What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Not enough meat on a hamster!
I'll take your word for it.
Although I suppose one could eat several. As one does with quail. I am reminded of the time I was stopped outside our local Co-op by two very attractive young ladies who were campaigning for some animal charity. “Cat or dog” they asked me, obviously what sort of pet I preferred. “Neither” I replied “Rabbit!” “Oh, why?” “Because you can eat rabbit!” I am, apparently, a cruel, inhuman person, who is totally outside any concept of decency!
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Not enough meat on a hamster!
I'll take your word for it.
Although I suppose one could eat several. As one does with quail. I am reminded of the time I was stopped outside our local Co-op by two very attractive young ladies who were campaigning for some animal charity. “Cat or dog” they asked me, obviously what sort of pet I preferred. “Neither” I replied “Rabbit!” “Oh, why?” “Because you can eat rabbit!” I am, apparently, a cruel, inhuman person, who is totally outside any concept of decency!
Clever.
Maybe you could have thrown them even more by saying, 'pussy, because I can eat it?'
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.
The individualised learning nonsense is a major part of the problem. In a resource rich environment it seems desirable but in the real world it seems an incredible waste of a teacher's valuable time. My sister spends hours ticking boxes and providing "evidence" that her pupils have attained certain standards. The vast majority of this rubbish is never looked at again.
And there is pretty much no quality control on it either. My son was being marked satisfactory on his reading skills but an external assessment could not find a reading age at all. He could memorise entire books, he couldn't read.
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.)
According to this Denmark in 2020 spent:
$14,273 per student in primary education, $14,125 per student in secondary education and $23,432 per student in tertiary education.
Whereas the UK spends $12,513, $13,690 and $29,534.
So a bit less in the first years but more overall.
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.
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.
There probably was a greater underlying resilience, and self-reliance, in the face of disaster, in the past. Largely, I suspect, due to widespread religious belief.
Could any modern society cope with the loss of 33-40% of the population, in two years, as Europe did in 1347-49? That seems unlikely.
That said, the shocks of the GFC and Covid, and then the rise in prices, have been real enough.
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.
Nice one. Don't get arrested.
If the police have been reading her thread headers on here she has no chance.
Does anyone doubt REFUK will stand in the vast majority of constituencies at the GE? They might miss a few in Scotland but otherwise they will go for a full slate. They will also poll at least 2-3% and probably more like 5%. Maybe more. Once that is accepted it is clear that most REFUK voters will be, er, voting REFUK. There are a few votes out there for the Cons to chase but most are very, very, unlikely to vote for a party headed by Mr Sunak. I'd think there are far more possible votes in the middle-ground but that is just my opinion.
Either way the Cons need to stop trying to ride two horses in different directions simultaneously. It just spreads a strong impression that they haven't got a clue what they are doing. They should pick a strategy and stick to it!
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Not enough meat on a hamster!
I'll take your word for it.
Although I suppose one could eat several. As one does with quail. I am reminded of the time I was stopped outside our local Co-op by two very attractive young ladies who were campaigning for some animal charity. “Cat or dog” they asked me, obviously what sort of pet I preferred. “Neither” I replied “Rabbit!” “Oh, why?” “Because you can eat rabbit!” I am, apparently, a cruel, inhuman person, who is totally outside any concept of decency!
Clever.
Maybe you could have thrown them even more by saying, 'pussy, because I can eat it?'
I don’t think an old man could get away with that. Not in public, anyway.
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Not enough meat on a hamster!
I'll take your word for it.
Although I suppose one could eat several. As one does with quail. I am reminded of the time I was stopped outside our local Co-op by two very attractive young ladies who were campaigning for some animal charity. “Cat or dog” they asked me, obviously what sort of pet I preferred. “Neither” I replied “Rabbit!” “Oh, why?” “Because you can eat rabbit!” I am, apparently, a cruel, inhuman person, who is totally outside any concept of decency!
Pet rabbits are zero rated for VAT for exactly this reason IIRC.
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.
And even if we wanted class sizes of 50, we don't have buildings that can accommodate that.
(Something similar the other way. Primary teacher plus TA with a class of 30 probably isn't optimal. Single teacher classes of 20 are probably better and probably affordable, but need fifty percent more classrooms.)
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'.
I've noticed that you 'suspect' a lot of things, Richard, and they are rarely of a cheery nature.
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.)
According to this Denmark in 2020 spent:
$14,273 per student in primary education, $14,125 per student in secondary education and $23,432 per student in tertiary education.
Whereas the UK spends $12,513, $13,690 and $29,534.
So a bit less in the first years but more overall.
The UK also spends more than France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan among many others.
Tertiary education is universities, so all they are showing is the impact of student fees. At school (primary and secondary) we spend less. Teacher salaries and class sizes might be more informative metrics in any case.
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.
Nice one. Don't get arrested.
If the police have been reading her thread headers on here she has no chance.
That's what I'm worried about. We better start the whip-round now for the bail money.
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.)
According to this Denmark in 2020 spent:
$14,273 per student in primary education, $14,125 per student in secondary education and $23,432 per student in tertiary education.
Whereas the UK spends $12,513, $13,690 and $29,534.
So a bit less in the first years but more overall.
The UK also spends more than France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan among many others.
Tertiary education is universities, so all they are showing is the impact of student fees. At school (primary and secondary) we spend less. Teacher salaries and class sizes might be more informative metrics in any case.
And it is the (mostly temporary) immigrants funding the higher tertiary spending.
@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
Woof woof; nom nom!
Those who are clearly barking should approach dog eating cafes with more caution.
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.)
According to this Denmark in 2020 spent:
$14,273 per student in primary education, $14,125 per student in secondary education and $23,432 per student in tertiary education.
Whereas the UK spends $12,513, $13,690 and $29,534.
So a bit less in the first years but more overall.
If anyone wonders why alt-right parties are hoovering up the vote now, let me give you an anecdotal example happening right now.
I’m seeing on the metro in Paris. Two clearly North African descent guys have gone their mobiles on full volume. After playing Middle Eastern music you could hear throughout the carriage, they have now switched to pro-Palestinian messaging. Everyone immediately around them left their seats to other parts of their carriage.
So we have the attitude of:
1. “f*ck you; we can do what we want and you can’t complain because we will start kicking off if you do”
2. “You are going to listen to whatever we want you to listen to”
3. “We don’t care if you find our Pro-Palestine and actually more anti-Jewish stuff offensive”
Still I am sure we will have @Foxy , @kinablu et al asking why people didn’t have their headphones in, other people do it as well etc etc
It’s not the first time I’ve seen this on the Paris metro this weekend.
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.
Hope it goes well @Cyclefree . Just wanted to clarify I agree with Baddiel - Jews in the UK should not be blamed for issues in the Mid East.
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.
Hope it goes well @Cyclefree . Just wanted to clarify I agree with Baddiel - Jews in the UK should not be blamed for issues in the Mid East.
And neither should Muslims, actually. Nor Sikhs or Hindus for what happens in India, etc etc.
Certainly RefUK voters are much more likely to back the Tories than any other party if no RefUK candidate as the figures show. However they also were much more favourable to Boris than they are to Rishi. It was Boris who won them back from the Brexit Party to the Conservatives and Tory MPs removing him has moved them back to RefUK.
They are probably more likely to return to the Conservatives than voters who have shifted from Tory in 2019 to Labour and LD (the only voters Rishi seems to have won back are a few LDs). However it may take election defeat and a new more rightwing Conservative leader in opposition for them to do so. In the meantime Rishi's best hope is to squeeze them a little and DKs in particular to try and get the Tories at least back to 30%+
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'.
I've noticed that you 'suspect' a lot of things, Richard, and they are rarely of a cheery nature.
On the other side of the scales he's always been unremitingly positive about the UK soft fruit situation.
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.)
According to this Denmark in 2020 spent:
$14,273 per student in primary education, $14,125 per student in secondary education and $23,432 per student in tertiary education.
Whereas the UK spends $12,513, $13,690 and $29,534.
So a bit less in the first years but more overall.
The UK also spends more than France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan among many others.
Tertiary education is universities, so all they are showing is the impact of student fees. At school (primary and secondary) we spend less. Teacher salaries and class sizes might be more informative metrics in any case.
University fees are paid for through tax on employment.
So effectively the country is choosing for a higher amount of its tax to go to universities than to education in younger years.
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.
I think we're overlooking a rather basic point - the anonymity of the name "Reform". The well-informed people who enjoy doing online surveys know what it is, but in the hurly-burly of elections with hundreds of leaflets from the big parties, most people simply forget them. They have renamed themselves "the Reform and Brexit party" but that's cumbersome - they really need a distinctive and meaningful name that hoovers up the right-wing vote. Would "New Conservative Party" pass Electoral Commission scrutiny?
If anyone wonders why alt-right parties are hoovering up the vote now, let me give you an anecdotal example happening right now.
I’m seeing on the metro in Paris. Two clearly North African descent guys have gone their mobiles on full volume. After playing Middle Eastern music you could hear throughout the carriage, they have now switched to pro-Palestinian messaging. Everyone immediately around them left their seats to other parts of their carriage.
So we have the attitude of:
1. “f*ck you; we can do what we want and you can’t complain because we will start kicking off if you do”
2. “You are going to listen to whatever we want you to listen to”
3. “We don’t care if you find our Pro-Palestine and actually more anti-Jewish stuff offensive”
Still I am sure we will have @Foxy , @kinablu et al asking why people didn’t have their headphones in, other people do it as well etc etc
It’s not the first time I’ve seen this on the Paris metro this weekend.
I would absolutely hate that yet it wouldn't for a second make me think about voting for a far right nativist xenophobic political party. I guess I'm just a bit special.
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.
I think we're overlooking a rather basic point - the anonymity of the name "Reform". The well-informed people who enjoy doing online surveys know what it is, but in the hurly-burly of elections with hundreds of leaflets from the big parties, most people simply forget them. They have renamed themselves "the Reform and Brexit party" but that's cumbersome - they really need a distinctive and meaningful name that hoovers up the right-wing vote. Would "New Conservative Party" pass Electoral Commission scrutiny?
MEGA is a clear winner. Make England Great Again. Worth 5 percentage points imo.
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.
I think we're overlooking a rather basic point - the anonymity of the name "Reform". The well-informed people who enjoy doing online surveys know what it is, but in the hurly-burly of elections with hundreds of leaflets from the big parties, most people simply forget them. They have renamed themselves "the Reform and Brexit party" but that's cumbersome - they really need a distinctive and meaningful name that hoovers up the right-wing vote. Would "New Conservative Party" pass Electoral Commission scrutiny?
That's a point. The Reform Party sound like wishy washy liberals.
Personally I have always thought that if anything will save Sunak it's differential turnout. People say they vote Labour because it's cool, but how many will turn out at crunch time? We see how mad the left of Labour still is with him over Corbyn (although to be fair his party looks altogether more wholesome without most of the far left) and there is no Blair-style wave of enthusiasm.
That, however, rather presupposes that Tory voters will turn out themselves. Recent events suggest this may be a bold assumption.
In recent years at least one (or both) of the main party leaders has been an ideologue.
The next general election will be the first time since 1997 (or arguably 2010) when both the main party leaders have been from the moderate wing of their party.
That means centrist swing voters could vote for either (but given 13 years of Tory rule will likely vote for change as they did in 1997 and 2010) but voters on the hard right or the hard left have parties to the left or right of Labour and the Tories of more significance than back then in the Greens or Reform to consider voting for
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.
I think we're overlooking a rather basic point - the anonymity of the name "Reform". The well-informed people who enjoy doing online surveys know what it is, but in the hurly-burly of elections with hundreds of leaflets from the big parties, most people simply forget them. They have renamed themselves "the Reform and Brexit party" but that's cumbersome - they really need a distinctive and meaningful name that hoovers up the right-wing vote. Would "New Conservative Party" pass Electoral Commission scrutiny?
No and they want to hoover up working class Leave voting ex Labour voters not just Thatcherite ex Tories
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.
Nice one. Don't get arrested.
If the police have been reading her thread headers on here she has no chance.
That's what I'm worried about. We better start the whip-round now for the bail money.
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'.
I've noticed that you 'suspect' a lot of things, Richard, and they are rarely of a cheery nature.
On the other side of the scales he's always been unremitingly positive about the UK soft fruit situation.
Right. Well I'll raise that next time then and we'll see how we go. Hopes are up.
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Technically you can eat any animal if you are not vegetarian or vegan provided it is not an endangered species and provided it was ideally killed in a relatively humane way.
Most Brits however would balk at eating dogs or cats or horses or hamsters, even if it was the local custom. They couldn't eat animals they keep as pets
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.)
According to this Denmark in 2020 spent:
$14,273 per student in primary education, $14,125 per student in secondary education and $23,432 per student in tertiary education.
Whereas the UK spends $12,513, $13,690 and $29,534.
So a bit less in the first years but more overall.
The UK also spends more than France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan among many others.
Tertiary education is universities, so all they are showing is the impact of student fees. At school (primary and secondary) we spend less. Teacher salaries and class sizes might be more informative metrics in any case.
University fees are paid for through tax on employment.
So effectively the country is choosing for a higher amount of its tax to go to universities than to education in younger years.
So it is a defined government objective to get "the numbers of international higher education students studying in the UK to 600,000 per year" and to get net migration down to tens of thousands. Whilst not mathematically incompatible, they are clearly practically incompatible.
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Technically you can eat any animal if you are not vegetarian or vegan provided it is not an endangered species and provided it was ideally killed in a relatively humane way.
Most Brits however would balk at eating dogs or cats or horses or hamsters, even if it was the local custom. They couldn't eat animals they keep as pets
No point in balking at owt. If yer a dirty meat eater, lamb is no different to puppy. Just say no.
Interesting thread, thanks @Foxy. My guess is that Reform end up being like the Referendum Party in 1997.
In 1997 the Referendum Party and UKIP got only 3% combined, that was why Major's Tories still got 30.7% even with Labour on 43% under Blair.
Now however Sunak's Tories are down to just 26% with Opinium last night as Reform UK are on 8%, even if Starmer Labour is doing fractionally worse than New Labour did in 1997 on 42% and the LDs are only on 11% compared to 16% in 1997
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Technically you can eat any animal if you are not vegetarian or vegan provided it is not an endangered species and provided it was ideally killed in a relatively humane way.
Most Brits however would balk at eating dogs or cats or horses or hamsters, even if it was the local custom. They couldn't eat animals they keep as pets
Indeed. People are generally neophobic when it comes to new foods, but we are particularly so when it comes to novel meats, which tend to evoke a disgust response. See the work of Paul Rozin: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/sasalum/newsltr/fall97/rozin.html However, there is interpersonal variation: some people are more willing to eat novel meats than others. (Personally, I think horse is great. I can also recommend ostrich and kangaroo. Alligator was interesting.)
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.
So have I, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of people trying it on
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.)
According to this Denmark in 2020 spent:
$14,273 per student in primary education, $14,125 per student in secondary education and $23,432 per student in tertiary education.
Whereas the UK spends $12,513, $13,690 and $29,534.
So a bit less in the first years but more overall.
The UK also spends more than France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan among many others.
Tertiary education is universities, so all they are showing is the impact of student fees. At school (primary and secondary) we spend less. Teacher salaries and class sizes might be more informative metrics in any case.
University fees are paid for through tax on employment.
So effectively the country is choosing for a higher amount of its tax to go to universities than to education in younger years.
I'm not sure the country actively chose anything. In any case, these metrics are only a rough guide. The Scandinavians spend more but do they spend the extra money on teachers, class sizes, school computers, or just on central heating because of their cold climates? Britain has built a lot of new school buildings in the past 20 or so years. No doubt all very commendable but that investment does not speak to the quality of classroom teaching.
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'.
I've noticed that you 'suspect' a lot of things, Richard, and they are rarely of a cheery nature.
Suspect the worst and you manage to lower expectations so reality will then seem to overperform in comparison
But I think I'm right here - there's been too much of what I term 'middle class regression', ie people doing less well than their parents did or they expected they would do themselves, and people will always look for an excuse.
There have been outside factors influencing that - globalisation, recession, covid - and will continue to do so.
But its difficult to use those as an excuse if other people you know are being more successful.
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Technically you can eat any animal if you are not vegetarian or vegan provided it is not an endangered species and provided it was ideally killed in a relatively humane way.
Most Brits however would balk at eating dogs or cats or horses or hamsters, even if it was the local custom. They couldn't eat animals they keep as pets
No point in balking at owt. If yer a dirty meat eater, lamb is no different to puppy. Just say no.
Mrs PtP is a 'cute vegetarian'.
She does not eat cute animals, so rabbit, deer, and lamb is out. Beef and pork is ok though, because far from being cute, cows and pigs are ugly as well as stupid.
I think this original approach has something to be said it for it, and could perhaps be useful extended to other areas of life, and indeed death. I am, for example, against the death penalty, in principle, but perhaps a compromise in which only ugly and stupid murderers were executed would be acceptable.
If anyone wonders why alt-right parties are hoovering up the vote now, let me give you an anecdotal example happening right now.
I’m seeing on the metro in Paris. Two clearly North African descent guys have gone their mobiles on full volume. After playing Middle Eastern music you could hear throughout the carriage, they have now switched to pro-Palestinian messaging. Everyone immediately around them left their seats to other parts of their carriage.
So we have the attitude of:
1. “f*ck you; we can do what we want and you can’t complain because we will start kicking off if you do”
2. “You are going to listen to whatever we want you to listen to”
3. “We don’t care if you find our Pro-Palestine and actually more anti-Jewish stuff offensive”
Still I am sure we will have @Foxy , @kinablu et al asking why people didn’t have their headphones in, other people do it as well etc etc
It’s not the first time I’ve seen this on the Paris metro this weekend.
The extremely pleasant young French woman with whom I had lunch here - works at a posh hotel - was openly and firmly Islamophobic
At the same time she was anti racist, and all that
Yet made an exception for Islam. What’s more she wasn’t afraid of openly saying it
Le pen has a lot of support in the young, of all classes
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.)
According to this Denmark in 2020 spent:
$14,273 per student in primary education, $14,125 per student in secondary education and $23,432 per student in tertiary education.
Whereas the UK spends $12,513, $13,690 and $29,534.
So a bit less in the first years but more overall.
The UK also spends more than France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan among many others.
Tertiary education is universities, so all they are showing is the impact of student fees. At school (primary and secondary) we spend less. Teacher salaries and class sizes might be more informative metrics in any case.
University fees are paid for through tax on employment.
So effectively the country is choosing for a higher amount of its tax to go to universities than to education in younger years.
So it is a defined government objective to get "the numbers of international higher education students studying in the UK to 600,000 per year" and to get net migration down to tens of thousands. Whilst not mathematically incompatible, they are clearly practically incompatible.
Remedial maths for the cabinet please.
Indeed. I don’t believe that (even) Conservative Cabinet ministers are too stupid to realise this, so what’s going on? I presume they’re lying: they talk about cutting immigration because they think it will get them votes, but have no intention of actually doing so. Indeed, I sometimes think that some Tory ministers believe a high immigration figure is good for them because it produces a scary number that will get people to vote for the party they see as anti-immigration. Equally, not processing asylum seekers (which costs more than processing them) again seems to have an element of deliberateness so that they can go on about a scary figure. Maybe I’m being too conspiratorial here, but how else do we explain this strident anti-immigration rhetoric while implementing a set of policies that increase the immigration number? How else do we explain the Government’s constant misdirection over immigration: talking about people coming over on boats, but not the larger number of visa overstayers or the much larger sources of immigration (work visas, student visas)? Why does the Government never seek to defend its own policy choices?
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Technically you can eat any animal if you are not vegetarian or vegan provided it is not an endangered species and provided it was ideally killed in a relatively humane way.
Most Brits however would balk at eating dogs or cats or horses or hamsters, even if it was the local custom. They couldn't eat animals they keep as pets
No point in balking at owt. If yer a dirty meat eater, lamb is no different to puppy. Just say no.
I misread your first sentence and was going to respond that I’m happy to taste owl.
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Technically you can eat any animal if you are not vegetarian or vegan provided it is not an endangered species and provided it was ideally killed in a relatively humane way.
Most Brits however would balk at eating dogs or cats or horses or hamsters, even if it was the local custom. They couldn't eat animals they keep as pets
Indeed. People are generally neophobic when it comes to new foods, but we are particularly so when it comes to novel meats, which tend to evoke a disgust response. See the work of Paul Rozin: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/sasalum/newsltr/fall97/rozin.html However, there is interpersonal variation: some people are more willing to eat novel meats than others. (Personally, I think horse is great. I can also recommend ostrich and kangaroo. Alligator was interesting.)
Elk is absolutely delicious. Croc is ok. Ostrich peasant. Didn’t like roo. Bear is nice in small doses. Snake “tastes like chicken”. Guinea pig is ageeable
I can now report that dog is tolerabe. Like chewy goose
I wouldn’t choose it on a menu but it was far from disgusting
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Technically you can eat any animal if you are not vegetarian or vegan provided it is not an endangered species and provided it was ideally killed in a relatively humane way.
Most Brits however would balk at eating dogs or cats or horses or hamsters, even if it was the local custom. They couldn't eat animals they keep as pets
Indeed. People are generally neophobic when it comes to new foods, but we are particularly so when it comes to novel meats, which tend to evoke a disgust response. See the work of Paul Rozin: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/sasalum/newsltr/fall97/rozin.html However, there is interpersonal variation: some people are more willing to eat novel meats than others. (Personally, I think horse is great. I can also recommend ostrich and kangaroo. Alligator was interesting.)
Ostrich was OK. It was the monkey gland sauce that put me off.
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.
So have I, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of people trying it on
There are some people trying it on, benefit fraud exists. However, we know tax fraud is bigger than benefit fraud. It’s people evading taxes that cost the nation more. Let’s focus our resources on them first.
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Technically you can eat any animal if you are not vegetarian or vegan provided it is not an endangered species and provided it was ideally killed in a relatively humane way.
Most Brits however would balk at eating dogs or cats or horses or hamsters, even if it was the local custom. They couldn't eat animals they keep as pets
No point in balking at owt. If yer a dirty meat eater, lamb is no different to puppy. Just say no.
Mrs PtP is a 'cute vegetarian'.
She does not eat cute animals, so rabbit, deer, and lamb is out. Beef and pork is ok though, because far from being cute, cows and pigs are ugly as well as stupid.
I think this original approach has something to be said it for it, and could perhaps be useful extended to other areas of life, and indeed death. I am, for example, against the death penalty, in principle, but perhaps a compromise in which only ugly and stupid murderers were executed would be acceptable.
What say you, PBers?
You need to convince her that rabbits are as brutal as Woundwort and as treacherous as Cowslip.
If anyone wonders why alt-right parties are hoovering up the vote now, let me give you an anecdotal example happening right now.
I’m seeing on the metro in Paris. Two clearly North African descent guys have gone their mobiles on full volume. After playing Middle Eastern music you could hear throughout the carriage, they have now switched to pro-Palestinian messaging. Everyone immediately around them left their seats to other parts of their carriage.
So we have the attitude of:
1. “f*ck you; we can do what we want and you can’t complain because we will start kicking off if you do”
2. “You are going to listen to whatever we want you to listen to”
3. “We don’t care if you find our Pro-Palestine and actually more anti-Jewish stuff offensive”
Still I am sure we will have @Foxy , @kinablu et al asking why people didn’t have their headphones in, other people do it as well etc etc
It’s not the first time I’ve seen this on the Paris metro this weekend.
I would absolutely hate that yet it wouldn't for a second make me think about voting for a far right nativist xenophobic political party. I guess I'm just a bit special.
Well, it's the tendentiousness of the racial angle that I balk at.
I can't stand loud music played in public places. I hate it when some idiot pulls up at the traffic lights with loud and (usually) dreadful music obliterating the senses of all around them. There a mindless despotism about it. Everyone has to endure their taste, albeit briefly, and there is nothing you can do about it.
I hate the bastards, but it has nothing to do with race.
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Technically you can eat any animal if you are not vegetarian or vegan provided it is not an endangered species and provided it was ideally killed in a relatively humane way.
Most Brits however would balk at eating dogs or cats or horses or hamsters, even if it was the local custom. They couldn't eat animals they keep as pets
Another occasion on which I was accused of lack of sympathy for animals was when one of our junior technicians in the hospital was seeking sympathy from the dispensary manager about her cat, which was apparently ill. “Don’t worry” he reassured her “animals are tough!”. I was passing and remarked “Only if you don’t cook them long enough!” I don’t think the technician ever spoke to me again unless absolutely necessary.
If anyone wonders why alt-right parties are hoovering up the vote now, let me give you an anecdotal example happening right now.
I’m seeing on the metro in Paris. Two clearly North African descent guys have gone their mobiles on full volume. After playing Middle Eastern music you could hear throughout the carriage, they have now switched to pro-Palestinian messaging. Everyone immediately around them left their seats to other parts of their carriage.
So we have the attitude of:
1. “f*ck you; we can do what we want and you can’t complain because we will start kicking off if you do”
2. “You are going to listen to whatever we want you to listen to”
3. “We don’t care if you find our Pro-Palestine and actually more anti-Jewish stuff offensive”
Still I am sure we will have @Foxy , @kinablu et al asking why people didn’t have their headphones in, other people do it as well etc etc
It’s not the first time I’ve seen this on the Paris metro this weekend.
I regard such behaviour as antisocial and obnoxious, and would also move carriage if it appeared to be too threatening to ask them to desist. Not sure why you cite me in your post.
I am not sure how you propose to alter such bad manners though. Gendarmerie in every Metro carriage seems a little impractical. Deportation of anyone who is too noisy? There won't be many football fans left, or nocturnal economy.
If anyone wonders why alt-right parties are hoovering up the vote now, let me give you an anecdotal example happening right now.
I’m seeing on the metro in Paris. Two clearly North African descent guys have gone their mobiles on full volume. After playing Middle Eastern music you could hear throughout the carriage, they have now switched to pro-Palestinian messaging. Everyone immediately around them left their seats to other parts of their carriage.
So we have the attitude of:
1. “f*ck you; we can do what we want and you can’t complain because we will start kicking off if you do”
2. “You are going to listen to whatever we want you to listen to”
3. “We don’t care if you find our Pro-Palestine and actually more anti-Jewish stuff offensive”
Still I am sure we will have @Foxy , @kinablu et al asking why people didn’t have their headphones in, other people do it as well etc etc
It’s not the first time I’ve seen this on the Paris metro this weekend.
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.)
According to this Denmark in 2020 spent:
$14,273 per student in primary education, $14,125 per student in secondary education and $23,432 per student in tertiary education.
Whereas the UK spends $12,513, $13,690 and $29,534.
So a bit less in the first years but more overall.
The UK also spends more than France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan among many others.
Tertiary education is universities, so all they are showing is the impact of student fees. At school (primary and secondary) we spend less. Teacher salaries and class sizes might be more informative metrics in any case.
University fees are paid for through tax on employment.
So effectively the country is choosing for a higher amount of its tax to go to universities than to education in younger years.
So it is a defined government objective to get "the numbers of international higher education students studying in the UK to 600,000 per year" and to get net migration down to tens of thousands. Whilst not mathematically incompatible, they are clearly practically incompatible.
Remedial maths for the cabinet please.
Student comes to the UK = immigrant Student leaves the UK = emigrant
Unless UK universities are continually expanding those numbers will net off.
Of course covid might have had an effect which is still working its way through.
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.
I think we're overlooking a rather basic point - the anonymity of the name "Reform". The well-informed people who enjoy doing online surveys know what it is, but in the hurly-burly of elections with hundreds of leaflets from the big parties, most people simply forget them. They have renamed themselves "the Reform and Brexit party" but that's cumbersome - they really need a distinctive and meaningful name that hoovers up the right-wing vote. Would "New Conservative Party" pass Electoral Commission scrutiny?
People say they’re racist, yet they’re inviting people to an R&B party!
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'.
I've noticed that you 'suspect' a lot of things, Richard, and they are rarely of a cheery nature.
On the other side of the scales he's always been unremitingly positive about the UK soft fruit situation.
Its gratifying that my work is so well remembered.
I'm sure you will also remember that I was shown to be right.
On a related note the 'no pigs in blankets' stories seem to be much reduced this year.
If anyone wonders why alt-right parties are hoovering up the vote now, let me give you an anecdotal example happening right now.
I’m seeing on the metro in Paris. Two clearly North African descent guys have gone their mobiles on full volume. After playing Middle Eastern music you could hear throughout the carriage, they have now switched to pro-Palestinian messaging. Everyone immediately around them left their seats to other parts of their carriage.
So we have the attitude of:
1. “f*ck you; we can do what we want and you can’t complain because we will start kicking off if you do”
2. “You are going to listen to whatever we want you to listen to”
3. “We don’t care if you find our Pro-Palestine and actually more anti-Jewish stuff offensive”
Still I am sure we will have @Foxy , @kinablu et al asking why people didn’t have their headphones in, other people do it as well etc etc
It’s not the first time I’ve seen this on the Paris metro this weekend.
I would absolutely hate that yet it wouldn't for a second make me think about voting for a far right nativist xenophobic political party. I guess I'm just a bit special.
Well, it's the tendentiousness of the racial angle that I balk at.
I can't stand loud music played in public places. I hate it when some idiot pulls up at the traffic lights with loud and (usually) dreadful music obliterating the senses of all around them. There a mindless despotism about it. Everyone has to endure their taste, albeit briefly, and there is nothing you can do about it.
I hate the bastards, but it has nothing to do with race.
Sounds more like a youth of today kind of issue.
Indeed it does imply a degree of assimilation because I doubt you’d get behaviour like that on a metro in Algiers (I speak from personal experience having taken the Algiers metro which is a very pleasant experience).
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Technically you can eat any animal if you are not vegetarian or vegan provided it is not an endangered species and provided it was ideally killed in a relatively humane way.
Most Brits however would balk at eating dogs or cats or horses or hamsters, even if it was the local custom. They couldn't eat animals they keep as pets
Indeed. People are generally neophobic when it comes to new foods, but we are particularly so when it comes to novel meats, which tend to evoke a disgust response. See the work of Paul Rozin: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/sasalum/newsltr/fall97/rozin.html However, there is interpersonal variation: some people are more willing to eat novel meats than others. (Personally, I think horse is great. I can also recommend ostrich and kangaroo. Alligator was interesting.)
Elk is absolutely delicious. Croc is ok. Ostrich peasant. Didn’t like roo. Bear is nice in small doses. Snake “tastes like chicken”. Guinea pig is ageeable
I can now report that dog is tolerabe. Like chewy goose
I wouldn’t choose it on a menu but it was far from disgusting
Hello Hombre
Audra Favor : I can't imagine eating a dog and not thinking anything of it. John Russell : You even been hungry, lady? Not just ready for supper. Hungry enough so that your belly swells? Audra Favor : I wouldn't care how hungry I got. I know I wouldn't eat one of those camp dogs. John Russell : You'd eat it. You'd fight for the bones, too. Audra Favor : Have you ever eaten a dog, Mr. Russell? John Russell : Eaten one and lived like one. Audra Favor : Dear me.
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.)
According to this Denmark in 2020 spent:
$14,273 per student in primary education, $14,125 per student in secondary education and $23,432 per student in tertiary education.
Whereas the UK spends $12,513, $13,690 and $29,534.
So a bit less in the first years but more overall.
The UK also spends more than France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan among many others.
Tertiary education is universities, so all they are showing is the impact of student fees. At school (primary and secondary) we spend less. Teacher salaries and class sizes might be more informative metrics in any case.
University fees are paid for through tax on employment.
So effectively the country is choosing for a higher amount of its tax to go to universities than to education in younger years.
So it is a defined government objective to get "the numbers of international higher education students studying in the UK to 600,000 per year" and to get net migration down to tens of thousands. Whilst not mathematically incompatible, they are clearly practically incompatible.
Remedial maths for the cabinet please.
Student comes to the UK = immigrant Student leaves the UK = emigrant
Unless UK universities are continually expanding those numbers will net off.
Of course covid might have had an effect which is still working its way through.
Both of those things are true. There is a COVID effect, which will work through, but UK universities are significantly expanding numbers of overseas students, as this is UK government policy (as above) for the next several years. (The policy goes up to 2030.)
But also, the more people on student visas, the more people who will end up falling in love and marrying a UK national, and the more people in a good position to go after a job and get a work visa, so there are additional knock on effects.
I’m all for this, but then part of my salary comes from teaching these overseas students.
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Technically you can eat any animal if you are not vegetarian or vegan provided it is not an endangered species and provided it was ideally killed in a relatively humane way.
Most Brits however would balk at eating dogs or cats or horses or hamsters, even if it was the local custom. They couldn't eat animals they keep as pets
Indeed. People are generally neophobic when it comes to new foods, but we are particularly so when it comes to novel meats, which tend to evoke a disgust response. See the work of Paul Rozin: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/sasalum/newsltr/fall97/rozin.html However, there is interpersonal variation: some people are more willing to eat novel meats than others. (Personally, I think horse is great. I can also recommend ostrich and kangaroo. Alligator was interesting.)
Elk is absolutely delicious. Croc is ok. Ostrich peasant. Didn’t like roo. Bear is nice in small doses. Snake “tastes like chicken”. Guinea pig is ageeable
I can now report that dog is tolerabe. Like chewy goose
I wouldn’t choose it on a menu but it was far from disgusting
How about humans? Would you eat them if nothing else was available? (cf. that plane crash where I think the survivors did?)
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Technically you can eat any animal if you are not vegetarian or vegan provided it is not an endangered species and provided it was ideally killed in a relatively humane way.
Most Brits however would balk at eating dogs or cats or horses or hamsters, even if it was the local custom. They couldn't eat animals they keep as pets
No point in balking at owt. If yer a dirty meat eater, lamb is no different to puppy. Just say no.
Mrs PtP is a 'cute vegetarian'.
She does not eat cute animals, so rabbit, deer, and lamb is out. Beef and pork is ok though, because far from being cute, cows and pigs are ugly as well as stupid.
I think this original approach has something to be said it for it, and could perhaps be useful extended to other areas of life, and indeed death. I am, for example, against the death penalty, in principle, but perhaps a compromise in which only ugly and stupid murderers were executed would be acceptable.
What say you, PBers?
The problem is, that logic would allow us to eat Civil Servants.
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.)
According to this Denmark in 2020 spent:
$14,273 per student in primary education, $14,125 per student in secondary education and $23,432 per student in tertiary education.
Whereas the UK spends $12,513, $13,690 and $29,534.
So a bit less in the first years but more overall.
The UK also spends more than France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan among many others.
Tertiary education is universities, so all they are showing is the impact of student fees. At school (primary and secondary) we spend less. Teacher salaries and class sizes might be more informative metrics in any case.
University fees are paid for through tax on employment.
So effectively the country is choosing for a higher amount of its tax to go to universities than to education in younger years.
So it is a defined government objective to get "the numbers of international higher education students studying in the UK to 600,000 per year" and to get net migration down to tens of thousands. Whilst not mathematically incompatible, they are clearly practically incompatible.
Remedial maths for the cabinet please.
Student comes to the UK = immigrant Student leaves the UK = emigrant
Unless UK universities are continually expanding those numbers will net off.
Of course covid might have had an effect which is still working its way through.
If anyone wonders why alt-right parties are hoovering up the vote now, let me give you an anecdotal example happening right now.
I’m seeing on the metro in Paris. Two clearly North African descent guys have gone their mobiles on full volume. After playing Middle Eastern music you could hear throughout the carriage, they have now switched to pro-Palestinian messaging. Everyone immediately around them left their seats to other parts of their carriage.
So we have the attitude of:
1. “f*ck you; we can do what we want and you can’t complain because we will start kicking off if you do”
2. “You are going to listen to whatever we want you to listen to”
3. “We don’t care if you find our Pro-Palestine and actually more anti-Jewish stuff offensive”
Still I am sure we will have @Foxy , @kinablu et al asking why people didn’t have their headphones in, other people do it as well etc etc
It’s not the first time I’ve seen this on the Paris metro this weekend.
I would absolutely hate that yet it wouldn't for a second make me think about voting for a far right nativist xenophobic political party. I guess I'm just a bit special.
Well, it's the tendentiousness of the racial angle that I balk at.
I can't stand loud music played in public places. I hate it when some idiot pulls up at the traffic lights with loud and (usually) dreadful music obliterating the senses of all around them. There a mindless despotism about it. Everyone has to endure their taste, albeit briefly, and there is nothing you can do about it.
I hate the bastards, but it has nothing to do with race.
Similarly, there was a French study that worked out that a loud motorcycle exhaust could wake over 10,000 Parisians in just one late night journey. Hence the introduction of noise radar and fines.
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Technically you can eat any animal if you are not vegetarian or vegan provided it is not an endangered species and provided it was ideally killed in a relatively humane way.
Most Brits however would balk at eating dogs or cats or horses or hamsters, even if it was the local custom. They couldn't eat animals they keep as pets
Indeed. People are generally neophobic when it comes to new foods, but we are particularly so when it comes to novel meats, which tend to evoke a disgust response. See the work of Paul Rozin: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/sasalum/newsltr/fall97/rozin.html However, there is interpersonal variation: some people are more willing to eat novel meats than others. (Personally, I think horse is great. I can also recommend ostrich and kangaroo. Alligator was interesting.)
Elk is absolutely delicious. Croc is ok. Ostrich peasant. Didn’t like roo. Bear is nice in small doses. Snake “tastes like chicken”. Guinea pig is ageeable
I can now report that dog is tolerabe. Like chewy goose
I wouldn’t choose it on a menu but it was far from disgusting
How about humans? Would you eat them if nothing else was available? (cf. that plane crash where I think the survivors did?)
Of course, if the alternative was starving to death. Not otherwise
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Technically you can eat any animal if you are not vegetarian or vegan provided it is not an endangered species and provided it was ideally killed in a relatively humane way.
Most Brits however would balk at eating dogs or cats or horses or hamsters, even if it was the local custom. They couldn't eat animals they keep as pets
Indeed. People are generally neophobic when it comes to new foods, but we are particularly so when it comes to novel meats, which tend to evoke a disgust response. See the work of Paul Rozin: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/sasalum/newsltr/fall97/rozin.html However, there is interpersonal variation: some people are more willing to eat novel meats than others. (Personally, I think horse is great. I can also recommend ostrich and kangaroo. Alligator was interesting.)
Elk is absolutely delicious. Croc is ok. Ostrich peasant. Didn’t like roo. Bear is nice in small doses. Snake “tastes like chicken”. Guinea pig is ageeable
I can now report that dog is tolerabe. Like chewy goose
I wouldn’t choose it on a menu but it was far from disgusting
How about humans? Would you eat them if nothing else was available? (cf. that plane crash where I think the survivors did?)
Ahaha, as I predicted. Reform vote share at the next election? Nah.
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Technically you can eat any animal if you are not vegetarian or vegan provided it is not an endangered species and provided it was ideally killed in a relatively humane way.
Most Brits however would balk at eating dogs or cats or horses or hamsters, even if it was the local custom. They couldn't eat animals they keep as pets
No point in balking at owt. If yer a dirty meat eater, lamb is no different to puppy. Just say no.
Mrs PtP is a 'cute vegetarian'.
She does not eat cute animals, so rabbit, deer, and lamb is out. Beef and pork is ok though, because far from being cute, cows and pigs are ugly as well as stupid.
I think this original approach has something to be said it for it, and could perhaps be useful extended to other areas of life, and indeed death. I am, for example, against the death penalty, in principle, but perhaps a compromise in which only ugly and stupid murderers were executed would be acceptable.
What say you, PBers?
The problem is, that logic would allow us to eat Civil Servants.
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.)
According to this Denmark in 2020 spent:
$14,273 per student in primary education, $14,125 per student in secondary education and $23,432 per student in tertiary education.
Whereas the UK spends $12,513, $13,690 and $29,534.
So a bit less in the first years but more overall.
The UK also spends more than France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan among many others.
Tertiary education is universities, so all they are showing is the impact of student fees. At school (primary and secondary) we spend less. Teacher salaries and class sizes might be more informative metrics in any case.
University fees are paid for through tax on employment.
So effectively the country is choosing for a higher amount of its tax to go to universities than to education in younger years.
So it is a defined government objective to get "the numbers of international higher education students studying in the UK to 600,000 per year" and to get net migration down to tens of thousands. Whilst not mathematically incompatible, they are clearly practically incompatible.
Remedial maths for the cabinet please.
Student comes to the UK = immigrant Student leaves the UK = emigrant
Unless UK universities are continually expanding those numbers will net off.
Of course covid might have had an effect which is still working its way through.
15-20% stay, so no they don't net off.
The figure I found in the last thread (or the one before?) was 13% and falling, but, yes, some stay.
Sad. He was a great character as well as a brilliant player in a brilliant Chelsea side.
Yes RIP. He created a real buzz as a coach with Malcolm Allison at Palace. South London Dynasty. Team of the Eighties. Never quite happened but it got the whole of Croydon rocking. Then that glorious Euro 96 summer. I was at the 'Gaza goal' match.
It always amazes me btw how quick Wiki are to change the "is" to a "was" when somebody dies. My FiL was a well known Malaysian politician and it happened when he died. Ten seconds later he was a 'was'. It made my wife's heart jump (although she did already know of course, she was there for it).
If anyone wonders why alt-right parties are hoovering up the vote now, let me give you an anecdotal example happening right now.
I’m seeing on the metro in Paris. Two clearly North African descent guys have gone their mobiles on full volume. After playing Middle Eastern music you could hear throughout the carriage, they have now switched to pro-Palestinian messaging. Everyone immediately around them left their seats to other parts of their carriage.
So we have the attitude of:
1. “f*ck you; we can do what we want and you can’t complain because we will start kicking off if you do”
2. “You are going to listen to whatever we want you to listen to”
3. “We don’t care if you find our Pro-Palestine and actually more anti-Jewish stuff offensive”
Still I am sure we will have @Foxy , @kinablu et al asking why people didn’t have their headphones in, other people do it as well etc etc
It’s not the first time I’ve seen this on the Paris metro this weekend.
I would absolutely hate that yet it wouldn't for a second make me think about voting for a far right nativist xenophobic political party. I guess I'm just a bit special.
Well, it's the tendentiousness of the racial angle that I balk at.
I can't stand loud music played in public places. I hate it when some idiot pulls up at the traffic lights with loud and (usually) dreadful music obliterating the senses of all around them. There a mindless despotism about it. Everyone has to endure their taste, albeit briefly, and there is nothing you can do about it.
I hate the bastards, but it has nothing to do with race.
Similarly, there was a French study that worked out that a loud motorcycle exhaust could wake over 10,000 Parisians in just one late night journey. Hence the introduction of noise radar and fines.
Well they haven’t worked
France is infested with loud motorbikes. Probably worse than the UK
If anyone wonders why alt-right parties are hoovering up the vote now, let me give you an anecdotal example happening right now.
I’m seeing on the metro in Paris. Two clearly North African descent guys have gone their mobiles on full volume. After playing Middle Eastern music you could hear throughout the carriage, they have now switched to pro-Palestinian messaging. Everyone immediately around them left their seats to other parts of their carriage.
So we have the attitude of:
1. “f*ck you; we can do what we want and you can’t complain because we will start kicking off if you do”
2. “You are going to listen to whatever we want you to listen to”
3. “We don’t care if you find our Pro-Palestine and actually more anti-Jewish stuff offensive”
Still I am sure we will have @Foxy , @kinablu et al asking why people didn’t have their headphones in, other people do it as well etc etc
It’s not the first time I’ve seen this on the Paris metro this weekend.
I would absolutely hate that yet it wouldn't for a second make me think about voting for a far right nativist xenophobic political party. I guess I'm just a bit special.
Well, it's the tendentiousness of the racial angle that I balk at.
I can't stand loud music played in public places. I hate it when some idiot pulls up at the traffic lights with loud and (usually) dreadful music obliterating the senses of all around them. There a mindless despotism about it. Everyone has to endure their taste, albeit briefly, and there is nothing you can do about it.
I hate the bastards, but it has nothing to do with race.
Similarly, there was a French study that worked out that a loud motorcycle exhaust could wake over 10,000 Parisians in just one late night journey. Hence the introduction of noise radar and fines.
French race tracks are going to down to 95dBA next year which is loud but not that loud. A normal streetbike is 89dBA. Mine is 107dBA. 🤘
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Technically you can eat any animal if you are not vegetarian or vegan provided it is not an endangered species and provided it was ideally killed in a relatively humane way.
Most Brits however would balk at eating dogs or cats or horses or hamsters, even if it was the local custom. They couldn't eat animals they keep as pets
Indeed. People are generally neophobic when it comes to new foods, but we are particularly so when it comes to novel meats, which tend to evoke a disgust response. See the work of Paul Rozin: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/sasalum/newsltr/fall97/rozin.html However, there is interpersonal variation: some people are more willing to eat novel meats than others. (Personally, I think horse is great. I can also recommend ostrich and kangaroo. Alligator was interesting.)
Elk is absolutely delicious. Croc is ok. Ostrich peasant. Didn’t like roo. Bear is nice in small doses. Snake “tastes like chicken”. Guinea pig is ageeable
I can now report that dog is tolerabe. Like chewy goose
I wouldn’t choose it on a menu but it was far from disgusting
How about humans? Would you eat them if nothing else was available? (cf. that plane crash where I think the survivors did?)
Of course, if the alternative was starving to death. Not otherwise
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.)
According to this Denmark in 2020 spent:
$14,273 per student in primary education, $14,125 per student in secondary education and $23,432 per student in tertiary education.
Whereas the UK spends $12,513, $13,690 and $29,534.
So a bit less in the first years but more overall.
The UK also spends more than France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan among many others.
Tertiary education is universities, so all they are showing is the impact of student fees. At school (primary and secondary) we spend less. Teacher salaries and class sizes might be more informative metrics in any case.
University fees are paid for through tax on employment.
So effectively the country is choosing for a higher amount of its tax to go to universities than to education in younger years.
So it is a defined government objective to get "the numbers of international higher education students studying in the UK to 600,000 per year" and to get net migration down to tens of thousands. Whilst not mathematically incompatible, they are clearly practically incompatible.
Remedial maths for the cabinet please.
Student comes to the UK = immigrant Student leaves the UK = emigrant
Unless UK universities are continually expanding those numbers will net off.
Of course covid might have had an effect which is still working its way through.
15-20% stay, so no they don't net off.
But presumably they don't stay as permanent students.
If they stay as workers then they come under a different category of migrant.
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.)
According to this Denmark in 2020 spent:
$14,273 per student in primary education, $14,125 per student in secondary education and $23,432 per student in tertiary education.
Whereas the UK spends $12,513, $13,690 and $29,534.
So a bit less in the first years but more overall.
The UK also spends more than France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan among many others.
Tertiary education is universities, so all they are showing is the impact of student fees. At school (primary and secondary) we spend less. Teacher salaries and class sizes might be more informative metrics in any case.
University fees are paid for through tax on employment.
So effectively the country is choosing for a higher amount of its tax to go to universities than to education in younger years.
So it is a defined government objective to get "the numbers of international higher education students studying in the UK to 600,000 per year" and to get net migration down to tens of thousands. Whilst not mathematically incompatible, they are clearly practically incompatible.
Remedial maths for the cabinet please.
Student comes to the UK = immigrant Student leaves the UK = emigrant
Unless UK universities are continually expanding those numbers will net off.
Of course covid might have had an effect which is still working its way through.
15-20% stay, so no they don't net off.
But presumably they don't stay as permanent students.
If they stay as workers then they come under a different category of migrant.
If anyone wonders why alt-right parties are hoovering up the vote now, let me give you an anecdotal example happening right now.
I’m seeing on the metro in Paris. Two clearly North African descent guys have gone their mobiles on full volume. After playing Middle Eastern music you could hear throughout the carriage, they have now switched to pro-Palestinian messaging. Everyone immediately around them left their seats to other parts of their carriage.
So we have the attitude of:
1. “f*ck you; we can do what we want and you can’t complain because we will start kicking off if you do”
2. “You are going to listen to whatever we want you to listen to”
3. “We don’t care if you find our Pro-Palestine and actually more anti-Jewish stuff offensive”
Still I am sure we will have @Foxy , @kinablu et al asking why people didn’t have their headphones in, other people do it as well etc etc
It’s not the first time I’ve seen this on the Paris metro this weekend.
The extremely pleasant young French woman with whom I had lunch here - works at a posh hotel - was openly and firmly Islamophobic
At the same time she was anti racist, and all that
Yet made an exception for Islam. What’s more she wasn’t afraid of openly saying it
Le pen has a lot of support in the young, of all classes
You must have got on like a house on fire. Any follow up?
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.
I think we're overlooking a rather basic point - the anonymity of the name "Reform". The well-informed people who enjoy doing online surveys know what it is, but in the hurly-burly of elections with hundreds of leaflets from the big parties, most people simply forget them. They have renamed themselves "the Reform and Brexit party" but that's cumbersome - they really need a distinctive and meaningful name that hoovers up the right-wing vote. Would "New Conservative Party" pass Electoral Commission scrutiny?
People say they’re racist, yet they’re inviting people to an R&B party!
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'.
I've noticed that you 'suspect' a lot of things, Richard, and they are rarely of a cheery nature.
Suspect the worst and you manage to lower expectations so reality will then seem to overperform in comparison
But I think I'm right here - there's been too much of what I term 'middle class regression', ie people doing less well than their parents did or they expected they would do themselves, and people will always look for an excuse.
There have been outside factors influencing that - globalisation, recession, covid - and will continue to do so.
But its difficult to use those as an excuse if other people you know are being more successful.
Well you've found an angle there, I'll give you that.
Let's do this matter of 'soft fruit' next time. I'm not familiar with it but I hear you own the topic and in a good way.
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.)
According to this Denmark in 2020 spent:
$14,273 per student in primary education, $14,125 per student in secondary education and $23,432 per student in tertiary education.
Whereas the UK spends $12,513, $13,690 and $29,534.
So a bit less in the first years but more overall.
The UK also spends more than France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan among many others.
Tertiary education is universities, so all they are showing is the impact of student fees. At school (primary and secondary) we spend less. Teacher salaries and class sizes might be more informative metrics in any case.
University fees are paid for through tax on employment.
So effectively the country is choosing for a higher amount of its tax to go to universities than to education in younger years.
So it is a defined government objective to get "the numbers of international higher education students studying in the UK to 600,000 per year" and to get net migration down to tens of thousands. Whilst not mathematically incompatible, they are clearly practically incompatible.
Remedial maths for the cabinet please.
Student comes to the UK = immigrant Student leaves the UK = emigrant
Unless UK universities are continually expanding those numbers will net off.
Of course covid might have had an effect which is still working its way through.
15-20% stay, so no they don't net off.
But presumably they don't stay as permanent students.
If they stay as workers then they come under a different category of migrant.
They're not migrating at that point though
The migration has already happened.
The process is either:
1a) Student migrates to UK and goes to UK university = +1 immigrant student 1b) Student finishes UK university and leaves UK = -1 immigrant student
net effect = zero
or:
2a) Student migrates to UK and goes to UK university = +1 immigrant student 2b) Student finishes UK university and get UK job = -1 immigrant student, +1 immigrant worker
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.)
According to this Denmark in 2020 spent:
$14,273 per student in primary education, $14,125 per student in secondary education and $23,432 per student in tertiary education.
Whereas the UK spends $12,513, $13,690 and $29,534.
So a bit less in the first years but more overall.
The UK also spends more than France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan among many others.
Tertiary education is universities, so all they are showing is the impact of student fees. At school (primary and secondary) we spend less. Teacher salaries and class sizes might be more informative metrics in any case.
University fees are paid for through tax on employment.
So effectively the country is choosing for a higher amount of its tax to go to universities than to education in younger years.
So it is a defined government objective to get "the numbers of international higher education students studying in the UK to 600,000 per year" and to get net migration down to tens of thousands. Whilst not mathematically incompatible, they are clearly practically incompatible.
Remedial maths for the cabinet please.
Student comes to the UK = immigrant Student leaves the UK = emigrant
Unless UK universities are continually expanding those numbers will net off.
Of course covid might have had an effect which is still working its way through.
So, since the flag is finally going to come down on by far the dullest year in F1 I can recall who will be the next British world champion. Russell or Norris? Or possibly even a last blast from Hamilton? I fear it will be a while although even Newey has to retire eventually.
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Technically you can eat any animal if you are not vegetarian or vegan provided it is not an endangered species and provided it was ideally killed in a relatively humane way.
Most Brits however would balk at eating dogs or cats or horses or hamsters, even if it was the local custom. They couldn't eat animals they keep as pets
Indeed. People are generally neophobic when it comes to new foods, but we are particularly so when it comes to novel meats, which tend to evoke a disgust response. See the work of Paul Rozin: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/sasalum/newsltr/fall97/rozin.html However, there is interpersonal variation: some people are more willing to eat novel meats than others. (Personally, I think horse is great. I can also recommend ostrich and kangaroo. Alligator was interesting.)
Elk is absolutely delicious. Croc is ok. Ostrich peasant. Didn’t like roo. Bear is nice in small doses. Snake “tastes like chicken”. Guinea pig is ageeable
I can now report that dog is tolerabe. Like chewy goose
I wouldn’t choose it on a menu but it was far from disgusting
How about humans? Would you eat them if nothing else was available? (cf. that plane crash where I think the survivors did?)
If I remember rightly from a Sunday supplement serialisation from very long ago, they had to air dry the meat to make it edible. Not sure if that’s +/-/neutral in the whole eating human flesh thing. Imagining it as Jamon Iberica might work.
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.
Didn't Anthony Bourdain set out to eat all types of animal? (I presume excluding humans) I remember reading a review of his book which said that he found mole the most disgusting.
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Technically you can eat any animal if you are not vegetarian or vegan provided it is not an endangered species and provided it was ideally killed in a relatively humane way.
Most Brits however would balk at eating dogs or cats or horses or hamsters, even if it was the local custom. They couldn't eat animals they keep as pets
No point in balking at owt. If yer a dirty meat eater, lamb is no different to puppy. Just say no.
Mrs PtP is a 'cute vegetarian'.
She does not eat cute animals, so rabbit, deer, and lamb is out. Beef and pork is ok though, because far from being cute, cows and pigs are ugly as well as stupid.
I think this original approach has something to be said it for it, and could perhaps be useful extended to other areas of life, and indeed death. I am, for example, against the death penalty, in principle, but perhaps a compromise in which only ugly and stupid murderers were executed would be acceptable.
What say you, PBers?
The problem is, that logic would allow us to eat Civil Servants.
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.)
According to this Denmark in 2020 spent:
$14,273 per student in primary education, $14,125 per student in secondary education and $23,432 per student in tertiary education.
Whereas the UK spends $12,513, $13,690 and $29,534.
So a bit less in the first years but more overall.
The UK also spends more than France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan among many others.
Tertiary education is universities, so all they are showing is the impact of student fees. At school (primary and secondary) we spend less. Teacher salaries and class sizes might be more informative metrics in any case.
University fees are paid for through tax on employment.
So effectively the country is choosing for a higher amount of its tax to go to universities than to education in younger years.
So it is a defined government objective to get "the numbers of international higher education students studying in the UK to 600,000 per year" and to get net migration down to tens of thousands. Whilst not mathematically incompatible, they are clearly practically incompatible.
Remedial maths for the cabinet please.
Student comes to the UK = immigrant Student leaves the UK = emigrant
Unless UK universities are continually expanding those numbers will net off.
Of course covid might have had an effect which is still working its way through.
Student comes to the UK.
Graduate gets a job in the UK.
Graduate brings extended family to UK, rinse and repeat
Interesting thread, thanks @Foxy. My guess is that Reform end up being like the Referendum Party in 1997.
In 1997 the Referendum Party and UKIP got only 3% combined, that was why Major's Tories still got 30.7% even with Labour on 43% under Blair.
Now however Sunak's Tories are down to just 26% with Opinium last night as Reform UK are on 8%, even if Starmer Labour is doing fractionally worse than New Labour did in 1997 on 42% and the LDs are only on 11% compared to 16% in 1997
Looking at the underlying data tables for the various poling companies, Omnisis/WeThink provide good breakdown by party as for each question they ask, they provide the split for each party.
In addition as they ask numerous questions on policy, it is possible to delve into the detail on the voters beliefs.
Friday's poll is not yet up on the website, but looking at the 17th November data sheet it would appear that Reform voters are mainly men, dislike Sunak, want more oil and gas, main concerns are immigration but not climate change. 40% think the Government should ignore the supreme court rulling on Rwanda (Conservatives on 20%), and they tend to think that Sunak's government is not right wing enough and sacking Braverman was a mistake.
What is the problem with me eating a dog? Get a fucking grip
It's no different to eating any animal. If you can eat a chicken, why can't you eat dog. Or cat. Or hamster. Or anything.
Technically you can eat any animal if you are not vegetarian or vegan provided it is not an endangered species and provided it was ideally killed in a relatively humane way.
Most Brits however would balk at eating dogs or cats or horses or hamsters, even if it was the local custom. They couldn't eat animals they keep as pets
Indeed. People are generally neophobic when it comes to new foods, but we are particularly so when it comes to novel meats, which tend to evoke a disgust response. See the work of Paul Rozin: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/sasalum/newsltr/fall97/rozin.html However, there is interpersonal variation: some people are more willing to eat novel meats than others. (Personally, I think horse is great. I can also recommend ostrich and kangaroo. Alligator was interesting.)
Elk is absolutely delicious. Croc is ok. Ostrich peasant. Didn’t like roo. Bear is nice in small doses. Snake “tastes like chicken”. Guinea pig is ageeable
I can now report that dog is tolerabe. Like chewy goose
I wouldn’t choose it on a menu but it was far from disgusting
How about humans? Would you eat them if nothing else was available? (cf. that plane crash where I think the survivors did?)
If it was that and survive, or not at all? Probably, yes.
Tbh, there's probably little ethically different from eating pig to dog, or horse to cow.
If anyone wonders why alt-right parties are hoovering up the vote now, let me give you an anecdotal example happening right now.
I’m seeing on the metro in Paris. Two clearly North African descent guys have gone their mobiles on full volume. After playing Middle Eastern music you could hear throughout the carriage, they have now switched to pro-Palestinian messaging. Everyone immediately around them left their seats to other parts of their carriage.
So we have the attitude of:
1. “f*ck you; we can do what we want and you can’t complain because we will start kicking off if you do”
2. “You are going to listen to whatever we want you to listen to”
3. “We don’t care if you find our Pro-Palestine and actually more anti-Jewish stuff offensive”
Still I am sure we will have @Foxy , @kinablu et al asking why people didn’t have their headphones in, other people do it as well etc etc
It’s not the first time I’ve seen this on the Paris metro this weekend.
I would absolutely hate that yet it wouldn't for a second make me think about voting for a far right nativist xenophobic political party. I guess I'm just a bit special.
Well, it's the tendentiousness of the racial angle that I balk at.
I can't stand loud music played in public places. I hate it when some idiot pulls up at the traffic lights with loud and (usually) dreadful music obliterating the senses of all around them. There a mindless despotism about it. Everyone has to endure their taste, albeit briefly, and there is nothing you can do about it.
I hate the bastards, but it has nothing to do with race.
Similarly, there was a French study that worked out that a loud motorcycle exhaust could wake over 10,000 Parisians in just one late night journey. Hence the introduction of noise radar and fines.
French race tracks are going to down to 95dBA next year which is loud but not that loud. A normal streetbike is 89dBA. Mine is 107dBA. 🤘
You've removed the silencer from your moped exhaust then?
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.)
According to this Denmark in 2020 spent:
$14,273 per student in primary education, $14,125 per student in secondary education and $23,432 per student in tertiary education.
Whereas the UK spends $12,513, $13,690 and $29,534.
So a bit less in the first years but more overall.
The UK also spends more than France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan among many others.
Tertiary education is universities, so all they are showing is the impact of student fees. At school (primary and secondary) we spend less. Teacher salaries and class sizes might be more informative metrics in any case.
University fees are paid for through tax on employment.
So effectively the country is choosing for a higher amount of its tax to go to universities than to education in younger years.
So it is a defined government objective to get "the numbers of international higher education students studying in the UK to 600,000 per year" and to get net migration down to tens of thousands. Whilst not mathematically incompatible, they are clearly practically incompatible.
Remedial maths for the cabinet please.
Student comes to the UK = immigrant Student leaves the UK = emigrant
Unless UK universities are continually expanding those numbers will net off.
Of course covid might have had an effect which is still working its way through.
Student comes to the UK.
Graduate gets a job in the UK.
One idea I have is for our universities is to set up outstations (outcolleges?) around the country aimed at the overseas student market.
We could have a little bit of Cambridge in Keighley and Oxford in Stockton.
Comments
I am reminded of the time I was stopped outside our local Co-op by two very attractive young ladies who were campaigning for some animal charity.
“Cat or dog” they asked me, obviously what sort of pet I preferred.
“Neither” I replied “Rabbit!”
“Oh, why?”
“Because you can eat rabbit!”
I am, apparently, a cruel, inhuman person, who is totally outside any concept of decency!
Maybe you could have thrown them even more by saying, 'pussy, because I can eat it?'
The individualised learning nonsense is a major part of the problem. In a resource rich environment it seems desirable but in the real world it seems an incredible waste of a teacher's valuable time. My sister spends hours ticking boxes and providing "evidence" that her pupils have attained certain standards. The vast majority of this rubbish is never looked at again.
And there is pretty much no quality control on it either. My son was being marked satisfactory on his reading skills but an external assessment could not find a reading age at all. He could memorise entire books, he couldn't read.
$14,273 per student in primary education, $14,125 per student in secondary education and $23,432 per student in tertiary education.
Whereas the UK spends $12,513, $13,690 and $29,534.
So a bit less in the first years but more overall.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/238733/expenditure-on-education-by-country/
The UK also spends more than France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan among many others.
Could any modern society cope with the loss of 33-40% of the population, in two years, as Europe did in 1347-49? That seems unlikely.
That said, the shocks of the GFC and Covid, and then the rise in prices, have been real enough.
Either way the Cons need to stop trying to ride two horses in different directions simultaneously. It just spreads a strong impression that they haven't got a clue what they are doing. They should pick a strategy and stick to it!
(Something similar the other way. Primary teacher plus TA with a class of 30 probably isn't optimal. Single teacher classes of 20 are probably better and probably affordable, but need fifty percent more classrooms.)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1973692/
Worth a watch!
I’m seeing on the metro in Paris. Two clearly North African descent guys have gone their mobiles on full volume. After playing Middle Eastern music you could hear throughout the carriage, they have now switched to pro-Palestinian messaging. Everyone immediately around them left their seats to other parts of their carriage.
So we have the attitude of:
1. “f*ck you; we can do what we want and you can’t complain because we will start kicking off if you do”
2. “You are going to listen to whatever we want you to listen to”
3. “We don’t care if you find our Pro-Palestine and actually more anti-Jewish stuff offensive”
Still I am sure we will have @Foxy , @kinablu et al asking why people didn’t have their headphones in, other people do it as well etc etc
It’s not the first time I’ve seen this on the Paris metro this weekend.
S Korea moved their entire book industry to a single municipality.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/25/books/south-korea-paju-books.html
One for the next trip.
They are probably more likely to return to the Conservatives than voters who have shifted from Tory in 2019 to Labour and LD (the only voters Rishi seems to have won back are a few LDs). However it may take election defeat and a new more rightwing Conservative leader in opposition for them to do so. In the meantime Rishi's best hope is to squeeze them a little and DKs in particular to try and get the Tories at least back to 30%+
So effectively the country is choosing for a higher amount of its tax to go to universities than to education in younger years.
The next general election will be the first time since 1997 (or arguably 2010) when both the main party leaders have been from the moderate wing of their party.
That means centrist swing voters could vote for either (but given 13 years of Tory rule will likely vote for change as they did in 1997 and 2010) but voters on the hard right or the hard left have parties to the left or right of Labour and the Tories of more significance than back then in the Greens or Reform to consider voting for
Most Brits however would balk at eating dogs or cats or horses or hamsters, even if it was the local custom. They couldn't eat animals they keep as pets
Found this as well
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/international-education-strategy-2021-update
So it is a defined government objective to get "the numbers of international higher education students studying in the UK to 600,000 per year" and to get net migration down to tens of thousands. Whilst not mathematically incompatible, they are clearly practically incompatible.
Remedial maths for the cabinet please.
Now however Sunak's Tories are down to just 26% with Opinium last night as Reform UK are on 8%, even if Starmer Labour is doing fractionally worse than New Labour did in 1997 on 42% and the LDs are only on 11% compared to 16% in 1997
But I think I'm right here - there's been too much of what I term 'middle class regression', ie people doing less well than their parents did or they expected they would do themselves, and people will always look for an excuse.
There have been outside factors influencing that - globalisation, recession, covid - and will continue to do so.
But its difficult to use those as an excuse if other people you know are being more successful.
She does not eat cute animals, so rabbit, deer, and lamb is out. Beef and pork is ok though, because far from being cute, cows and pigs are ugly as well as stupid.
I think this original approach has something to be said it for it, and could perhaps be useful extended to other areas of life, and indeed death. I am, for example, against the death penalty, in principle, but perhaps a compromise in which only ugly and stupid murderers were executed would be acceptable.
What say you, PBers?
At the same time she was anti racist, and all that
Yet made an exception for Islam. What’s more she wasn’t afraid of openly saying it
Le pen has a lot of support in the young, of all classes
I can now report that dog is tolerabe. Like chewy goose
I wouldn’t choose it on a menu but it was far from disgusting
I can't stand loud music played in public places. I hate it when some idiot pulls up at the traffic lights with loud and (usually) dreadful music obliterating the senses of all around them. There a mindless despotism about it. Everyone has to endure their taste, albeit briefly, and there is nothing you can do about it.
I hate the bastards, but it has nothing to do with race.
“Don’t worry” he reassured her “animals are tough!”.
I was passing and remarked “Only if you don’t cook them long enough!”
I don’t think the technician ever spoke to me again unless absolutely necessary.
I am not sure how you propose to alter such bad manners though. Gendarmerie in every Metro carriage seems a little impractical. Deportation of anyone who is too noisy? There won't be many football fans left, or nocturnal economy.
Student leaves the UK = emigrant
Unless UK universities are continually expanding those numbers will net off.
Of course covid might have had an effect which is still working its way through.
I'm sure you will also remember that I was shown to be right.
On a related note the 'no pigs in blankets' stories seem to be much reduced this year.
Indeed it does imply a degree of assimilation because I doubt you’d get behaviour like that on a metro in Algiers (I speak from personal experience having taken the Algiers metro which is a very pleasant experience).
Audra Favor : I can't imagine eating a dog and not thinking anything of it.
John Russell : You even been hungry, lady? Not just ready for supper. Hungry enough so that your belly swells?
Audra Favor : I wouldn't care how hungry I got. I know I wouldn't eat one of those camp dogs.
John Russell : You'd eat it. You'd fight for the bones, too.
Audra Favor : Have you ever eaten a dog, Mr. Russell?
John Russell : Eaten one and lived like one.
Audra Favor : Dear me.
But also, the more people on student visas, the more people who will end up falling in love and marrying a UK national, and the more people in a good position to go after a job and get a work visa, so there are additional knock on effects.
I’m all for this, but then part of my salary comes from teaching these overseas students.
You’d have to be quite strange to prefer to die
CANNIBALISM.
It always amazes me btw how quick Wiki are to change the "is" to a "was" when somebody dies. My FiL was a well known Malaysian politician and it happened when he died. Ten seconds later he was a 'was'. It made my wife's heart jump (although she did already know of course, she was there for it).
France is infested with loud motorbikes. Probably worse than the UK
When will they be abolished? They are hideous
If they stay as workers then they come under a different category of migrant.
I can imagine extremely religious people maybe feeling that way. Maybe. But who else?!
Eating people is not a great menu choice. But it the alternative is certain death then chuck another dead kid on the barbie
A more interesting dilemma is would you KILL someone else so as to eat them, if the alternative was death by starvation. I would
Let's do this matter of 'soft fruit' next time. I'm not familiar with it but I hear you own the topic and in a good way.
The process is either:
1a) Student migrates to UK and goes to UK university = +1 immigrant student
1b) Student finishes UK university and leaves UK = -1 immigrant student
net effect = zero
or:
2a) Student migrates to UK and goes to UK university = +1 immigrant student
2b) Student finishes UK university and get UK job = -1 immigrant student, +1 immigrant worker
net effect = +1 immigrant worker
Graduate gets a job in the UK.
Foreign national on work visa finds British citizen to marry. Home and hosed.
In addition as they ask numerous questions on policy, it is possible to delve into the detail on the voters beliefs.
https://www.omnisis.co.uk/poll-results
Friday's poll is not yet up on the website, but looking at the 17th November data sheet it would appear that Reform voters are mainly men, dislike Sunak, want more oil and gas, main concerns are immigration but not climate change. 40% think the Government should ignore the supreme court rulling on Rwanda (Conservatives on 20%), and they tend to think that Sunak's government is not right wing enough and sacking Braverman was a mistake.
https://www.omnisis.co.uk/media/1344/vi-061-report-tables-17-11-2023.xlsx
This does not suggest that they would be easily persuadeable to vote Conservative at the moment.
Tbh, there's probably little ethically different from eating pig to dog, or horse to cow.
Just what we're used to culturally.
We could have a little bit of Cambridge in Keighley and Oxford in Stockton.