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!
Reform And Brexit Independent Democrats.
I might replace Brexit with New Conservative there.
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?
Pigs are quite intelligent, as I understand.
As I see it the "ethics" are entirely contrived in people's minds, and not reasoned. And that in itself is only a luxury of being a wealthy and privileged society where foodstuffs are readily available and abundant.
Otherwise it would all rapidly go out the window and we'd all eat whatever we could get and think nothing more of it.
Net so far movement in the Labour lead in the 4 polls with fieldwork starting on the day of the Autumn Statement or later, compared to the previous pre-Autumn Statement poll from the same company: -4 +1 +3 -2
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.
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.
Just what we're used to culturally.
I believe there is a health risk in eating meat that is genetically closer to humans, obviously even worse with actual humans
Because we share parasites etc
Indeed that may be an evolutionary explanation for our emotional aversion to eating domestic pets who share living space. Perhaps they have co-evolved parasites with us?
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.
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.
There's already a campus of Teeside University in Stockton. Although it's probably less attractive to the overseas market than Oxbridge as it doesn't sell its degrees for money.
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?
Pigs are quite intelligent, as I understand.
As I see it the "ethics" are entirely contrived in people's minds, and not reasoned. And that in itself is only a luxury of being a wealthy and privileged society where foodstuffs are readily available and abundant.
Otherwise it would all rapidly go out the window and we'd all eat whatever we could get and think nothing more of it.
At this point one is tempted to mention the popularity of monkey brains in the Far East, but good taste and the ban hammer discourage me from doing so.
Is there anyone here who would rather die than survive via cannibalism?
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
If this is a serious call for 'feed'back I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt I wouldn't. Kill and eat, I mean. Nor would I help with the prep and cooking if somebody else had done the killing. Just eat, maybe, not sure, the situation would have to happen before I'd know. And I truly hope it doesn't.
Apologies if this has been commented before but it seems obvious from those polls that Sunak should not bother going after Refuk voters as he would lose more on his left than he gained from that.
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, in the face of disaster, in the past. Largely, I suspect, due
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.)
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.
Just what we're used to culturally.
I believe there is a health risk in eating meat that is genetically closer to humans, obviously even worse than actual humans
Because we share parasites etc
Indeed that may be an evolutionary explanation for our emotional aversion to eating domestic pets who share living space. Perhaps they have co-evolved parasites with us?
I dimly recall a ww2 prisoner of war speaking about the time they ate a cat. Apparently the meat was unpleasant and stringy, and they never repeated the exercise. As a rule, we eat herbivores who stand around all day, not carnivores who rush about the place (when not asleep).
Apologies if this has been commented before but it seems obvious from those polls that Sunak should not bother going after Refuk voters as he would lose more on his left than he gained from that.
Eh? You really think any of the 26% still voting Tory with Opinium yesterday are anything but diehard Tories? If they are still voting Tory even now they certainly aren't voting Labour or LD.
By contrast Opinium has 8% voting Reform, assuming most Labour and LD voters are not voting Tory under any circumstances at the next election anyway he needs to squeeze that 8% to get back over 30%
Is there anyone here who would rather die than survive via cannibalism?
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
If this is a serious call for 'feed'back I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt I wouldn't. Kill and eat, I mean. Nor would I help with the prep and cooking if somebody else had done the killing. Just eat, maybe, not sure, the situation would have to happen before I'd know. And I truly hope it doesn't.
Surely if you can get Just Eat there will be other things on the menu.
Net so far movement in the Labour lead in the 4 polls with fieldwork starting on the day of the Autumn Statement or later, compared to the previous pre-Autumn Statement poll from the same company: -4 +1 +3 -2
i.e. minimal change
Braverman sacking, calling Call me Dave, Labour rebellion, Autumn Statement... nothing seems to change the polls. The only movement is noise.
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.
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, in the face of disaster, in the past. Largely, I suspect, due
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?
Pigs are quite intelligent, as I understand.
As I see it the "ethics" are entirely contrived in people's minds, and not reasoned. And that in itself is only a luxury of being a wealthy and privileged society where foodstuffs are readily available and abundant.
Otherwise it would all rapidly go out the window and we'd all eat whatever we could get and think nothing more of it.
I suppose there is a function thing with domesticated animals, ie ones that have evolved through artificial selection to be used by humans.
Horses were evolved to be ridden, cows to be eaten, cats to be pets and hunt mice. Etc. So doing something that you didn’t evolve for becomes a taboo.
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.
There's already a campus of Teeside University in Stockton. Although it's probably less attractive to the overseas market than Oxbridge as it doesn't sell its degrees for money.
Sunderland Uni has a campus in London. Whether another Uni is needed In London is open to doubt. In my mind anyway.
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
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?
Pigs are quite intelligent, as I understand.
As I see it the "ethics" are entirely contrived in people's minds, and not reasoned. And that in itself is only a luxury of being a wealthy and privileged society where foodstuffs are readily available and abundant.
Otherwise it would all rapidly go out the window and we'd all eat whatever we could get and think nothing more of it.
At this point one is tempted to mention the popularity of monkey brains in the Far East, but good taste and the ban hammer discourage me from doing so.
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.
That's 60s Newman isn't it. Has a man ever looked better than that man at that time. Not for me.
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.
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, in the face of disaster, in the past. Largely, I suspect, due
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.
There's already a campus of Teeside University in Stockton. Although it's probably less attractive to the overseas market than Oxbridge as it doesn't sell its degrees for money.
When does Oxbridge sell degrees for money? It doesn't even have a small percentage of legacy students who are children of wealthy alumni like Harvard does
Apologies if this has been commented before but it seems obvious from those polls that Sunak should not bother going after Refuk voters as he would lose more on his left than he gained from that.
Eh? You really think any of the 26% still voting Tory with Opinium yesterday are anything but diehard Tories? If they are still voting Tory even now they certainly aren't voting Labour or LD.
By contrast Opinium has 8% voting Reform, assuming most Labour and LD voters are not voting Tory under any circumstances at the next election anyway he needs to squeeze that 8% to get back over 30%
I’m not sure we can be certain about this. There will still be a number of (particularly older) lifelong Tory voters who could be turned off by objectionable policies.
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?
Pigs are quite intelligent, as I understand.
As I see it the "ethics" are entirely contrived in people's minds, and not reasoned. And that in itself is only a luxury of being a wealthy and privileged society where foodstuffs are readily available and abundant.
Otherwise it would all rapidly go out the window and we'd all eat whatever we could get and think nothing more of it.
At this point one is tempted to mention the popularity of monkey brains in the Far East, but good taste and the ban hammer discourage me from doing so.
In the Far East, they eat them.
In this country, we elect them to the Senedd.
Monkey is one of those words that just sounds better in a (South) Welsh accent.
Reminds me of the “donkey pitch” in that surreal Wolf series set in Monmouthshire.
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.
There's already a campus of Teeside University in Stockton. Although it's probably less attractive to the overseas market than Oxbridge as it doesn't sell its degrees for money.
When does Oxbridge sell degrees for money? It doesn't even have a small percentage of legacy students who are children of wealthy alumni like Harvard does
(Even allowing for that, there's always been a great deal of cynicism about their degrees, especially at the lower end. Eric Hobsbawm said to get a pass at Cambridge when he worked there, you needed basically a purse and a pulse.)
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.
I suspect that's only because Gaza is colonizing the news.
Apologies if this has been commented before but it seems obvious from those polls that Sunak should not bother going after Refuk voters as he would lose more on his left than he gained from that.
Eh? You really think any of the 26% still voting Tory with Opinium yesterday are anything but diehard Tories? If they are still voting Tory even now they certainly aren't voting Labour or LD.
By contrast Opinium has 8% voting Reform, assuming most Labour and LD voters are not voting Tory under any circumstances at the next election anyway he needs to squeeze that 8% to get back over 30%
I’m not sure we can be certain about this. There will still be a number of (particularly older) lifelong Tory voters who could be turned off by objectionable policies.
Ie there are a lot of BigGs out there.
As long as Sunak doesn't go full Truss again the handful of BigGs will still vote Tory regardless with Sunak leader, if he doesn't squeeze the 8% of Reform voters he has no chance of getting back to the 30-35% the Conservatives were on before Boris resigned.
The NI tax cut hasn't got the Tories back there so more needed
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, in the face of disaster, in the past. Largely, I suspect, due
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?)
Very likely I’d eat anything, if I was starving.
We all would, surely
Death by starvation is, by all accounts, prolonged and hideous, it drives you senseless
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.
I suspect that's only because Gaza is colonizing the news.
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.
There's already a campus of Teeside University in Stockton. Although it's probably less attractive to the overseas market than Oxbridge as it doesn't sell its degrees for money.
When does Oxbridge sell degrees for money? It doesn't even have a small percentage of legacy students who are children of wealthy alumni like Harvard does
(Even allowing for that, there's always been a great deal of cynicism about their degrees, especially at the lower end. Eric Hobsbawm said to get a pass at Cambridge when he worked there, you needed basically a purse and a pulse.)
That MA is just an honorary one (and you have to have got a BA first) and to get a pass at any university in the country you need a pulse only, most graduate employers now however only look at those with 2.1s and 1sts and at a push 2.2s
Apologies if this has been commented before but it seems obvious from those polls that Sunak should not bother going after Refuk voters as he would lose more on his left than he gained from that.
Eh? You really think any of the 26% still voting Tory with Opinium yesterday are anything but diehard Tories? If they are still voting Tory even now they certainly aren't voting Labour or LD.
By contrast Opinium has 8% voting Reform, assuming most Labour and LD voters are not voting Tory under any circumstances at the next election anyway he needs to squeeze that 8% to get back over 30%
I’m not sure we can be certain about this. There will still be a number of (particularly older) lifelong Tory voters who could be turned off by objectionable policies.
Ie there are a lot of BigGs out there.
As long as Sunak doesn't go full Truss again the handful of BigGs will still vote Tory regardless with Sunak leader, if he doesn't squeeze the 8% of Reform voters he has no chance of getting back to the 30-35% the Conservatives were on before Boris resigned.
The NI tax cut hasn't got the Tories back there so more needed
Go for it!
Though in fact there is very little 'more' the Tories can do that will attract Reform voters back. Anything too extreme won't get through the HoC because One Nation Tories won't support 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.
Is there anyone here who would rather die than survive via cannibalism?
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
If this is a serious call for 'feed'back I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt I wouldn't. Kill and eat, I mean. Nor would I help with the prep and cooking if somebody else had done the killing. Just eat, maybe, not sure, the situation would have to happen before I'd know. And I truly hope it doesn't.
Surely if you can get Just Eat there will be other things on the menu.
🙂 Plus you never know with some of these fastfood outlets do you. Where's that new guy gone? He only started last week.
Apologies if this has been commented before but it seems obvious from those polls that Sunak should not bother going after Refuk voters as he would lose more on his left than he gained from that.
Eh? You really think any of the 26% still voting Tory with Opinium yesterday are anything but diehard Tories? If they are still voting Tory even now they certainly aren't voting Labour or LD.
By contrast Opinium has 8% voting Reform, assuming most Labour and LD voters are not voting Tory under any circumstances at the next election anyway he needs to squeeze that 8% to get back over 30%
I’m not sure we can be certain about this. There will still be a number of (particularly older) lifelong Tory voters who could be turned off by objectionable policies.
Ie there are a lot of BigGs out there.
As long as Sunak doesn't go full Truss again the handful of BigGs will still vote Tory regardless with Sunak leader, if he doesn't squeeze the 8% of Reform voters he has no chance of getting back to the 30-35% the Conservatives were on before Boris resigned.
The NI tax cut hasn't got the Tories back there so more needed
Go for it!
Though in fact there is very little 'more' the Tories can do that will attract Reform voters back. Anything too extreme won't get through the HoC because One Nation Tories won't support it.
The Tories have a majority of 80, reducing immigration, an immigration minimum salary of £35k - even £45k for example would certainly get through the Commons
Yeah, ChatGPT says starving to death is a load of old pants. I think most of us would eat dog, horse, mole, freshly dead human air crash victims, to avoid this:
Initial Response to Lack of Food: When the body first experiences a lack of food, it starts using stored glucose and fat for energy. People might feel hunger pangs and may become irritable or lose concentration.
Ketosis and Fatigue: As fat reserves are used up, the body enters a state called ketosis, where it starts to break down fats more aggressively to produce energy. This can lead to a temporary feeling of less hunger, but also causes extreme fatigue, weakness, and dizziness.
Muscle and Tissue Breakdown: As the starvation continues, the body begins to consume its own muscle and tissue for energy. This leads to severe muscle wasting and loss of strength. The heart, being a muscular organ, can also weaken, which may lead to heart-related complications.
Immune System Suppression: Starvation severely weakens the immune system, making the body more susceptible to infections and illnesses.
Vitamin and Mineral Deficiencies: Lack of essential vitamins and minerals can lead to various deficiency diseases, affecting vision, bone health, and blood coagulation, among other functions.
Neurological Effects: Starvation can lead to changes in mental state, including apathy, confusion, and even hallucinations or delirium in severe cases.
Organ Failure and Death: Ultimately, prolonged starvation leads to the failure of vital organs like the heart, liver, and kidneys. This process is typically very painful, as the body is essentially consuming itself to try to stay alive.
Psychological Pain: In addition to physical pain, the psychological torment of starvation, including the constant experience of hunger and the awareness of bodily deterioration, contributes to the overall suffering.
Net so far movement in the Labour lead in the 4 polls with fieldwork starting on the day of the Autumn Statement or later, compared to the previous pre-Autumn Statement poll from the same company: -4 +1 +3 -2
i.e. minimal change
Braverman sacking, calling Call me Dave, Labour rebellion, Autumn Statement... nothing seems to change the polls. The only movement is noise.
That was pretty true from GE 2017 into early 2019. Remarkable stability that collapsed that summer in Brexit crisis and May's departure.
So things can change suddenly, but I think 2019 was an exceptional year and not likely to see such wild shifts in 2024.
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.
Just what we're used to culturally.
It's because we often form relationships with horses and dogs. Far less so with cows or pigs (although it can happen).
Net so far movement in the Labour lead in the 4 polls with fieldwork starting on the day of the Autumn Statement or later, compared to the previous pre-Autumn Statement poll from the same company: -4 +1 +3 -2
i.e. minimal change
Braverman sacking, calling Call me Dave, Labour rebellion, Autumn Statement... nothing seems to change the polls. The only movement is noise.
That was pretty true from GE 2017 into early 2019. Remarkable stability that collapsed that summer in Brexit crisis and May's departure.
So things can change suddenly, but I think 2019 was an exceptional year and not likely to see such wild shifts in 2024.
A brave prediction in the Crazy 2020s. My hunch is that further chaos is coming down the line. We will not revert to the mean
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.
It's not incompatable at all. If 600k students arrive and 600k leave every year I'm cool with that. What I'm not cool with is if it's just a route to dodge normal visa requirements, so they come and never leave.
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.
There's already a campus of Teeside University in Stockton. Although it's probably less attractive to the overseas market than Oxbridge as it doesn't sell its degrees for money.
When does Oxbridge sell degrees for money? It doesn't even have a small percentage of legacy students who are children of wealthy alumni like Harvard does
(Even allowing for that, there's always been a great deal of cynicism about their degrees, especially at the lower end. Eric Hobsbawm said to get a pass at Cambridge when he worked there, you needed basically a purse and a pulse.)
That MA is just an honorary one (and you have to have got a BA first) and to get a pass at any university in the country you need a pulse only, most graduate employers now however only look at those with 2.1s and 1sts and at a push 2.2s
Undergrad degrees, sure.
One year post-grad courses... Not so sure. And that's where the money is for universities.
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?
Pigs are quite intelligent, as I understand.
As I see it the "ethics" are entirely contrived in people's minds, and not reasoned. And that in itself is only a luxury of being a wealthy and privileged society where foodstuffs are readily available and abundant.
Otherwise it would all rapidly go out the window and we'd all eat whatever we could get and think nothing more of it.
The prevalence of vegetarianism in India, which for large parts of its history has not been wealthy and privileged, nor where foodstuffs have always been abundant, suggests that you are wrong and that ethics are very powerful.
Similarly the rarity of canabalism during famines suggests that the vast majority choose death over cannibalism.
Net so far movement in the Labour lead in the 4 polls with fieldwork starting on the day of the Autumn Statement or later, compared to the previous pre-Autumn Statement poll from the same company: -4 +1 +3 -2
i.e. minimal change
Braverman sacking, calling Call me Dave, Labour rebellion, Autumn Statement... nothing seems to change the polls. The only movement is noise.
That was pretty true from GE 2017 into early 2019. Remarkable stability that collapsed that summer in Brexit crisis and May's departure.
So things can change suddenly, but I think 2019 was an exceptional year and not likely to see such wild shifts in 2024.
A brave prediction in the Crazy 2020s. My hunch is that further chaos is coming down the line. We will not revert to the mean
Sure, there will be events, but what that would magic up a Tory recovery in the next 6 or 12 months?
A change of leader possibly, but seems neither likely nor a sure fire cure of the Tory malaise.
Is there anyone here who would rather die than survive via cannibalism?
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
Kryten : I beg you to reconsider, Sir. Human history is resplendent with examples of such sacrifice. Remember Captain Oates: "I'm going out for a walk. I may be some time."
Rimmer : Yes, but the thing is, about Captain Oates; the thing you have to remember about Captain Oates; Captain Oates... Captain Oates was a prat. If that'd been me, I'd've stayed in the tent, whacked Scott over the head with a frozen husky, and then eaten him.
Lister : You would too, wouldn't you?
Rimmer : History, Lister, is written by the winners. How do we know that Oates went out for this legendary walk? From the only surviving document: Scott's diary. And he's hardly likely to have written down, "February the First, bludgeoned Oates to death while he slept, then scoffed him along with the last packet of instant mash." How's that going to look when he gets rescued, eh? No, much better to say, "Oates made the supreme sacrifice," while you're dabbing up his gravy with the last piece of crusty bread.
I didn't know that was his age. It always comes as a surprise. You see them on telly and think they are ageless, and then - wham - they're not and they die.
Yeah, ChatGPT says starving to death is a load of old pants. I think most of us would eat dog, horse, mole, freshly dead human air crash victims, to avoid this:
Initial Response to Lack of Food: When the body first experiences a lack of food, it starts using stored glucose and fat for energy. People might feel hunger pangs and may become irritable or lose concentration.
Ketosis and Fatigue: As fat reserves are used up, the body enters a state called ketosis, where it starts to break down fats more aggressively to produce energy. This can lead to a temporary feeling of less hunger, but also causes extreme fatigue, weakness, and dizziness.
Muscle and Tissue Breakdown: As the starvation continues, the body begins to consume its own muscle and tissue for energy. This leads to severe muscle wasting and loss of strength. The heart, being a muscular organ, can also weaken, which may lead to heart-related complications.
Immune System Suppression: Starvation severely weakens the immune system, making the body more susceptible to infections and illnesses.
Vitamin and Mineral Deficiencies: Lack of essential vitamins and minerals can lead to various deficiency diseases, affecting vision, bone health, and blood coagulation, among other functions.
Neurological Effects: Starvation can lead to changes in mental state, including apathy, confusion, and even hallucinations or delirium in severe cases.
Organ Failure and Death: Ultimately, prolonged starvation leads to the failure of vital organs like the heart, liver, and kidneys. This process is typically very painful, as the body is essentially consuming itself to try to stay alive.
Psychological Pain: In addition to physical pain, the psychological torment of starvation, including the constant experience of hunger and the awareness of bodily deterioration, contributes to the overall suffering.
Imagine inflicting that on several million people.
Ukrainians gathered in Lviv to commemorate victims of the Holodomor genocide committed by the Soviet Union on 25 November
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?
Pigs are quite intelligent, as I understand.
As I see it the "ethics" are entirely contrived in people's minds, and not reasoned. And that in itself is only a luxury of being a wealthy and privileged society where foodstuffs are readily available and abundant.
Otherwise it would all rapidly go out the window and we'd all eat whatever we could get and think nothing more of it.
The prevalence of vegetarianism in India, which for large parts of its history has not been wealthy and privileged, nor where foodstuffs have always been abundant, suggests that you are wrong and that ethics are very powerful.
Similarly the rarity of canabalism during famines suggests that the vast majority choose death over cannibalism.
I fear a 'Woke v AntiWoke' schism might be opening up on this topic of cannibalism.
I'm with you btw. I don't think it's any sort of slam dunk that someone would go that route.
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.
There's already a campus of Teeside University in Stockton. Although it's probably less attractive to the overseas market than Oxbridge as it doesn't sell its degrees for money.
When does Oxbridge sell degrees for money? It doesn't even have a small percentage of legacy students who are children of wealthy alumni like Harvard does
(Even allowing for that, there's always been a great deal of cynicism about their degrees, especially at the lower end. Eric Hobsbawm said to get a pass at Cambridge when he worked there, you needed basically a purse and a pulse.)
That MA is just an honorary one (and you have to have got a BA first) and to get a pass at any university in the country you need a pulse only, most graduate employers now however only look at those with 2.1s and 1sts and at a push 2.2s
95 per cent of Oxford degrees are 1sts or 2.1s. 95 per cent.
Net so far movement in the Labour lead in the 4 polls with fieldwork starting on the day of the Autumn Statement or later, compared to the previous pre-Autumn Statement poll from the same company: -4 +1 +3 -2
i.e. minimal change
Braverman sacking, calling Call me Dave, Labour rebellion, Autumn Statement... nothing seems to change the polls. The only movement is noise.
That was pretty true from GE 2017 into early 2019. Remarkable stability that collapsed that summer in Brexit crisis and May's departure.
So things can change suddenly, but I think 2019 was an exceptional year and not likely to see such wild shifts in 2024.
The next big change is likely to come if as is likely Labour form the next government.
Most governments in the west are behind in the polls at the moment as cost of living and inflation remains an issue.
Net so far movement in the Labour lead in the 4 polls with fieldwork starting on the day of the Autumn Statement or later, compared to the previous pre-Autumn Statement poll from the same company: -4 +1 +3 -2
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?
Pigs are quite intelligent, as I understand.
As I see it the "ethics" are entirely contrived in people's minds, and not reasoned. And that in itself is only a luxury of being a wealthy and privileged society where foodstuffs are readily available and abundant.
Otherwise it would all rapidly go out the window and we'd all eat whatever we could get and think nothing more of it.
The prevalence of vegetarianism in India, which for large parts of its history has not been wealthy and privileged, nor where foodstuffs have always been abundant, suggests that you are wrong and that ethics are very powerful.
Similarly the rarity of canabalism during famines suggests that the vast majority choose death over cannibalism.
Except, the majority of Indians are not vegetarian.
You just like to be right, and for me to be wrong; even though, sadly, it's almost always precisely the other way round.
Net so far movement in the Labour lead in the 4 polls with fieldwork starting on the day of the Autumn Statement or later, compared to the previous pre-Autumn Statement poll from the same company: -4 +1 +3 -2
i.e. minimal change
Braverman sacking, calling Call me Dave, Labour rebellion, Autumn Statement... nothing seems to change the polls. The only movement is noise.
That was pretty true from GE 2017 into early 2019. Remarkable stability that collapsed that summer in Brexit crisis and May's departure.
So things can change suddenly, but I think 2019 was an exceptional year and not likely to see such wild shifts in 2024.
A brave prediction in the Crazy 2020s. My hunch is that further chaos is coming down the line. We will not revert to the mean
Sure, there will be events, but what that would magic up a Tory recovery in the next 6 or 12 months?
A change of leader possibly, but seems neither likely nor a sure fire cure of the Tory malaise.
On the other hand, remember where the Conservatives were in 2019- a landslide to last a decade.
Or in 2021. Still ahead mid term.
And now... Only losing half their seats would be pretty good going. Isn't that crazy enough?
(OK, I expected it to end like this sometime, and suddenly too. The seeds of the disaster were there in the triumph, and con tricks often collapse very rapidly. But it's still bonkers, when you stop and think )
Yeah, ChatGPT says starving to death is a load of old pants. I think most of us would eat dog, horse, mole, freshly dead human air crash victims, to avoid this:
Initial Response to Lack of Food: When the body first experiences a lack of food, it starts using stored glucose and fat for energy. People might feel hunger pangs and may become irritable or lose concentration.
Ketosis and Fatigue: As fat reserves are used up, the body enters a state called ketosis, where it starts to break down fats more aggressively to produce energy. This can lead to a temporary feeling of less hunger, but also causes extreme fatigue, weakness, and dizziness.
Muscle and Tissue Breakdown: As the starvation continues, the body begins to consume its own muscle and tissue for energy. This leads to severe muscle wasting and loss of strength. The heart, being a muscular organ, can also weaken, which may lead to heart-related complications.
Immune System Suppression: Starvation severely weakens the immune system, making the body more susceptible to infections and illnesses.
Vitamin and Mineral Deficiencies: Lack of essential vitamins and minerals can lead to various deficiency diseases, affecting vision, bone health, and blood coagulation, among other functions.
Neurological Effects: Starvation can lead to changes in mental state, including apathy, confusion, and even hallucinations or delirium in severe cases.
Organ Failure and Death: Ultimately, prolonged starvation leads to the failure of vital organs like the heart, liver, and kidneys. This process is typically very painful, as the body is essentially consuming itself to try to stay alive.
Psychological Pain: In addition to physical pain, the psychological torment of starvation, including the constant experience of hunger and the awareness of bodily deterioration, contributes to the overall suffering.
Imagine inflicting that on several million people.
Ukrainians gathered in Lviv to commemorate victims of the Holodomor genocide committed by the Soviet Union on 25 November
So do a fair few tankies over here. There were a fair few posts on Twitter the other day stating the Holodomor was a genocide, or even that it was particularly bad. Unsurprisingly, one of these was very keen to state that Israel was performing atrocities in Gaza, and had another post about 'Ukrainian Nazis',
Net so far movement in the Labour lead in the 4 polls with fieldwork starting on the day of the Autumn Statement or later, compared to the previous pre-Autumn Statement poll from the same company: -4 +1 +3 -2
i.e. minimal change
Give it time....
I come back to the idea of “where will the votes come from”?
The Conservatives seem to have a “flexible floor” of about 26% - they go below that by screwing up worse than usual, but bounce back after a short time.
The Lib Dem’s are going to get 10% or so.
The more you look at it, the more it looks like Labour are on their maximum practicable vote.
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?
Pigs are quite intelligent, as I understand.
As I see it the "ethics" are entirely contrived in people's minds, and not reasoned. And that in itself is only a luxury of being a wealthy and privileged society where foodstuffs are readily available and abundant.
Otherwise it would all rapidly go out the window and we'd all eat whatever we could get and think nothing more of it.
The prevalence of vegetarianism in India, which for large parts of its history has not been wealthy and privileged, nor where foodstuffs have always been abundant, suggests that you are wrong and that ethics are very powerful.
Similarly the rarity of canabalism during famines suggests that the vast majority choose death over cannibalism.
Except, the majority of Indians are not vegetarian.
You just like to be right, and for me to be wrong; even though, sadly, it's almost always precisely the other way round.
I did not say that the majority of Indians are vegetarian, just that vegetarianism is resistant to poverty and food scarcity if a strong ethical belief.
You just like to attack imaginary opinions and positions. Classic straw-manning.
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?
Pigs are quite intelligent, as I understand.
As I see it the "ethics" are entirely contrived in people's minds, and not reasoned. And that in itself is only a luxury of being a wealthy and privileged society where foodstuffs are readily available and abundant.
Otherwise it would all rapidly go out the window and we'd all eat whatever we could get and think nothing more of it.
The prevalence of vegetarianism in India, which for large parts of its history has not been wealthy and privileged, nor where foodstuffs have always been abundant, suggests that you are wrong and that ethics are very powerful.
Similarly the rarity of canabalism during famines suggests that the vast majority choose death over cannibalism.
I'd have to pretty far gone to murder someone and then eat them. Probably couldn't do it. Non human animals on the other hand would be fair game, even as a vegan. In a developed country, I can choose not to eat animal products for all sorts of health/ethical reasons. Once Waitrose disappears after the nuclear apocalypse, then we're back to hunter/gatherer mode, where you're either predator or prey. I'd probably last a week.
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?
Pigs are quite intelligent, as I understand.
As I see it the "ethics" are entirely contrived in people's minds, and not reasoned. And that in itself is only a luxury of being a wealthy and privileged society where foodstuffs are readily available and abundant.
Otherwise it would all rapidly go out the window and we'd all eat whatever we could get and think nothing more of it.
The prevalence of vegetarianism in India, which for large parts of its history has not been wealthy and privileged, nor where foodstuffs have always been abundant, suggests that you are wrong and that ethics are very powerful.
Similarly the rarity of canabalism during famines suggests that the vast majority choose death over cannibalism.
Except, the majority of Indians are not vegetarian.
You just like to be right, and for me to be wrong; even though, sadly, it's almost always precisely the other way round.
I did not say that the majority of Indians are vegetarian, just that vegetarianism is resistant to poverty and food scarcity if a strong ethical belief.
You just like to attack imaginary opinions and positions. Classic straw-manning.
It must hurt for you to be this wrong about everything, all the time.
On topic, good piece, somewhat ruined by the dogwhistle racism prejudice at the end.
In this thread I have made the argument that I don't think racial prejudice is the principal driver of the REFUK polling.
Once again you are misrepresenting my views.
You wanted to 'nod nod, wink wink' intimate at the end that all RefUk voters are secret racists because that makes it all much easier to accommodate within your pre-formed world view.
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?
Pigs are quite intelligent, as I understand.
As I see it the "ethics" are entirely contrived in people's minds, and not reasoned. And that in itself is only a luxury of being a wealthy and privileged society where foodstuffs are readily available and abundant.
Otherwise it would all rapidly go out the window and we'd all eat whatever we could get and think nothing more of it.
The prevalence of vegetarianism in India, which for large parts of its history has not been wealthy and privileged, nor where foodstuffs have always been abundant, suggests that you are wrong and that ethics are very powerful.
Similarly the rarity of canabalism during famines suggests that the vast majority choose death over cannibalism.
Except, the majority of Indians are not vegetarian.
You just like to be right, and for me to be wrong; even though, sadly, it's almost always precisely the other way round.
I did not say that the majority of Indians are vegetarian, just that vegetarianism is resistant to poverty and food scarcity if a strong ethical belief.
You just like to attack imaginary opinions and positions. Classic straw-manning.
It must hurt for you to be this wrong about everything, all the time.
@Foxy must be the most boring, dreary, tedious and joyless individuals on here. And that's saying something.
Also, he NEVER SEEMS TO DO ANY WORK.
I can just imagine his shifts at Leicester General Hospital: "Oh, Dr. 'Fox', would you mind awfully coming any checking up on that patient? Please? It's just you’ve been in your office for over 2 hours and he really needs to see you before the end of your shift.", "Oh, umm... yeah. Sorry, give me a minute... sorry 10 minutes. I've just got to update this admin record. Again."
*Fruitlessly types his entirely predictable and banal bilge into Vanilla once more*
Net so far movement in the Labour lead in the 4 polls with fieldwork starting on the day of the Autumn Statement or later, compared to the previous pre-Autumn Statement poll from the same company: -4 +1 +3 -2
i.e. minimal change
Give it time....
I come back to the idea of “where will the votes come from”?
The Conservatives seem to have a “flexible floor” of about 26% - they go below that by screwing up worse than usual, but bounce back after a short time.
The Lib Dem’s are going to get 10% or so.
The more you look at it, the more it looks like Labour are on their maximum practicable vote.
@Foxy must be the most boring, dreary, tedious and joyless individuals on here. And that's saying something.
Also, he NEVER SEEMS TO DO ANY WORK.
I can just imagine his shifts at Leicester General Hospital: "Oh, Dr. 'Fox', would you mind awfully coming any checking up on that patient? Please? It's just you’ve been in your office for over 2 hours and he really needs to see you before the end of your shift.", "Oh, umm... yeah. Sorry, give me a minute... sorry 10 minutes. I've just got to update this admin record. Again."
*Fruitlessly types his entirely predictable and banal bilge into Vanilla once more*
Foxy..42055 Casino...53584 Why the personal attack?
I agree that the polling suggests that the Reform UK vote in 2024 will be significantly higher than that of the Brexit Party in 2019 and that few of their current supporters will be tempted back into the Conservative fold. Their disillusionment with Sunak's Conservatives is in marked contrast with their liking for Johnson in 2019, and there is no policy imperative equivalent to delivery of Brexit to tempt them back against their better judgement.
What has gone unremarked though is that the emergence of Reform will also help unravel the bias in the UK electoral system towards the Conservatives, which based on UNS would currently give the Conservatives a disproportionately greater share of seats compared to Labour when the parties are polling similar vote shares. It's not just that Reform will peel off Conservative votes in general, it's the fact that they will do so with added effect in the seats that really matter if Labour is to achieve a majority.
The reason is this. In 2019 the Brexit Party averaged around 4% in the seats it did contest, but 0% in Conservative held seats all of which it chose not to contest. Let's say that Reform averages 6% in 2024. If that 6% is spread fairly evenly, that would be a 2% increase in the seats which Labour lost for the first time in 2019, and a 6% increase in the 2019 Conservative held seats. Almost all of that increase would be at the expense of the Conservatives' previous vote share.
If Labour is to achieve a majority, rather than just a hung parliament, it will need to go beyond willing back the "Red Wall" seats which the Conservatives won in 2019. Most of those Red Wall seats are now regarded by Labour as relatively low hanging fruit unless the Conservatives manage to close most of the national poll deficit. Although the Conservative majority in many is substantial, it comes from Labour voters who only gave up on the party in 2019 when Corbyn was at his nadir, and who will be easier to tempt back than lifelong Conservatives. To get a majority in 2024, Labour will need to go beyond the Red Wall and achieve victories in many of the seats (or their successors following boundary changes) which the Conservatives first won from Labour in 2017 or 2015. The likes of Walsall North, Broxtowe, Thurrock for example. In that sort of seat the presence of a Reform/Brexit Party candidate for the first time would really damage the Conservatives' chances, by comparison with the 2019 Red Wall successor seats where the Brexit Party stood previously.
I think this a perceptive observation, that the fairly even distribution of REFUK voters geographically does negate some of the Conservative advantage in FPTP. In this it could play a role similar to the Referendum Party in 1997, which I recall gave New Labour an additional 20 or so seats.
It is also true that REFUK voting could also duplicate the Referendum Party by catalysing the Conservatives into similar hard line positions further down the line.
The Referendum Party did ultimately get their Referendum, albeit 2 decades later.
@Foxy must be the most boring, dreary, tedious and joyless individuals on here. And that's saying something.
Also, he NEVER SEEMS TO DO ANY WORK.
I can just imagine his shifts at Leicester General Hospital: "Oh, Dr. 'Fox', would you mind awfully coming any checking up on that patient? Please? It's just you’ve been in your office for over 2 hours and he really needs to see you before the end of your shift.", "Oh, umm... yeah. Sorry, give me a minute... sorry 10 minutes. I've just got to update this admin record. Again."
*Fruitlessly types his entirely predictable and banal bilge into Vanilla once more*
What was it the Blessed Margaret said about personal attacks?
On topic, good piece, somewhat ruined by the dogwhistle racism prejudice at the end.
In this thread I have made the argument that I don't think racial prejudice is the principal driver of the REFUK polling.
Once again you are misrepresenting my views.
You wanted to 'nod nod, wink wink' intimate at the end that all RefUk voters are secret racists because that makes it all much easier to accommodate within your pre-formed world view.
We can all read you like a book.
Your regular use of "we", when promoting your own opinions, is somewhat tedious.
@Foxy must be the most boring, dreary, tedious and joyless individuals on here. And that's saying something.
Also, he NEVER SEEMS TO DO ANY WORK.
I can just imagine his shifts at Leicester General Hospital: "Oh, Dr. 'Fox', would you mind awfully coming any checking up on that patient? Please? It's just you’ve been in your office for over 2 hours and he really needs to see you before the end of your shift.", "Oh, umm... yeah. Sorry, give me a minute... sorry 10 minutes. I've just got to update this admin record. Again."
*Fruitlessly types his entirely predictable and banal bilge into Vanilla once more*
Foxy..42055 Casino...53584 Why the personal attack?
He agrees with me. It is time for this war to end, and for us to advise Ukraine that sacrificing another 200,000 young people. - this time often women - is just a really really bad idea. Sure, they can do it, but it’s not going to get them very far. Sadly
On topic, good piece, somewhat ruined by the dogwhistle racism prejudice at the end.
In this thread I have made the argument that I don't think racial prejudice is the principal driver of the REFUK polling.
Once again you are misrepresenting my views.
You wanted to 'nod nod, wink wink' intimate at the end that all RefUk voters are secret racists because that makes it all much easier to accommodate within your pre-formed world view.
We can all read you like a book.
You clearly didn't read my comment at 0919 this morning, which I repost here for your convenience:
He agrees with me. It is time for this war to end, and for us to advise Ukraine that sacrificing another 200,000 young people. - this time often women - is just a really really bad idea. Sure, they can do it, but it’s not going to get them very far. Sadly
Dom Cummings Russian years have never been adequately explained have they?
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?
Pigs are quite intelligent, as I understand.
As I see it the "ethics" are entirely contrived in people's minds, and not reasoned. And that in itself is only a luxury of being a wealthy and privileged society where foodstuffs are readily available and abundant.
Otherwise it would all rapidly go out the window and we'd all eat whatever we could get and think nothing more of it.
The prevalence of vegetarianism in India, which for large parts of its history has not been wealthy and privileged, nor where foodstuffs have always been abundant, suggests that you are wrong and that ethics are very powerful.
Similarly the rarity of canabalism during famines suggests that the vast majority choose death over cannibalism.
There are plenty of accounts of cannibalism during famines such as the Holodomor, the Siege of Leningrad, the Chinese Famine of 1958-61, this century’s North Korean famine, the Mongol conquest of Northern China, the famines that hit Northern Europe from 1310- 20.
The fact that quite often, the people who did it faced execution, means the incidence is likely to be underrecorded.
He agrees with me. It is time for this war to end, and for us to advise Ukraine that sacrificing another 200,000 young people. - this time often women - is just a really really bad idea. Sure, they can do it, but it’s not going to get them very far. Sadly
If your analysis chimes with his, that merely provides further evidence that you're wrong.
He agrees with me. It is time for this war to end, and for us to advise Ukraine that sacrificing another 200,000 young people. - this time often women - is just a really really bad idea. Sure, they can do it, but it’s not going to get them very far. Sadly
“Fighting to the last Ukrainian” is one of the most dishonest expressions that Putin’s shills, like Cummings, Hitchens and Douglas Macgegor come up with.
He agrees with me. It is time for this war to end, and for us to advise Ukraine that sacrificing another 200,000 young people. - this time often women - is just a really really bad idea. Sure, they can do it, but it’s not going to get them very far. Sadly
Dom Cummings Russian years have never been adequately explained have they?
Oh FFS
Even a blinkered silly person like you can see the war is going badly for Ukraine. Worse, there is now no realistic route to victory. It’s tragic, I wish they’d won, I wish Putin had fallen, but it hasn’t turned out that way
An armistice now would save 100,000s of lives on both sides
I get the opinion of people like @rcs1000 who think we must support Ukraine as long as they want to fight, but perhaps - also - a candid friend and ally can advise when discretion is the better part of valour
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?
Pigs are quite intelligent, as I understand.
As I see it the "ethics" are entirely contrived in people's minds, and not reasoned. And that in itself is only a luxury of being a wealthy and privileged society where foodstuffs are readily available and abundant.
Otherwise it would all rapidly go out the window and we'd all eat whatever we could get and think nothing more of it.
The prevalence of vegetarianism in India, which for large parts of its history has not been wealthy and privileged, nor where foodstuffs have always been abundant, suggests that you are wrong and that ethics are very powerful.
Similarly the rarity of canabalism during famines suggests that the vast majority choose death over cannibalism.
There are plenty of accounts of cannibalism during famines such as the Holodomor, the Siege of Leningrad, the Chinese Famine of 1958-61, this century’s North Korean famine, the Mongol conquest of Northern China, the famines that hit Northern Europe from 1310- 20.
The fact that quite often, the people who did it faced execution, means the incidence is likely to be underrecorded.
It certainly has happened in many famines in many cultures and times, but does seem a pretty rare phenomenon.
He agrees with me. It is time for this war to end, and for us to advise Ukraine that sacrificing another 200,000 young people. - this time often women - is just a really really bad idea. Sure, they can do it, but it’s not going to get them very far. Sadly
Dom Cummings Russian years have never been adequately explained have they?
Oh FFS
Even a blinkered silly person like you can see the war is going badly for Ukraine. Worse, there is now no realistic route to victory. It’s tragic, I wish they’d won, I wish Putin had fallen, but it hasn’t turned out that way
An armistice now would save 100,000s of lives on both sides
I get the opinion of people like @rcs1000 who think we must support Ukraine as long as they want to fight, but perhaps - also - a candid friend and ally can advise when discretion is the better part of valour
If Putin were to demand Odessa and the rest of the Black Sea coast as the price for peace, would you give it to him?
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.
That's 60s Newman isn't it. Has a man ever looked better than that man at that time. Not for me.
It is. He was looking pretty good, and coming out with some great lines too. The movie my Dad & I love most.
[Hunt] spoke as if getting more out of the economy was a novel idea that had never occurred to anyone before, but his is the 12th growth plan the Tories have fanfared since 2010, which makes it one for almost every year they have been in power.
Osbornite austerity, sporadic interventionism during the May days, Johnsonian Brexit boosterism, the self-destructing experiment of Liz Truss, each of these was presented as the road to nirvana. Yet Britain still finds itself trudging through the dark valley of grim growth and high taxes while living standards have taken a horrible beating. It is true that many of the advanced economies have been struggling to significantly improve their productivity ...Yet Britain has performed worse than most of its peers in critical respects.
Bad decision-making explains some of this. So does the repellent way our politics has been conducted. Investors, both domestic and international, prefer a predictable environment to a chaotic one. This has been an era of Tory instability. Five prime ministers since 2010, seven chancellors and nine business secretaries.
There is wide agreement that Mr Hunt did announce some useful reforms to encourage investment and speed up economically beneficial projects. Against that, the chancellor added a drag to growth by declaring a cash freeze in government investment spending.
Labour’s emphasis on growth is smart and welcome, but a lot of question marks hover over whether Sir Keir and Ms Reeves can pass the tests the Conservatives have flunked. Labour is now putting a lot of weight on generating growth from planning reforms designed to accelerate housebuilding and the construction of critical infrastructure. That and refashioning government to become “an agile state” working in partnership with trades unions and business. I get a bit of a sense of deja vu about that too.
A Labour government will be handed a nation with miserable productivity, emasculated public services, big debts, high tax levels and acute inequalities. The ultimate success or otherwise of a Labour government will be determined above all else by whether it can deliver a more vigorous economy. You could even call it Sir Keir’s holy grail. His government will fail if the quest for growth eludes him as dismally as it has the Tories.
This is exactly the problem for StarmerLabour. If they really do want to get us out of the current muddle, structural reform is needed, and there will be winners and losers. At the moment, Starmer and Reeves are petrified of giving the impression that anything controversial will happen in a Labour government (beyond perhaps the planning reform piece). I get it from an electoral standpoint, but they are going to be confronted with a lot of challenges when governing, and failure to be honest upfront may cost them. Either that, or they stick their heads in the sand and carry on with the status quo, which would be very bad for our country.
Interesting times ahead.
Either they man (person) up, once in power, and take some bold but unpopular decisions to put our country onto a different path, or they triangulate and duck and weave and we find ourselves suffering another five wasted years.
He agrees with me. It is time for this war to end, and for us to advise Ukraine that sacrificing another 200,000 young people. - this time often women - is just a really really bad idea. Sure, they can do it, but it’s not going to get them very far. Sadly
“Fighting to the last Ukrainian” is one of the most dishonest expressions that Putin’s shills, like Cummings, Hitchens and Douglas Macgegor come up with.
It’s concern-trolling.
Explain to me how Ukraine can realistically win, from here
Otherwise your remarks are just bloviating belligerence from the safety of the UK. It’s not your compatriots dying in their thousands, for nothing
He agrees with me. It is time for this war to end, and for us to advise Ukraine that sacrificing another 200,000 young people. - this time often women - is just a really really bad idea. Sure, they can do it, but it’s not going to get them very far. Sadly
Dom Cummings Russian years have never been adequately explained have they?
Oh FFS
Even a blinkered silly person like you can see the war is going badly for Ukraine. Worse, there is now no realistic route to victory. It’s tragic, I wish they’d won, I wish Putin had fallen, but it hasn’t turned out that way
An armistice now would save 100,000s of lives on both sides
I get the opinion of people like @rcs1000 who think we must support Ukraine as long as they want to fight, but perhaps - also - a candid friend and ally can advise when discretion is the better part of valour
If the war is going badly for Ukraine, then it is going disastrously for Russia. Something, for whatever reason, you seem to ignore. Fiscally, militarily, and reputationally; Russia is a diminished state. Putin has squandered two decades of plenty on an iniquitous vanity project.
What's so remarkable about women being in the front line? A lot of the front line these days is flying drones. Much of the rest is driving around artillery which is self loading. These don't require physical strength, I don't see any obvious male advantage.
OTOH the last few days have seen the heaviest attacks on Kyiv for the entire year. The theory that Russia is running out of rockets or logistics looks ever more tattered. It is just not happening. The Ukrainians are fortunate that the Russians have thrown away so much at Avdiivka. If they had not they may well have been finishing this year the stronger of the two. As it is they both look pretty punch drunk.
He agrees with me. It is time for this war to end, and for us to advise Ukraine that sacrificing another 200,000 young people. - this time often women - is just a really really bad idea. Sure, they can do it, but it’s not going to get them very far. Sadly
Dom Cummings Russian years have never been adequately explained have they?
Oh FFS
Even a blinkered silly person like you can see the war is going badly for Ukraine. Worse, there is now no realistic route to victory. It’s tragic, I wish they’d won, I wish Putin had fallen, but it hasn’t turned out that way
An armistice now would save 100,000s of lives on both sides
I get the opinion of people like @rcs1000 who think we must support Ukraine as long as they want to fight, but perhaps - also - a candid friend and ally can advise when discretion is the better part of valour
If Putin were to demand Odessa and the rest of the Black Sea coast as the price for peace, would you give it to him?
Absolutely not, because it is clear Ukraine CAN defend territory gained or possessed. The problem is this is true of both sides
The war has degraded to a terrible conflict of attrition where whoever is defending has the easy upper hand and attack is horribly expensive in lives - and doesn’t work
Ukraine discovered that in its counter offensive June-November, Russia is relearning that in Advidka
A Korean style armistice - a frozen war - seems the only to save another 209,000 wasted young lives
He agrees with me. It is time for this war to end, and for us to advise Ukraine that sacrificing another 200,000 young people. - this time often women - is just a really really bad idea. Sure, they can do it, but it’s not going to get them very far. Sadly
“Fighting to the last Ukrainian” is one of the most dishonest expressions that Putin’s shills, like Cummings, Hitchens and Douglas Macgegor come up with.
It’s concern-trolling.
Explain to me how Ukraine can realistically win, from here
Otherwise your remarks are just bloviating belligerence from the safety of the UK. It’s not your compatriots dying in their thousands, for nothing
I’m not running their military campaign.
Explain how Ukraine can achieve peace with a power that has shown no desire for peace, other than to surrender at discretion.
You may think Ukrainians are wiser to surrender at discretion, than to fight, but that is their decision to make, not yours.
He agrees with me. It is time for this war to end, and for us to advise Ukraine that sacrificing another 200,000 young people. - this time often women - is just a really really bad idea. Sure, they can do it, but it’s not going to get them very far. Sadly
“Fighting to the last Ukrainian” is one of the most dishonest expressions that Putin’s shills, like Cummings, Hitchens and Douglas Macgegor come up with.
It’s concern-trolling.
Explain to me how Ukraine can realistically win, from here
Otherwise your remarks are just bloviating belligerence from the safety of the UK. It’s not your compatriots dying in their thousands, for nothing
The recent report that Ukrainian men were seeking to leave their country to avoid military service suggested to me that things were not going well. The problem is of course that Putin is likely to regard peace, or even ceasefire, suggestions as tantamount to surrender.
What's so remarkable about women being in the front line? A lot of the front line these days is flying drones. Much of the rest is driving around artillery which is self loading. These don't require physical strength, I don't see any obvious male advantage.
OTOH the last few days have seen the heaviest attacks on Kyiv for the entire year. The theory that Russia is running out of rockets or logistics looks ever more tattered. It is just not happening. The Ukrainians are fortunate that the Russians have thrown away so much at Avdiivka. If they had not they may well have been finishing this year the stronger of the two. As it is they both look pretty punch drunk.
The Russian attack was entirely of Iranian drones. Basically very big model aircraft - that were nearly all shot down.
It’s come a long way from the Russians having lots of real missiles to throw.
Comments
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/25/they-feel-they-are-being-neglected-why-voters-turned-to-dutch-trump-geert-wilders
As I see it the "ethics" are entirely contrived in people's minds, and not reasoned. And that in itself is only a luxury of being a wealthy and privileged society where foodstuffs are readily available and abundant.
Otherwise it would all rapidly go out the window and we'd all eat whatever we could get and think nothing more of it.
-4
+1
+3
-2
i.e. minimal change
Because we share parasites etc
Indeed that may be an evolutionary explanation for our emotional aversion to eating domestic pets who share living space. Perhaps they have co-evolved parasites with us?
By contrast Opinium has 8% voting Reform, assuming most Labour and LD voters are not voting Tory under any circumstances at the next election anyway he needs to squeeze that 8% to get back over 30%
Setting up the campus in the City of London maximises costs.
Horses were evolved to be ridden, cows to be eaten, cats to be pets and hunt mice. Etc. So doing something that you didn’t evolve for becomes a taboo.
No chance of them coming back unless and until Labour get into government and inflation goes up again, along with taxes and growth falls
In this country, we elect them to the Senedd.
Ie there are a lot of BigGs out there.
Reminds me of the “donkey pitch” in that surreal Wolf series set in Monmouthshire.
(Even allowing for that, there's always been a great deal of cynicism about their degrees, especially at the lower end. Eric Hobsbawm said to get a pass at Cambridge when he worked there, you needed basically a purse and a pulse.)
The NI tax cut hasn't got the Tories back there so more needed
Death by starvation is, by all accounts, prolonged and hideous, it drives you senseless
99% of us would eat anything to avoid it
Though in fact there is very little 'more' the Tories can do that will attract Reform voters back. Anything too extreme won't get through the HoC because One Nation Tories won't support it.
Furious council leaders warn chancellor that austerity measures could force ‘flagship blue counties’ to go bankrupt
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/nov/26/jeremy-hunt-budget-cuts-chancellor-threat-flagship-councils-england-bankrupt
The Tory party has hated local government for decades.
Initial Response to Lack of Food: When the body first experiences a lack of food, it starts using stored glucose and fat for energy. People might feel hunger pangs and may become irritable or lose concentration.
Ketosis and Fatigue: As fat reserves are used up, the body enters a state called ketosis, where it starts to break down fats more aggressively to produce energy. This can lead to a temporary feeling of less hunger, but also causes extreme fatigue, weakness, and dizziness.
Muscle and Tissue Breakdown: As the starvation continues, the body begins to consume its own muscle and tissue for energy. This leads to severe muscle wasting and loss of strength. The heart, being a muscular organ, can also weaken, which may lead to heart-related complications.
Immune System Suppression: Starvation severely weakens the immune system, making the body more susceptible to infections and illnesses.
Vitamin and Mineral Deficiencies: Lack of essential vitamins and minerals can lead to various deficiency diseases, affecting vision, bone health, and blood coagulation, among other functions.
Neurological Effects: Starvation can lead to changes in mental state, including apathy, confusion, and even hallucinations or delirium in severe cases.
Organ Failure and Death: Ultimately, prolonged starvation leads to the failure of vital organs like the heart, liver, and kidneys. This process is typically very painful, as the body is essentially consuming itself to try to stay alive.
Psychological Pain: In addition to physical pain, the psychological torment of starvation, including the constant experience of hunger and the awareness of bodily deterioration, contributes to the overall suffering.
So things can change suddenly, but I think 2019 was an exceptional year and not likely to see such wild shifts in 2024.
What I'm not cool with is if it's just a route to dodge normal visa requirements, so they come and never leave.
One year post-grad courses... Not so sure. And that's where the money is for universities.
Well, they were told to become more businesslike.
Similarly the rarity of canabalism during famines suggests that the vast majority choose death over cannibalism.
A change of leader possibly, but seems neither likely nor a sure fire cure of the Tory malaise.
Rimmer : Yes, but the thing is, about Captain Oates; the thing you have to remember about Captain Oates; Captain Oates... Captain Oates was a prat. If that'd been me, I'd've stayed in the tent, whacked Scott over the head with a frozen husky, and then eaten him.
Lister : You would too, wouldn't you?
Rimmer : History, Lister, is written by the winners. How do we know that Oates went out for this legendary walk? From the only surviving document: Scott's diary. And he's hardly likely to have written down, "February the First, bludgeoned Oates to death while he slept, then scoffed him along with the last packet of instant mash." How's that going to look when he gets rescued, eh? No, much better to say, "Oates made the supreme sacrifice," while you're dabbing up his gravy with the last piece of crusty bread.
Ukrainians gathered in Lviv to commemorate victims of the Holodomor genocide committed by the Soviet Union on 25 November
Soviet authorities attempted to cover up the Holodomor, and Russia continues to deny it today
https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1728630659151753460
I'm with you btw. I don't think it's any sort of slam dunk that someone would go that route.
Most governments in the west are behind in the polls at the moment as cost of living and inflation remains an issue.
Remember despite only getting 29% at the 2010 general election under Brown by May 2011, just a year later, Ed Miliband's Labour was on 40% with Yougov and 38% with Opinium as the Coalition battled with the economy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2015_United_Kingdom_general_election
You just like to be right, and for me to be wrong; even though, sadly, it's almost always precisely the other way round.
Or in 2021. Still ahead mid term.
And now... Only losing half their seats would be pretty good going. Isn't that crazy enough?
(OK, I expected it to end like this sometime, and suddenly too. The seeds of the disaster were there in the triumph, and con tricks often collapse very rapidly. But it's still bonkers, when you stop and think )
People are weird.
The Conservatives seem to have a “flexible floor” of about 26% - they go below that by screwing up worse than usual, but bounce back after a short time.
The Lib Dem’s are going to get 10% or so.
The more you look at it, the more it looks like Labour are on their maximum practicable vote.
You just like to attack imaginary opinions and positions. Classic straw-manning.
"Ten ways to wreck a country
How the Tories bungled their way through 13 years of government.
By Ivor Crewe"
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2023/11/british-politics-conservatives-ineptitude
Non human animals on the other hand would be fair game, even as a vegan. In a developed country, I can choose not to eat animal products for all sorts of health/ethical reasons. Once Waitrose disappears after the nuclear apocalypse, then we're back to hunter/gatherer mode, where you're either predator or prey. I'd probably last a week.
Once again you are misrepresenting my views.
The Tories since Thatcher have been toxic to local government.
I feel sorry for you.
We can all read you like a book.
Also, he NEVER SEEMS TO DO ANY WORK.
I can just imagine his shifts at Leicester General Hospital: "Oh, Dr. 'Fox', would you mind awfully coming any checking up on that patient? Please? It's just you’ve been in your office for over 2 hours and he really needs to see you before the end of your shift.", "Oh, umm... yeah. Sorry, give me a minute... sorry 10 minutes. I've just got to update this admin record. Again."
*Fruitlessly types his entirely predictable and banal bilge into Vanilla once more*
Casino...53584
Why the personal attack?
It is also true that REFUK voting could also duplicate the Referendum Party by catalysing the Conservatives into similar hard line positions further down the line.
The Referendum Party did ultimately get their Referendum, albeit 2 decades later.
Concorde: The Race for Supersonic
The true story of the battle to build the world's first supersonic airliner. A tale of genius, Cold War espionage, and an whole new kind of jet plane.
https://www.channel4.com/programmes/concorde-the-race-for-supersonic
“US (+barking UK) will fight RUS to the last Ukrainian.
That includes Ukrainian women?
Videos already show trenches defended by UKR women soldiers?
Early in war UKR boasted a "million man" army.
>>100k casualties in order for them to resort to conscripting women now?
🤔🎈🐒”
https://x.com/hsu_steve/status/1728111711075344793?s=61&t=GGp3Vs1t1kTWDiyA-odnZg
He agrees with me. It is time for this war to end, and for us to advise Ukraine that sacrificing another 200,000 young people. - this time often women - is just a really really bad idea. Sure, they can do it, but it’s not going to get them very far. Sadly
20.
The fact that quite often, the people who did it faced execution, means the incidence is likely to be underrecorded.
https://twitter.com/JNkappers/status/1728768058423157227?t=KJtXkyypNhLBvnCaj3WuSA&s=19
It’s concern-trolling.
Even a blinkered silly person like you can see the war is going badly for Ukraine. Worse, there is now no realistic route to victory. It’s tragic, I wish they’d won, I wish Putin had fallen, but it hasn’t turned out that way
An armistice now would save 100,000s of lives on both sides
I get the opinion of people like @rcs1000 who think we must support Ukraine as long as they want to fight, but perhaps - also - a candid friend and ally can advise when discretion is the better part of valour
Otherwise your remarks are just bloviating belligerence from the safety of the UK. It’s not your compatriots dying in their thousands, for nothing
OTOH the last few days have seen the heaviest attacks on Kyiv for the entire year. The theory that Russia is running out of rockets or logistics looks ever more tattered. It is just not happening. The Ukrainians are fortunate that the Russians have thrown away so much at Avdiivka. If they had not they may well have been finishing this year the stronger of the two. As it is they both look pretty punch drunk.
The war has degraded to a terrible conflict of attrition where whoever is defending has the easy upper hand and attack is horribly expensive in lives - and doesn’t work
Ukraine discovered that in its counter offensive June-November, Russia is relearning that in Advidka
A Korean style armistice - a frozen war - seems the only to save another 209,000 wasted young lives
Explain how Ukraine can achieve peace with a power that has shown no desire for peace, other than to surrender at discretion.
You may think Ukrainians are wiser to surrender at discretion, than to fight, but that is their decision to make, not yours.
The problem is of course that Putin is likely to regard peace, or even ceasefire, suggestions as tantamount to surrender.
It’s come a long way from the Russians having lots of real missiles to throw.