that at some point we will have a generation who are taxed out to the max (where pretty much there now), and at the same time the budget for health-care etc. will be stretched. There's not much we can do about this, other than picking the "when" part of the equation. And the politicians always want to can kick, so they do. But it doesn't solve the problem - it just saves it for later.
Short-termism seems to be an inherent flaw in democracy. I can’t think of a better system however.
A directly elected dictator with terms of 14 years.
No short termism is.
Long term solutions for long term problems.
We’d be facing 10 more years of Boris Johnson using your approach - no thanks!
Sack the lot and start again. Four years until the next World Cup.
Something can't be right in the dressing room / with the entire setup. I refuse to believe that England - Bazball in Tests and winners of the T20 World Cup last year - don't have the resources to put on a better showing than this.
For anyone complaining about weather, the first storm of the year just arrived in the sandpit. Wind and rain and sandstorms.
Dont drive theres no drainage there
The story is that after the first storm of the year, they work out which drains need the sand to be cleared out of them.
How’s about clearing all the drains of sand before the winter starts! The bigger problem is the people who forget how to drive in the rain. I’m happily home now, holding a glass of wine and laughing at the view out of the window, very un-happily watching the cricket.
How can they have sandstorms if it's raining? Or is the rain just very gritty, or the sand come in wet splatters?
If the city of London is to compete with NYC, Singapore etc at the top level of the financial sector it needed to end the cap on bankers' bonuses. Bonuses also ensure reward based on performance rather than banks having to set aside larger fixed costs for salary.
If you are strongly opposed to big bankers' bonuses and will vote accordingly you will be voting Labour anyway, as the poll figures show while most Labour and to a lesser extent LD voters oppose removing the cap on the bonuses most Conservative voters don't
I am very glad to see the government realise the importance of pay in retention of skilled personnel.
I am sure that a similar approach to the renewed talks with the BMA will be welcomed by the Tory faithful.
That is funded by higher taxes, not the private sector as bankers bonuses now are (except for private doctors salaries)
Same issue of staff retention...
Well we could also have a bigger private health sector like Australia with more private health insurance and higher doctors salaries
Basically, the problem is not having enough babies and everyone living longer - it makes both the tax base and services demands harder and harder to reconcile every year.
I'm not sure what the solution is other than people have to pay in more and expect less.
Maybe AI could be a massive gamechanger but that could go so many different ways.
essentially if there's more people living longer and fewer people working there's less money to spend on health. it's going to get worse for a lot of countries. for example the uk has a fertility rate of 1.56 babies per woman. this results in only 78 children or 60 grandchildren from every 100 people.
it's worse for China whose fertility rate is 1.16 which results in 58 children per 100 people and 33 grandchildren worst of all is South Korea whose fertility rate is 0.88 resulting in 44 children per 100 people and only 19 grandchildren.
long term that decline in working aged people has historically (in the UK) been made up of immigrants. (the UK's fertility rate was last above 2 in the 1970's)
Given that pressure on housing and pressure for both parents to work in order to pay for housing is one of the key factors in the lower numbers of kids people have, if we didn't keep filling in the gaps with immigration, wouldn't this be somewhat self correcting? At 1.56, pressure on housing (and lots of other infrastructure - e.g. schools) would collapse fairly quickly.
This would both free up resources (e.g. fewer builders and primary teachers needed) which would end up directed at care for the elderly, but also make having kids much cheaper (if housing cost 50% of what it does now, most families could live comfortably on one income, rather than requiring two) so people are more likely to start have families earlier, which should start to shift the replacement rate up?
But who does the work and pays the taxes in the meantime? Your plan requires at least 2 decades before you get any replacement workforce even if everyone reacts to the announcement by immediately holding a great big orgy.
Great question, and hard to answer beyond saying it will be painful.
My general point is that UK governments current operate (and have done for at least 50 years) what is a fundamentally a population Ponzi scheme. The only way they can see for sufficient workers/tax to go round is to keep increasing the population. But this will have to stop somewhere - the UK might be able to manage to sustain a population of say 100 million, but 150million? 200 million? At some point we will have to learn to live with a stable or declining population. It will be painful, but the longer we leave it, the worse the problem gets.
Currently we have a lot of "head-in-sandism" about this reality. The harsh truth is that at some point we will have a generation who are taxed out to the max (where pretty much there now), and at the same time the budget for health-care etc. will be stretched. There's not much we can do about this, other than picking the "when" part of the equation. And the politicians always want to can kick, so they do. But it doesn't solve the problem - it just saves it for later.
Any attempt to limit the population is, of course, WAAAAAACIST.
If you shout that loud enough, the issue you mention can't happen.
Are you twelve? In any case, that's not what they shout, which is demographic crisis; see Japan or indeed China.
The city of London is one of our key industries and one of the few that is internationally competitive. The restriction on bonuses is a silly idea introduced by the EU at the insistence of those who don’t have such an industry. The really surprising thing is that the government has taken so little to abolish a measure that they always opposed.
Of course it won’t win any votes but if it enhances London as a place for financial services it will help improve our tax base.
We will get a little bit of extra tax each year sure. But lets not pretend it doesn't also increase our potential liabilities in a future bank bailout too.
One of the scenarios where the governance and the politics ought to be considered separately.
From a governance point of view, there's tax revenues that come from the City, the UK needs them and this move might unlock some more. (Whether it's in the UK's medium term interests to court the sort of financial behaviours that bonus culture rewards, I dunno. Suburban science master and all that. But they do seem a bit unreliable. Famine and feast and all that.)
From a politics point of view, it's an insane thing to do- see the polling in the header. And given that, as far as the electorate are concerned, Rishi is a rich banker (I know there are subspecies there, but most voters have more sense than to dive into those), he's exactly the wrong PM to be doing this.
Has 'rebalancing away from the City' gone into the 'too hard' basket?
Capping bankers' bonuses isn't going to make shoe factories reopen in Northampton.
It'll just boost remuneration in an already bloated and over-remunerated sector.
Do you mean that it will boost tax receipts to the Treasury from the top 1%?
Is that necessarily a good thing though?
Partly because of the increased decoupling of where tax comes from and who votes.
But mostly because it doesn't seem like a reliably stable source of tax. Wasn't the size of the City one of the reasons the 2008 crash hit UK finances so hard?
And we can be sure that there will be will be another crash.
Good question from earlier.
There’s a fine line for the Chancellor to draw, between making hay while the sun shines, and fixing the roof in the summer; and strangling the country’s most successful industry, which happens to be highly mobile.
There’s little correlation between individual pay and the more systemic issues, and I think that the regulatory changes since 2010 mean that the BoE is now much less on the hook than previously.
The banks appear to have responsed to the previous regime with massive base salaries and smaller bonuses, how this unwinds might be interesting politically.
If the city of London is to compete with NYC, Singapore etc at the top level of the financial sector it needed to end the cap on bankers' bonuses. Bonuses also ensure reward based on performance rather than banks having to set aside larger fixed costs for salary.
If you are strongly opposed to big bankers' bonuses and will vote accordingly you will be voting Labour anyway, as the poll figures show while most Labour and to a lesser extent LD voters oppose removing the cap on the bonuses most Conservative voters don't
I am very glad to see the government realise the importance of pay in retention of skilled personnel.
I am sure that a similar approach to the renewed talks with the BMA will be welcomed by the Tory faithful.
That is funded by higher taxes, not the private sector as bankers bonuses now are (except for private doctors salaries)
Same issue of staff retention...
Well we could also have a bigger private health sector like Australia with more private health insurance and higher doctors salaries
Basically, the problem is not having enough babies and everyone living longer - it makes both the tax base and services demands harder and harder to reconcile every year.
I'm not sure what the solution is other than people have to pay in more and expect less.
Maybe AI could be a massive gamechanger but that could go so many different ways.
essentially if there's more people living longer and fewer people working there's less money to spend on health. it's going to get worse for a lot of countries. for example the uk has a fertility rate of 1.56 babies per woman. this results in only 78 children or 60 grandchildren from every 100 people.
it's worse for China whose fertility rate is 1.16 which results in 58 children per 100 people and 33 grandchildren worst of all is South Korea whose fertility rate is 0.88 resulting in 44 children per 100 people and only 19 grandchildren.
long term that decline in working aged people has historically (in the UK) been made up of immigrants. (the UK's fertility rate was last above 2 in the 1970's)
Given that pressure on housing and pressure for both parents to work in order to pay for housing is one of the key factors in the lower numbers of kids people have, if we didn't keep filling in the gaps with immigration, wouldn't this be somewhat self correcting? At 1.56, pressure on housing (and lots of other infrastructure - e.g. schools) would collapse fairly quickly.
This would both free up resources (e.g. fewer builders and primary teachers needed) which would end up directed at care for the elderly, but also make having kids much cheaper (if housing cost 50% of what it does now, most families could live comfortably on one income, rather than requiring two) so people are more likely to start have families earlier, which should start to shift the replacement rate up?
But who does the work and pays the taxes in the meantime? Your plan requires at least 2 decades before you get any replacement workforce even if everyone reacts to the announcement by immediately holding a great big orgy.
Great question, and hard to answer beyond saying it will be painful.
My general point is that UK governments current operate (and have done for at least 50 years) what is a fundamentally a population Ponzi scheme. The only way they can see for sufficient workers/tax to go round is to keep increasing the population. But this will have to stop somewhere - the UK might be able to manage to sustain a population of say 100 million, but 150million? 200 million? At some point we will have to learn to live with a stable or declining population. It will be painful, but the longer we leave it, the worse the problem gets.
Currently we have a lot of "head-in-sandism" about this reality. The harsh truth is that at some point we will have a generation who are taxed out to the max (where pretty much there now), and at the same time the budget for health-care etc. will be stretched. There's not much we can do about this, other than picking the "when" part of the equation. And the politicians always want to can kick, so they do. But it doesn't solve the problem - it just saves it for later.
Any attempt to limit the population is, of course, WAAAAAACIST.
If you shout that loud enough, the issue you mention can't happen.
Are you twelve? In any case, that's not what they shout, which is demographic crisis; see Japan or indeed China.
One of the reasons we can't have a serious debate about population or infrastructure is that any attempt to deal with the above issue ends up being labelled as racist or being taken up by actual racists.
Try saying "The country is full" or "The country will be full with X many people"...
The Japanese situation, by the way, is because a large number of Japanese are quite racist about non-Japanese. Hence next to no immigration.
I am sure this is what the Red Wall voted for in 2016 and 2019
They voted for control of Eastern European migration and extra spending on the NHS.
Both of which they've received.
They've also got the combination of full employment, pay rises and affordable housing for the first time since the Ogdens moved into Coronation Street.
"affordable housing" and all the other benefits? Wow the party in power must be surfing a wave of popularity. The slogan at election '24 must be "You've never had it so good."
If the city of London is to compete with NYC, Singapore etc at the top level of the financial sector it needed to end the cap on bankers' bonuses. Bonuses also ensure reward based on performance rather than banks having to set aside larger fixed costs for salary.
If you are strongly opposed to big bankers' bonuses and will vote accordingly you will be voting Labour anyway, as the poll figures show while most Labour and to a lesser extent LD voters oppose removing the cap on the bonuses most Conservative voters don't
I am very glad to see the government realise the importance of pay in retention of skilled personnel.
I am sure that a similar approach to the renewed talks with the BMA will be welcomed by the Tory faithful.
That is funded by higher taxes, not the private sector as bankers bonuses now are (except for private doctors salaries)
Same issue of staff retention...
Well we could also have a bigger private health sector like Australia with more private health insurance and higher doctors salaries
Basically, the problem is not having enough babies and everyone living longer - it makes both the tax base and services demands harder and harder to reconcile every year.
I'm not sure what the solution is other than people have to pay in more and expect less.
Maybe AI could be a massive gamechanger but that could go so many different ways.
essentially if there's more people living longer and fewer people working there's less money to spend on health. it's going to get worse for a lot of countries. for example the uk has a fertility rate of 1.56 babies per woman. this results in only 78 children or 60 grandchildren from every 100 people.
it's worse for China whose fertility rate is 1.16 which results in 58 children per 100 people and 33 grandchildren worst of all is South Korea whose fertility rate is 0.88 resulting in 44 children per 100 people and only 19 grandchildren.
long term that decline in working aged people has historically (in the UK) been made up of immigrants. (the UK's fertility rate was last above 2 in the 1970's)
Given that pressure on housing and pressure for both parents to work in order to pay for housing is one of the key factors in the lower numbers of kids people have, if we didn't keep filling in the gaps with immigration, wouldn't this be somewhat self correcting? At 1.56, pressure on housing (and lots of other infrastructure - e.g. schools) would collapse fairly quickly.
This would both free up resources (e.g. fewer builders and primary teachers needed) which would end up directed at care for the elderly, but also make having kids much cheaper (if housing cost 50% of what it does now, most families could live comfortably on one income, rather than requiring two) so people are more likely to start have families earlier, which should start to shift the replacement rate up?
The other major change is plenty of young people actively don't want a life partner, they are content living alone and hooking up with each other for bedroom activities as and when desired. They see no reason to indulge in the compromises that living jointly entails
If that's true (and I'm not sure that's entirely true, at least based on my observations of friends, co-workers, etc), that's a lot of people setting themselves up for a remarkably miserable existence, particularly as they get older.
I got married last year. Leaving the bedroom sports out of it, I've found it's got so many other advantages which essentially come from pooling resources. I get home after a hard day in a physical job, and there is a decent healthy meal waiting for me. She has an evening feeling rough and the kitchen magically clears itself up and puts all the dirty stuff in the dishwasher. A car fails it's MOT, and because we've two cars, and two drivers, all the usual dramas around getting it dropped off at a garage and getting to work evaporate. She never has to worry about wood for the logburner, it just appears in the living room every night. Meanwhile there's always milk in the fridge without me having bought any for months.
And that's before considering the financials which mean that we are now paying for one house, one electric bill, one lot of heating etc. so we've massively better off than we used to be. It's also before considering what happens when we age - I don't know if I'll have to care for her, or she will be looking after me, or perhaps a bit of both, but more likely, than not, one of us will have to support the other through the hard times which come from age and infirmity.
If people want to all live insular lives on their own, they can, but they need to accept that with that comes tougher and poorer lives too. Particularly when they're old - no spouse, no children - do would really want to only have the state looking out for you then?
Several friends who didn't get married, lived the perpetual holiday life style etc, are now talking about forming a group living thing for old age - no kids to come and see them, so someone to make sure that the cats don't eat the corpse. It sounds a bit grim, to be honest.
Alternative way to look at it relationships are great while they last. When they end however can often leave you in a position where you end up struggling because you built a life, had a house and now suddenly in your 40's or 50's find your self having to sell up and can no longer afford a home and have to rent while your partner gets 50% of any profit. It is what happened to me for example in the 90's I could have bought the house I lived in on my own. Payed about 85% of the mortgage and bills as I earned more. We split up sold the house for a profit. She got half as her name was on the deed.
However by that time house prices were exploding could no longer afford a one bedroom flat even with the deposit. So I was screwed that way. I don't blame her in the least for this. We came to an end and we split. She walked away with more than she had actually ever earned in the 8 years we were together. I walked away with the same amount but it wasn't enough that I could afford to buy anymore so been renting ever since and watching that money dribble away due to my paycheck not matching my outgoings.
She was better off than if we had not got together, I was in a worse position than if we hadn't as already had a mortgage when we got together. Tell me again how having a partner helped me. It left me living in a pokey rental. (This by the way is not a rant about women, merely pointing out that being with a partner has its downsides if you split up)
The city of London is one of our key industries and one of the few that is internationally competitive. The restriction on bonuses is a silly idea introduced by the EU at the insistence of those who don’t have such an industry. The really surprising thing is that the government has taken so little to abolish a measure that they always opposed.
Of course it won’t win any votes but if it enhances London as a place for financial services it will help improve our tax base.
We will get a little bit of extra tax each year sure. But lets not pretend it doesn't also increase our potential liabilities in a future bank bailout too.
One of the scenarios where the governance and the politics ought to be considered separately.
From a governance point of view, there's tax revenues that come from the City, the UK needs them and this move might unlock some more. (Whether it's in the UK's medium term interests to court the sort of financial behaviours that bonus culture rewards, I dunno. Suburban science master and all that. But they do seem a bit unreliable. Famine and feast and all that.)
From a politics point of view, it's an insane thing to do- see the polling in the header. And given that, as far as the electorate are concerned, Rishi is a rich banker (I know there are subspecies there, but most voters have more sense than to dive into those), he's exactly the wrong PM to be doing this.
Has 'rebalancing away from the City' gone into the 'too hard' basket?
Capping bankers' bonuses isn't going to make shoe factories reopen in Northampton.
It'll just boost remuneration in an already bloated and over-remunerated sector.
Do you mean that it will boost tax receipts to the Treasury from the top 1%?
Is that necessarily a good thing though?
Partly because of the increased decoupling of where tax comes from and who votes.
But mostly because it doesn't seem like a reliably stable source of tax. Wasn't the size of the City one of the reasons the 2008 crash hit UK finances so hard?
And we can be sure that there will be will be another crash.
Good question from earlier.
There’s a fine line for the Chancellor to draw, between making hay while the sun shines, and fixing the roof in the summer; and strangling the country’s most successful industry, which happens to be highly mobile.
There’s little correlation between individual pay and the more systemic issues, and I think that the regulatory changes since 2010 mean that the BoE is now much less on the hook than previously.
More banks based in London/UK (could help the Edinburgh industry) is a universally good thing - people paying rent, buildings full, Pret a Manger baguettes being purchased, more tax being paid.
If the city of London is to compete with NYC, Singapore etc at the top level of the financial sector it needed to end the cap on bankers' bonuses. Bonuses also ensure reward based on performance rather than banks having to set aside larger fixed costs for salary.
If you are strongly opposed to big bankers' bonuses and will vote accordingly you will be voting Labour anyway, as the poll figures show while most Labour and to a lesser extent LD voters oppose removing the cap on the bonuses most Conservative voters don't
I am very glad to see the government realise the importance of pay in retention of skilled personnel.
I am sure that a similar approach to the renewed talks with the BMA will be welcomed by the Tory faithful.
That is funded by higher taxes, not the private sector as bankers bonuses now are (except for private doctors salaries)
Same issue of staff retention...
Well we could also have a bigger private health sector like Australia with more private health insurance and higher doctors salaries
Basically, the problem is not having enough babies and everyone living longer - it makes both the tax base and services demands harder and harder to reconcile every year.
I'm not sure what the solution is other than people have to pay in more and expect less.
Maybe AI could be a massive gamechanger but that could go so many different ways.
essentially if there's more people living longer and fewer people working there's less money to spend on health. it's going to get worse for a lot of countries. for example the uk has a fertility rate of 1.56 babies per woman. this results in only 78 children or 60 grandchildren from every 100 people.
it's worse for China whose fertility rate is 1.16 which results in 58 children per 100 people and 33 grandchildren worst of all is South Korea whose fertility rate is 0.88 resulting in 44 children per 100 people and only 19 grandchildren.
long term that decline in working aged people has historically (in the UK) been made up of immigrants. (the UK's fertility rate was last above 2 in the 1970's)
Given that pressure on housing and pressure for both parents to work in order to pay for housing is one of the key factors in the lower numbers of kids people have, if we didn't keep filling in the gaps with immigration, wouldn't this be somewhat self correcting? At 1.56, pressure on housing (and lots of other infrastructure - e.g. schools) would collapse fairly quickly.
This would both free up resources (e.g. fewer builders and primary teachers needed) which would end up directed at care for the elderly, but also make having kids much cheaper (if housing cost 50% of what it does now, most families could live comfortably on one income, rather than requiring two) so people are more likely to start have families earlier, which should start to shift the replacement rate up?
The other major change is plenty of young people actively don't want a life partner, they are content living alone and hooking up with each other for bedroom activities as and when desired. They see no reason to indulge in the compromises that living jointly entails
If that's true (and I'm not sure that's entirely true, at least based on my observations of friends, co-workers, etc), that's a lot of people setting themselves up for a remarkably miserable existence, particularly as they get older.
I got married last year. Leaving the bedroom sports out of it, I've found it's got so many other advantages which essentially come from pooling resources. I get home after a hard day in a physical job, and there is a decent healthy meal waiting for me. She has an evening feeling rough and the kitchen magically clears itself up and puts all the dirty stuff in the dishwasher. A car fails it's MOT, and because we've two cars, and two drivers, all the usual dramas around getting it dropped off at a garage and getting to work evaporate. She never has to worry about wood for the logburner, it just appears in the living room every night. Meanwhile there's always milk in the fridge without me having bought any for months.
And that's before considering the financials which mean that we are now paying for one house, one electric bill, one lot of heating etc. so we've massively better off than we used to be. It's also before considering what happens when we age - I don't know if I'll have to care for her, or she will be looking after me, or perhaps a bit of both, but more likely, than not, one of us will have to support the other through the hard times which come from age and infirmity.
If people want to all live insular lives on their own, they can, but they need to accept that with that comes tougher and poorer lives too. Particularly when they're old - no spouse, no children - do would really want to only have the state looking out for you then?
Several friends who didn't get married, lived the perpetual holiday life style etc, are now talking about forming a group living thing for old age - no kids to come and see them, so someone to make sure that the cats don't eat the corpse. It sounds a bit grim, to be honest.
Alternative way to look at it relationships are great while they last. When they end however can often leave you in a position where you end up struggling because you built a life, had a house and now suddenly in your 40's or 50's find your self having to sell up and can no longer afford a home and have to rent while your partner gets 50% of any profit. It is what happened to me for example in the 90's I could have bought the house I lived in on my own. Payed about 85% of the mortgage and bills as I earned more. We split up sold the house for a profit. She got half as her name was on the deed.
However by that time house prices were exploding could no longer afford a one bedroom flat even with the deposit. So I was screwed that way. I don't blame her in the least for this. We came to an end and we split. She walked away with more than she had actually ever earned in the 8 years we were together. I walked away with the same amount but it wasn't enough that I could afford to buy anymore so been renting ever since and watching that money dribble away due to my paycheck not matching my outgoings.
She was better off than if we had not got together, I was in a worse position than if we hadn't as already had a mortgage when we got together. Tell me again how having a partner helped me. It left me living in a pokey rental. (This by the way is not a rant about women, merely pointing out that being with a partner has its downsides if you split up)
It comes back to the enormous percentage of income we spend on housing. Quite a few people are in the situation that they could never again buy the home they live in.
I sometimes think about getting a life partner again. It is certainly advantageous in multiple ways - as lucidly outlined by @theProle
However I just can’t. Not yet. 99.9% of people are so boring. I can’t talk to them for more than 2 hours (and that’s with alcohol)
How do people spend entire lives with one other person??
They find someone who isn't you ?
Sudden childhood memory of being taken to visit an old family friend of my gran's. OFF had a solitary budgie. To keep it happy she hung a mirror in the cage with a perch in front. Budgie would perch and preen and chatter to itself all day long.
Comments
Given the scale of destruction in Gaza it seem that Hamas were everywhere . How does the IDF get the intelligence to target these buildings . Is it just those where rockets have been fired from . There must have been an awful lot of rockets given the amount of buildings destroyed or damaged !
And why is Israel hitting south Gaza when it specifically told civilians to evacuate there ?
My general point is that UK governments current operate (and have done for at least 50 years) what is a fundamentally a population Ponzi scheme. The only way they can see for sufficient workers/tax to go round is to keep increasing the population. But this will have to stop somewhere - the UK might be able to manage to sustain a population of say 100 million, but 150million? 200 million? At some point we will have to learn to live with a stable or declining population.
It will be painful, but the longer we leave it, the worse the problem gets.
Currently we have a lot of "head-in-sandism" about this reality. The harsh truth is that at some point we will have a generation who are taxed out to the max (where pretty much there now), and at the same time the budget for health-care etc. will be stretched. There's not much we can do about this, other than picking the "when" part of the equation. And the politicians always want to can kick, so they do. But it doesn't solve the problem - it just saves it for later.
She isn’t a gormless reality TV star, she wants to be the next Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Partly because of the increased decoupling of where tax comes from and who votes.
But mostly because it doesn't seem like a reliably stable source of tax. Wasn't the size of the City one of the reasons the 2008 crash hit UK finances so hard?
And we can be sure that there will be will be another crash.
Although there were some earnest, informed question-asking what must have been students there so it was a fairly mixed bunch.
But no, no Zendaya.
The comedy in Germany with a number of politician's academic work comes to mind.
a) Trump is a shoo-in for the GOP nomination given the level of his core support and the way the GOP nominee election process works. Trump 1.29 to be nominee on the Exchange.
b) Given a) then Biden is a shoo-in for 2024 POTUS given the hostility towards Trump shown by Independents in the midterm elections which will be replicated in the POTUS election. Biden 3.0 to be POTUS on the Exchange.
https://www.google.com/search?q=boris+johnson+plagiarism
https://jacobin.com/2020/07/william-cuffay-chartists-black-british-history-statue#:~:text=There can only be one,Chartists in London and nationally.
To many the amount of destruction in Gaza seems a result of just lobbing in loads of missiles in an indiscriminate fashion .
They voted for control of Eastern European migration and extra spending on the NHS.
Both of which they've received.
They've also got the combination of full employment, pay rises and affordable housing for the first time since the Ogdens moved into Coronation Street.
https://youtu.be/PHM5jaLHECU?t=354
1) Hamas has a anthill of secret tunnels, often around or under civilian buildings.
2) The IDF had a major intelligence failure on Oct 7th.
I think it really quite unlikely that the IDF knows where Hamas assets are, or how to target them. Hence the indiscriminate bombing and siege, and delays to a ground invasion.
Apparently Gowrie, who had a swarthy complexion, and Waugh were love rivals in their youth.
(Bron's other obsession, as I recall, was bats which he accused of representing an existential threat to the country by bringing rabies over the Channel.)
As to immigration its not all the same.
Immigrants from the third world moving to cities is different in its appearance and effect to Eastern Europeans moving to northern industrial towns.
The Red Wall has received what it voted for and if the Conservatives had any sense they would be saying so.
The combination of full employment and affordable housing that much of northern England currently has should be hailed as the ideal instead of the unaffordability, inequality and congestion of London and the Waitrose belt.
It’s for this reason Hamas took the hostages . There really are no good choices here .
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67225006
That's one sort-of tax rise. Airlines are not happy but presumably will pass it on.
I got married last year. Leaving the bedroom sports out of it, I've found it's got so many other advantages which essentially come from pooling resources. I get home after a hard day in a physical job, and there is a decent healthy meal waiting for me. She has an evening feeling rough and the kitchen magically clears itself up and puts all the dirty stuff in the dishwasher. A car fails it's MOT, and because we've two cars, and two drivers, all the usual dramas around getting it dropped off at a garage and getting to work evaporate. She never has to worry about wood for the logburner, it just appears in the living room every night. Meanwhile there's always milk in the fridge without me having bought any for months.
And that's before considering the financials which mean that we are now paying for one house, one electric bill, one lot of heating etc. so we've massively better off than we used to be. It's also before considering what happens when we age - I don't know if I'll have to care for her, or she will be looking after me, or perhaps a bit of both, but more likely, than not, one of us will have to support the other through the hard times which come from age and infirmity.
If people want to all live insular lives on their own, they can, but they need to accept that with that comes tougher and poorer lives too. Particularly when they're old - no spouse, no children - do would really want to only have the state looking out for you then?
Latest YouGov Westminster voting intention (24-25 Oct)
Con: 24% (-1 from 17-18 Oct)
Lab: 48% (+1)
Lib Dem: 9% (=)
Reform UK: 8% (+1)
Green: 5% (-2)
SNP: 4% (+1)
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1717475688825987282
Pay in City jobs is an interesting topic. There's no question it's absurdly high by any rational measure. A mid-ranking front office employee will typically be paid similar to the FD of a sizeable company or a partner in a prof services firm. Yet the intellectual and emotional demands, and the responsibility, are far less. It's like factory work in many ways, just with a phone and a keyboard. You have to be brighter than average, numerate, literate, judicious, handle a bit of pressure, not insist on 9 to 5 with regular tea breaks. That's about it.
You'd have thought the market would produce a more appropriate (lower) pay level since the supply of bright (enough) young people to enter and be trained up to do the sort of work you do there, and who'd also want to to do it, is far greater than the 'slots' available. Yet this doesn't happen. It's odd.
I think it's to do with how the City overall earns its corn. It's essentially a skimming machine. Gigantic sums flow through it 24/7/52 and what the sector does is skim off just a small slice, small as a percentage, that is, but it amounts to an awful lot of money relative to the number of people required to generate it (since the IT infrastructure and the balance sheet capital are actually doing most of the heavy lifting). The place being awash with moolah like this, so used to it, its smell, its taste, money itself being the product as it were, this means you don't get the usual disciplines on the remuneration of the people in it.
Not a walkover for Sunak...
Labour 48% (+3)
Conservative 32% (+1)
Liberal Democrat 7% (+1)
Reform UK 6% (-4)
Green 4% (-2)
Plaid Cymru 1% (–)
Other 2% (+1)
(Note the REFUK to Lab swing)
And on the issues:
I therefore submit that your analysis of the Red Wall is not grounded in polling reality. Armageddon for the Tories gets closer each day.
It is not something I am imagining there is research into it. Nor am I saying single is better. It is just an observation made with no judgement
Do they even know what end of the bat to hold?
https://youtu.be/-_kXIGvB1uU
England v Afghanistanthe Jallianwala Bagh massacre.The number who would be knowledgeable about the history of Black Britons, pre 20th century would be vanishingly small, because its quite an esoteric subject.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZlvClFDW55c
"...bring it back, bring it baaack..."
How’s about clearing all the drains of sand before the winter starts! The bigger problem is the people who forget how to drive in the rain. I’m happily home now, holding a glass of wine and laughing at the view out of the window, very un-happily watching the cricket.
Huge leads. The tories are in for the same kind of hammering as the English cricket team in India.
No short termism is.
Long term solutions for long term problems.
If you shout that loud enough, the issue you mention can't happen.
Sack the lot and start again. Four years until the next World Cup.
Back when ULA were importing Russian rocket engines for space launches, there was a company in Florida, which imported them, and then passed them onto an actual rocket engine company for various work. Apparently the whole import thing was so difficult that a huge markup was required to stamp some papers.
The company was part owned by some Russian oligarchs - this is why the engines kept coming despite worsening Russia/US relations. The profits/kickbacks ended up with Putin (in part), so he was literally invested in the import of the Russian engines into the US.
McCain kept on digging, despite people telling him to shut up. Eventually he made enough noise that the ending of the reliance on the Russian engines was bought forward. And hence the Vulcan rocket....
The other option is that they let their godchildren know they have a lot of money to leave in their will and suddenly they might be interested in visits and sucking up.
I don’t want to see what my car looks like tomorrow morning. Once the spell of weather has passed, it’ll need a damn good wash and polish.
However I just can’t. Not yet. 99.9% of people are so boring. I can’t talk to them for more than 2 hours (and that’s with alcohol)
How do people spend entire lives with one other person??
There’s a fine line for the Chancellor to draw, between making hay while the sun shines, and fixing the roof in the summer; and strangling the country’s most successful industry, which happens to be highly mobile.
There’s little correlation between individual pay and the more systemic issues, and I think that the regulatory changes since 2010 mean that the BoE is now much less on the hook than previously.
The banks appear to have responsed to the previous regime with massive base salaries and smaller bonuses, how this unwinds might be interesting politically.
Try saying "The country is full" or "The country will be full with X many people"...
The Japanese situation, by the way, is because a large number of Japanese are quite racist about non-Japanese. Hence next to no immigration.
Wow the party in power must be surfing a wave of popularity.
The slogan at election '24 must be "You've never had it so good."
However by that time house prices were exploding could no longer afford a one bedroom flat even with the deposit. So I was screwed that way. I don't blame her in the least for this. We came to an end and we split. She walked away with more than she had actually ever earned in the 8 years we were together. I walked away with the same amount but it wasn't enough that I could afford to buy anymore so been renting ever since and watching that money dribble away due to my paycheck not matching my outgoings.
She was better off than if we had not got together, I was in a worse position than if we hadn't as already had a mortgage when we got together. Tell me again how having a partner helped me. It left me living in a pokey rental. (This by the way is not a rant about women, merely pointing out that being with a partner has its downsides if you split up)
Just rejoice at that news.
(Though evidently that doesn't work for you, so yes, it's a puzzle.)
No, didn't think that would work.
Fun fact - GDP growth never hit 4.9% in any quarter of the Presidencies of the last 3 Republican Presidents, over 16 years and 64 quarters. Not one time.
https://twitter.com/SimonWDC/status/1717532039392399811
As we get older Mrs P and I enjoy visiting new places together. New to us anyway, if not exotic to seasoned travel writers.
Olso yesterday including Munch’s Scream (x3). The Hague tomorrow for the Goldfinch at the Mauritshuis.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything