@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
How big a Maj SKS gets depends on the following strategy holding.
First 7 categories don't count and they concentrate all efforts on 8th
It is working so far so maybe it will continue to be successful
Labour Strategy It's okay, we can lose the muslim vote It's okay, we can lose the black vote It's okay, we can lose the socialist vote It's okay, we can lose the anti-racist vote It's okay, we can lose the green vote It's okay, we can lose the trade unionist vote Its OK to lose the Anti Genocide vote We've got the Tory vote
We're still in the phony war stage of the general election. People are not paying close attention. That will change when candidates are finalised and manifestos are published. Then the real battle begins.
I do not think for one minute that Labour will win by anything like 20 points. I am a very firm believer in the maxim that the worst poll for Labour is the most accurate because that's generally how it has turned out in the past. The final JLP and Opinium polls are very likely to be the most accurate. However, I also think that tactical voting means a huge poll lead may not be as necessary as it may otherwise have been. We will have to see.
So far, there's nothing in either campaign that makes me think the Tories can win. It's very noticeable what they are not talking about - the NHS, the cost of living, public services, transport, housing etc. VAT on schools, national service, small bungs to pensioners etc is core vote stuff.
Basically, I remain where I have been all along - the most important result is that this destructive, incompetent government loses power. Anything else is a bonus.
I agree. Even if Labour do, in the end, finish up with a lead in single digits, I'd expect them to get a working majority with it - especially now that Scotland is swinging their way.
A small Labour majority is probably the best for the country. If they fail again, even under these circumstances, that will be bad for democracy and cause them to swing back to their extreme left -and there will still be plenty of them - the "purge" is window dressing.
It's not window dressing, it's for real, but your central point is right. It's important for our democracy that the Conservatives lose this election. SKS has done everything possible (rather too much imo) to demonstrate that Labour occupies the moderate centre ground of politics, and here they are now running against a Brexit-poisoned Tory party that's been in power for 14 years, presided over recent self-inflicted chaos, and with the country in a bit of a mess. If Labour were somehow to lose on July 4th it would mean the main party of opposition to the Tories has become unelectable. Can't win from the Left. Can't win from the Centre. Can't beat any Tory leader, be it Cameron or May or Johnson or Sunak. Even in the most propitious of circumstances, regardless of political positioning and leadership, Labour cannot win. That would be the lesson drawn. We'd be a one party state.
It's been a tricky couple of days for Labour, particularly with Abbott and also the other candidate difficulties - their first setback so far. It's made me, a Labour supporter, slightly uncomfortable. However, nominations close on 7 June, four weeks before polling, so I suspect that in the heat of he campaign most people will have forgotten about events this week. So I don't think there will be any significant long-term harm, outside a handful of constituencies. Starmer will be hoping that nothing new emerges after the nominations deadline.
Is PB going to be a casualty of your Green/Soviet/Corbynista administration come the day after the revolution?
No but I will be surprised to see it continue in 2025
TSE has a FT job and is doing a wonderful job on here since Mike was unable to continue but i cant see how he could do that long term.
Hope i am wrong
Perhaps you could step up rather than taking it for granted
Let's hope you are wrong. It is a phenomenal resource. Thanks for the invite, but no one would want a c*** like me running a bath, let alone anything more sophisticated.
How big a Maj SKS gets depends on the following strategy holding.
First 7 categories don't count and they concentrate all efforts on 8th
It is working so far so maybe it will continue to be successful
Labour Strategy It's okay, we can lose the muslim vote It's okay, we can lose the black vote It's okay, we can lose the socialist vote It's okay, we can lose the anti-racist vote It's okay, we can lose the green vote It's okay, we can lose the trade unionist vote Its OK to lose the Anti Genocide vote We've got the Tory vote
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
To be fair AI does offer potential for some productivity improvements.
Though likely with losses among some jobs.
well yes, but then weve put the AI in the hands of HMG who will only mess it up as they do every IT project.
Except gov.uk including passport and driving licence applications, online tax accounts, the NHS app etc.
We should be more proud than we are about what we have achieved in public facing government IT in the is country. Most of it just works and it sooo much better than the old ways.
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
It’s still rather astonishing that the young can’t see the correlation between population increases and cost of housing increases.
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
It’s still rather astonishing that the young can’t see the correlation between population increases and cost of housing increases.
alongside population increases and the difficulty in getting a better paid job.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
The more you reduce the number of workers who are capable of productivity increases the greater the productivity increases the remaining workers will need to achieve to pull the national productivity average up.
At some point those workers still increasing their productivity wonder why they should do so if the gains from their extra productivity are going predominantly to the government or to the executive oligarchy instead of themselves.
Hunt is asking for 2% in the public sector - the point is the public sector consists of a lot of things were efficiency is impossible - can you teach someone more efficiently (well I can give you a 6% improvement by adding 10% to class sizes but is that really a great plan?)
You could improve productively by asking teachers to give up 1 period of PPA for cover purposes.
“..it is estimated that social workers spend between 12% and 20% of their time working directly with children and families, the remainder being spend on administrative tasks”
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
Eh? How does that work, your first statement?
Take something like cancer detection, where some interesting work has been done. You can get somewhere within your hospital, or within the NHS, analysing scans or teasing out trends and seeing if you can detect cancers early. But to be really, really effective you probably want a larger data set, and that means sharing patient info outside the system.
I'd have thought that NHS patient info is likely to be the largest available data set.
I don't see why it can't be done in-house.
Global datasets are massively useful. Data can be cleansed of identifying data for this and is/will be be hugely helpful for human health. AI is accelerating the capability and, if proper safeguards are put in place is an amazing opportunity for humankind, particularly in areas such as lifestyle related disease.
Of course, particularly for the rarer problems.
But for common-ish diseases, I'd have thought that the NHS would have enough.
Are patients not also more likely to agree to share their data with 'Our NHS' than GlobalCorp AI?
If the NHS were sensible (probably unlikely as it has a collectivist nationalised industry mindset) it should cleanse the data of personal identifiers and sell it to global business and other governments. It could provide a very substantial income.
Currently I believe they are not allowed to sell data for profit, but only for cost recovery.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
The 'last 14 years' question will be tricky for them to navigate throughout this campaign; not helped I think by the fact that Sunak has been trying to campaign from opposition throughout his tenure. The public (naturally) will not buy this, and it doesn't take much thought progression to consider therefore why they aren't campaigning on their record.
Just to let you know the Caspar David Friedrich exhibition was worth a visit. I had been in February when there was a major exhibition of all his works (250 anniversary of his birth ) and it had loads of his paintings in one place. However the exhibition was totally packed out so you didnt get much time before a dutch coach party moved you on.
This time the Kunsthalle was down to its core of about 8 works. But I had Wanderer uber dem Nebelmeer all to myself for as long as I wanted. Bliss
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
To be fair AI does offer potential for some productivity improvements.
Though likely with losses among some jobs.
well yes, but then weve put the AI in the hands of HMG who will only mess it up as they do every IT project.
Except gov.uk including passport and driving licence applications, online tax accounts, the NHS app etc.
We should be more proud than we are about what we have achieved in public facing government IT in the is country. Most of it just works and it sooo much better than the old ways.
It's a bit weird seeing Davey using the Boris Johnson playbook for his campaign stunts. It just doesn't work, because he isn't Boris. Mercifully, Starmer is doing no such thing - he'd be an object of ridicule if he did.
Some how this NHS consultant is 45 minutes delayed already and it’s only 10:30 like WTF
Leisurely breakfast. I hope you ask him/her why they are late.
IME for consultants if it happens suddenly it is usually because of something like an emergency (eg A. Patient. turns up in ambulance) or if it happens a few days before a personal issue causing non-attendance at work.
I'm sure that the latter is sometimes used as an excuse (eg a sudden affair), but that is a fact of life.
Delays of a few minutes to an hour have happened occasionally to me, but I've only ever had one really serious delay which was 4+ hours, and the consultant worked 2 hours beyond end-of-shift to deal with the clinic.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
The more you reduce the number of workers who are capable of productivity increases the greater the productivity increases the remaining workers will need to achieve to pull the national productivity average up.
At some point those workers still increasing their productivity wonder why they should do so if the gains from their extra productivity are going predominantly to the government or to the executive oligarchy instead of themselves.
Hunt is asking for 2% in the public sector - the point is the public sector consists of a lot of things were efficiency is impossible - can you teach someone more efficiently (well I can give you a 6% improvement by adding 10% to class sizes but is that really a great plan?)
You could improve productively by asking teachers to give up 1 period of PPA for cover purposes.
“..it is estimated that social workers spend between 12% and 20% of their time working directly with children and families, the remainder being spend on administrative tasks”
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
It’s still rather astonishing that the young can’t see the correlation between population increases and cost of housing increases.
Because young people know that correlation != causation.
From 2011 to 2021, the number of households renting increased by 28%. That's far faster than population growth (6.3%) or households growth (6.1%).
The fact is immigrants are far more efficient users of the housing stock than everyone else. We have a growing proportion of outright owners (12.5%) living in half empty houses, and 1 in 20 of us are now landlords. New Feudalism.
Your classic Tory mortgage owning class has declined by 5.1% - and then they got screwed by interest rates.
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
The prominent trend there is that those who are on average more healthy put less emphasis on healthcare.
How dare all those boomers with their artificial hip replacement privilege demand NHS money be spent on them ! Let them sit out their time in chairs !
On the other hand the 65+ are very sanguine about dying. It's there but in tiny letters. Not sure what manifesto pledge is going to improve things there.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
The 'last 14 years' question will be tricky for them to navigate throughout this campaign; not helped I think by the fact that Sunak has been trying to campaign from opposition throughout his tenure. The public (naturally) will not buy this, and it doesn't take much thought progression to consider therefore why they aren't campaigning on their record.
Just to let you know the Caspar David Friedrich exhibition was worth a visit. I had been in February when there was a major exhibition of all his works (250 anniversary of his birth ) and it had loads of his paintings in one place. However the exhibition was totally packed out so you didnt get much time before a dutch coach party moved you on.
This time the Kunsthalle was down to its core of about 8 works. But I had Wanderer uber dem Nebelmeer all to myself for as long as I wanted. Bliss
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
It’s still rather astonishing that the young can’t see the correlation between population increases and cost of housing increases.
Indeed. I believe it’s our education system. Anti racism and Not Talking About Immigration has been drummed into them from the age of 5 so they don’t even have the language or bandwidth to talk about it or even conceive that it is an issue
Plus they can see the intense social pain inflicted on anyone that tries to talk about it, so their aversion is logical
Comparisons with education in the communist era of Eastern Europe are not entirely inapt. The guides here in Moldova have been explaining to me how they were brainwashed as kids to believe in the Soviet system even when it was clearly failing
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
The prominent trend there is that those who are on average more healthy put less emphasis on healthcare.
How dare all those boomers with their artificial hip replacement privilege demand NHS money be spent on them ! Let them sit out their time in chairs !
My dad (turns 85 tomorrow) had had a new knee and a new hip in the last 18 months, both done privately. Cost 15 grand each time. He can afford it and he might as well spend the money to improve his quality of life in whatever he has left (hopefully plenty of years)*. I support any boomer who is well off doing the same, rather than wait for the NHS.
*He said recently that he would like to see my son get married, which might be touch ambitious as the poor lad is only 16 months, but hey. Gotta have a dream!
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
I can see analyzing complex systems and making improvements as something AI might in due course be useful for. In fact I don't see why Sunak doesn't lean in to the tech bro thing and present himself as the White Heat of Technology choice.
The problem with AI in the public sector is that, by definition, it can’t be in-house. So using it creatively on anything public facing is a GDPR nightmare.
You can have many in-house AI systems.
When people say "AI", they are sometimes just talking about generative AI like ChatGPT. But you can run in-house large language models like ChatGPT. People currently favour Llama 3. It's not as good, but it works. Government can do something at scale if they wanted to.
Definitely not Generative AI. God knows what shit it would come up with that looked credible. Machine learning. Saying you can just buy product X shows me you have never worked within the procurement regs. And the usually issue is having trained staff who understand and can properly use what you just bought, because Acme PLC down the road pays better.
I work in health informatics, but at a university. I was involved in the main evaluations of both the National Programme for IT and the Global Digital Exemplars. I am aware that procurement is a nightmare. I agree about the lack of trained staff.
What I don't understand is you saying "it can’t be in-house".
Well you’re the example - the NHS is insufficiently centralised, and no one invests in analytical teams capable of using any system properly, to any sort of scale. This isn’t an AI point - it’s a data science one. Scratch the surface of any part of Gvt and you’ll find that almost all forms of research are outsourced, because 80% of the staff are scared by simple excel.
Dominic Cummings' complaint.
Stopped clocks….
DC is very often right on the problems. He is nearly always wrong on the solutions.
Someone I know was expecting a baby, nipped over to France and while there the baby arrived early. This required the extraordinary palaver of obtaining a temporary passport (with photo of course) just for the baby to be allowed to get back to the UK.
(Don't try this in North Korea, Transnistria, Gaza, Sudan, Crimea etc).
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
The prominent trend there is that those who are on average more healthy put less emphasis on healthcare.
How dare all those boomers with their artificial hip replacement privilege demand NHS money be spent on them ! Let them sit out their time in chairs !
That is your way of looking at it.
I'd say all age groups would be in favour of NHS being well funded. The difference is who should pay for it and how?
The richer retired or the poorer workers? More borrowing? Cuts elsewhere or more taxes?
The other difference is who is going to provide the health and social care - younger workers think immigration is part of the answer, the retired don't want immigrants but still want the nurses, doctors and carers from somewhere.
It's a bit weird seeing Davey using the Boris Johnson playbook for his campaign stunts. It just doesn't work, because he isn't Boris. Mercifully, Starmer is doing no such thing - he'd be an object of ridicule if he did.
As would Sunak. And that's the point. Davey's easily achievable goal is to look more human than either of the opposition.
It's a bit weird seeing Davey using the Boris Johnson playbook for his campaign stunts. It just doesn't work, because he isn't Boris. Mercifully, Starmer is doing no such thing - he'd be an object of ridicule if he did.
The Tories until very recently hadn’t realised that Johnson wasn’t the leader, and were having Sunak do all sorts of stunts that just didn’t match his personality.
I assume that Davey’s team are running with the mantra that the only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about, so anything that gets Twitter going for a couple of hours generates headlines in tomorrow’s papers is going to be positive for him.
It's a bit weird seeing Davey using the Boris Johnson playbook for his campaign stunts. It just doesn't work, because he isn't Boris. Mercifully, Starmer is doing no such thing - he'd be an object of ridicule if he did.
However, it's probably necessary for third party leaders to do naff gimmicky if they want any sort of attention at all. So a solid 3/5 for putting the effort in.
But if Ed Davey is at a children's playground, he should be on an enormous swing. Do I have to do everyone's thinking round here?
I kinda feel he’s running the right strategy as weird as it sounds. He has no name recognition and he saw what “I am going to be the next prime minister, honest I am” did to Jo Swinson.
So pratting about does make him look a bit of a pillock but at this GE the Lib Dem goal is to increase their profile and seats and not be drowned out by Labour and the Tories. No-one seriously thinks they’ll be a disruptor in this election.
I don’t think these japes will be doing him any harm at the moment; though if he overdoes it then there is the risk it crosses an invisible line and puts more people off.
Diane Abbott deserved not to be let back in. I entirely agree with the previous header: being a victim of more racism than any other politician should not permit that politician themself to write or say racist things without consequence.
As is frequently pointed out, the Tory voters gained from being tough to the far left are worth more than the left-wing voters lost to the Greens and Galloway.
The key question about Starmer for right-wing voters has always been: was he lying when he said he wanted Corbyn to be Prime Minister (and Abbott to be Home Secretary), or is he lying now when he says Corbyn and his ilk are beyond the pale? For the moment, at least, the answer is the former rather than the latter. Indeed, 2024 Starmer would probably expel 2019 Starmer.
The 'racists who can't do mathematics' faction of the Labour party will eventually have their revenge - the pendulum always swings back eventually - but whether that opportunity happens within 20 months or 20 years is now beyond their control.
P.S. There is, of course, no guarantee that any Labour candidate who believes that the Jews run the world must be on the far left of the party, as the Rochdale by-election proved.
We're still in the phony war stage of the general election. People are not paying close attention. That will change when candidates are finalised and manifestos are published. Then the real battle begins.
I do not think for one minute that Labour will win by anything like 20 points. I am a very firm believer in the maxim that the worst poll for Labour is the most accurate because that's generally how it has turned out in the past. The final JLP and Opinium polls are very likely to be the most accurate. However, I also think that tactical voting means a huge poll lead may not be as necessary as it may otherwise have been. We will have to see.
So far, there's nothing in either campaign that makes me think the Tories can win. It's very noticeable what they are not talking about - the NHS, the cost of living, public services, transport, housing etc. VAT on schools, national service, small bungs to pensioners etc is core vote stuff.
Basically, I remain where I have been all along - the most important result is that this destructive, incompetent government loses power. Anything else is a bonus.
I agree. Even if Labour do, in the end, finish up with a lead in single digits, I'd expect them to get a working majority with it - especially now that Scotland is swinging their way.
A small Labour majority is probably the best for the country. If they fail again, even under these circumstances, that will be bad for democracy and cause them to swing back to their extreme left -and there will still be plenty of them - the "purge" is window dressing.
It's not window dressing, it's for real, but your central point is right. It's important for our democracy that the Conservatives lose this election. SKS has done everything possible (rather too much imo) to demonstrate that Labour occupies the moderate centre ground of politics, and here they are now running against a Brexit-poisoned Tory party that's been in power for 14 years, presided over recent self-inflicted chaos, and with the country in a bit of a mess. If Labour were somehow to lose on July 4th it would mean the main party of opposition to the Tories has become unelectable. Can't win from the Left. Can't win from the Centre. Can't beat any Tory leader, be it Cameron or May or Johnson or Sunak. Even in the most propitious of circumstances, regardless of political positioning and leadership, Labour cannot win. That would be the lesson drawn. We'd be a one party state.
Which is why the Liberal Democrats want to change, not just the party of government, but the system of government.
Our Victorian system is totally obsolete and needs major reform. Not just the voting system, not just the House of Lords, not just Whitehall, not just the divisive and short run Westminster bubble, not just local and regional administration, not just the government of NI, Wales, Scotland and England, not just the often maladministered overseas territories, but all of it.
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
The prominent trend there is that those who are on average more healthy put less emphasis on healthcare.
How dare all those boomers with their artificial hip replacement privilege demand NHS money be spent on them ! Let them sit out their time in chairs !
That is your way of looking at it.
I'd say all age groups would be in favour of NHS being well funded. The difference is who should pay for it and how?
The richer retired or the poorer workers? More borrowing? Cuts elsewhere or more taxes?
The other difference is who is going to provide the health and social care - younger workers think immigration is part of the answer, the retired don't want immigrants but still want the nurses, doctors and carers from somewhere.
On thread, that's an interesting dive into the Opinium methodology and Opinium's approach is consistent with what I've been saying for some time - namely that if "don't knows" are to be reallocated for a party, it should be no more than in proportion to how the 2019 "do knows" for that party are breaking.
Reallocating on that basis is in my view a reasonable method, but I do still wonder whether the "don't votes" amongst the undecided are being underestimated by Opinium, because essentially they're assuming that every single one of the "dont knows" will vote if they respond to say that they will. To be fair, they are following the question response there, rather than making assumptions and therefore predictions of their own. However, I think it probable that a lot of undecideds who at the moment think that they will probably vote won't in the end bother if they can't easily make up their mind by polling day, whatever they say to pollsters now. So Opinium are in my opinion probably still overestimating the number of undecideds who realistically should be allocated back.
Opinium would counter that by saying that they apply very heavy turnout filters before asking voting intention questions, so the turnout implied by their polling isn't that unrealistic compared to actual turnout on polling day. I know that Opinium are unusual in that they at the start they ask a very loaded question designed to get people to admit that they aren't on the electoral register and then exclude them - that was apparent from their old published tables although they don't publish such detail now. But they may be overdoing it - in particular because a lot of people get onto the electoral register at the last minute after a general election is called. In 2019 nearly 3 million people did.
So although Opinium may claim that their overall implied turnout is plausible, Opinium may be excluding quite a few unregistered people who will in fact get on the register and vote, while including too many undecided voters by imputing votes for all of them. The former tend to be disproportionately Labour, while there are a lot of 2019 Conservatives in the latter. So I think that is probably biasing Opinium's polling a tad towards the Conservatives at this point, when the final electoral register has still to be set in stone.
We're still in the phony war stage of the general election. People are not paying close attention. That will change when candidates are finalised and manifestos are published. Then the real battle begins.
I do not think for one minute that Labour will win by anything like 20 points. I am a very firm believer in the maxim that the worst poll for Labour is the most accurate because that's generally how it has turned out in the past. The final JLP and Opinium polls are very likely to be the most accurate. However, I also think that tactical voting means a huge poll lead may not be as necessary as it may otherwise have been. We will have to see.
So far, there's nothing in either campaign that makes me think the Tories can win. It's very noticeable what they are not talking about - the NHS, the cost of living, public services, transport, housing etc. VAT on schools, national service, small bungs to pensioners etc is core vote stuff.
Basically, I remain where I have been all along - the most important result is that this destructive, incompetent government loses power. Anything else is a bonus.
I agree. Even if Labour do, in the end, finish up with a lead in single digits, I'd expect them to get a working majority with it - especially now that Scotland is swinging their way.
A small Labour majority is probably the best for the country. If they fail again, even under these circumstances, that will be bad for democracy and cause them to swing back to their extreme left -and there will still be plenty of them - the "purge" is window dressing.
It's not window dressing, it's for real, but your central point is right. It's important for our democracy that the Conservatives lose this election. SKS has done everything possible (rather too much imo) to demonstrate that Labour occupies the moderate centre ground of politics, and here they are now running against a Brexit-poisoned Tory party that's been in power for 14 years, presided over recent self-inflicted chaos, and with the country in a bit of a mess. If Labour were somehow to lose on July 4th it would mean the main party of opposition to the Tories has become unelectable. Can't win from the Left. Can't win from the Centre. Can't beat any Tory leader, be it Cameron or May or Johnson or Sunak. Even in the most propitious of circumstances, regardless of political positioning and leadership, Labour cannot win. That would be the lesson drawn. We'd be a one party state.
Which is why the Liberal Democrats want to change, not just the party of government, but the system of government.
Our Victorian system is totally obsolete and needs major reform. Not just the voting system, not just the House of Lords, not just Whitehall, not just the divisive and short run Westminster bubble, not just local and regional administration, not just the government of NI, Wales, Scotland and England, not just the often maladministered overseas territories, but all of it.
It's a bit weird seeing Davey using the Boris Johnson playbook for his campaign stunts. It just doesn't work, because he isn't Boris. Mercifully, Starmer is doing no such thing - he'd be an object of ridicule if he did.
As would Sunak. And that's the point. Davey's easily achievable goal is to look more human than either of the opposition.
Davey's goal is to have everyone forget about his link to the post office scandal....
If you can't afford to buy anything, there's nothing to throw away.
There's parts of Ethiopia where 15 years ago you drove along deserted roads except every 5 miles was a small boy shouting eyelan! Eyelan! at passing vehicles. Bottled water in those parts comes from a company called Highland and these guys were begging for the empty bottles to be chucked out to them
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
The more you reduce the number of workers who are capable of productivity increases the greater the productivity increases the remaining workers will need to achieve to pull the national productivity average up.
At some point those workers still increasing their productivity wonder why they should do so if the gains from their extra productivity are going predominantly to the government or to the executive oligarchy instead of themselves.
Hunt is asking for 2% in the public sector - the point is the public sector consists of a lot of things were efficiency is impossible - can you teach someone more efficiently (well I can give you a 6% improvement by adding 10% to class sizes but is that really a great plan?)
You could improve productively by asking teachers to give up 1 period of PPA for cover purposes.
“..it is estimated that social workers spend between 12% and 20% of their time working directly with children and families, the remainder being spend on administrative tasks”
Which would explain why teachers seem to spend about 20% of their time being social workers with children and families.
While it can't be entire, it would be good to separate more these two things. The best things schools can do for disadvantaged children is to educate and civilize them. Social work is a separate skill, and a separate department of local government.
It would assist the thought processes of some parents if they knew that most of the stuff that 'pastoral' dealt with in schools is going to be dealt with by the statutory services of social workers.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
The more you reduce the number of workers who are capable of productivity increases the greater the productivity increases the remaining workers will need to achieve to pull the national productivity average up.
At some point those workers still increasing their productivity wonder why they should do so if the gains from their extra productivity are going predominantly to the government or to the executive oligarchy instead of themselves.
Hunt is asking for 2% in the public sector - the point is the public sector consists of a lot of things were efficiency is impossible - can you teach someone more efficiently (well I can give you a 6% improvement by adding 10% to class sizes but is that really a great plan?)
In very isolated places it can work. One can imagine making the passport office more efficient through process design and automation, though it’s possible those gains have been made. My God, there’s space to redesign the average A&E for efficiency. But as you say, it’s hard with talking or care work, or policy wonks. You can’t define productivity, never mind increase it.
The passport office is a bad example believe me those gains have been made - last December Mrs Eek got her new passport in 4 days and 1 day of that delay was because I missed the post the night before when sending her old passport back in.
DVLA is an example where improvements could be made but a lot has already been done and what is left is weird areas - where things are manual for reasons that don't make sense until you get into the weeds. 1 example is change of address where the driving license is often the first document updating placing the most awkward checks on the DVLA...
DVLA is incredibly incompetent. I’ve been in ‘correspondence’ with them since January over getting my licence back ….. I surrendered it when I didn’t think I’d ever be able to drive again, but asked for it back when I realised I’d recovered considerably, and had professional advice to that effect ……. but they haven’t answered anything for months. I was on the point of trying to get help from the local MP when the election was called.
My brother had a minor prang in his car last autumn and had his licence suspended until he took a sight test. He has had the test and filled in all the necessary forms but the DVLA has been sitting on his application and he has till not had it returned. He has tried phoning but the DVLA just say that they have his application and are dealing with it. Where he is living is quite remote so it is causing an enormous amount of problems.
That bizarre and biased take “oh not those 120 business leaders” must upset you to see, as a ‘lifelong Labour voter’?
Let's be clear, just one endorsement from ftse 100 and 250 put together is not great.
It is a tad reminiscent of the list of PPE providers. Granted they wanted to make the point about business trusting them, but this has rather backfired, in my eyes. Like a budget that gets a good reception on day one and then falls apart,,,
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
The more you reduce the number of workers who are capable of productivity increases the greater the productivity increases the remaining workers will need to achieve to pull the national productivity average up.
At some point those workers still increasing their productivity wonder why they should do so if the gains from their extra productivity are going predominantly to the government or to the executive oligarchy instead of themselves.
Hunt is asking for 2% in the public sector - the point is the public sector consists of a lot of things were efficiency is impossible - can you teach someone more efficiently (well I can give you a 6% improvement by adding 10% to class sizes but is that really a great plan?)
You could improve productively by asking teachers to give up 1 period of PPA for cover purposes.
“..it is estimated that social workers spend between 12% and 20% of their time working directly with children and families, the remainder being spend on administrative tasks”
Which would explain why teachers seem to spend about 20% of their time being social workers with children and families.
While it can't be entire, it would be good to separate more these two things. The best things schools can do for disadvantaged children is to educate and civilize them. Social work is a separate skill, and a separate department of local government.
It would assist the thought processes of some parents if they knew that most of the stuff that 'pastoral' dealt with in schools is going to be dealt with by the statutory services of social workers.
That's a great way of telling me you don't have a clue about how schools are elsewhere work...
I would reply but I doubt it's worth the effort - but as a hint there are a lot of reasons why schools and teachers now do a lot more family related work since 2010....
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
It’s still rather astonishing that the young can’t see the correlation between population increases and cost of housing increases.
Because young people know that correlation != causation.
From 2011 to 2021, the number of households renting increased by 28%. That's far faster than population growth (6.3%) or households growth (6.1%).
The fact is immigrants are far more efficient users of the housing stock than everyone else. We have a growing proportion of outright owners (12.5%) living in half empty houses, and 1 in 20 of us are now landlords. New Feudalism.
Your classic Tory mortgage owning class has declined by 5.1% - and then they got screwed by interest rates.
Yes it’s true that immigrants live more densely than the native population, but that doesn’t make all of the overcrowded HMOs and houses a good thing.
Those who wish to advocate for increasing the population, need to also advocate for building somewhere for them to live.
Issues of crap landlords and unsanitary conditions go away if there’s a surplus of housing availability.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
The 'last 14 years' question will be tricky for them to navigate throughout this campaign; not helped I think by the fact that Sunak has been trying to campaign from opposition throughout his tenure. The public (naturally) will not buy this, and it doesn't take much thought progression to consider therefore why they aren't campaigning on their record.
Just to let you know the Caspar David Friedrich exhibition was worth a visit. I had been in February when there was a major exhibition of all his works (250 anniversary of his birth ) and it had loads of his paintings in one place. However the exhibition was totally packed out so you didnt get much time before a dutch coach party moved you on.
This time the Kunsthalle was down to its core of about 8 works. But I had Wanderer uber dem Nebelmeer all to myself for as long as I wanted. Bliss
That bizarre and biased take “oh not those 120 business leaders” must upset you to see, as a ‘lifelong Labour voter’?
Let's be clear, just one endorsement from ftse 100 and 250 put together is not great.
It is a tad reminiscent of the list of PPE providers. Granted they wanted to make the point about business trusting them, but this has rather backfired, in my eyes. Like a budget that gets a good reception on day one and then falls apart,,,
From a campaign perspective, I think they’ll be OK. The point of it is window dressing/mood music to say “look, business isn’t scared of us”. Yes when the list is looked into it might look a bit iffy, but at that point the news cycle has moved on. The Labour = can be trusted with business message has been delivered.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
The more you reduce the number of workers who are capable of productivity increases the greater the productivity increases the remaining workers will need to achieve to pull the national productivity average up.
At some point those workers still increasing their productivity wonder why they should do so if the gains from their extra productivity are going predominantly to the government or to the executive oligarchy instead of themselves.
Hunt is asking for 2% in the public sector - the point is the public sector consists of a lot of things were efficiency is impossible - can you teach someone more efficiently (well I can give you a 6% improvement by adding 10% to class sizes but is that really a great plan?)
You could improve productively by asking teachers to give up 1 period of PPA for cover purposes.
Give up their lesson preparation time to lead a lesson that they know nothing about?
You would be way better paying for a TA to run cover. Large schools will often have TAs or teachers for the express purpose of providing in-house cover...
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
It’s still rather astonishing that the young can’t see the correlation between population increases and cost of housing increases.
Because young people know that correlation != causation.
From 2011 to 2021, the number of households renting increased by 28%. That's far faster than population growth (6.3%) or households growth (6.1%).
The fact is immigrants are far more efficient users of the housing stock than everyone else. We have a growing proportion of outright owners (12.5%) living in half empty houses, and 1 in 20 of us are now landlords. New Feudalism.
Your classic Tory mortgage owning class has declined by 5.1% - and then they got screwed by interest rates.
Yes it’s true that immigrants live more densely than the native population, but that doesn’t make all of the overcrowded HMOs and houses a good thing.
Those who wish to advocate for increasing the population, need to also advocate for building somewhere for them to live.
Issues of crap landlords and unsanitary conditions go away if there’s a surplus of housing availability.
There is less overcrowding and more spare bedrooms than there was in 2011.
The difference between the number of houses and population/households has grown too - 0.96 households per dwelling to 0.94 households per dwellings, 2.30 people to 2.26 people.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
The more you reduce the number of workers who are capable of productivity increases the greater the productivity increases the remaining workers will need to achieve to pull the national productivity average up.
At some point those workers still increasing their productivity wonder why they should do so if the gains from their extra productivity are going predominantly to the government or to the executive oligarchy instead of themselves.
Hunt is asking for 2% in the public sector - the point is the public sector consists of a lot of things were efficiency is impossible - can you teach someone more efficiently (well I can give you a 6% improvement by adding 10% to class sizes but is that really a great plan?)
You could improve productively by asking teachers to give up 1 period of PPA for cover purposes.
“..it is estimated that social workers spend between 12% and 20% of their time working directly with children and families, the remainder being spend on administrative tasks”
Relatives of me are just emerging from a Kafkaesque social worker/police/court nightmare ("no case to answer"). Its gone on for over a year, resulted from my nephew ringing 111 for advice and help too many times (red flag apparently) and an overzealous doctor thinking he saw historic bone fractures on my nephews baby, that no-one else could see (canals on Mars next?). I imagine the paperwork load is huge. And they are going to need it as the shit is coming right back at them as soon as the official process ends.
I have huge sympathy for social workers. They often deal with the worst of humanity and when it goes wrong we get children murdered and the press rips into the social workers more than the murderers. But they don't always get it right and sometimes make stupid errors. I imagine they are taught to document EVERYTHING for their own protection.
Hell we even do it as tutors at Uni. Log every meeting, keep emails etc, just in case it goes bad.
That bizarre and biased take “oh not those 120 business leaders” must upset you to see, as a ‘lifelong Labour voter’?
Let's be clear, just one endorsement from ftse 100 and 250 put together is not great.
It is a tad reminiscent of the list of PPE providers. Granted they wanted to make the point about business trusting them, but this has rather backfired, in my eyes. Like a budget that gets a good reception on day one and then falls apart,,,
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
It’s still rather astonishing that the young can’t see the correlation between population increases and cost of housing increases.
Because young people know that correlation != causation.
From 2011 to 2021, the number of households renting increased by 28%. That's far faster than population growth (6.3%) or households growth (6.1%).
The fact is immigrants are far more efficient users of the housing stock than everyone else. We have a growing proportion of outright owners (12.5%) living in half empty houses, and 1 in 20 of us are now landlords. New Feudalism.
Your classic Tory mortgage owning class has declined by 5.1% - and then they got screwed by interest rates.
Yes it’s true that immigrants live more densely than the native population, but that doesn’t make all of the overcrowded HMOs and houses a good thing.
Those who wish to advocate for increasing the population, need to also advocate for building somewhere for them to live.
Issues of crap landlords and unsanitary conditions go away if there’s a surplus of housing availability.
On this board the vast majority of those who recognise the need to immigration also recognise the need for not just housing but also the infrastructure and planning to go with it.
If we had actually built the homes the Tories have promised since 2010 things would be a lot better, but as always they over promise, over charge and under deliver.
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
It’s still rather astonishing that the young can’t see the correlation between population increases and cost of housing increases.
Because young people know that correlation != causation.
From 2011 to 2021, the number of households renting increased by 28%. That's far faster than population growth (6.3%) or households growth (6.1%).
The fact is immigrants are far more efficient users of the housing stock than everyone else. We have a growing proportion of outright owners (12.5%) living in half empty houses, and 1 in 20 of us are now landlords. New Feudalism.
Your classic Tory mortgage owning class has declined by 5.1% - and then they got screwed by interest rates.
Yes it’s true that immigrants live more densely than the native population, but that doesn’t make all of the overcrowded HMOs and houses a good thing.
Those who wish to advocate for increasing the population, need to also advocate for building somewhere for them to live.
Issues of crap landlords and unsanitary conditions go away if there’s a surplus of housing availability.
On this board the vast majority of those who recognise the need to immigration also recognise the need for not just housing but also the infrastructure and planning to go with it.
If we had actually built the homes the Tories have promised since 2010 things would be a lot better, but as always they over promise, over charge and under deliver.
The total number of homes has increased faster than the population/number of households.
(This is England and Wales btw - the difference is even starker in Scotland, with our flatlining population and soaring housing costs)
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
The more you reduce the number of workers who are capable of productivity increases the greater the productivity increases the remaining workers will need to achieve to pull the national productivity average up.
At some point those workers still increasing their productivity wonder why they should do so if the gains from their extra productivity are going predominantly to the government or to the executive oligarchy instead of themselves.
Hunt is asking for 2% in the public sector - the point is the public sector consists of a lot of things were efficiency is impossible - can you teach someone more efficiently (well I can give you a 6% improvement by adding 10% to class sizes but is that really a great plan?)
In very isolated places it can work. One can imagine making the passport office more efficient through process design and automation, though it’s possible those gains have been made. My God, there’s space to redesign the average A&E for efficiency. But as you say, it’s hard with talking or care work, or policy wonks. You can’t define productivity, never mind increase it.
The passport office is a bad example believe me those gains have been made - last December Mrs Eek got her new passport in 4 days and 1 day of that delay was because I missed the post the night before when sending her old passport back in.
DVLA is an example where improvements could be made but a lot has already been done and what is left is weird areas - where things are manual for reasons that don't make sense until you get into the weeds. 1 example is change of address where the driving license is often the first document updating placing the most awkward checks on the DVLA...
DVLA is incredibly incompetent. I’ve been in ‘correspondence’ with them since January over getting my licence back ….. I surrendered it when I didn’t think I’d ever be able to drive again, but asked for it back when I realised I’d recovered considerably, and had professional advice to that effect ……. but they haven’t answered anything for months. I was on the point of trying to get help from the local MP when the election was called.
My brother had a minor prang in his car last autumn and had his licence suspended until he took a sight test. He has had the test and filled in all the necessary forms but the DVLA has been sitting on his application and he has till not had it returned. He has tried phoning but the DVLA just say that they have his application and are dealing with it. Where he is living is quite remote so it is causing an enormous amount of problems.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
The more you reduce the number of workers who are capable of productivity increases the greater the productivity increases the remaining workers will need to achieve to pull the national productivity average up.
At some point those workers still increasing their productivity wonder why they should do so if the gains from their extra productivity are going predominantly to the government or to the executive oligarchy instead of themselves.
Hunt is asking for 2% in the public sector - the point is the public sector consists of a lot of things were efficiency is impossible - can you teach someone more efficiently (well I can give you a 6% improvement by adding 10% to class sizes but is that really a great plan?)
In very isolated places it can work. One can imagine making the passport office more efficient through process design and automation, though it’s possible those gains have been made. My God, there’s space to redesign the average A&E for efficiency. But as you say, it’s hard with talking or care work, or policy wonks. You can’t define productivity, never mind increase it.
The passport office is a bad example believe me those gains have been made - last December Mrs Eek got her new passport in 4 days and 1 day of that delay was because I missed the post the night before when sending her old passport back in.
DVLA is an example where improvements could be made but a lot has already been done and what is left is weird areas - where things are manual for reasons that don't make sense until you get into the weeds. 1 example is change of address where the driving license is often the first document updating placing the most awkward checks on the DVLA...
DVLA is incredibly incompetent. I’ve been in ‘correspondence’ with them since January over getting my licence back ….. I surrendered it when I didn’t think I’d ever be able to drive again, but asked for it back when I realised I’d recovered considerably, and had professional advice to that effect ……. but they haven’t answered anything for months. I was on the point of trying to get help from the local MP when the election was called.
My brother had a minor prang in his car last autumn and had his licence suspended until he took a sight test. He has had the test and filled in all the necessary forms but the DVLA has been sitting on his application and he has till not had it returned. He has tried phoning but the DVLA just say that they have his application and are dealing with it. Where he is living is quite remote so it is causing an enormous amount of problems.
My aged father lost his licence for over a year because of the crapness of the DVLA. He had cataract surgery on both eyes over a period of six weeks. In between there was an eye test that he failed (passed fine after the surgery) but it took a year to get DVLA to return his licence. At the time there were a lot of stories coming out of the DVLA - workers refusing to work on site etc. Shysters.
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
It’s still rather astonishing that the young can’t see the correlation between population increases and cost of housing increases.
Because young people know that correlation != causation.
From 2011 to 2021, the number of households renting increased by 28%. That's far faster than population growth (6.3%) or households growth (6.1%).
The fact is immigrants are far more efficient users of the housing stock than everyone else. We have a growing proportion of outright owners (12.5%) living in half empty houses, and 1 in 20 of us are now landlords. New Feudalism.
Your classic Tory mortgage owning class has declined by 5.1% - and then they got screwed by interest rates.
Yes it’s true that immigrants live more densely than the native population, but that doesn’t make all of the overcrowded HMOs and houses a good thing.
Those who wish to advocate for increasing the population, need to also advocate for building somewhere for them to live.
Issues of crap landlords and unsanitary conditions go away if there’s a surplus of housing availability.
On this board the vast majority of those who recognise the need to immigration also recognise the need for not just housing but also the infrastructure and planning to go with it.
If we had actually built the homes the Tories have promised since 2010 things would be a lot better, but as always they over promise, over charge and under deliver.
I will agree that not enough houses have been built, but most housebuilding is private-sector and most planning is dealt with by local authorities (of all political stripes) rather than by central government.
The problem is that local politics is dominated by authoritarian NIMBYs, as anyone who watched Jeramy Clarkson’s farm show could see. How we can change that, is the big question. How we can change that, and still be elected afterwards, is an even bigger question.
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
The more you reduce the number of workers who are capable of productivity increases the greater the productivity increases the remaining workers will need to achieve to pull the national productivity average up.
At some point those workers still increasing their productivity wonder why they should do so if the gains from their extra productivity are going predominantly to the government or to the executive oligarchy instead of themselves.
Hunt is asking for 2% in the public sector - the point is the public sector consists of a lot of things were efficiency is impossible - can you teach someone more efficiently (well I can give you a 6% improvement by adding 10% to class sizes but is that really a great plan?)
You could improve productively by asking teachers to give up 1 period of PPA for cover purposes.
Give up their lesson preparation time to lead a lesson that they know nothing about?
You would be way better paying for a TA to run cover. Large schools will often have TAs or teachers for the express purpose of providing in-house cover...
For new teachers I imagine lesson prep is huge. Been teaching the material for ten years - probably less so. Some of the lectures I give at Uni I can give with zero prep as I know them so well.
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
It’s still rather astonishing that the young can’t see the correlation between population increases and cost of housing increases.
Because young people know that correlation != causation.
From 2011 to 2021, the number of households renting increased by 28%. That's far faster than population growth (6.3%) or households growth (6.1%).
The fact is immigrants are far more efficient users of the housing stock than everyone else. We have a growing proportion of outright owners (12.5%) living in half empty houses, and 1 in 20 of us are now landlords. New Feudalism.
Your classic Tory mortgage owning class has declined by 5.1% - and then they got screwed by interest rates.
Yes it’s true that immigrants live more densely than the native population, but that doesn’t make all of the overcrowded HMOs and houses a good thing.
Those who wish to advocate for increasing the population, need to also advocate for building somewhere for them to live.
Issues of crap landlords and unsanitary conditions go away if there’s a surplus of housing availability.
On this board the vast majority of those who recognise the need to immigration also recognise the need for not just housing but also the infrastructure and planning to go with it.
If we had actually built the homes the Tories have promised since 2010 things would be a lot better, but as always they over promise, over charge and under deliver.
The total number of homes has increased faster than the population/number of households.
(This is England and Wales btw - the difference is even starker in Scotland, with our flatlining population and soaring housing costs)
Converting a comfortable 3 bedroom house into 3 flats increases the number of homes but isn't particularly great for people wanting to start a family.
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
It’s still rather astonishing that the young can’t see the correlation between population increases and cost of housing increases.
It's the single most astonishing thing in British politics imo.
That bizarre and biased take “oh not those 120 business leaders” must upset you to see, as a ‘lifelong Labour voter’?
Let's be clear, just one endorsement from ftse 100 and 250 put together is not great.
It is a tad reminiscent of the list of PPE providers. Granted they wanted to make the point about business trusting them, but this has rather backfired, in my eyes. Like a budget that gets a good reception on day one and then falls apart,,,
Justice Alito's insistence in his letters to Congress that he has an "obligation to sit" in the January 6 cases *because* the Code of Conduct says so is an interesting data point for thoseª who have insisted that the Code doesn't impose *any* requirements on the justices. https://x.com/steve_vladeck/status/1795886852961947993
That bizarre and biased take “oh not those 120 business leaders” must upset you to see, as a ‘lifelong Labour voter’?
Let's be clear, just one endorsement from ftse 100 and 250 put together is not great.
It is a tad reminiscent of the list of PPE providers. Granted they wanted to make the point about business trusting them, but this has rather backfired, in my eyes. Like a budget that gets a good reception on day one and then falls apart,,,
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
It’s still rather astonishing that the young can’t see the correlation between population increases and cost of housing increases.
Because young people know that correlation != causation.
From 2011 to 2021, the number of households renting increased by 28%. That's far faster than population growth (6.3%) or households growth (6.1%).
The fact is immigrants are far more efficient users of the housing stock than everyone else. We have a growing proportion of outright owners (12.5%) living in half empty houses, and 1 in 20 of us are now landlords. New Feudalism.
Your classic Tory mortgage owning class has declined by 5.1% - and then they got screwed by interest rates.
Yes it’s true that immigrants live more densely than the native population, but that doesn’t make all of the overcrowded HMOs and houses a good thing.
Those who wish to advocate for increasing the population, need to also advocate for building somewhere for them to live.
Issues of crap landlords and unsanitary conditions go away if there’s a surplus of housing availability.
On this board the vast majority of those who recognise the need to immigration also recognise the need for not just housing but also the infrastructure and planning to go with it.
If we had actually built the homes the Tories have promised since 2010 things would be a lot better, but as always they over promise, over charge and under deliver.
I will agree that not enough houses have been built, but most housebuilding is private-sector and most planning is dealt with by local authorities (of all political stripes) rather than by central government.
The problem is that local politics is dominated by authoritarian NIMBYs, as anyone who watched Jeramy Clarkson’s farm show could see. How we can change that, is the big question. How we can change that, and still be elected afterwards, is an even bigger question.
Easy. I’ve been saying it for years. Abolish local government. Run everything from the centre and give everyone the same services. Central government gets blamed anyway.
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
It’s still rather astonishing that the young can’t see the correlation between population increases and cost of housing increases.
Because young people know that correlation != causation.
From 2011 to 2021, the number of households renting increased by 28%. That's far faster than population growth (6.3%) or households growth (6.1%).
The fact is immigrants are far more efficient users of the housing stock than everyone else. We have a growing proportion of outright owners (12.5%) living in half empty houses, and 1 in 20 of us are now landlords. New Feudalism.
Your classic Tory mortgage owning class has declined by 5.1% - and then they got screwed by interest rates.
Yes it’s true that immigrants live more densely than the native population, but that doesn’t make all of the overcrowded HMOs and houses a good thing.
Those who wish to advocate for increasing the population, need to also advocate for building somewhere for them to live.
Issues of crap landlords and unsanitary conditions go away if there’s a surplus of housing availability.
On this board the vast majority of those who recognise the need to immigration also recognise the need for not just housing but also the infrastructure and planning to go with it.
If we had actually built the homes the Tories have promised since 2010 things would be a lot better, but as always they over promise, over charge and under deliver.
The total number of homes has increased faster than the population/number of households.
(This is England and Wales btw - the difference is even starker in Scotland, with our flatlining population and soaring housing costs)
Converting a comfortable 3 bedroom house into 3 flats increases the number of homes but isn't particularly great for people wanting to start a family.
How come the number of spare bedrooms has increased then?
He rides a water slide exactly the same way he rides a bike, even down to the facial expression
Vote for consistency. Vote for knowing what you'll get. Vote for someone who knows how to go downhill fast. Vote LD 👍
Richard Madeley asked whether Davey falling in the water was good for the party. Add was told that he and the media are talking out our policy on sewage in our lakes and rivers.
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
It’s still rather astonishing that the young can’t see the correlation between population increases and cost of housing increases.
Indeed. I believe it’s our education system. Anti racism and Not Talking About Immigration has been drummed into them from the age of 5 so they don’t even have the language or bandwidth to talk about it or even conceive that it is an issue
Plus they can see the intense social pain inflicted on anyone that tries to talk about it, so their aversion is logical
Comparisons with education in the communist era of Eastern Europe are not entirely inapt. The guides here in Moldova have been explaining to me how they were brainwashed as kids to believe in the Soviet system even when it was clearly failing
You are a fucking dolt.
It is successive governments not building enough houses or schools or hospitals or whatnot that is the issue. Not immigration. The education and its detested focus on "anti-racism" has been hugely successful and means that the vast majority of our children are colour-blind (and XXX-blind also). Not everyone but broadly.
They - and you - should be campaigning for the government to be able to accommodate us all, not stopping some of us from being here.
That said, if you could do us all a favour and stay in the undoubted paradise that is Moldova rather than ever coming to the UK that would mean one more immigrant family able to move in to NW1. Hurrah!
We're still in the phony war stage of the general election. People are not paying close attention. That will change when candidates are finalised and manifestos are published. Then the real battle begins.
[rest snipped]
There is an early QT tonight, oddly enough featuring Nigel Farage who is not involved in this election but is presumably blackmailing the head of the BBC because he is never off our screens. Then the first tv debate between Sunak and Starmer is next Tuesday.
Farage is involved in this election. He isn't standing, but he is at the forefront of Reform UK's campaigning.
Funny how few democracy supporters on PB have a problem with a broadcaster restricting the main televised debate(s) to S & S.
He rides a water slide exactly the same way he rides a bike, even down to the facial expression
Vote for consistency. Vote for knowing what you'll get. Vote for someone who knows how to go downhill fast. Vote LD 👍
Richard Madeley asked whether Davey falling in the water was good for the party. Add was told that he and the media are talking out our policy on sewage in our lakes and rivers.
Would they have done so without the stunts?
Shouldn't you be canvassing or leafletting or something? Isn't there are market somewhere you could go round? What's your agent thinking, letting you idle your time away on pb?
He rides a water slide exactly the same way he rides a bike, even down to the facial expression
Vote for consistency. Vote for knowing what you'll get. Vote for someone who knows how to go downhill fast. Vote LD 👍
Richard Madeley asked whether Davey falling in the water was good for the party. Add was told that he and the media are talking out our policy on sewage in our lakes and rivers.
Would they have done so without the stunts?
Yeah, he's getting noticed, which is not something I'd have backed Ed D to do well. And if you're getting on TV then you have the chance to talk about actual policies.
He could do with getting on the debates and a good performance, then it could be a good night for the LDs - along with the ground game tactical voting push and the (in)famous bar charts
ETA: To be fair, he also looks like he's enjoying himself. It's not as forced as Hague on a water slide
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
It’s still rather astonishing that the young can’t see the correlation between population increases and cost of housing increases.
Indeed. I believe it’s our education system. Anti racism and Not Talking About Immigration has been drummed into them from the age of 5 so they don’t even have the language or bandwidth to talk about it or even conceive that it is an issue
Plus they can see the intense social pain inflicted on anyone that tries to talk about it, so their aversion is logical
Comparisons with education in the communist era of Eastern Europe are not entirely inapt. The guides here in Moldova have been explaining to me how they were brainwashed as kids to believe in the Soviet system even when it was clearly failing
You are a fucking dolt.
It is successive governments not building enough houses or schools or hospitals or whatnot that is the issue. Not immigration. The education and its detested focus on "anti-racism" has been hugely successful and means that the vast majority of our children are colour-blind (and XXX-blind also). Not everyone but broadly.
They - and you - should be campaigning for the government to be able to accommodate us all, not stopping some of us from being here.
That said, if you could do us all a favour and stay in the undoubted paradise that is Moldova rather than ever coming to the UK that would mean one more immigrant family able to move in to NW1. Hurrah!
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
It’s still rather astonishing that the young can’t see the correlation between population increases and cost of housing increases.
Because young people know that correlation != causation.
From 2011 to 2021, the number of households renting increased by 28%. That's far faster than population growth (6.3%) or households growth (6.1%).
The fact is immigrants are far more efficient users of the housing stock than everyone else. We have a growing proportion of outright owners (12.5%) living in half empty houses, and 1 in 20 of us are now landlords. New Feudalism.
Your classic Tory mortgage owning class has declined by 5.1% - and then they got screwed by interest rates.
Yes it’s true that immigrants live more densely than the native population, but that doesn’t make all of the overcrowded HMOs and houses a good thing.
Those who wish to advocate for increasing the population, need to also advocate for building somewhere for them to live.
Issues of crap landlords and unsanitary conditions go away if there’s a surplus of housing availability.
On this board the vast majority of those who recognise the need to immigration also recognise the need for not just housing but also the infrastructure and planning to go with it.
If we had actually built the homes the Tories have promised since 2010 things would be a lot better, but as always they over promise, over charge and under deliver.
The total number of homes has increased faster than the population/number of households.
(This is England and Wales btw - the difference is even starker in Scotland, with our flatlining population and soaring housing costs)
Converting a comfortable 3 bedroom house into 3 flats increases the number of homes but isn't particularly great for people wanting to start a family.
How come the number of spare bedrooms has increased then?
Can't be sure, but I suspect that a fair bit of the answer is older homeowners deciding that they don't want to, or need to, downsize. And the bottom line is that, in a free country, it's not obvious that they can be made to or that they should be made to.
As with many things, the issue isn't in the averages, it's in the variance from the averages. But the Janet Slimfast "I don't like the idea of new houses near me and they wouldn't be necessary if we didn't have so many incomers" argument has a load of holes in it as well.
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
It’s still rather astonishing that the young can’t see the correlation between population increases and cost of housing increases.
It's the single most astonishing thing in British politics imo.
It may not be sustained. Younger people in many western nations are trending rightwards. Their trajectory here has been stopped by three main factors I think - 1) the Tory brand is seriously uncool, 2) Brexit as a right wing populist concept removed a lot of freedoms for young people to study/work abroad, and 3) the Tories have spent the last decade trying to keep the elderly vote happy, largely at the expense of the young.
Once the Tories lose power then there might a realignment that starts this process. We shall see.
He rides a water slide exactly the same way he rides a bike, even down to the facial expression
Vote for consistency. Vote for knowing what you'll get. Vote for someone who knows how to go downhill fast. Vote LD 👍
Richard Madeley asked whether Davey falling in the water was good for the party. Add was told that he and the media are talking out our policy on sewage in our lakes and rivers.
Would they have done so without the stunts?
You will pleased to learn that the billboard count in my area is now six LD , others nil. Mind you, four of them were in 'Libby' Bishops Cleeve, but all the same we have to say 'LibDems - Trying Hard Here.'
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
It’s still rather astonishing that the young can’t see the correlation between population increases and cost of housing increases.
Indeed. I believe it’s our education system. Anti racism and Not Talking About Immigration has been drummed into them from the age of 5 so they don’t even have the language or bandwidth to talk about it or even conceive that it is an issue
Plus they can see the intense social pain inflicted on anyone that tries to talk about it, so their aversion is logical
Comparisons with education in the communist era of Eastern Europe are not entirely inapt. The guides here in Moldova have been explaining to me how they were brainwashed as kids to believe in the Soviet system even when it was clearly failing
You are a fucking dolt.
It is successive governments not building enough houses or schools or hospitals or whatnot that is the issue. Not immigration. The education and its detested focus on "anti-racism" has been hugely successful and means that the vast majority of our children are colour-blind (and XXX-blind also). Not everyone but broadly.
They - and you - should be campaigning for the government to be able to accommodate us all, not stopping some of us from being here.
That said, if you could do us all a favour and stay in the undoubted paradise that is Moldova rather than ever coming to the UK that would mean one more immigrant family able to move in to NW1. Hurrah!
He rides a water slide exactly the same way he rides a bike, even down to the facial expression
Vote for consistency. Vote for knowing what you'll get. Vote for someone who knows how to go downhill fast. Vote LD 👍
Richard Madeley asked whether Davey falling in the water was good for the party. Add was told that he and the media are talking out our policy on sewage in our lakes and rivers.
Would they have done so without the stunts?
Shouldn't you be canvassing or leafletting or something? Isn't there are market somewhere you could go round? What's your agent thinking, letting you idle your time away on pb?
Be fair to him, he's probably sitting in the front seat of his agent's car creeping along behind a tractor and spray gear en route to his next task to work through the houses of Foggieloan (pop: 987).
Hunt on R4 just now was promising an annual 2% productivity improvement in public services if re-elected.
LOL.
Sort of makes you ask why he's not doing it now.
Because it's not actually that easy - a lot of the easy wins have been done so what you are now left with is expensive automation projects and there isn't the money to do that - because it would require identifying where they are and getting consultancies in to do it.
And Government procurement is crap at that and then brings in crap firms who rarely know what new technology can do..
See also local government.
If savings through efficiency were easy, it ought to be possible to point to some council somewhere that has been able to respond to austerity without cutting many activities or enshittifying what remains.
Of course it's right to keep an eye open for where things can be made to work better more cheaply. But I'd like to see some evidence that the reform fairy can save us from the consequences of decades of not really paying as much tax as we should have for the things we expect the state to do.
The thing people forget is that a lot of things Government does is not exactly ripe for efficiency improvements. A home help can't fit in another visit a day because they do need to spend the hour getting the patient up, washed, dressed and fed.
You can write computer software to improve social care work, but that's incredibly expensive both up front and (nowadays) monthly on top but the efficiency is on the edges, the meetings themselves are required and can't be shortened (well they could be but that way leads to deaths).
Basically a lot of the public sector can only be improved at the edges and a lot of other ones will seem counter intuitive - for instance it makes sense that a consultant does their own paper work in a business consultancy, it makes zero sense when a consultant does it at a hospital, they could see another couple of patients in that time.
The more you reduce the number of workers who are capable of productivity increases the greater the productivity increases the remaining workers will need to achieve to pull the national productivity average up.
At some point those workers still increasing their productivity wonder why they should do so if the gains from their extra productivity are going predominantly to the government or to the executive oligarchy instead of themselves.
Hunt is asking for 2% in the public sector - the point is the public sector consists of a lot of things were efficiency is impossible - can you teach someone more efficiently (well I can give you a 6% improvement by adding 10% to class sizes but is that really a great plan?)
You could improve productively by asking teachers to give up 1 period of PPA for cover purposes.
Give up their lesson preparation time to lead a lesson that they know nothing about?
You would be way better paying for a TA to run cover. Large schools will often have TAs or teachers for the express purpose of providing in-house cover...
For new teachers I imagine lesson prep is huge. Been teaching the material for ten years - probably less so. Some of the lectures I give at Uni I can give with zero prep as I know them so well.
Is there not an open source lesson plan / homework task depository somewhere? That would likely help with productivity at the margin, especially when the curriculum changes.
He rides a water slide exactly the same way he rides a bike, even down to the facial expression
Vote for consistency. Vote for knowing what you'll get. Vote for someone who knows how to go downhill fast. Vote LD 👍
Richard Madeley asked whether Davey falling in the water was good for the party. Add was told that he and the media are talking out our policy on sewage in our lakes and rivers.
Would they have done so without the stunts?
Yes, I think they would. Campaigns have very little impact. Unless, of course, you do something really daft like threaten to reintroduce National Service (Con 2024) or bang on and on and on about Brexit and Brexit and Brexit and Brexit and trans and Brexit (Lib Dem 2019) or hide in a fridge (Con 2019) or, just, everything (Lab 2019) or refuse to talk about anything at all (Con 2017). But in general, campaigns don't really shift the dial. So you may as well enjoy yourself.
That bizarre and biased take “oh not those 120 business leaders” must upset you to see, as a ‘lifelong Labour voter’?
Whereas for SKS fans (who are not lifelong Labour voters) like you and Pete they believe any old hype/tripe from Lab.
The Telegraph report is mainly factual but hey Centrists don't let facts get in the way of anything whilst at the same time being full on hypocrites about their own voting records.
Comments
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
I thought he said
"Under Labour, babies will continue to be slaughtered in Gaza, and here is his LFI ID to prove it"
We should be more proud than we are about what we have achieved in public facing government IT in the is country. Most of it just works and it sooo much better than the old ways.
How dare all those boomers with their artificial hip replacement privilege demand NHS money be spent on them ! Let them sit out their time in chairs !
“..it is estimated that social workers spend between 12% and 20% of their time working directly with children and families, the remainder being spend on administrative tasks”
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2024/02/04/the-state-of-process-the-process-state/
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2024/03/08/we-need-more-bureaucracy/
https://x.com/skynews/status/1796108810387329179?s=61
@lukeakehurst
, Labour's candidate for North Durham!
When SKS says country first which one is he referring to.
This Candidate has a proud history as a paid lobbyist for one outside the UK
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_David_Friedrich#/media/File:Gerhard_von_Kügelgen_portrait_of_Friedrich.jpg
Mercifully, Starmer is doing no such thing - he'd be an object of ridicule if he did.
I'm sure that the latter is sometimes used as an excuse (eg a sudden affair), but that is a fact of life.
Delays of a few minutes to an hour have happened occasionally to me, but I've only ever had one really serious delay which was 4+ hours, and the consultant worked 2 hours beyond end-of-shift to deal with the clinic.
From 2011 to 2021, the number of households renting increased by 28%. That's far faster than population growth (6.3%) or households growth (6.1%).
The fact is immigrants are far more efficient users of the housing stock than everyone else. We have a growing proportion of outright owners (12.5%) living in half empty houses, and 1 in 20 of us are now landlords. New Feudalism.
Your classic Tory mortgage owning class has declined by 5.1% - and then they got screwed by interest rates.
Plus they can see the intense social pain inflicted on anyone that tries to talk about it, so their aversion is logical
Comparisons with education in the communist era of Eastern Europe are not entirely inapt. The guides here in Moldova have been explaining to me how they were brainwashed as kids to believe in the Soviet system even when it was clearly failing
*He said recently that he would like to see my son get married, which might be touch ambitious as the poor lad is only 16 months, but hey. Gotta have a dream!
(Don't try this in North Korea, Transnistria, Gaza, Sudan, Crimea etc).
I'd say all age groups would be in favour of NHS being well funded. The difference is who should pay for it and how?
The richer retired or the poorer workers? More borrowing? Cuts elsewhere or more taxes?
The other difference is who is going to provide the health and social care - younger workers think immigration is part of the answer, the retired don't want immigrants but still want the nurses, doctors and carers from somewhere.
I assume that Davey’s team are running with the mantra that the only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about, so anything that gets Twitter going for a couple of hours generates headlines in tomorrow’s papers is going to be positive for him.
But if Ed Davey is at a children's playground, he should be on an enormous swing. Do I have to do everyone's thinking round here?
So pratting about does make him look a bit of a pillock but at this GE the Lib Dem goal is to increase their profile and seats and not be drowned out by Labour and the Tories. No-one seriously thinks they’ll be a disruptor in this election.
I don’t think these japes will be doing him any harm at the moment; though if he overdoes it then there is the risk it crosses an invisible line and puts more people off.
As is frequently pointed out, the Tory voters gained from being tough to the far left are worth more than the left-wing voters lost to the Greens and Galloway.
The key question about Starmer for right-wing voters has always been: was he lying when he said he wanted Corbyn to be Prime Minister (and Abbott to be Home Secretary), or is he lying now when he says Corbyn and his ilk are beyond the pale? For the moment, at least, the answer is the former rather than the latter. Indeed, 2024 Starmer would probably expel 2019 Starmer.
The 'racists who can't do mathematics' faction of the Labour party will eventually have their revenge - the pendulum always swings back eventually - but whether that opportunity happens within 20 months or 20 years is now beyond their control.
P.S. There is, of course, no guarantee that any Labour candidate who believes that the Jews run the world must be on the far left of the party, as the Rochdale by-election proved.
Our Victorian system is totally obsolete and needs major reform. Not just the voting system, not just the House of Lords, not just Whitehall, not just the divisive and short run Westminster bubble, not just local and regional administration, not just the government of NI, Wales, Scotland and England, not just the often maladministered overseas territories, but all of it.
Reallocating on that basis is in my view a reasonable method, but I do still wonder whether the "don't votes" amongst the undecided are being underestimated by Opinium, because essentially they're assuming that every single one of the "dont knows" will vote if they respond to say that they will. To be fair, they are following the question response there, rather than making assumptions and therefore predictions of their own. However, I think it probable that a lot of undecideds who at the moment think that they will probably vote won't in the end bother if they can't easily make up their mind by polling day, whatever they say to pollsters now. So Opinium are in my opinion probably still overestimating the number of undecideds who realistically should be allocated back.
Opinium would counter that by saying that they apply very heavy turnout filters before asking voting intention questions, so the turnout implied by their polling isn't that unrealistic compared to actual turnout on polling day. I know that Opinium are unusual in that they at the start they ask a very loaded question designed to get people to admit that they aren't on the electoral register and then exclude them - that was apparent from their old published tables although they don't publish such detail now. But they may be overdoing it - in particular because a lot of people get onto the electoral register at the last minute after a general election is called. In 2019 nearly 3 million people did.
So although Opinium may claim that their overall implied turnout is plausible, Opinium may be excluding quite a few unregistered people who will in fact get on the register and vote, while including too many undecided voters by imputing votes for all of them. The former tend to be disproportionately Labour, while there are a lot of 2019 Conservatives in the latter. So I think that is probably biasing Opinium's polling a tad towards the Conservatives at this point, when the final electoral register has still to be set in stone.
It would assist the thought processes of some parents if they knew that most of the stuff that 'pastoral' dealt with in schools is going to be dealt with by the statutory services of social workers.
Hands in pockets, sleeve roll is the new version of the power stance it seems
I would reply but I doubt it's worth the effort - but as a hint there are a lot of reasons why schools and teachers now do a lot more family related work since 2010....
Those who wish to advocate for increasing the population, need to also advocate for building somewhere for them to live.
Issues of crap landlords and unsanitary conditions go away if there’s a surplus of housing availability.
If only we had somebody on the spot with an inquiring mind to discover why not...
Need to pay those school fees, you know.
You would be way better paying for a TA to run cover. Large schools will often have TAs or teachers for the express purpose of providing in-house cover...
The difference between the number of houses and population/households has grown too - 0.96 households per dwelling to 0.94 households per dwellings, 2.30 people to 2.26 people.
I have huge sympathy for social workers. They often deal with the worst of humanity and when it goes wrong we get children murdered and the press rips into the social workers more than the murderers. But they don't always get it right and sometimes make stupid errors. I imagine they are taught to document EVERYTHING for their own protection.
Hell we even do it as tutors at Uni. Log every meeting, keep emails etc, just in case it goes bad.
https://x.com/woodgnomology/status/1733779953458590181
If we had actually built the homes the Tories have promised since 2010 things would be a lot better, but as always they over promise, over charge and under deliver.
(This is England and Wales btw - the difference is even starker in Scotland, with our flatlining population and soaring housing costs)
The problem is that local politics is dominated by authoritarian NIMBYs, as anyone who watched Jeramy Clarkson’s farm show could see. How we can change that, is the big question. How we can change that, and still be elected afterwards, is an even bigger question.
https://x.com/steve_vladeck/status/1795886852961947993
ªLike Alito.
Vote for consistency. Vote for knowing what you'll get. Vote for someone who knows how to go downhill fast. Vote LD 👍
Would they have done so without the stunts?
Choose life. Choose a fucking big majority...
It is successive governments not building enough houses or schools or hospitals or whatnot that is the issue. Not immigration. The education and its detested focus on "anti-racism" has been hugely successful and means that the vast majority of our children are colour-blind (and XXX-blind also). Not everyone but broadly.
They - and you - should be campaigning for the government to be able to accommodate us all, not stopping some of us from being here.
That said, if you could do us all a favour and stay in the undoubted paradise that is Moldova rather than ever coming to the UK that would mean one more immigrant family able to move in to NW1. Hurrah!
He could do with getting on the debates and a good performance, then it could be a good night for the LDs - along with the ground game tactical voting push and the (in)famous bar charts
ETA: To be fair, he also looks like he's enjoying himself. It's not as forced as Hague on a water slide
As with many things, the issue isn't in the averages, it's in the variance from the averages. But the Janet Slimfast "I don't like the idea of new houses near me and they wouldn't be necessary if we didn't have so many incomers" argument has a load of holes in it as well.
Once the Tories lose power then there might a realignment that starts this process. We shall see.
Campaigns have very little impact.
Unless, of course, you do something really daft like threaten to reintroduce National Service (Con 2024) or bang on and on and on about Brexit and Brexit and Brexit and Brexit and trans and Brexit (Lib Dem 2019) or hide in a fridge (Con 2019) or, just, everything (Lab 2019) or refuse to talk about anything at all (Con 2017). But in general, campaigns don't really shift the dial. So you may as well enjoy yourself.
The Telegraph report is mainly factual but hey Centrists don't let facts get in the way of anything whilst at the same time being full on hypocrites about their own voting records.