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#NU10K – politicalbetting.com
#NU10K – politicalbetting.com
“In order to save space the word esquire has not been added to any name, though of course such should be added in every ease when no inconsistent addition is affixed.” – Kelly’s Handbook to the Upper Ten Thousand, 1875
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It's the groupthink, lack of accountability and integrity that's the issue and I think that's more of a structural and values problem.
We have been growing somewhat slower than the rest of the UK for some time but we seem to have reached a tipping point where firms that were just holding on have fallen over, possibly as a consequence of higher interest rates. Our industrial base, never strong in recent times, is fading whilst our public sector continues to grow. The consequences of economic mismanagement on an epic scale are being brought home to us. It is a very sad state of affairs that is not getting nearly enough attention.
What evidence does the writer have that any of his "NU10k" have had any training by Common Cause?
Paula Vennells has the look of a human shield to protect the political classes from nearly 30 years of political ineptitude and disinterest.
You have skipped an important point: their religious faith. The old Upper Ten Thousand had to be observant Church of England, at least ostensibly, with perhaps a few token Jews and Catholics
The NU10K have to be Woke; that is their belief system, which similarly binds them together
https://commonpurpose.org/what-we-do
I have no idea about any connection between that organisation and NU10k, but the blurb on their website is remarkably similar to the bollocks spouted in the civil service.
In principle, people should be able to make mistakes and start again. If that were not so we would end up with almost no decisions made at all. But the reluctance to accept that gross mismanagement requires gross consequences for the individual is very marked in much of our society and not just in the public sector either.
Open up the appointment process to more parliamentary and public scrutiny. If people are applying for extremely highly paid public roles, they must expect to have to sacrifice their privacy to some extent, just as many other people in the public eye have to.
Strengthen criminal sanctions again conspiracies to conceal wrongdoing in public bodies.
I'm on a major committee for an organisation and they keep going on about it to demonstrate their commitment to climate change. So it's about only laying this on at their events and meetings. Because it's "progressive".
I struggle to challenge this in a calm way - it's very unpopular, and their members have said so - and, of course, you can end up looking like the difficult one / bogeyman even though you know many secretly agree.
Consider the Old Testament in overview. It is a varied volume of work, but in large part consists of prophets bewailing the corruption, greed, veniality and self interest of the elites, counterpointed by history of those elites. Take David for example, a peasant boy who becomes king, but then falls foul of God once in power after establishing Jerusalem as his capital.
It has always been easier to be a prophet lobbing brickbats at the powers that be than to actually get one's hands dirty and try to administer change in the real world. See also Corbyn vs Blair.
The reason cited: a big increase in dog ownership during Covid and irresponsible owners.
Why do we have to put up with this?
TwiX is right now engulfed in debate at to how much Wokeness has contributed to the fall of Boeing. Turns out Boeing is extremely Woke and might have neglected - might - important safety aspects in pursuit of DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion)
Hard to say if the allegation is entirely accurate. There is certainly some evidence
I particularly liked 'unflushed turds', even at this time of the morning.
Amanda Spielman. Crashed and burned at OFQUAL, overseeing catastrophic changes to exams to somehow make them worse, went to OFSTED where on her own admission things were so bad it ended completely discredited.
Susan Acland-Hood - chief executive of Courts and Probation, where she oversaw the collapse of the probation service. Then to education where between boozy parties, bungled lockdown regulations, the impending scandal at Oak National Academy, the errors over school budgets and schools literally falling down around us she has wrecked what was left of the school system too.
Sam Freedman - oversaw the academies programme, went to Teach First when that had to be paused due to innumerable scandals, lasted less than two years there (even less long than Rory Gribbell) and now lectures on public policy at the IfG telling other people how to get it right.
Dominic Cummings - a finger in all these pies, where he earned a reputation for mindless arrogance and total incompetence, ran one of the Brexit campaigns and then made chief of staff at No. 10 where following the catastrophic decision to scrap May's deal and sign one much more favourable to the EU he oversaw the early stages of Covid including the disastrous drinking culture inside government.
And that's just education, and without even thinking hard.
It's notable that the US have expressed their displeasure by blowing up Yemeni Hi-Luces rather an amphibious assault on Bushehr.
She had some management roles, particularly reviewing investment portfolios etc, but just a few years back was being hailed for her management expertise, for example being awarded a CBE and being brought into the Cabinet Office after leaving the Post Office.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67923190
I respond to it.
This is like: "you're the only one who's had problems with Horizon."
And of course, in the round, we don’t get upper quartile performance; it’s the same bunch of people, just being paid more. Just as if we paid a £million as MPs salary, we wouldn’t get better MPs. The explosion in top pay even spreads into the charity sector, where the top people in organisations like Amnesty earn absurd amounts.
The challenge ought to be a flood of people coming up behind competing for these highly paid positions, bringing the market rate down. And it’s true that universities churn out far more business studies, marketing and accounting graduates than they used to. But, as with much of the ‘bread and bricks economy’, competition through supply and demand seems not to be working as a restraint on prices. Western economies nowadays looks increasingly more oligarchic than competitive.
Leon is just at the "Old man shouts at Cloud" phase of his life, though to be fair there is a lucrative journalist market for such tosh.
I was pondering Starmer's tooth brushing intervention and my first impression was the banal absurdity of supervised oral hygiene for children in schools. Then I read that dental interventions are the main driver for child hospital admissions in the UK.
I cast my mind back to the dreaded moment when a cheery young dentist would tow the Worcestershire CC dental caravan into the school car park for a week of fillings and milk teeth extractions. Imagine the long term saving to the NHS for two salaries and a mobile dental surgery in each education authority.
We had so much as children in the 1970s and then someone in Government decided we couldn't afford this and we couldn't afford that (making no consideration for the costs down the line). The nanny state in the context of children may have been Communism, but sometimes it worked.
It wasn't the NU10K that broke our nation, and if they did,it was at the behest of their political masters. Bloody hell, that was some leap!
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/simon-blagden-cbe-confirmed-as-new-chair-of-building-digital-uk
That is a significant minority of the population. The chances are the organisation you represent has people who are vegan, vegetarian or pescetarian. Are you doing your duty to your members if you do not provide food that they can eat?
I'm not a vegetarian, but I'm perfectly happy to cook - and eat - veggie, or even vegan, food. What have you got against it?
(1): https://www.finder.com/uk/uk-diet-trends
I know a lot of PBers will be worried about me, but I’m determined to cope. The wifi seems ok so I can at least maintain some kind of rudimentary communication
Putting it bluntly, everyone is broke. Individuals & businesses - insane levels of debt post Covid are now rendering many to ruin.
The route through this is to invest...
Gordon Browns investment formula was to take current spending and call it "investment". Reeves will do the same.
When Paula Vennells was considered for, didn't get the Bishop of London gig (boy, that was a bullet dodged), it went to Sarah Mullally, who had also into a big X in another field (Chief Nursing Officer for England in her case). Under Archbishop Oilwellby who famously rose very quickly through the ranks of the church after another career.
See also the various PLU governments of Thatcher (self made men with a tendency to worship their creators), Shiny Happy Blairites, or the government-Telegraph group nexus of the Johnson years.
It's infuriating if your not in the in group (doubly so if you used to be and aren't any more), and almost certainly bad to select from such a narrow gene pool. But not easy to fix. (I think the only solution is to disperse active power, so that there are more, but less big, big jobs).
I'd say it should be £150k basic (plus allowances and expenses) with cabinet minister salaries in the FTSE250 executive category.
Otherwise we'll forever get Spads and researchers doing it, and maybe some ex-journalists, and no-one else.
They bring you a special wooden tray of elixirs and unguents, including Raffles-own “White Turmeric and Ylang Ylang Body Cream” and “Khmer Flowers with Frangipani Moisturising Mist”
There's lots of indications (the Bible is full of them) that belief in God isn't, by itself, enough to stop people acting appallingly. Indeed, it can give people a reason to behave even worse. (See also: the many sins of the C of E as an employer.)
They want to lay on this, and only this, for everyone.
100% of people.
Funnily enough, over time this change of culture has increasingly led to engineering problems with the products. Things like exploding batteries, non-redundant flight control systems, and now plug doors that weren’t fitted properly.
Their regulator, the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), has also been caught sleeping, and let these engineering failures get past them, in some cases with fatal results.
I suspect she's somewhat susceptible to institution capture and she was completely different in the Post Office and primarily (only) interested in defending its corporate interests and blinded by confirmation bias and selective presentation of evidence.
Instead it has become a strangling and expansive creed which ALL must adhere to and all most publicly pay obeisance to, and any deviation from the faith can be career ending
How else are we to choose the leadership of public and private sector bodies than amongst people who have succeeded at smaller roles? That is after all how Vennells was appointed, and was successful at previous posts.
I am debuting my new swimming pool proof earphones, as recommended on here by @rcs1000, so I can listen to Michael Wood’s History of China as I do my laps
🙏🥂
The BBC join the Tory client media Starmer smear club
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67952479.amp
Although they do have a point.
https://twitter.com/WalkerMarcus/status/1745132035675472017
Agreed that wouldn't if itself be sufficient.
It would be a huge task, as would need reform in both individual organisations, and across society. And determined (and capable) reformers are quite rare.
@rcs1000 's belief in small iterative improvements is one approach - though in this context, how might that apply ?