Matthew Parris has written two articles recently that ask if many of the people currently claiming benefit because of mental health problems would be better off if they were at work.
If they were given the much greater level of support and intervention needed for people in that situation to go back to work, yes, but that's not on the table.
If they get their benefits cut because they're incapable of finding work off their own bat, they'll be worse off. That is what's on the table.
The biggest problem for the Tories with this group is one we have discussed before. Starmer doesn’t scare them, in fact they see Starmer as much of the same.
If the consequence of them telling the Tories what they really think was someone like Corbyn many would hold their nose and vote Tory to stop him. They will not do that for Starmer so the Tories are more likely to bleed votes to the right than in 2019 or 2017.
Yet more bad news for Sunak I’m afraid.
But also, Boris did tell them what they thought. There would be milk, honey and no need to share it with others. It was tosh then as it is now, but BoJo had the verve to carry it off.
Sunak is turning out to be just as dishonest. However, when push comes to shove, his vision is more "a land safe for hedge fund squillionaires" and (more importantly) he's not capable of styling it out.
If the political benefit of charisma is to be able to lie more effectively, Sunak's lack of charisma is probably for the best.
Boris was able to get them on board because he channeled their anger at the undemocratic twats in the remainer Parliament who were determined to overturn the outcome of the referendum. He was never far right , indeed he has always been at the wetter end of the party but the end of his Love Actually advert summed up his campaign: “ enough, enough let’s get this done “.
Sunak doesn’t have such a weapon. His attempt to make the boat people a similar target has blown up in his face. These people are lost to him.
Up to a point, though the Conservatives who spat out the May plan as Not A Proper Brexit (figurehead: Alex de Pfeffel) played a big part there as well.
And then there were the indicative votes, which were canned just as they were getting somewhere. Two rounds was never going to be enough for a deliberative process like that- think how long Papal conclaves take.
In my lifetime most Papal conclaves have taken a few days. The remainer Parliament deliberately wasted 2 years. They had no intention of ever finding a way forward.
The ‘Remainer Parliament’ was full of MPs who could see how bad Brexit would be for their constituents. And they’ve been proved to be entirely correct. History will judge them kindly.
There’s much wailing and gnashing of teeth this week about the problems with the British economy, yet not much mention of the B-word. The self-imposed omertà continues despite the country knowing Brexit has failed for the bulk of businesses and people in this country. But not the elites who funded and lied for it. They’re happy. And their media remains silent.
The biggest boost the British economy could have is getting back into the Single Market. Something, you’ll remember many prominent Leavers saying, we would never be stupid enough to leave. A lie, of course. Once the right were given their head it was always going to happen.
Because no trade deals have become anywhere near to mitigating the damage Brexit has done. The OBR now says joining the CPTPP will boost the economy 0.04% over the next 15 years.
Brexit was supposed to heal the Tories. That’s failed. It was supposed to lower immigration. That’s failed. It was supposed to improve our economy. That’s failed. It was supposed to help the NHS. That’s failed. What was the point of all the division and the harm we have done to ourselves?
Sorry, I am not ignoring you but I have no desire to rehash this yet again.
Surely it IS fairly clear why Reform voters dislike Sunak so much, especially if you spend a little time on right-wing messaging boards. He has presided over record immigration, a record peacetime tax burden, falling living standards and is generally seen as out of touch. He is also brown himself, though I don't think that's a decisive factor for most.
Anti-immigration rhetoric has served the Conservatives well since beyond the days of Enoch Powell. It worked for Peter Griffiths in Smethwick in the early 1960s. And back at the tail end of the Blair/Brown Labour Government someone somewhere deep in CCHQ thought it would be big and clever to reheat that old chestnut by claiming that a net 100,000 (mainly EU) nationals arriving on our shores was unacceptable. I didn't have a problem with our fellow EU citizens moving here and assimilating into our society. The argument against was spurious and disingenuous. England in particular has always seen its thriving economy require imported labour, be that Irish labourers to build the canals and railways or post war Welsh school teachers. Not to mention train drivers, doctors and nurses from the Caribbean.
And here we are now, a net immigration of 600,000 to keep our economy going, and because of Brexit those people, necessary incomers to keep our economy on track are from places that make our bigoted racist friends turn puce with rage. But hey, Boris told you any shortfall in labour after Brexit would be reliant on "our friends from the Indian subcontinent". A truth the bigots ignored because they were so used to him lying. And to cap it all, those self-same Tory politicians who lit this version of the immigration touch paper nearly 20 years ago are again raging that legal immigration is out of control, pretending it is not on their watch, and it is not they're fault.
Economic migration is a fact of life. If in the 1950s you wanted the buses to run, you relied on help from the commonwealth, now we are reliant on anyone who wants to travel 5,000 miles to look after our elderly parents because we don't have the time or inclination. Maybe if the Tories didn't keep weaponising immigration to the UK they wouldn't find themselves in this political dilemma, a dilemma authored by them.
And as to your last statement, it's almost worth voting Tory, if only to piss off people who baulk at the idea of a non- white Prime Minister. Sod 'em!
The issue isn’t immigration. The issue is housing.
Matthew Parris has written two articles recently that ask if many of the people currently claiming benefit because of mental health problems would be better off if they were at work.
I suspect for many claiming a mental health problem is either 'fashionable' or an excuse to justify their lack of achievement by being some sort of 'misunderstood genius in an uncaring world'.
@Benpointer Did you do anything with your Medlars. I made medlar jelly for the first time which is gorgeous and looks lovely. A clear orange/pink jelly. It took a 2nd boil to get it to set. I also made medlar cheese, but I am really struggling to get that to set. I also froze a lot for future use in tarts. Looking forward to eating it with cheese. Strong flavour of dates.
Re training the dog to find the kibble under a cup (the interest in which I am finding surprising), he has now cracked it, but only if I move the cups very slowly. It is amusing watching the concentration on his face as the cups are moved and it is very sweet when he taps the cup with his paw, to tell me to lift it so he can get the treat.
Fuck all that: eat him. He’s probably quite tasty
In my experience dogs are best consumed when fiercely barbecued - then served with herbal salads and greens, and a peanut dipping sauce
Why should an anti-immigration party be reluctant to vote for a prime minister with Indian ancestry? It's an unfathomable mystery.
That's a little trite given a lot of these polls show the voters who really dislike Sunak want Braverman or Badenoch to replace him.
Hmmm... is that true of ex-Tory voters who now say they will vote Reform?
As Foxy points outReform's numbers ticked up when Sunak became PM. They were averaging 3% throughout 2022 until 25 October; by the end of 2022 they were averaging 7%.
It feels sadly plausible to me that 4 or 5% of the electorate are racists who will never vote for Sunak (or Braverman or Badenoch).
The defection of these voters is less about Rishi and more about Boris and Liz Truss being ousted.
Yes, it is surely all about Boris being ousted. There’s no residual loyalty for Sunak; I can imagine many first time Tories think of him, rightly or wrongly, as the school nerd who snitched on the boy who the popular class prankster.
Matthew Parris has written two articles recently that ask if many of the people currently claiming benefit because of mental health problems would be better off if they were at work.
Inter alia, this could destroy crypto/bitcoin overnight
However, approach with caution, several expert voices say this is bullshit
I've heard that it could do simple maths not crack encryption. Doing simple maths for a generative LLM is quite remarkable.
From "The Rundown AI" newsletter/
It is fairly obvious where this is going, but I see no way to stop it. Humans are the new lemmings.
There are fairly basic reasons why LLMs won’t lead to AGI.
That will require a different approach.
Properly used, LLMs can boost producivity enormously.
My prediction is that they will be used to increase the size of the telephone directory sized reports that no-one reads.
Why would it stop with LLMs? The incentives for us to build ever greater computational power are hard wired into our society, and at some point it will go bad. Hopefully for me, when I am long gone but for humans as a whole I think we can see how we end up now.
We are likely to attain AGI before 2030, some rumours say we have it now (hence OpenAI chaos)
After AGI - if it is recursively improving - ASI might ensue within months or even hours
Matthew Parris has written two articles recently that ask if many of the people currently claiming benefit because of mental health problems would be better off if they were at work.
I suspect for many claiming a mental health problem is either 'fashionable' or an excuse to justify their lack of achievement by being some sort of 'misunderstood genius in an uncaring world'.
Cummings has claimed mental illness?
More seriously, there is a rather grim irony that Parris is making exactly the same statements made about deserters in the First World War at a time when it's fashionable to criticise the tribunals who had them shot...
Matthew Parris has written two articles recently that ask if many of the people currently claiming benefit because of mental health problems would be better off if they were at work.
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Matthew Parris has written two articles recently that ask if many of the people currently claiming benefit because of mental health problems would be better off if they were at work.
I suspect for many claiming a mental health problem is either 'fashionable' or an excuse to justify their lack of achievement by being some sort of 'misunderstood genius in an uncaring world'.
Cummings has claimed mental illness?
More seriously, there is a rather grim irony that Parris is making exactly the same statements made about deserters in the First World War at a time when it's fashionable to criticise the tribunals who had them shot...
It's not as if Parris doesn't have history for understimating the challenges of a life on benefits.
Matthew Parris has written two articles recently that ask if many of the people currently claiming benefit because of mental health problems would be better off if they were at work.
I suspect for many claiming a mental health problem is either 'fashionable' or an excuse to justify their lack of achievement by being some sort of 'misunderstood genius in an uncaring world'.
Cummings has claimed mental illness?
More seriously, there is a rather grim irony that Parris is making exactly the same statements made about deserters in the First World War at a time when it's fashionable to criticise the tribunals who had them shot...
I doubt many of those claiming mental health problems have been under an artillery bombardment.
The biggest problem for the Tories with this group is one we have discussed before. Starmer doesn’t scare them, in fact they see Starmer as much of the same.
If the consequence of them telling the Tories what they really think was someone like Corbyn many would hold their nose and vote Tory to stop him. They will not do that for Starmer so the Tories are more likely to bleed votes to the right than in 2019 or 2017.
Yet more bad news for Sunak I’m afraid.
But also, Boris did tell them what they thought. There would be milk, honey and no need to share it with others. It was tosh then as it is now, but BoJo had the verve to carry it off.
Sunak is turning out to be just as dishonest. However, when push comes to shove, his vision is more "a land safe for hedge fund squillionaires" and (more importantly) he's not capable of styling it out.
If the political benefit of charisma is to be able to lie more effectively, Sunak's lack of charisma is probably for the best.
Boris was able to get them on board because he channeled their anger at the undemocratic twats in the remainer Parliament who were determined to overturn the outcome of the referendum. He was never far right , indeed he has always been at the wetter end of the party but the end of his Love Actually advert summed up his campaign: “ enough, enough let’s get this done “.
Sunak doesn’t have such a weapon. His attempt to make the boat people a similar target has blown up in his face. These people are lost to him.
Up to a point, though the Conservatives who spat out the May plan as Not A Proper Brexit (figurehead: Alex de Pfeffel) played a big part there as well.
And then there were the indicative votes, which were canned just as they were getting somewhere. Two rounds was never going to be enough for a deliberative process like that- think how long Papal conclaves take.
In my lifetime most Papal conclaves have taken a few days. The remainer Parliament deliberately wasted 2 years. They had no intention of ever finding a way forward.
The ‘Remainer Parliament’ was full of MPs who could see how bad Brexit would be for their constituents. And they’ve been proved to be entirely correct. History will judge them kindly.
There’s much wailing and gnashing of teeth this week about the problems with the British economy, yet not much mention of the B-word. The self-imposed omertà continues despite the country knowing Brexit has failed for the bulk of businesses and people in this country. But not the elites who funded and lied for it. They’re happy. And their media remains silent.
The biggest boost the British economy could have is getting back into the Single Market. Something, you’ll remember many prominent Leavers saying, we would never be stupid enough to leave. A lie, of course. Once the right were given their head it was always going to happen.
Because no trade deals have become anywhere near to mitigating the damage Brexit has done. The OBR now says joining the CPTPP will boost the economy 0.04% over the next 15 years.
Brexit was supposed to heal the Tories. That’s failed. It was supposed to lower immigration. That’s failed. It was supposed to improve our economy. That’s failed. It was supposed to help the NHS. That’s failed. What was the point of all the division and the harm we have done to ourselves?
Sorry, I am not ignoring you but I have no desire to rehash this yet again.
That poster is utterly obsessed with Brexit. Everyone is a brexiteer in their view. Even if you voted remain. I don’t use mental health slurs,just as well. At least ScottZf has moved on from Brexit now.
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Then social care, the NHS and schools fall over in rapid succession.
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
Matthew Parris has written two articles recently that ask if many of the people currently claiming benefit because of mental health problems would be better off if they were at work.
I suspect for many claiming a mental health problem is either 'fashionable' or an excuse to justify their lack of achievement by being some sort of 'misunderstood genius in an uncaring world'.
Cummings has claimed mental illness?
More seriously, there is a rather grim irony that Parris is making exactly the same statements made about deserters in the First World War at a time when it's fashionable to criticise the tribunals who had them shot...
I doubt many of those claiming mental health problems have been under an artillery bombardment.
What was then called 'shell-shock' is now called PTSD. That can be picked up in a number of ways, some of them rather surprising to those who don't have it. Bullying at work is a common one, for example, and there's certainly no shortage of that.
Inter alia, this could destroy crypto/bitcoin overnight
However, approach with caution, several expert voices say this is bullshit
I've heard that it could do simple maths not crack encryption. Doing simple maths for a generative LLM is quite remarkable.
From "The Rundown AI" newsletter/
It is fairly obvious where this is going, but I see no way to stop it. Humans are the new lemmings.
There are fairly basic reasons why LLMs won’t lead to AGI.
That will require a different approach.
Properly used, LLMs can boost producivity enormously.
My prediction is that they will be used to increase the size of the telephone directory sized reports that no-one reads.
Why would it stop with LLMs? The incentives for us to build ever greater computational power are hard wired into our society, and at some point it will go bad. Hopefully for me, when I am long gone but for humans as a whole I think we can see how we end up now.
We are likely to attain AGI before 2030, some rumours say we have it now (hence OpenAI chaos)
After AGI - if it is recursively improving - ASI might ensue within months or even hours
Then we have a problem
For someone detached from this why ? You seem to be well up on this all.
I know what AGi is but why is it a problem and not a great opportunity ?
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
Why should an anti-immigration party be reluctant to vote for a prime minister with Indian ancestry? It's an unfathomable mystery.
That's a little trite given a lot of these polls show the voters who really dislike Sunak want Braverman or Badenoch to replace him.
Hmmm... is that true of ex-Tory voters who now say they will vote Reform?
As Foxy points outReform's numbers ticked up when Sunak became PM. They were averaging 3% throughout 2022 until 25 October; by the end of 2022 they were averaging 7%.
It feels sadly plausible to me that 4 or 5% of the electorate are racists who will never vote for Sunak (or Braverman or Badenoch).
I think more like libertarians rather than racists. As others have said, many who liked Truss but oppose Sunak would happily vote for someone like Kemi Badenoch. I’ll include myself in that group.
Inter alia, this could destroy crypto/bitcoin overnight
However, approach with caution, several expert voices say this is bullshit
I've heard that it could do simple maths not crack encryption. Doing simple maths for a generative LLM is quite remarkable.
From "The Rundown AI" newsletter/
It is fairly obvious where this is going, but I see no way to stop it. Humans are the new lemmings.
There are fairly basic reasons why LLMs won’t lead to AGI.
That will require a different approach.
Properly used, LLMs can boost producivity enormously.
My prediction is that they will be used to increase the size of the telephone directory sized reports that no-one reads.
Ah, but LLMs can also be used to summarise the telephone directory (whatever that is, grandad!) that no-one reads. You can try it now with Bing/ChatGPT.
And the circle is complete - generate bullshit automatically to be unread and ignored automatically.
The biggest problem for the Tories with this group is one we have discussed before. Starmer doesn’t scare them, in fact they see Starmer as much of the same.
If the consequence of them telling the Tories what they really think was someone like Corbyn many would hold their nose and vote Tory to stop him. They will not do that for Starmer so the Tories are more likely to bleed votes to the right than in 2019 or 2017.
Yet more bad news for Sunak I’m afraid.
But also, Boris did tell them what they thought. There would be milk, honey and no need to share it with others. It was tosh then as it is now, but BoJo had the verve to carry it off.
Sunak is turning out to be just as dishonest. However, when push comes to shove, his vision is more "a land safe for hedge fund squillionaires" and (more importantly) he's not capable of styling it out.
If the political benefit of charisma is to be able to lie more effectively, Sunak's lack of charisma is probably for the best.
Boris was able to get them on board because he channeled their anger at the undemocratic twats in the remainer Parliament who were determined to overturn the outcome of the referendum. He was never far right , indeed he has always been at the wetter end of the party but the end of his Love Actually advert summed up his campaign: “ enough, enough let’s get this done “.
Sunak doesn’t have such a weapon. His attempt to make the boat people a similar target has blown up in his face. These people are lost to him.
Up to a point, though the Conservatives who spat out the May plan as Not A Proper Brexit (figurehead: Alex de Pfeffel) played a big part there as well.
And then there were the indicative votes, which were canned just as they were getting somewhere. Two rounds was never going to be enough for a deliberative process like that- think how long Papal conclaves take.
In my lifetime most Papal conclaves have taken a few days. The remainer Parliament deliberately wasted 2 years. They had no intention of ever finding a way forward.
The ‘Remainer Parliament’ was full of MPs who could see how bad Brexit would be for their constituents. And they’ve been proved to be entirely correct. History will judge them kindly.
There’s much wailing and gnashing of teeth this week about the problems with the British economy, yet not much mention of the B-word. The self-imposed omertà continues despite the country knowing Brexit has failed for the bulk of businesses and people in this country. But not the elites who funded and lied for it. They’re happy. And their media remains silent.
The biggest boost the British economy could have is getting back into the Single Market. Something, you’ll remember many prominent Leavers saying, we would never be stupid enough to leave. A lie, of course. Once the right were given their head it was always going to happen.
Because no trade deals have become anywhere near to mitigating the damage Brexit has done. The OBR now says joining the CPTPP will boost the economy 0.04% over the next 15 years.
Brexit was supposed to heal the Tories. That’s failed. It was supposed to lower immigration. That’s failed. It was supposed to improve our economy. That’s failed. It was supposed to help the NHS. That’s failed. What was the point of all the division and the harm we have done to ourselves?
Given that the UK has full employment how would joining the Single Market result in this miraculous increase in growth ?
To increase GDP we need to increase productivity and that's an issue many countries are struggling with and which needs to be resolved domestically.
A 20% increase in public sector productivity would do far to boost the UK economy than any trade deal with any country.
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Then social care, the NHS and schools fall over in rapid succession.
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
That said, they're all about to fall over anyway. And the government know it.
Keegan, for example, tried to suppress the report on RAAC (and is incidentally currently suppressing another one on mass failings at OFSTED) until after the election, when she hopes education will disintegrate under Labour rather than under her.
One school in Warwickshire which hasn't had any geography or biology teachers for more than six months has just been told by OFSTED it is 'good.'
Another in Walsall where attendance is under 70% has been told it is 'on track to meet its attendance targets.'
Matthew Parris has written two articles recently that ask if many of the people currently claiming benefit because of mental health problems would be better off if they were at work.
I suspect for many claiming a mental health problem is either 'fashionable' or an excuse to justify their lack of achievement by being some sort of 'misunderstood genius in an uncaring world'.
Cummings has claimed mental illness?
More seriously, there is a rather grim irony that Parris is making exactly the same statements made about deserters in the First World War at a time when it's fashionable to criticise the tribunals who had them shot...
I doubt many of those claiming mental health problems have been under an artillery bombardment.
What was then called 'shell-shock' is now called PTSD. That can be picked up in a number of ways, some of them rather surprising to those who don't have it. Bullying at work is a common one, for example, and there's certainly no shortage of that.
Sure, but that's always existed and almost certainly in greater amounts than today.
Plus more job opportunities should mean its easier to leave an abusive job and get another.
Matthew Parris has written two articles recently that ask if many of the people currently claiming benefit because of mental health problems would be better off if they were at work.
I suspect for many claiming a mental health problem is either 'fashionable' or an excuse to justify their lack of achievement by being some sort of 'misunderstood genius in an uncaring world'.
Cummings has claimed mental illness?
More seriously, there is a rather grim irony that Parris is making exactly the same statements made about deserters in the First World War at a time when it's fashionable to criticise the tribunals who had them shot...
I doubt many of those claiming mental health problems have been under an artillery bombardment.
What was then called 'shell-shock' is now called PTSD. That can be picked up in a number of ways, some of them rather surprising to those who don't have it. Bullying at work is a common one, for example, and there's certainly no shortage of that.
I know far too many people who have suffered PTSD and mental illness to varying degrees, 3 of them friends driven to suicide. Now Tories want them to all "man up" and "pull themselves together"? Fuck me, it's enough to make me vote Labour.
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Then social care, the NHS and schools fall over in rapid succession.
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
That said, they're all about to fall over anyway. And the government know it.
Keegan, for example, tried to suppress the report on RAAC (and is incidentally currently suppressing another one on mass failings at OFSTED) until after the election, when she hopes education will disintegrate under Labour rather than under her.
One school in Warwickshire which hasn't had any geography or biology teachers for more than six months has just been told by OFSTED it is 'good.'
Another in Walsall where attendance is under 70% has been told it is 'on track to meet its attendance targets.'
And those are just the ones I know about.
Social care is from all I hear in a worse state.
I wonder how much that is feeding into election date calculations?
As with Mr Creosote, every moment that passes increases the chance of a hideous explosion.
Good thing Mr Hunt left some slack in his budget for unexpected nasty surprises.
Oh.
ETA: No biology teachers? No physicists is almost the norm, and no chemists not that uncommon. But no biologists? Blimey.
Matthew Parris has written two articles recently that ask if many of the people currently claiming benefit because of mental health problems would be better off if they were at work.
From one of the articles: "the symptoms to claim can be found on Google and nobody can prove you don’t have them".
Abuse to one side, there has been an increase in self-diagnosis (and therefore also professional diagnosis) of things like ASD (what Leon calls Aspergers) that became fashionable in the tech nerd community and online support (or at least reinforcement) groups grow up around that. Yes, there are doubtless shirkers but they were there anyway. The test for Matthew Parris is whether he can persuade The Times to employ these people with mental health problems.
Matthew Parris has written two articles recently that ask if many of the people currently claiming benefit because of mental health problems would be better off if they were at work.
I suspect for many claiming a mental health problem is either 'fashionable' or an excuse to justify their lack of achievement by being some sort of 'misunderstood genius in an uncaring world'.
Cummings has claimed mental illness?
More seriously, there is a rather grim irony that Parris is making exactly the same statements made about deserters in the First World War at a time when it's fashionable to criticise the tribunals who had them shot...
I doubt many of those claiming mental health problems have been under an artillery bombardment.
What was then called 'shell-shock' is now called PTSD. That can be picked up in a number of ways, some of them rather surprising to those who don't have it. Bullying at work is a common one, for example, and there's certainly no shortage of that.
There is also the factor of societal expectations. When everyone is in the shit, the life of a medieval peasant was endurable. Sort of.
Today, probably 50% would kill themselves within a month or 2 of those conditions.
Because they know a better life is possible - they’ve seen it….
Inter alia, this could destroy crypto/bitcoin overnight
However, approach with caution, several expert voices say this is bullshit
I've heard that it could do simple maths not crack encryption. Doing simple maths for a generative LLM is quite remarkable.
From "The Rundown AI" newsletter/
It is fairly obvious where this is going, but I see no way to stop it. Humans are the new lemmings.
There are fairly basic reasons why LLMs won’t lead to AGI.
That will require a different approach.
Properly used, LLMs can boost producivity enormously.
My prediction is that they will be used to increase the size of the telephone directory sized reports that no-one reads.
Why would it stop with LLMs? The incentives for us to build ever greater computational power are hard wired into our society, and at some point it will go bad. Hopefully for me, when I am long gone but for humans as a whole I think we can see how we end up now.
We are likely to attain AGI before 2030, some rumours say we have it now (hence OpenAI chaos)
After AGI - if it is recursively improving - ASI might ensue within months or even hours
Then we have a problem
For someone detached from this why ? You seem to be well up on this all.
I know what AGi is but why is it a problem and not a great opportunity ?
Indeed. I am still puzzled as to how my laptop is going to kill not only me but every resident on our street.
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Then social care, the NHS and schools fall over in rapid succession.
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
That said, they're all about to fall over anyway. And the government know it.
Keegan, for example, tried to suppress the report on RAAC (and is incidentally currently suppressing another one on mass failings at OFSTED) until after the election, when she hopes education will disintegrate under Labour rather than under her.
One school in Warwickshire which hasn't had any geography or biology teachers for more than six months has just been told by OFSTED it is 'good.'
Another in Walsall where attendance is under 70% has been told it is 'on track to meet its attendance targets.'
And those are just the ones I know about.
Social care is from all I hear in a worse state.
I wonder how much that is feeding into election date calculations?
As with Mr Creosote, every moment that passes increases the chance of a hideous explosion.
Good thing Mr Hunt left some slack in his budget for unexpected nasty surprises.
Oh.
ETA: No biology teachers? No physicists is almost the norm, and no chemists not that uncommon. But no biologists? Blimey.
Yes.
I gather there were other issues at this particular school which OFSTED in their curriculum framework inspired wisdom completely failed to pick up...
They are surviving on supply teachers and Oak National Academy lessons, which if they are as bad as the ones for History and RS means the students are completely screwed.
Inter alia, this could destroy crypto/bitcoin overnight
However, approach with caution, several expert voices say this is bullshit
I've heard that it could do simple maths not crack encryption. Doing simple maths for a generative LLM is quite remarkable.
From "The Rundown AI" newsletter/
It is fairly obvious where this is going, but I see no way to stop it. Humans are the new lemmings.
There are fairly basic reasons why LLMs won’t lead to AGI.
That will require a different approach.
Properly used, LLMs can boost producivity enormously.
My prediction is that they will be used to increase the size of the telephone directory sized reports that no-one reads.
Why would it stop with LLMs? The incentives for us to build ever greater computational power are hard wired into our society, and at some point it will go bad. Hopefully for me, when I am long gone but for humans as a whole I think we can see how we end up now.
We are likely to attain AGI before 2030, some rumours say we have it now (hence OpenAI chaos)
After AGI - if it is recursively improving - ASI might ensue within months or even hours
Then we have a problem
For someone detached from this why ? You seem to be well up on this all.
I know what AGi is but why is it a problem and not a great opportunity ?
We do not definitely have a problem. The head of A.I. at meta is a total optimist. Others are complete doomers
It could be as wonderful as the advent of fire or the wheel or electricity or all combined times a million. Or it could be like the creation of nuclear weapons where we ACTUALLY enact “Threads”
No one knows. Certainly it will be a titanic change
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Then social care, the NHS and schools fall over in rapid succession.
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
That said, they're all about to fall over anyway. And the government know it.
Keegan, for example, tried to suppress the report on RAAC (and is incidentally currently suppressing another one on mass failings at OFSTED) until after the election, when she hopes education will disintegrate under Labour rather than under her.
One school in Warwickshire which hasn't had any geography or biology teachers for more than six months has just been told by OFSTED it is 'good.'
Another in Walsall where attendance is under 70% has been told it is 'on track to meet its attendance targets.'
And those are just the ones I know about.
Social care is from all I hear in a worse state.
The RAAC story is getting more and more interesting.
Why should an anti-immigration party be reluctant to vote for a prime minister with Indian ancestry? It's an unfathomable mystery.
That's a little trite given a lot of these polls show the voters who really dislike Sunak want Braverman or Badenoch to replace him.
Hmmm... is that true of ex-Tory voters who now say they will vote Reform?
As Foxy points outReform's numbers ticked up when Sunak became PM. They were averaging 3% throughout 2022 until 25 October; by the end of 2022 they were averaging 7%.
It feels sadly plausible to me that 4 or 5% of the electorate are racists who will never vote for Sunak (or Braverman or Badenoch).
There are racists but it won't drive the majority of it.
The switchers would have happened if Sunak was white, the cost of living crisis etc has damaged the Tory vote, the Truss bombshell of higher mortgages filtered through on Sunak's watch.
Yes, I think that's probably fair. At least, I hope so.
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
I suppose fundamentally I am a supply sider. I think that the way to address problems is to address the underlying cause of them rather than trying to regulate them from the top.
I want us to train our own people in jobs that we actually need, I agree with you about the non jobs in the public sector in particular. I think we should welcome the contribution and skills we get from the 20% or so of foreign students who end up staying here, they will create employment opportunities for others. I am very opposed to the cheap labour we got from freedom of movement with no quality control on who was coming. That was not in our interests.
I also think those who think the answer is 600k new people a year really have to factor in the costs of an extra 200k houses, more hospitals, more schools, more sewage and more power. I don't think that we are doing that, partly because we are ignoring the implications of such changes in population.
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Then social care, the NHS and schools fall over in rapid succession.
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
That said, they're all about to fall over anyway. And the government know it.
Keegan, for example, tried to suppress the report on RAAC (and is incidentally currently suppressing another one on mass failings at OFSTED) until after the election, when she hopes education will disintegrate under Labour rather than under her.
One school in Warwickshire which hasn't had any geography or biology teachers for more than six months has just been told by OFSTED it is 'good.'
Another in Walsall where attendance is under 70% has been told it is 'on track to meet its attendance targets.'
And those are just the ones I know about.
Social care is from all I hear in a worse state.
The RAAC story is getting more and more interesting.
{the Vickers Valiant has entered the chat}
I am hopeful that RAAC will finally bring the DfE to ruin.
Especially after their absolutely outrageous rudeness towards the Public Accounts Committee. Meg Hillier would be well within her rights to hold Acland-Hood in contempt and I hope she does.
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Then social care, the NHS and schools fall over in rapid succession.
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
That said, they're all about to fall over anyway. And the government know it.
Keegan, for example, tried to suppress the report on RAAC (and is incidentally currently suppressing another one on mass failings at OFSTED) until after the election, when she hopes education will disintegrate under Labour rather than under her.
One school in Warwickshire which hasn't had any geography or biology teachers for more than six months has just been told by OFSTED it is 'good.'
Another in Walsall where attendance is under 70% has been told it is 'on track to meet its attendance targets.'
And those are just the ones I know about.
Social care is from all I hear in a worse state.
Yet vast amounts of money are poured into all of them.
So the only ways out are productivity increases and taxing domestic property.
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Then social care, the NHS and schools fall over in rapid succession.
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
That said, they're all about to fall over anyway. And the government know it.
Keegan, for example, tried to suppress the report on RAAC (and is incidentally currently suppressing another one on mass failings at OFSTED) until after the election, when she hopes education will disintegrate under Labour rather than under her.
One school in Warwickshire which hasn't had any geography or biology teachers for more than six months has just been told by OFSTED it is 'good.'
Another in Walsall where attendance is under 70% has been told it is 'on track to meet its attendance targets.'
And those are just the ones I know about.
Social care is from all I hear in a worse state.
Yet vast amounts of money are poured into all of them.
So the only ways out are productivity increases and taxing domestic property.
Inter alia, this could destroy crypto/bitcoin overnight
However, approach with caution, several expert voices say this is bullshit
I've heard that it could do simple maths not crack encryption. Doing simple maths for a generative LLM is quite remarkable.
From "The Rundown AI" newsletter/
It is fairly obvious where this is going, but I see no way to stop it. Humans are the new lemmings.
There are fairly basic reasons why LLMs won’t lead to AGI.
That will require a different approach.
Properly used, LLMs can boost producivity enormously.
My prediction is that they will be used to increase the size of the telephone directory sized reports that no-one reads.
Why would it stop with LLMs? The incentives for us to build ever greater computational power are hard wired into our society, and at some point it will go bad. Hopefully for me, when I am long gone but for humans as a whole I think we can see how we end up now.
We are likely to attain AGI before 2030, some rumours say we have it now (hence OpenAI chaos)
After AGI - if it is recursively improving - ASI might ensue within months or even hours
Then we have a problem
For someone detached from this why ? You seem to be well up on this all.
I know what AGi is but why is it a problem and not a great opportunity ?
Indeed. I am still puzzled as to how my laptop is going to kill not only me but every resident on our street.
Mine has a very subtle long term plan designed to drive me to insanity and self harm. It has reasonable prospects.
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Then social care, the NHS and schools fall over in rapid succession.
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
That said, they're all about to fall over anyway. And the government know it.
Keegan, for example, tried to suppress the report on RAAC (and is incidentally currently suppressing another one on mass failings at OFSTED) until after the election, when she hopes education will disintegrate under Labour rather than under her.
One school in Warwickshire which hasn't had any geography or biology teachers for more than six months has just been told by OFSTED it is 'good.'
Another in Walsall where attendance is under 70% has been told it is 'on track to meet its attendance targets.'
And those are just the ones I know about.
Social care is from all I hear in a worse state.
Yet vast amounts of money are poured into all of them.
So the only ways out are productivity increases and taxing domestic property.
Vast amounts of money are *not* poured into state education. That is the core of the problem.
If you're lucky as an inner city school you might get seven grand per head (or less after the DfE have bungled their sums following a 'works meeting'). Mostly it would be more like five. In moderately affluent areas it can dip well below four.
That is one very good reason why you have class sizes pushing 40, no TAs, crumbling buildings and an attendance rate that would make a member of the Lords blush.
There may be vast amounts of money in the education budget - that's a separate issue.
The red wall Con-curious have gone. Plain and simple. Scattered in all directions.
The Tories are also losing a chunk of the Gammonati, mainly to ReFuk. Drowning folk in the Channel might bring some of them back, but otherwise they are not supportive of the current incarnation of the Conservative Party, as led by Sunak, and with only Common Sense Esther flying the flag for the swivel eyed.
Matthew Parris has written two articles recently that ask if many of the people currently claiming benefit because of mental health problems would be better off if they were at work.
From one of the articles: "the symptoms to claim can be found on Google and nobody can prove you don’t have them".
Abuse to one side, there has been an increase in self-diagnosis (and therefore also professional diagnosis) of things like ASD (what Leon calls Aspergers) that became fashionable in the tech nerd community and online support (or at least reinforcement) groups grow up around that. Yes, there are doubtless shirkers but they were there anyway. The test for Matthew Parris is whether he can persuade The Times to employ these people with mental health problems.
The Spectator and Tele are valiant pioneers in this area.
One thing I posted after October 7th was that one of the by-products of the attacks in Israel was that it was likely to lead to a strengthening of support for right / alt-right / anti-immigrant parties in Europe given those parties would use the attacks as showing the dangers of Islamic immigration into Europe. So far, that looks to be happening and, even if the war stopped tomorrow, I suspect the residual effects will be permanent not temporary in nature.
On that basis, I think more Reform voters will head back to the Conservatives than Foxy thinks. Yes, the Tories have been a disaster on immigration for those who see the numbers as too high but, for many, the perception remains of Labour that 'they will let them all in'. In many Northern areas, although it is hard to poll, I do not see any reason why people would be changing their view that Labour relies heavily on the Muslim block vote - yes Starmer has stood up with his stance (plaudits to him) but the resignations of his frontbenchers and shoot up in the view Labour is divided give off a certain impression.
@Benpointer Did you do anything with your Medlars. I made medlar jelly for the first time which is gorgeous and looks lovely. A clear orange/pink jelly. It took a 2nd boil to get it to set. I also made medlar cheese, but I am really struggling to get that to set. I also froze a lot for future use in tarts. Looking forward to eating it with cheese. Strong flavour of dates.
Re training the dog to find the kibble under a cup (the interest in which I am finding surprising), he has now cracked it, but only if I move the cups very slowly. It is amusing watching the concentration on his face as the cups are moved and it is very sweet when he taps the cup with his paw, to tell me to lift it so he can get the treat.
No, we are not going to do anything with them; we've already got far too many pickles for the next few years.
This week's frost has caused the tree to drop all its leaves and some of the fruit. Still plenty on the tree though:
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Then social care, the NHS and schools fall over in rapid succession.
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
That said, they're all about to fall over anyway. And the government know it.
Keegan, for example, tried to suppress the report on RAAC (and is incidentally currently suppressing another one on mass failings at OFSTED) until after the election, when she hopes education will disintegrate under Labour rather than under her.
One school in Warwickshire which hasn't had any geography or biology teachers for more than six months has just been told by OFSTED it is 'good.'
Another in Walsall where attendance is under 70% has been told it is 'on track to meet its attendance targets.'
And those are just the ones I know about.
Social care is from all I hear in a worse state.
Yet vast amounts of money are poured into all of them.
So the only ways out are productivity increases and taxing domestic property.
Or stop treating staff as widgets perhaps.
An effective employer will treat its workforce in the manner most suited to increasing productivity.
That includes treating its workforce in a manner such that it doesn't leave and find another employer.
I don’t have dog for lunch, I have lamb for lunch. At least that’s what the restaurant said it was.
Could be wolf..
It's probably a street dog, so it'll have spent it's life eating whatever shite it could find. I hope it's last meal was a dysentery riddled plague rat.
Morning! A good thread: Why are REFUK voters unsympathetic to Sunak? Cos he's brown. Will REFUK voters go home to the Tories? Nope.
The interesting thing about UKIXPFUK is the journey that so many of its voters have been on. Many were the "bigoted woman" strain of the left who wandered towards Farage and are still there. Others the shire bigots who dislike anyone who isn't exactly like them.
In 2019 we saw the Tories win a majority of 80. There are many seats at least in the NE where the UKIXPFUK vote was bigger than the Tory majority. They didn't go home to the Tories then - and that Tory party offered (at least on paper) what they want). Why would they vote Tory this time when it is the opposite of what they want?
Partly his skin colour, but also everything about him screams "globetrotting citizen of nowhere".
To an extent, that was true of Boris (born in NY, son of an MEP). But he covered it up with bluster. And of Braverman (studied at the Sorbonne, but I don't want to look inside her head) and Badenoch, though their life stories haven't really been poked into because they're not important enough yet.
But Rishi couldn't pull off "stout patriot" even if he tried. Which he doesn't.
Part of 2016-9 was a revolt against the metropolitan elites. Unfortunately, it was a revolt led by a different elite, many of them pining for a bigger stage than a mere metropolis. And I'm not sure it's a better one.
It is his wealth not his skin colour that comes up in the focus groups.
FWIW - Labour will absolutely hammer that point if inheritance tax is cut.
'Sunak has just decided to give his family a £300 million tax cut' will be the Labour attack line.
Focus groups hah . Be a white middle aged man knocking on their doors and they'll be quite explicit - they won't vote for the Conservatives 'while the Indians are in charge'.
I don’t have dog for lunch, I have lamb for lunch. At least that’s what the restaurant said it was.
Could be wolf..
It's probably a street dog, so it'll have spent it's life eating whatever shite it could find. I hope it's last meal was a dysentery riddled plague rat.
No, I checked. Apparently this “restaurant” is known for its dog because they go out to villages and buy the fattest or healthiest looking pets (or steal the equivalent strays)
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Then social care, the NHS and schools fall over in rapid succession.
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
That said, they're all about to fall over anyway. And the government know it.
Keegan, for example, tried to suppress the report on RAAC (and is incidentally currently suppressing another one on mass failings at OFSTED) until after the election, when she hopes education will disintegrate under Labour rather than under her.
One school in Warwickshire which hasn't had any geography or biology teachers for more than six months has just been told by OFSTED it is 'good.'
Another in Walsall where attendance is under 70% has been told it is 'on track to meet its attendance targets.'
And those are just the ones I know about.
Social care is from all I hear in a worse state.
Yet vast amounts of money are poured into all of them.
So the only ways out are productivity increases and taxing domestic property.
Vast amounts of money are *not* poured into state education. That is the core of the problem.
If you're lucky as an inner city school you might get seven grand per head (or less after the DfE have bungled their sums following a 'works meeting'). Mostly it would be more like five. In moderately affluent areas it can dip well below four.
That is one very good reason why you have class sizes pushing 40, no TAs, crumbling buildings and an attendance rate that would make a member of the Lords blush.
There may be vast amounts of money in the education budget - that's a separate issue.
So you're saying there's an imbalance of funding inputs and educational outputs.
Or how effectively the money is being spent.
I cannot help you there and I doubt any government will either.
Matthew Parris has written two articles recently that ask if many of the people currently claiming benefit because of mental health problems would be better off if they were at work.
I suspect for many claiming a mental health problem is either 'fashionable' or an excuse to justify their lack of achievement by being some sort of 'misunderstood genius in an uncaring world'.
Cummings has claimed mental illness?
More seriously, there is a rather grim irony that Parris is making exactly the same statements made about deserters in the First World War at a time when it's fashionable to criticise the tribunals who had them shot...
I doubt many of those claiming mental health problems have been under an artillery bombardment.
I am very conflicted about this. Looking back, the fact my manager identified that I was going through an episode of stress and anxiety and needed time off work profoundly changed my life in a positive way. But I can also see that workplace absence and sickness relating to mental health is imposing an economic cost and that there can never be enough resources to deal with it. Many of the treatments also seem to be essentially pseudoscientific and the therapeutic 'profession' is infested with ideology.
Regarding PTSD, there is probably something in the idea the the growth in diagnosis is linked to people becoming fragile due to not being exposed to things like bullying, war, fighting, industrial accidents in the way that earlier generations were. So relatively small events can trigger a disproportionate psychological reaction.
Matthew Parris has written two articles recently that ask if many of the people currently claiming benefit because of mental health problems would be better off if they were at work.
I suspect for many claiming a mental health problem is either 'fashionable' or an excuse to justify their lack of achievement by being some sort of 'misunderstood genius in an uncaring world'.
Cummings has claimed mental illness?
More seriously, there is a rather grim irony that Parris is making exactly the same statements made about deserters in the First World War at a time when it's fashionable to criticise the tribunals who had them shot...
I doubt many of those claiming mental health problems have been under an artillery bombardment.
I am very conflicted about this. Looking back, the fact my manager identified that I was going through an episode of stress and anxiety and needed time off work profoundly changed my life in a positive way. But I can also see that workplace absence and sickness relating to mental health is imposing an economic cost and that there can never be enough resources to deal with it. Many of the treatments also seem to be essentially pseudoscientific and the therapeutic 'profession' is infested with ideology.
Regarding PTSD, there is probably something in the idea the the growth in diagnosis is linked to people becoming fragile due to not being exposed to things like bullying, war, fighting, industrial accidents in the way that earlier generations were. So relatively small events can trigger a disproportionate psychological reaction.
Er, we have all just collectively been through a global plague, during which billions of people experienced the greatest restrictions on their freedom - to the point of torture - in human history (in terms of scale)
Worse than a war, in many ways. It is therefore unsurprising there is a surge in PTSD - we all had the Trauma
The entire world is, in some ways, dealing with PTSD
I don’t have dog for lunch, I have lamb for lunch. At least that’s what the restaurant said it was.
Could be wolf..
It's probably a street dog, so it'll have spent it's life eating whatever shite it could find. I hope it's last meal was a dysentery riddled plague rat.
No, I checked. Apparently this “restaurant” is known for its dog because they go out to villages and buy the fattest or healthiest looking pets (or steal the equivalent strays)
Rich Cambodians turn up in SUVs to eat it
So they tell you. They tell people in this country that the chickens they eat are free range......
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Then social care, the NHS and schools fall over in rapid succession.
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
That said, they're all about to fall over anyway. And the government know it.
Keegan, for example, tried to suppress the report on RAAC (and is incidentally currently suppressing another one on mass failings at OFSTED) until after the election, when she hopes education will disintegrate under Labour rather than under her.
One school in Warwickshire which hasn't had any geography or biology teachers for more than six months has just been told by OFSTED it is 'good.'
Another in Walsall where attendance is under 70% has been told it is 'on track to meet its attendance targets.'
And those are just the ones I know about.
Social care is from all I hear in a worse state.
Yet vast amounts of money are poured into all of them.
So the only ways out are productivity increases and taxing domestic property.
Vast amounts of money are *not* poured into state education. That is the core of the problem.
If you're lucky as an inner city school you might get seven grand per head (or less after the DfE have bungled their sums following a 'works meeting'). Mostly it would be more like five. In moderately affluent areas it can dip well below four.
That is one very good reason why you have class sizes pushing 40, no TAs, crumbling buildings and an attendance rate that would make a member of the Lords blush.
There may be vast amounts of money in the education budget - that's a separate issue.
So you're saying there's an imbalance of funding inputs and educational outputs.
Or how effectively the money is being spent.
I cannot help you there and I doubt any government will either.
Possibly. Or, alternatively, we get roughly the quality of education that we're willing to pay for.
Regarding PTSD, there is probably something in the idea the the growth in diagnosis is linked to people becoming fragile due to not being exposed to things like bullying, war, fighting, industrial accidents in the way that earlier generations were. So relatively small events can trigger a disproportionate psychological reaction.
Being in a violent conflict like war doesn't inoculate you against PTSD. The experience you more susceptible to stress related disorders in my opinion (and experience).
Re mental health: a lot of people I see have been screwed over by drugs imo. Long term effects of cannabis seems to f*ck-up the mental health of quite a few.
I also wonder about whether other as yet unappreciated environmental issues will be shown in years to come to have caused a rise in mental health issues.
Do some use it as an excuse for idleness? Of course some do, but frankly, living on UC is a shit life. Many of course are unemployable; no sane employer would touch them and their problems.
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Then social care, the NHS and schools fall over in rapid succession.
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
That said, they're all about to fall over anyway. And the government know it.
Keegan, for example, tried to suppress the report on RAAC (and is incidentally currently suppressing another one on mass failings at OFSTED) until after the election, when she hopes education will disintegrate under Labour rather than under her.
One school in Warwickshire which hasn't had any geography or biology teachers for more than six months has just been told by OFSTED it is 'good.'
Another in Walsall where attendance is under 70% has been told it is 'on track to meet its attendance targets.'
And those are just the ones I know about.
Social care is from all I hear in a worse state.
Yet vast amounts of money are poured into all of them.
So the only ways out are productivity increases and taxing domestic property.
Vast amounts of money are *not* poured into state education. That is the core of the problem.
If you're lucky as an inner city school you might get seven grand per head (or less after the DfE have bungled their sums following a 'works meeting'). Mostly it would be more like five. In moderately affluent areas it can dip well below four.
That is one very good reason why you have class sizes pushing 40, no TAs, crumbling buildings and an attendance rate that would make a member of the Lords blush.
There may be vast amounts of money in the education budget - that's a separate issue.
So you're saying there's an imbalance of funding inputs and educational outputs.
Or how effectively the money is being spent.
I cannot help you there and I doubt any government will either.
Possibly. Or, alternatively, we get roughly the quality of education that we're willing to pay for.
Stuff costs what it costs.
And UK education isn't deemed to be the 'envy of the world' or treated as a substitute religion by millions of fools.
I do have a theory that the prestige of education was diminished when schoolmasters became called teachers.
Good header Foxy. Agree with the conclusions. Sadly I think the 'something else' is in play with some of these voters (although hopefully and probably a minority of them). Possibly more significant is the absence of that 'Tory who reached the parts other Tories cannot reach'. I think that was true and the particular 'parts' in question were these Reformy Brexity Faragey types. They gave and now they taketh away. With the centre gone too (to Labour and LD) plus tactical anti-Con voting on top of this and you have where we are and (imo) what the GE will deliver regardless of when it is - a clear Labour win and the Tories below 200 seats. Could be more like 150.
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Then social care, the NHS and schools fall over in rapid succession.
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
That said, they're all about to fall over anyway. And the government know it.
Keegan, for example, tried to suppress the report on RAAC (and is incidentally currently suppressing another one on mass failings at OFSTED) until after the election, when she hopes education will disintegrate under Labour rather than under her.
One school in Warwickshire which hasn't had any geography or biology teachers for more than six months has just been told by OFSTED it is 'good.'
Another in Walsall where attendance is under 70% has been told it is 'on track to meet its attendance targets.'
And those are just the ones I know about.
Social care is from all I hear in a worse state.
Yet vast amounts of money are poured into all of them.
So the only ways out are productivity increases and taxing domestic property.
Or stop treating staff as widgets perhaps.
An effective employer will treat its workforce in the manner most suited to increasing productivity.
That includes treating its workforce in a manner such that it doesn't leave and find another employer.
Well, let's go back to education. Last year, 33% of teachers who had qualified in 2017 either left or had already left the profession.
That does not strike me as a productive use of resources.
(On your other point, the differential between funding input and outcome, I do not *know* that there is ample funding. I haven't checked the overall figures in detail and analysed them.
I can tell you that in the last ten years there have been multiple expensive and wasteful reorganisations - academy chains, exam reform and inspection changes to name only the three most obvious - which have taken enormous amounts of time and money that could have been much better spent on other things.
From that point of view I do have sympathy with your view that low productivity in government is a serious problem. If you waste resources on unproductive things you will suffer.
However, if you want a decent education system you would need to be looking at an average of nine grand per head minimum. That's still not what Denmark spends (which is about £13,000) but it's roughly what a lower-end private school would consider viable.
We're not getting near that, and barely halfway to the systems we aspire to match even with designated premiums for students in special need.
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Then social care, the NHS and schools fall over in rapid succession.
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
That said, they're all about to fall over anyway. And the government know it.
Keegan, for example, tried to suppress the report on RAAC (and is incidentally currently suppressing another one on mass failings at OFSTED) until after the election, when she hopes education will disintegrate under Labour rather than under her.
One school in Warwickshire which hasn't had any geography or biology teachers for more than six months has just been told by OFSTED it is 'good.'
Another in Walsall where attendance is under 70% has been told it is 'on track to meet its attendance targets.'
And those are just the ones I know about.
Social care is from all I hear in a worse state.
Yet vast amounts of money are poured into all of them.
So the only ways out are productivity increases and taxing domestic property.
Vast amounts of money are *not* poured into state education. That is the core of the problem.
If you're lucky as an inner city school you might get seven grand per head (or less after the DfE have bungled their sums following a 'works meeting'). Mostly it would be more like five. In moderately affluent areas it can dip well below four.
That is one very good reason why you have class sizes pushing 40, no TAs, crumbling buildings and an attendance rate that would make a member of the Lords blush.
There may be vast amounts of money in the education budget - that's a separate issue.
So you're saying there's an imbalance of funding inputs and educational outputs.
Or how effectively the money is being spent.
I cannot help you there and I doubt any government will either.
Possibly. Or, alternatively, we get roughly the quality of education that we're willing to pay for.
Stuff costs what it costs.
And UK education isn't deemed to be the 'envy of the world' or treated as a substitute religion by millions of fools.
I do have a theory that the prestige of education was diminished when schoolmasters became called teachers.
When they started allowing ladies to teach, surely? Or the poor to attend schools? Shocking decline in standards.
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Then social care, the NHS and schools fall over in rapid succession.
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
That said, they're all about to fall over anyway. And the government know it.
Keegan, for example, tried to suppress the report on RAAC (and is incidentally currently suppressing another one on mass failings at OFSTED) until after the election, when she hopes education will disintegrate under Labour rather than under her.
One school in Warwickshire which hasn't had any geography or biology teachers for more than six months has just been told by OFSTED it is 'good.'
Another in Walsall where attendance is under 70% has been told it is 'on track to meet its attendance targets.'
And those are just the ones I know about.
Social care is from all I hear in a worse state.
Yet vast amounts of money are poured into all of them.
So the only ways out are productivity increases and taxing domestic property.
Vast amounts of money are *not* poured into state education. That is the core of the problem.
If you're lucky as an inner city school you might get seven grand per head (or less after the DfE have bungled their sums following a 'works meeting'). Mostly it would be more like five. In moderately affluent areas it can dip well below four.
That is one very good reason why you have class sizes pushing 40, no TAs, crumbling buildings and an attendance rate that would make a member of the Lords blush.
There may be vast amounts of money in the education budget - that's a separate issue.
So you're saying there's an imbalance of funding inputs and educational outputs.
Or how effectively the money is being spent.
I cannot help you there and I doubt any government will either.
Possibly. Or, alternatively, we get roughly the quality of education that we're willing to pay for.
Stuff costs what it costs.
And UK education isn't deemed to be the 'envy of the world' or treated as a substitute religion by millions of fools.
I do have a theory that the prestige of education was diminished when schoolmasters became called teachers.
'Headteacher' instead of headmaster All part of the woke agenda
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Then social care, the NHS and schools fall over in rapid succession.
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
That said, they're all about to fall over anyway. And the government know it.
Keegan, for example, tried to suppress the report on RAAC (and is incidentally currently suppressing another one on mass failings at OFSTED) until after the election, when she hopes education will disintegrate under Labour rather than under her.
One school in Warwickshire which hasn't had any geography or biology teachers for more than six months has just been told by OFSTED it is 'good.'
Another in Walsall where attendance is under 70% has been told it is 'on track to meet its attendance targets.'
And those are just the ones I know about.
Social care is from all I hear in a worse state.
Yet vast amounts of money are poured into all of them.
So the only ways out are productivity increases and taxing domestic property.
Vast amounts of money are *not* poured into state education. That is the core of the problem.
If you're lucky as an inner city school you might get seven grand per head (or less after the DfE have bungled their sums following a 'works meeting'). Mostly it would be more like five. In moderately affluent areas it can dip well below four.
That is one very good reason why you have class sizes pushing 40, no TAs, crumbling buildings and an attendance rate that would make a member of the Lords blush.
There may be vast amounts of money in the education budget - that's a separate issue.
So you're saying there's an imbalance of funding inputs and educational outputs.
Or how effectively the money is being spent.
I cannot help you there and I doubt any government will either.
Possibly. Or, alternatively, we get roughly the quality of education that we're willing to pay for.
Stuff costs what it costs.
And UK education isn't deemed to be the 'envy of the world' or treated as a substitute religion by millions of fools.
I do have a theory that the prestige of education was diminished when schoolmasters became called teachers.
When they started allowing ladies to teach, surely? Or the poor to attend schools? Shocking decline in standards.
I look forward to the upcoming Speccie article from Leon's stalker suggesting the XL Bully problem be resolved once and for all by a gigantic spit roast.
After which, perhaps, the dogs will be cooked and eaten as well.
I agree that the polling suggests that the Reform UK vote in 2024 will be significantly higher than that of the Brexit Party in 2019 and that few of their current supporters will be tempted back into the Conservative fold. Their disillusionment with Sunak's Conservatives is in marked contrast with their liking for Johnson in 2019, and there is no policy imperative equivalent to delivery of Brexit to tempt them back against their better judgement.
What has gone unremarked though is that the emergence of Reform will also help unravel the bias in the UK electoral system towards the Conservatives, which based on UNS would currently give the Conservatives a disproportionately greater share of seats compared to Labour when the parties are polling similar vote shares. It's not just that Reform will peel off Conservative votes in general, it's the fact that they will do so with added effect in the seats that really matter if Labour is to achieve a majority.
The reason is this. In 2019 the Brexit Party averaged around 4% in the seats it did contest, but 0% in Conservative held seats all of which it chose not to contest. Let's say that Reform averages 6% in 2024. If that 6% is spread fairly evenly, that would be a 2% increase in the seats which Labour lost for the first time in 2019, and a 6% increase in the 2019 Conservative held seats. Almost all of that increase would be at the expense of the Conservatives' previous vote share.
If Labour is to achieve a majority, rather than just a hung parliament, it will need to go beyond willing back the "Red Wall" seats which the Conservatives won in 2019. Most of those Red Wall seats are now regarded by Labour as relatively low hanging fruit unless the Conservatives manage to close most of the national poll deficit. Although the Conservative majority in many is substantial, it comes from Labour voters who only gave up on the party in 2019 when Corbyn was at his nadir, and who will be easier to tempt back than lifelong Conservatives. To get a majority in 2024, Labour will need to go beyond the Red Wall and achieve victories in many of the seats (or their successors following boundary changes) which the Conservatives first won from Labour in 2017 or 2015. The likes of Walsall North, Broxtowe, Thurrock for example. In that sort of seat the presence of a Reform/Brexit Party candidate for the first time would really damage the Conservatives' chances, by comparison with the 2019 Red Wall successor seats where the Brexit Party stood previously.
Matthew Parris has written two articles recently that ask if many of the people currently claiming benefit because of mental health problems would be better off if they were at work.
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Then social care, the NHS and schools fall over in rapid succession.
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
That said, they're all about to fall over anyway. And the government know it.
Keegan, for example, tried to suppress the report on RAAC (and is incidentally currently suppressing another one on mass failings at OFSTED) until after the election, when she hopes education will disintegrate under Labour rather than under her.
One school in Warwickshire which hasn't had any geography or biology teachers for more than six months has just been told by OFSTED it is 'good.'
Another in Walsall where attendance is under 70% has been told it is 'on track to meet its attendance targets.'
And those are just the ones I know about.
Social care is from all I hear in a worse state.
Yet vast amounts of money are poured into all of them.
So the only ways out are productivity increases and taxing domestic property.
Vast amounts of money are *not* poured into state education. That is the core of the problem.
If you're lucky as an inner city school you might get seven grand per head (or less after the DfE have bungled their sums following a 'works meeting'). Mostly it would be more like five. In moderately affluent areas it can dip well below four.
That is one very good reason why you have class sizes pushing 40, no TAs, crumbling buildings and an attendance rate that would make a member of the Lords blush.
There may be vast amounts of money in the education budget - that's a separate issue.
So you're saying there's an imbalance of funding inputs and educational outputs.
Or how effectively the money is being spent.
I cannot help you there and I doubt any government will either.
Possibly. Or, alternatively, we get roughly the quality of education that we're willing to pay for.
Stuff costs what it costs.
And UK education isn't deemed to be the 'envy of the world' or treated as a substitute religion by millions of fools.
I do have a theory that the prestige of education was diminished when schoolmasters became called teachers.
When they started allowing ladies to teach, surely? Or the poor to attend schools? Shocking decline in standards.
Women have been teaching since 1871.
Nah, women have been teaching since the beginning of time. It's just that men are slow learners.
Matthew Parris has written two articles recently that ask if many of the people currently claiming benefit because of mental health problems would be better off if they were at work.
I suspect for many claiming a mental health problem is either 'fashionable' or an excuse to justify their lack of achievement by being some sort of 'misunderstood genius in an uncaring world'.
Cummings has claimed mental illness?
More seriously, there is a rather grim irony that Parris is making exactly the same statements made about deserters in the First World War at a time when it's fashionable to criticise the tribunals who had them shot...
I doubt many of those claiming mental health problems have been under an artillery bombardment.
I am very conflicted about this. Looking back, the fact my manager identified that I was going through an episode of stress and anxiety and needed time off work profoundly changed my life in a positive way. But I can also see that workplace absence and sickness relating to mental health is imposing an economic cost and that there can never be enough resources to deal with it. Many of the treatments also seem to be essentially pseudoscientific and the therapeutic 'profession' is infested with ideology.
Regarding PTSD, there is probably something in the idea the the growth in diagnosis is linked to people becoming fragile due to not being exposed to things like bullying, war, fighting, industrial accidents in the way that earlier generations were. So relatively small events can trigger a disproportionate psychological reaction.
Er, we have all just collectively been through a global plague, during which billions of people experienced the greatest restrictions on their freedom - to the point of torture - in human history (in terms of scale)
Worse than a war, in many ways. It is therefore unsurprising there is a surge in PTSD - we all had the Trauma
The entire world is, in some ways, dealing with PTSD
The other interpretation is the reaction to Covid and the associated trauma was itself a reflection of an underlying fragility in western countries.
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Then social care, the NHS and schools fall over in rapid succession.
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
That said, they're all about to fall over anyway. And the government know it.
Keegan, for example, tried to suppress the report on RAAC (and is incidentally currently suppressing another one on mass failings at OFSTED) until after the election, when she hopes education will disintegrate under Labour rather than under her.
One school in Warwickshire which hasn't had any geography or biology teachers for more than six months has just been told by OFSTED it is 'good.'
Another in Walsall where attendance is under 70% has been told it is 'on track to meet its attendance targets.'
And those are just the ones I know about.
Social care is from all I hear in a worse state.
Yet vast amounts of money are poured into all of them.
So the only ways out are productivity increases and taxing domestic property.
Or stop treating staff as widgets perhaps.
An effective employer will treat its workforce in the manner most suited to increasing productivity.
That includes treating its workforce in a manner such that it doesn't leave and find another employer.
Well, let's go back to education. Last year, 33% of teachers who had qualified in 2017 either left or had already left the profession.
That does not strike me as a productive use of resources.
(On your other point, the differential between funding input and outcome, I do not *know* that there is ample funding. I haven't checked the overall figures in detail and analysed them.
I can tell you that in the last ten years there have been multiple expensive and wasteful reorganisations - academy chains, exam reform and inspection changes to name only the three most obvious - which have taken enormous amounts of time and money that could have been much better spent on other things.
From that point of view I do have sympathy with your view that low productivity in government is a serious problem. If you waste resources on unproductive things you will suffer.
However, if you want a decent education system you would need to be looking at an average of nine grand per head minimum. That's still not what Denmark spends (which is about £13,000) but it's roughly what a lower-end private school would consider viable.
We're not getting near that, and barely halfway to the systems we aspire to match even with designated premiums for students in special need.
That tells me we are not spending enough.)
This assumes that there are no efficiencies of mass production in education. Which would be disappointing.
I am joining today's march against anti-semitism. Anti-semitism disgusts me, wherever it comes from, left & right & in-between. I am doing this in solidarity and friendship with my Jewish relatives, friends & colleagues here, to let them know they are not alone, that we have their back, that they are part of us, that this is their home and they should feel safe and wanted here.
That's all.
Wrapping up warm as it's colder here than in the Lakes.
I am joining today's march against anti-semitism. Anti-semitism disgusts me, wherever it comes from, left & right & in-between. I am doing this in solidarity and friendship with my Jewish relatives, friends & colleagues here, to let them know they are not alone, that we have their back, that they are part of us, that this is their home and they should feel safe and wanted here.
That's all.
Wrapping up warm as it's colder here than in the Lakes.
This is actually quite moving. Turns out I’m here for the huge ancient november full moon water festival. The biggest in the Khmer calendar. Millions of people
They are doing traditional Khmer dance in the squares and parks under the fireworks. And if you know the history - the Khmer Rouge destroyed the great traditions of Khmer dance by killing everyone that did it - and it was an art form handed down orally and practically - never written - that is quite something
The second biggest problem is that to change the views of this group Sunak would require policies that would cause millions of centre right voters to either vote for someone else or at least sit on their hands. He tried to court them with Braverman and it seriously undermined him and the party.
With Hunt and Cameron on board he won’t do that again. He is going to steer more towards the centre ground and try to wrestle some of those more numerous voters off Starmer. But a lot of damage has been done and he has too little time to repair it.
When we look at poll shares the big 2 of Con and Lab are at around 70% (Scotlind is different of course) so there is a big chunk of the electorate who choose a third party that is not going to form a government or opposition and may well struggle to gain any seats. Reform is only one of several, and the motivations of these voters a rather neglected topic.
I see Reform poll slightly worse in Scotland, but still around 5%. I wonder what is going on in their thinking.
It may be because the media very largely ignore them but I frankly have no idea what Tice and his cohort really want.
Their current headline is that they want net zero immigration. Its a nice play on words but it is not a serious policy when we still have a million vacancies and find it much easier to increase employment than increase investment and productivity. The hard work in reducing immigration is improving our skills base, the value added in our schools and further education and changing the ratio between more labour and more investment. The small steps Hunt took with capital allowances are welcome and in the long run may reduce immigration by much more than the Rwanda nonsense ever will.
To me, and all parties do this to varying degrees, they describe a world that they would like to live in rather than address the issues in this one. But then I am not their target audience.
I'm going to disagree. If we pretty much stopped issuing work visas tomorrow, the market would sort it out. Wages in certain sectors would rise, there would be some bumps along the road (remember a couple of years back when you couldn't get a lorry driver for love or money), we'd stop doing some unproductive or marginally productive things, but ultimately the market would ensure that the things which we actually value would get done.
The big win that would help would be to try and get rid of all the pointless make-work jobs which tied people up in unproductive employment (in both the public and private sectors). If we deregulated so that companies didn't need huge HR departments mostly dedicated to ensuring that people can't sue them, if we sacked every single person in the public sector with diversity in their job title (not a single one of whom will have ever created a single penny of value), if we were to remove the requirements for firms of consultants to write environmental impact assessments running to hundreds of pages for every planning application, and then teams of planning officers to read said statement etc. etc. etc, then there would be quite a large pool of people released to go and do productive employment like caring for the old.
Sounds like you are a lot more in their target range than I am. Saying the market will sort it out may be true in the longer term but you are talking a short term recession and serious disruption of services such as care and health. I am not willing to pay that price but I would support policies that meant that the demand for additional labour was somewhat reduced over time. Indeed I would say such policies are essential if we are to maintain, let alone improve, our standard of living.
I don't actually disagree about the short term disruption, and if you made me Prime Minister tomorrow I probably wouldn't immediately slam the hatch down and refuse to issue a single visa more. But I would make it really clear it was coming, and maybe just raise the earnings threshold by £10k a year until it was achieved.
Then social care, the NHS and schools fall over in rapid succession.
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
That said, they're all about to fall over anyway. And the government know it.
Keegan, for example, tried to suppress the report on RAAC (and is incidentally currently suppressing another one on mass failings at OFSTED) until after the election, when she hopes education will disintegrate under Labour rather than under her.
One school in Warwickshire which hasn't had any geography or biology teachers for more than six months has just been told by OFSTED it is 'good.'
Another in Walsall where attendance is under 70% has been told it is 'on track to meet its attendance targets.'
And those are just the ones I know about.
Social care is from all I hear in a worse state.
Yet vast amounts of money are poured into all of them.
So the only ways out are productivity increases and taxing domestic property.
Or stop treating staff as widgets perhaps.
An effective employer will treat its workforce in the manner most suited to increasing productivity.
That includes treating its workforce in a manner such that it doesn't leave and find another employer.
Well, let's go back to education. Last year, 33% of teachers who had qualified in 2017 either left or had already left the profession.
That does not strike me as a productive use of resources.
(On your other point, the differential between funding input and outcome, I do not *know* that there is ample funding. I haven't checked the overall figures in detail and analysed them.
I can tell you that in the last ten years there have been multiple expensive and wasteful reorganisations - academy chains, exam reform and inspection changes to name only the three most obvious - which have taken enormous amounts of time and money that could have been much better spent on other things.
From that point of view I do have sympathy with your view that low productivity in government is a serious problem. If you waste resources on unproductive things you will suffer.
However, if you want a decent education system you would need to be looking at an average of nine grand per head minimum. That's still not what Denmark spends (which is about £13,000) but it's roughly what a lower-end private school would consider viable.
We're not getting near that, and barely halfway to the systems we aspire to match even with designated premiums for students in special need.
That tells me we are not spending enough.)
This assumes that there are no efficiencies of mass production in education. Which would be disappointing.
Efficiency of mass (or economy of scale) is something that varies from industry to industry. In transport, for example, you start to get diseconomy of scale at quite a low level.
In the system we have of individualised learning, you also have diseconomies of scale. Because the more you pile on, the less you can know about or do for individuals. Schools above a certain size, for example, tend to do worse than their smaller peers for this reason. Same with classes. Much easier to differentiate, manage and support a group of twelve than a group of 30+.
If you have learning by rote as in China then you can whack 50 in front of a class teacher and economies of scale magically appear. But that's not what the government says it wants.
We come back, as ever in every industry in this country, to we want top whack but we don't want to pay for it. So we do it on the cheap and then grouse when it doesn't turn out as we think it should.
I am joining today's march against anti-semitism. Anti-semitism disgusts me, wherever it comes from, left & right & in-between. I am doing this in solidarity and friendship with my Jewish relatives, friends & colleagues here, to let them know they are not alone, that we have their back, that they are part of us, that this is their home and they should feel safe and wanted here.
That's all.
Wrapping up warm as it's colder here than in the Lakes.
Comments
If they get their benefits cut because they're incapable of finding work off their own bat, they'll be worse off. That is what's on the table.
In my experience dogs are best consumed when fiercely barbecued - then served with herbal salads and greens, and a peanut dipping sauce
Woof woof; nom nom!
There’s no residual loyalty for Sunak; I can imagine many first time Tories think of him, rightly or wrongly, as the school nerd who snitched on the boy who the popular class prankster.
After AGI - if it is recursively improving - ASI might ensue within months or even hours
Then we have a problem
More seriously, there is a rather grim irony that Parris is making exactly the same statements made about deserters in the First World War at a time when it's fashionable to criticise the tribunals who had them shot...
From one of the articles: "the symptoms to claim can be found on Google and nobody can prove you don’t have them".
The dirty secret of the cheap labour argument is that the worst abusers of it include the government.
I know what AGi is but why is it a problem and not a great opportunity ?
To increase GDP we need to increase productivity and that's an issue many countries are struggling with and which needs to be resolved domestically.
A 20% increase in public sector productivity would do far to boost the UK economy than any trade deal with any country.
Keegan, for example, tried to suppress the report on RAAC (and is incidentally currently suppressing another one on mass failings at OFSTED) until after the election, when she hopes education will disintegrate under Labour rather than under her.
One school in Warwickshire which hasn't had any geography or biology teachers for more than six months has just been told by OFSTED it is 'good.'
Another in Walsall where attendance is under 70% has been told it is 'on track to meet its attendance targets.'
And those are just the ones I know about.
Social care is from all I hear in a worse state.
In some wards round here it benefits the white candidates. In others it goes the other way.
So yes, I am certain that a chunk of previous Tory voters have jumped to ReFuk due to Sunak being brown.
Plus more job opportunities should mean its easier to leave an abusive job and get another.
It also aptly describes their programme, such as it is.
Now Tories want them to all "man up" and "pull themselves together"?
Fuck me, it's enough to make me vote Labour.
As with Mr Creosote, every moment that passes increases the chance of a hideous explosion.
Good thing Mr Hunt left some slack in his budget for unexpected nasty surprises.
Oh.
ETA: No biology teachers? No physicists is almost the norm, and no chemists not that uncommon. But no biologists? Blimey.
Today, probably 50% would kill themselves within a month or 2 of those conditions.
Because they know a better life is possible - they’ve seen it….
I gather there were other issues at this particular school which OFSTED in their curriculum framework inspired wisdom completely failed to pick up...
They are surviving on supply teachers and Oak National Academy lessons, which if they are as bad as the ones for History and RS means the students are completely screwed.
It could be as wonderful as the advent of fire or the wheel or electricity or all combined times a million. Or it could be like the creation of nuclear weapons where we ACTUALLY enact “Threads”
No one knows. Certainly it will be a titanic change
{the Vickers Valiant has entered the chat}
I want us to train our own people in jobs that we actually need, I agree with you about the non jobs in the public sector in particular. I think we should welcome the contribution and skills we get from the 20% or so of foreign students who end up staying here, they will create employment opportunities for others. I am very opposed to the cheap labour we got from freedom of movement with no quality control on who was coming. That was not in our interests.
I also think those who think the answer is 600k new people a year really have to factor in the costs of an extra 200k houses, more hospitals, more schools, more sewage and more power. I don't think that we are doing that, partly because we are ignoring the implications of such changes in population.
Especially after their absolutely outrageous rudeness towards the Public Accounts Committee. Meg Hillier would be well within her rights to hold Acland-Hood in contempt and I hope she does.
So the only ways out are productivity increases and taxing domestic property.
If you're lucky as an inner city school you might get seven grand per head (or less after the DfE have bungled their sums following a 'works meeting'). Mostly it would be more like five. In moderately affluent areas it can dip well below four.
That is one very good reason why you have class sizes pushing 40, no TAs, crumbling buildings and an attendance rate that would make a member of the Lords blush.
There may be vast amounts of money in the education budget - that's a separate issue.
The Tories are also losing a chunk of the Gammonati, mainly to ReFuk. Drowning folk in the Channel might bring some of them back, but otherwise they are not supportive of the current incarnation of the Conservative Party, as led by Sunak, and with only Common Sense Esther flying the flag for the swivel eyed.
On that basis, I think more Reform voters will head back to the Conservatives than Foxy thinks. Yes, the Tories have been a disaster on immigration for those who see the numbers as too high but, for many, the perception remains of Labour that 'they will let them all in'. In many Northern areas, although it is hard to poll, I do not see any reason why people would be changing their view that Labour relies heavily on the Muslim block vote - yes Starmer has stood up with his stance (plaudits to him) but the resignations of his frontbenchers and shoot up in the view Labour is divided give off a certain impression.
This week's frost has caused the tree to drop all its leaves and some of the fruit. Still plenty on the tree though:
That includes treating its workforce in a manner such that it doesn't leave and find another employer.
Rich Cambodians turn up in SUVs to eat it
Or how effectively the money is being spent.
I cannot help you there and I doubt any government will either.
Regarding PTSD, there is probably something in the idea the the growth in diagnosis is linked to people becoming fragile due to not being exposed to things like bullying, war, fighting, industrial accidents in the way that earlier generations were. So relatively small events can trigger a disproportionate psychological reaction.
Worse than a war, in many ways. It is therefore unsurprising there is a surge in PTSD - we all had the Trauma
The entire world is, in some ways, dealing with PTSD
Stuff costs what it costs.
I also wonder about whether other as yet unappreciated environmental issues will be shown in years to come to have caused a rise in mental health issues.
Do some use it as an excuse for idleness? Of course some do, but frankly, living on UC is a shit life. Many of course are unemployable; no sane employer would touch them and their problems.
I do have a theory that the prestige of education was diminished when schoolmasters became called teachers.
That does not strike me as a productive use of resources.
(On your other point, the differential between funding input and outcome, I do not *know* that there is ample funding. I haven't checked the overall figures in detail and analysed them.
I can tell you that in the last ten years there have been multiple expensive and wasteful reorganisations - academy chains, exam reform and inspection changes to name only the three most obvious - which have taken enormous amounts of time and money that could have been much better spent on other things.
From that point of view I do have sympathy with your view that low productivity in government is a serious problem. If you waste resources on unproductive things you will suffer.
However, if you want a decent education system you would need to be looking at an average of nine grand per head minimum. That's still not what Denmark spends (which is about £13,000) but it's roughly what a lower-end private school would consider viable.
We're not getting near that, and barely halfway to the systems we aspire to match even with designated premiums for students in special need.
That tells me we are not spending enough.)
All part of the woke agenda
After which, perhaps, the dogs will be cooked and eaten as well.
I agree that the polling suggests that the Reform UK vote in 2024 will be significantly higher than that of the Brexit Party in 2019 and that few of their current supporters will be tempted back into the Conservative fold. Their disillusionment with Sunak's Conservatives is in marked contrast with their liking for Johnson in 2019, and there is no policy imperative equivalent to delivery of Brexit to tempt them back against their better judgement.
What has gone unremarked though is that the emergence of Reform will also help unravel the bias in the UK electoral system towards the Conservatives, which based on UNS would currently give the Conservatives a disproportionately greater share of seats compared to Labour when the parties are polling similar vote shares. It's not just that Reform will peel off Conservative votes in general, it's the fact that they will do so with added effect in the seats that really matter if Labour is to achieve a majority.
The reason is this. In 2019 the Brexit Party averaged around 4% in the seats it did contest, but 0% in Conservative held seats all of which it chose not to contest. Let's say that Reform averages 6% in 2024. If that 6% is spread fairly evenly, that would be a 2% increase in the seats which Labour lost for the first time in 2019, and a 6% increase in the 2019 Conservative held seats. Almost all of that increase would be at the expense of the Conservatives' previous vote share.
If Labour is to achieve a majority, rather than just a hung parliament, it will need to go beyond willing back the "Red Wall" seats which the Conservatives won in 2019. Most of those Red Wall seats are now regarded by Labour as relatively low hanging fruit unless the Conservatives manage to close most of the national poll deficit. Although the Conservative majority in many is substantial, it comes from Labour voters who only gave up on the party in 2019 when Corbyn was at his nadir, and who will be easier to tempt back than lifelong Conservatives. To get a majority in 2024, Labour will need to go beyond the Red Wall and achieve victories in many of the seats (or their successors following boundary changes) which the Conservatives first won from Labour in 2017 or 2015. The likes of Walsall North, Broxtowe, Thurrock for example. In that sort of seat the presence of a Reform/Brexit Party candidate for the first time would really damage the Conservatives' chances, by comparison with the 2019 Red Wall successor seats where the Brexit Party stood previously.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewziegler/autocorrect-fails-of-the-decade (Number 4)
I am joining today's march against anti-semitism. Anti-semitism disgusts me, wherever it comes from, left & right & in-between. I am doing this in solidarity and friendship with my Jewish relatives, friends & colleagues here, to let them know they are not alone, that we have their back, that they are part of us, that this is their home and they should feel safe and wanted here.
That's all.
Wrapping up warm as it's colder here than in the Lakes.
See you later.
My then girlfriend broke up with me and called the police and RSPCA after I sent her a text which autocorrect had turned into
‘I cannot wait to kick your puppy tonight.’
They are doing traditional Khmer dance in the squares and parks under the fireworks. And if you know the history - the Khmer Rouge destroyed the great traditions of Khmer dance by killing everyone that did it - and it was an art form handed down orally and practically - never written - that is quite something
In the system we have of individualised learning, you also have diseconomies of scale. Because the more you pile on, the less you can know about or do for individuals. Schools above a certain size, for example, tend to do worse than their smaller peers for this reason. Same with classes. Much easier to differentiate, manage and support a group of twelve than a group of 30+.
If you have learning by rote as in China then you can whack 50 in front of a class teacher and economies of scale magically appear. But that's not what the government says it wants.
We come back, as ever in every industry in this country, to we want top whack but we don't want to pay for it. So we do it on the cheap and then grouse when it doesn't turn out as we think it should.