These are parliamentary elections not presidential ones, right? After a couple of glasses of wine I'm unable to parse the BBC article. Either my tolerance has gone down, or it's unclear.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
What Leon and others miss in their Europe will lurch to the right thesis is that it is authoritarianism they increasingly find attractive, whether of right, left or middle. A strongman to free us from crime and vanquish our enemies and enforce bike lanes.
Is it really though? Sure Orban misbehaves, but Tusk deposed the Polish authritarians democratically, which seems to suggest that they aren't really very authoritarian at all.
Reform and Farage spout incoherent right wing populism to the gullible, and I hold them in great contempt, but even I don't think them undemocratic. Indeed about the only policy I agree with them is the need to move to PR.
The odd thing is that much of what you think of as incoherent right wing populism is actually lifted straight from the New Labour policy book.
I look forward to your examples of that.
New Labour took the existing core of the party’s working-class votes for granted because, according to Mandelson, they had ‘nowhere else to go’,
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
What Leon and others miss in their Europe will lurch to the right thesis is that it is authoritarianism they increasingly find attractive, whether of right, left or middle. A strongman to free us from crime and vanquish our enemies and enforce bike lanes.
Is it really though? Sure Orban misbehaves, but Tusk deposed the Polish authritarians democratically, which seems to suggest that they aren't really very authoritarian at all.
Reform and Farage spout incoherent right wing populism to the gullible, and I hold them in great contempt, but even I don't think them undemocratic. Indeed about the only policy I agree with them is the need to move to PR.
The odd thing is that much of what you think of as incoherent right wing populism is actually lifted straight from the New Labour policy book.
I look forward to your examples of that.
- Stop and search - Benefit cuts to encourage people back into work - Making it harder to claim aslyum because, "Once people get in... then it is very difficult to get them back."
What twaddle.
Stop & Search powers are largely based on the Section 1 of Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, Section 60 of Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, and Section 44/47A of Terrorism Act 2000. The first two were hardly New Labour laws
Benefit cuts? I thought the complaint of the right was that New Labour allowed benefit to escalate out of control.
Macron has just dissolved the french Parliament! election to take place around the same time as ours
Bonjour.
June 30th, which is commendably efficient.
Presumably it's an attempt to replay the "you really want the fash? Really?" gambit Sanchez used in Spain. Wonder how the UK and French campaigns interact?
What a miserable bastard.
This now means the the french side of my son's wedding on the 29th cant get smashed.
Why not? They have most of Sunday to vote.
French weddings pack up about 4 am and then they sleep the next day off.
So you could have a 12-hour kip and still plenty of time to vote.
Someone posted government data on actual incomes pre and post tax. It is quite fascinating. A 50k wage puts you in the top 16% of earners, £100k in the top 4%. What this seems to demonstrate to me is that the salary expectations of graduates as envisaged by the student loan system is completely disconnected from reality. To even service the interest payments on a 70k loan you would need to be in the top 10% of earners.
Are we comparing apples with apples?
How are earners defined? Do they include those on pensions, for example, or only those of working age from 16-65?
Even if the latter in any society like ours you will have vast swathes of people earning 15k-30k in all sorts of semi-skilled/services jobs so I'd expect top-end graduate jobs to be a top segment of 20%.
It does beg the question why we aim for 50% graduates, though.
I don't think it's a coincidence that countries with more successful economies than Britain's have high rates of participation in tertiary education.
I mean, Britain could continue to be a backward second-rate economy with low productivity if you really want, and deciding not to educate British children and instead importing the educated people the economy requires saves you some spending on the education budget, but it's not an approach that any other country with aspirations follows.
Why is British culture so anti-education?
I agree with you, but how do you move the balance of jobs in that direction?
I'm not sure how it works if 50% go to university but only 20% get decent graduate jobs.
My point exactly a lot of jobs now that ask for a degree don't actually need a degree to do and filtering by degree also gets rid of people that just dont want to do one even if they could intellectually.
The end result is you get a lot of people doing low end jobs with a ton of student debt
These are parliamentary elections not presidential ones, right? After a couple of glasses of wine I'm unable to parse the BBC article. Either my tolerance has gone down, or it's unclear.
Yes, you can't bring forward the presidential election (except in emergency situations).
These are parliamentary elections not presidential ones, right? After a couple of glasses of wine I'm unable to parse the BBC article. Either my tolerance has gone down, or it's unclear.
Off topic. Interesting stuff on old Lowry interviews uncovered.
I’ve reappraised him recently; I’d mentally pigeonholed him as a bit tiresome and amateurish but actually there’s a lot to his work - and I feel the key to it was looking at it from the viewpoint of his having probably quite deep and chronic depression.
Beyond the factory/crowd scenes he is best known for, there is a lot of pretty weird and visionary and even near-abstract (his seascapes). Since experiencing a sustained depressive bout myself I found I could relate to his work so much more.
His studies of girls in chaste but preposterously tight/throttling dress take on a peculiar dimension when considering the absence of romance in his life.
I was fortunate enough to go to an exhibition of his work many years ago and was knocked out by the range, skill and profundity of his work. Anyone who just thinks of him as just a painter of northern industrial landscapes is seriously underating him.
I was in the latter category until recently but have happily reappraised since. Whether he is a genuinely major artist, I’m not sure - but he was certainly much more interesting than the million prints of ‘going to the match’ might leave you thinking.
I don’t think that naff ‘Matchstick Men’ song helped either.
The paintings of northern industrial landscapes are interesting, well executed, and have been adopted by us in the NW as emblems. But I don't think they're a celebration. Lowry seems to me appalled by the landscape and sees little humanity among the crowds. If this genuinely is the impression he's trying tp convey he does it very well. As you say, though, he's a brilliant artist, and a much more rounded one than the paintings he's best known for would suggest.
The link isn’t working for me, but I know the one you mean.
His seascape here (which I snapped at the eponymous gallery in Salford Quays) is one that really struck me; I stood looking at it for ages. Something about the sea as oblivion, and oblivion itself being a release from the arduous mess of living. I don’t know whether it was me projecting onto the painting (I prefer to believe not) but it utterly held me.
I've had similar feelings about one of Munch's paintings (I've seen it titled as "Young girl on a jetty" and "Young girl at the beach") :
Beautiful painting.
Munch and Lowry are similar in some ways, both being kind of outside the main schools (with being capital-O Outsider), and having a place in popular culture that misrepresents them somewhat.
Nowadays a person like me would be job limited to stacking shelves in tesco's because I don't have a degree
In my time I have however got a patent to my name for a colour space algortithm I invented, I have written sat nav software that includes cars, cycles, pedestrians. I have written medical software and now work on educational software. Focussing everything on degrees now would make an 18 year old me never considered for any of that and you think thats a good thing?
You've not seen the BSc in Store Replenishment Methodologies at Chipping Camden University, I take it?
Interesting situation: the first round of the French legislative election is going to happen 4 days before the UK election, and the second round 3 days after.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
What Leon and others miss in their Europe will lurch to the right thesis is that it is authoritarianism they increasingly find attractive, whether of right, left or middle. A strongman to free us from crime and vanquish our enemies and enforce bike lanes.
Is it really though? Sure Orban misbehaves, but Tusk deposed the Polish authritarians democratically, which seems to suggest that they aren't really very authoritarian at all.
Reform and Farage spout incoherent right wing populism to the gullible, and I hold them in great contempt, but even I don't think them undemocratic. Indeed about the only policy I agree with them is the need to move to PR.
The odd thing is that much of what you think of as incoherent right wing populism is actually lifted straight from the New Labour policy book.
I look forward to your examples of that.
New Labour took the existing core of the party’s working-class votes for granted because, according to Mandelson, they had ‘nowhere else to go’,
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by Labour’s promise of 20,000 more prison places.
What Leon and others miss in their Europe will lurch to the right thesis is that it is authoritarianism they increasingly find attractive, whether of right, left or middle. A strongman to free us from crime and vanquish our enemies and enforce bike lanes.
Is it really though? Sure Orban misbehaves, but Tusk deposed the Polish authritarians democratically, which seems to suggest that they aren't really very authoritarian at all.
Reform and Farage spout incoherent right wing populism to the gullible, and I hold them in great contempt, but even I don't think them undemocratic. Indeed about the only policy I agree with them is the need to move to PR.
The odd thing is that much of what you think of as incoherent right wing populism is actually lifted straight from the New Labour policy book.
I look forward to your examples of that.
- Stop and search - Benefit cuts to encourage people back into work - Making it harder to claim aslyum because, "Once people get in... then it is very difficult to get them back."
What twaddle.
Stop & Search powers are largely based on the Section 1 of Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, Section 60 of Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, and Section 44/47A of Terrorism Act 2000. The first two were hardly New Labour laws
Benefit cuts? I thought the complaint of the right was that New Labour allowed benefit to escalate out of control.
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown will jointly unveil proposals for lone parents with children aged over 11 to seek jobs or else face potential benefit sanctions.
Blair: "The only way of dealing with this is to stop the numbers coming in. Once people get in, unless you can discover what country they come from and get that country to agree to take them back, then it is very difficult to get them back."
Nowadays a person like me would be job limited to stacking shelves in tesco's because I don't have a degree
In my time I have however got a patent to my name for a colour space algortithm I invented, I have written sat nav software that includes cars, cycles, pedestrians. I have written medical software and now work on educational software. Focussing everything on degrees now would make an 18 year old me never considered for any of that and you think thats a good thing?
Perhaps - but then if so many more people go on to do degrees, are you so sure you wouldn't have been one of them?
Or if you are exceptional in your field, growing up with the internet, maybe you'd already have been coding for money before the age of 18?
I'm not advocating for everyone to do degrees, but I assume even the 18 year old you was pretty clever?
- the next question is, subject to the usual laws around slander and libel and the requirement to have an imprint, are there any restrictions on what you can put in an Election Address? If you wanted to promote your company's business, could you do so?
Didn't Screaming Lord Sutch, late of the MRLP, use by-elections to put on a gig locally and promote it through the freepost provided for election addresses?
I miss His Lordship; none of his successors seem to have had quite the charisma.
His acolyte JohnLoony who used to post here was surprisingly well-informed about politics for someone who'd hitched his political wagon to the epitome of no-hope causes. Years of fighting local and national elections, presumably.
He then joined the Conservative Party.
He had an exhaustive knowledge and background in Trotskyite splinter parties of the Seventies and Eighties. I think he followed a path similar to the Revolutionary Communist Party running Spiked-Online, when policy changes they change with it. Oceana has always been at war with EastAsia.
JohnLoony morphed from quite an interesting quirky MRLP candidate to a rather boring garden-variety Tory apparatchik. It was a disappointing journey.
Someone posted government data on actual incomes pre and post tax. It is quite fascinating. A 50k wage puts you in the top 16% of earners, £100k in the top 4%. What this seems to demonstrate to me is that the salary expectations of graduates as envisaged by the student loan system is completely disconnected from reality. To even service the interest payments on a 70k loan you would need to be in the top 10% of earners.
Are we comparing apples with apples?
How are earners defined? Do they include those on pensions, for example, or only those of working age from 16-65?
Even if the latter in any society like ours you will have vast swathes of people earning 15k-30k in all sorts of semi-skilled/services jobs so I'd expect top-end graduate jobs to be a top segment of 20%.
It does beg the question why we aim for 50% graduates, though.
I don't think it's a coincidence that countries with more successful economies than Britain's have high rates of participation in tertiary education.
I mean, Britain could continue to be a backward second-rate economy with low productivity if you really want, and deciding not to educate British children and instead importing the educated people the economy requires saves you some spending on the education budget, but it's not an approach that any other country with aspirations follows.
Why is British culture so anti-education?
I would guess those other countries are educating people in economically valuable subjects. Generally British culture is reasonably pro-education as long as it is FOR something.
Number of decades ago, members of the Indiana legislature railed against the egghead of Indiana University for teaching "Mickey Mouse" courses and majors, for example "Uralic-Altaic studies"
What the hell is a Uralic, they asked
The president of IU had to explain to the irate/skeptical/ignorant legislators that, among other things, graduates of the program were MUCH sought after by CIA and other national security agencies due to their fluency in languages spoken in the Soviet Union.
Someone's taken my job it seems. I did this in 2015. Except mine was slightly better because I had the names of the candidates in the spreadsheet without having to click on a link.
Nowadays a person like me would be job limited to stacking shelves in tesco's because I don't have a degree
In my time I have however got a patent to my name for a colour space algortithm I invented, I have written sat nav software that includes cars, cycles, pedestrians. I have written medical software and now work on educational software. Focussing everything on degrees now would make an 18 year old me never considered for any of that and you think thats a good thing?
You've not seen the BSc in Store Replenishment Methodologies at Chipping Camden University, I take it?
To give an example my old job, we were on the top floor different company below us
I was writing medical software no degree.
Their company ( chatted to a number in the outside smoking area) required a degree to work there, their job was calling people and then typing details into an online form....rinse repeat. They had 50 k student debt for that
Do you think that job needs a degree even though the insurance company wouldn't bother interviewing unless you had one? Mainly because more degrees than jobs that require one
Nowadays a person like me would be job limited to stacking shelves in tesco's because I don't have a degree
In my time I have however got a patent to my name for a colour space algortithm I invented, I have written sat nav software that includes cars, cycles, pedestrians. I have written medical software and now work on educational software. Focussing everything on degrees now would make an 18 year old me never considered for any of that and you think thats a good thing?
You've not seen the BSc in Store Replenishment Methodologies at Chipping Camden University, I take it?
To give an example my old job, we were on the top floor different company below us
I was writing medical software no degree.
Their company ( chatted to a number in the outside smoking area) required a degree to work there, their job was calling people and then typing details into an online form....rinse repeat. They had 50 k student debt for that
Do you think that job needs a degree even though the insurance company wouldn't bother interviewing unless you had one? Mainly because more degrees than jobs that require one
A degree shouldn't be seen as simply a passport for a job. Having a highly educated population, regardless of job, should be seen as a good thing.
The far right is going to have its day in the sun, though lack of internal coordination between the parties makes its administrative impact rather limited.
The other thing that stops them uniting into a powerful bloc is that different versions of them believe different things.
Put simply, there are truly nasty neo-nazis in suits, like the AfD and Sweden democrats, the successors to Hitler and Mussolini, and there are dozens of essentially Falangist parties, the successors to Franco. The current iteration of the RN in France, the PiS in Poland and Meloni in Italy are Falangists. At worst. Arguably just 19th century style authoritarians.
The AfD are the scariest. Worse than Trump, though less powerful.
The other divide is pro-Putinists vs the rest. Another where PiS and Meloni are on one side.
History tends to repeat itself and what happens on a small scale in the UK first (reformation and religious conflict, anti-royalist revolution, the rise of socialism) then manifests itself in a vastly more bloody way in Central Europe next. We did Brexit back in 2016, so they are due.
Is it not a category error to call any democratic politician a fascist/falangist/nazi given that the one thing they had in common was opposition to multi-party democracy?
For rather obvious historical reasons, absolutely not.
The far right is going to have its day in the sun, though lack of internal coordination between the parties makes its administrative impact rather limited.
The other thing that stops them uniting into a powerful bloc is that different versions of them believe different things.
Put simply, there are truly nasty neo-nazis in suits, like the AfD and Sweden democrats, the successors to Hitler and Mussolini, and there are dozens of essentially Falangist parties, the successors to Franco. The current iteration of the RN in France, the PiS in Poland and Meloni in Italy are Falangists. At worst. Arguably just 19th century style authoritarians.
The AfD are the scariest. Worse than Trump, though less powerful.
The other divide is pro-Putinists vs the rest. Another where PiS and Meloni are on one side.
History tends to repeat itself and what happens on a small scale in the UK first (reformation and religious conflict, anti-royalist revolution, the rise of socialism) then manifests itself in a vastly more bloody way in Central Europe next. We did Brexit back in 2016, so they are due.
Is it not a category error to call any democratic politician a fascist/falangist/nazi given that the one thing they had in common was opposition to multi-party democracy?
For rather obvious historical reasons, absolutely not.
Meloni has been in power for a while now. When do you expect her to ban political parties and establish a dictatorship? Do you think this is her goal?
A degree shouldn't be seen as simply a passport for a job. Having a highly educated population, regardless of job, should be seen as a good thing.
I didnt claim a highly educated population is a bad thing. What I am saying is a bad thing is that there are many using it as a gatekeeper to winnow out people that can do the job because they chose not to go into student debt or in my case for personal reasons couldnt goto uni even though accepted in the free education days
I think it shows balls. Not being afraid of the electorate, etc. I wish our politicians were a bit more like that.
Well Rishi just called an election, so you could by the same token say he has balls. Whereas Farage only has one (the other is in a concert hall in South Ken).
Macron is, though, several orders of magnitude better looking than anyone in our entire House of Commons. So he gets to do silly things.
A degree shouldn't be seen as simply a passport for a job. Having a highly educated population, regardless of job, should be seen as a good thing.
I didnt claim a highly educated population is a bad thing. What I am saying is a bad thing is that there are many using it as a gatekeeper to winnow out people that can do the job because they chose not to go into student debt or in my case for personal reasons couldnt goto uni even though accepted in the free education days
That is a problem for employers to resolve. If they are missing out on talent then they will lose out.
It isn't the fault of the students or universities. When there is only one game in town you have to play it.
Oooh my Munch post has disappeared. That’s a bit off.
I carefully reduced all my little piccies into one place and screenshot them into 1, yes just 1, picture and put them up here. They weren’t 5 miniature photos. Just 1 photo screenshot. And that was my first photo of the day.
Boo
Anyway I was saying how wonderful the Munch collection is at the National museum of Oslo and it’s worth going there before you go to the new Munch museum.
Macron has some balls. Gutsy, potentially clever, move. He clearly saw this result coming, and having problems getting anything through the legislature anyway, has basically said to the French people “back me or get THAT”.
Could blow up badly of course, but if EU Parliament results were predictive of subsequent domestic Parliament elections the Tories would have won neither 2015 nor 2019.
A degree shouldn't be seen as simply a passport for a job. Having a highly educated population, regardless of job, should be seen as a good thing.
I didnt claim a highly educated population is a bad thing. What I am saying is a bad thing is that there are many using it as a gatekeeper to winnow out people that can do the job because they chose not to go into student debt or in my case for personal reasons couldnt goto uni even though accepted in the free education days
That is a problem for employers to resolve. If they are missing out on talent then they will lose out.
It isn't the fault of the students or universities. When there is only one game in town you have to play it.
Why would employers solve it, its not hurting them. The people it is hurting is people like me when I first went to work who instead of having my choices they are now condemned forever to crap jobs because they refused the debt
The statement, attributed to Richard Moore, the chairman of the Basildon and Billericay Conservative Association, said: "It didn’t take long for Richard to convince us that he was the only man for the job."
Oooh my Munch post has disappeared. That’s a bit off.
I carefully reduced all my little piccies into one place and screenshot them into 1, yes just 1, picture and put them up here. They weren’t 5 miniature photos. Just 1 photo screenshot. And that was my first photo of the day.
Boo
Anyway I was saying how wonderful the Munch collection is at the National museum of Oslo and it’s worth going there before you go to the new Munch museum.
Ah, I just did the Munch museum - which was very good. I also did the Nobel Peace Centre museum, which was also good.
Someone posted government data on actual incomes pre and post tax. It is quite fascinating. A 50k wage puts you in the top 16% of earners, £100k in the top 4%. What this seems to demonstrate to me is that the salary expectations of graduates as envisaged by the student loan system is completely disconnected from reality. To even service the interest payments on a 70k loan you would need to be in the top 10% of earners.
Are we comparing apples with apples?
How are earners defined? Do they include those on pensions, for example, or only those of working age from 16-65?
Even if the latter in any society like ours you will have vast swathes of people earning 15k-30k in all sorts of semi-skilled/services jobs so I'd expect top-end graduate jobs to be a top segment of 20%.
It does beg the question why we aim for 50% graduates, though.
I don't think it's a coincidence that countries with more successful economies than Britain's have high rates of participation in tertiary education.
I mean, Britain could continue to be a backward second-rate economy with low productivity if you really want, and deciding not to educate British children and instead importing the educated people the economy requires saves you some spending on the education budget, but it's not an approach that any other country with aspirations follows.
Why is British culture so anti-education?
Is it? UK universities have a remarkable showing among the top ones worldwide, and unlike in so many fields, institutions outside London, especially north England and Scotland, are outstanding. Good one in Cambridge too.
Of course there is also a huge, raucous mass of people who affect to hate learning of every sort; I know loads of them and live in just such a place. Many of them have fabulous expertise in practical and useful skills which they don't think of as education or learning at all. That's part of the class system we didn't make but are all born into.
Oooh my Munch post has disappeared. That’s a bit off.
I carefully reduced all my little piccies into one place and screenshot them into 1, yes just 1, picture and put them up here. They weren’t 5 miniature photos. Just 1 photo screenshot. And that was my first photo of the day.
Boo
Anyway I was saying how wonderful the Munch collection is at the National museum of Oslo and it’s worth going there before you go to the new Munch museum.
They should open a Munch Museum in Munich. Just because they could call it Munich Munch. Which is snappy.
Oooh my Munch post has disappeared. That’s a bit off.
I carefully reduced all my little piccies into one place and screenshot them into 1, yes just 1, picture and put them up here. They weren’t 5 miniature photos. Just 1 photo screenshot. And that was my first photo of the day.
Boo
Anyway I was saying how wonderful the Munch collection is at the National museum of Oslo and it’s worth going there before you go to the new Munch museum.
They should open a Munch Museum in Munich. Just because they could call it Munich Munch. Which is snappy.
Oooh my Munch post has disappeared. That’s a bit off.
I carefully reduced all my little piccies into one place and screenshot them into 1, yes just 1, picture and put them up here. They weren’t 5 miniature photos. Just 1 photo screenshot. And that was my first photo of the day.
Boo
Anyway I was saying how wonderful the Munch collection is at the National museum of Oslo and it’s worth going there before you go to the new Munch museum.
They should open a Munch Museum in Munich. Just because they could call it Munich Munch. Which is snappy.
Oooh my Munch post has disappeared. That’s a bit off.
I carefully reduced all my little piccies into one place and screenshot them into 1, yes just 1, picture and put them up here. They weren’t 5 miniature photos. Just 1 photo screenshot. And that was my first photo of the day.
Boo
Anyway I was saying how wonderful the Munch collection is at the National museum of Oslo and it’s worth going there before you go to the new Munch museum.
They should open a Munch Museum in Munich. Just because they could call it Munich Munch. Which is snappy.
Oooh my Munch post has disappeared. That’s a bit off.
I carefully reduced all my little piccies into one place and screenshot them into 1, yes just 1, picture and put them up here. They weren’t 5 miniature photos. Just 1 photo screenshot. And that was my first photo of the day.
Boo
Anyway I was saying how wonderful the Munch collection is at the National museum of Oslo and it’s worth going there before you go to the new Munch museum.
It seems from that that Richard Holden has left Twitter.
I've said this before a couple of times - he was my brilliant constituency MP until one day he suddenly wasn't and it became apparent it was all either a scam or something he was prepared to sacrifice for personal ambition.
Went to Conhome to survey the wreckage, but they have an excellent piece by Harry Phibbs:
It’s true that Labour has tended to do worse when pushing extreme socialist policies. But have the Conservatives won electoral advantage by shifting to the middle? Margaret Thatcher was not noted for abandoning Conservative principles for the cause of consensus and triangulation. Her predecessor, Edward Heath, was more keen on pursuing the “centre ground” – with bland appeals to “moderation” and for support from “men of goodwill”. The Conservatives lost three out of the four General Elections fought under his leadership.
It was a video aimed at Conservatives Abroad for voting in the GE, which I presume can be linked to his role as foreign secretary.
All 3.5 million of them. The Tories could win a very decent majority on the ex pat Tory votes alone
Though usually just 100 000 or so actually vote, don't they?
I do fear the other parties have missed a trick. Perhaps this is the plan Sunak keeps telling us about.
You really have this view of the Tories as being a Machiavellian election winning machine don’t you? There’s plenty of evidence that the ex-pat vote won’t go Tory.
The last person to carp so incessantly on TV about his ‘plan’ was Baldrick.
Nowadays a person like me would be job limited to stacking shelves in tesco's because I don't have a degree
In my time I have however got a patent to my name for a colour space algortithm I invented, I have written sat nav software that includes cars, cycles, pedestrians. I have written medical software and now work on educational software. Focussing everything on degrees now would make an 18 year old me never considered for any of that and you think thats a good thing?
I wouldn't use education as a gate-keeping exercise, no, and different people will learn better in different ways, and so there can be multiple pathways to the same end.
But, still, more education (assuming done right) generally produces a better educated workforce, which is generally a more productive workforce, which is generally a wealthier country.
Yet a lot of people are suspicious of it in Britain.
Nowadays a person like me would be job limited to stacking shelves in tesco's because I don't have a degree
In my time I have however got a patent to my name for a colour space algortithm I invented, I have written sat nav software that includes cars, cycles, pedestrians. I have written medical software and now work on educational software. Focussing everything on degrees now would make an 18 year old me never considered for any of that and you think thats a good thing?
I wouldn't use education as a gate-keeping exercise, no, and different people will learn better in different ways, and so there can be multiple pathways to the same end.
But, still, more education (assuming done right) generally produces a better educated workforce, which is generally a more productive workforce, which is generally a wealthier country.
Yet a lot of people are suspicious of it in Britain.
I am not disputing education is generally a good thing, hell I wish I had more.
Sadly though it has now become a gatekeeper for jobs, no longer do they ask can you do the job but can you do the job and have a degree for far too many jobs
Everybody should leave Richard Holden alone. Assuming he wins his seat, it's more than sufficient punishment to know that he will, presumably, be obliged to have a home in Basildon or Billericay. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
@Pagan2 quotes are borked but fair enough. I agree. However it is up to companies to rein in and reform their own HR departments.
What is their incentive to do so?
If they are missing out on cheap talent, that cannot easily go elsewhere then it isn't good business.
How do you prove that to them when most companies that aren't advertising min wage jobs are...must have a degree in the advert.
Hell I have applied for jobs in software engineering and been told that despite 30 years experience I am not qualified because no degree
You'll be delighted to hear the Public Sector is leading the way here. Due to the shortage of teachers, classes are increasingly being covered (and increasingly permanently led) by non-graduate HLTA's. On as little as less than £23k.
@Pagan2 quotes are borked but fair enough. I agree. However it is up to companies to rein in and reform their own HR departments.
What is their incentive to do so?
If they are missing out on cheap talent, that cannot easily go elsewhere then it isn't good business.
How do you prove that to them when most companies that aren't advertising min wage jobs are...must have a degree in the advert.
Hell I have applied for jobs in software engineering and been told that despite 30 years experience I am not qualified because no degree
It's not easy to convince them, but that is what you need to do, not punish the young for playing the only game in town.
Where am I advocating punishing the young, if anything I am arguing we shouldn't punish them by making them get a degree just to get a job that doesn't need one in the first point
I do not pretend to understand who is who in European elections but seems the right are making gains, especially in Germany and France, and Macron has called an unexpected election
I expect Farage to be all over this and it is not helpful to those worried about the right and his part in the UK
Oooh my Munch post has disappeared. That’s a bit off.
I carefully reduced all my little piccies into one place and screenshot them into 1, yes just 1, picture and put them up here. They weren’t 5 miniature photos. Just 1 photo screenshot. And that was my first photo of the day.
Boo
Anyway I was saying how wonderful the Munch collection is at the National museum of Oslo and it’s worth going there before you go to the new Munch museum.
They should open a Munch Museum in Munich. Just because they could call it Munich Munch. Which is snappy.
Auf Deutsch it is better still: Munchen Munch.
With a cafe:
Munchen Munch Munchies.
And, similar to the Tate in Liverpool, a subsidiary. Munchen Moenchengladbach Munch Munchies.
Don't people realise @Mexicanpete is a piss taking satirist par excellence?
On this occasion I am genuinely fearful. I read articles back in 1992 explaining that the Tory vote was bolstered in handy constituencies by South African voters (not ANC voters). I have subsequently been unable to locate such evidence.
Oooh my Munch post has disappeared. That’s a bit off.
I carefully reduced all my little piccies into one place and screenshot them into 1, yes just 1, picture and put them up here. They weren’t 5 miniature photos. Just 1 photo screenshot. And that was my first photo of the day.
Boo
Anyway I was saying how wonderful the Munch collection is at the National museum of Oslo and it’s worth going there before you go to the new Munch museum.
They should open a Munch Museum in Munich. Just because they could call it Munich Munch. Which is snappy.
Auf Deutsch it is better still: Munchen Munch.
PB Pungent Pendant Alert: Münchner Munch.
I hope they have a Munch museum in Münster, just saying.
@Pagan2 quotes are borked but fair enough. I agree. However it is up to companies to rein in and reform their own HR departments.
What is their incentive to do so?
If they are missing out on cheap talent, that cannot easily go elsewhere then it isn't good business.
How do you prove that to them when most companies that aren't advertising min wage jobs are...must have a degree in the advert.
Hell I have applied for jobs in software engineering and been told that despite 30 years experience I am not qualified because no degree
You'll be delighted to hear the Public Sector is leading the way here. Due to the shortage of teachers, classes are increasingly being covered (and increasingly permanently led) by non-graduate HLTA's. On as little as less than £23k.
Though possibly a job where a higher level of education is relevant. Be clear here I am not saying degrees are necessarily worthless. I am merely saying there seems to be a lot of jobs that were quite happily done properly by people with o levels or a levels alone that suddenly require a degree and a load of student debt
Everybody should leave Richard Holden alone. Assuming he wins his seat, it's more than sufficient punishment to know that he will, presumably, be obliged to have a home in Basildon or Billericay. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
Don't people realise @Mexicanpete is a piss taking satirist par excellence?
I realised that long ago
Good. I'm glad it's not just me. He really is great at it, isn't he? I often read his posts, and my hackles getup. Then I see the author and have a wry chuckle to myself.
Someone posted government data on actual incomes pre and post tax. It is quite fascinating. A 50k wage puts you in the top 16% of earners, £100k in the top 4%. What this seems to demonstrate to me is that the salary expectations of graduates as envisaged by the student loan system is completely disconnected from reality. To even service the interest payments on a 70k loan you would need to be in the top 10% of earners.
Are we comparing apples with apples?
How are earners defined? Do they include those on pensions, for example, or only those of working age from 16-65?
Even if the latter in any society like ours you will have vast swathes of people earning 15k-30k in all sorts of semi-skilled/services jobs so I'd expect top-end graduate jobs to be a top segment of 20%.
It does beg the question why we aim for 50% graduates, though.
I don't think it's a coincidence that countries with more successful economies than Britain's have high rates of participation in tertiary education.
I mean, Britain could continue to be a backward second-rate economy with low productivity if you really want, and deciding not to educate British children and instead importing the educated people the economy requires saves you some spending on the education budget, but it's not an approach that any other country with aspirations follows.
Why is British culture so anti-education?
I agree with you, but how do you move the balance of jobs in that direction?
I'm not sure how it works if 50% go to university but only 20% get decent graduate jobs.
Well I'd guess that it's partly the problem with British companies not investing. I've also said in the past that I think there's a problem with technical tertiary education not being as prestigious as academic tertiary education in Britain. So we might be encouraging people to get the wrong sort of education to some extent, or the wrong people.
Also, in Ireland, if you had large numbers of graduates not finding work at the right level for their qualifications, they'd go and find work in Australia/Canada/US/Britain/etc that paid better and they were qualified for. I know Britain has a larger population than Ireland, and so there are more graduates looking for work, but why aren't they finding work in other Anglophone countries?
Comments
Macron stays in office until 2027
Stop & Search powers are largely based on the Section 1 of Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, Section 60 of Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, and Section 44/47A of Terrorism Act 2000. The first two were hardly New Labour laws
Benefit cuts? I thought the complaint of the right was that New Labour allowed benefit to escalate out of control.
Ditto asylum.
The end result is you get a lot of people doing low end jobs with a ton of student debt
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/jun/09/eu-europe-elections-2024-results-news-updates-live-latest
He’s been a good President for France in uneasy times. But he hasn’t been the transformation he promised
Munch and Lowry are similar in some ways, both being kind of outside the main schools (with being capital-O Outsider), and having a place in popular culture that misrepresents them somewhat.
Tony Blair yesterday claimed the spate of knife and gun murders in London was not being caused by poverty, but a distinctive black culture.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2007/mar/04/socialexclusion.politics
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown will jointly unveil proposals for lone parents with children aged over 11 to seek jobs or else face potential benefit sanctions.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/2738771.stm
Blair: "The only way of dealing with this is to stop the numbers coming in. Once people get in, unless you can discover what country they come from and get that country to agree to take them back, then it is very difficult to get them back."
Or if you are exceptional in your field, growing up with the internet, maybe you'd already have been coding for money before the age of 18?
I'm not advocating for everyone to do degrees, but I assume even the 18 year old you was pretty clever?
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1799836148153659799?t=E4bWTooBPnpsasY4uA4XCA&s=19
rather boring garden-variety Tory apparatchik. It was a disappointing journey.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Klul21t3kREO3Mv-LOUEUpEtQkYHZ2P4Dxc8q5EWUWY/edit?gid=0#gid=0
I was writing medical software no degree.
Their company ( chatted to a number in the outside smoking area) required a degree to work there, their job was calling people and then typing details into an online form....rinse repeat. They had 50 k student debt for that
Do you think that job needs a degree even though the insurance company wouldn't bother interviewing unless you had one? Mainly because more degrees than jobs that require one
For a second there I almost even said they'd drown their sorrows together in a giant lash, forgetting that Rishi doesn't drink.
I didnt claim a highly educated population is a bad thing. What I am saying is a bad thing is that there are many using it as a gatekeeper to winnow out people that can do the job because they chose not to go into student debt or in my case for personal reasons couldnt goto uni even though accepted in the free education days
Macron is, though, several orders of magnitude better looking than anyone in our entire House of Commons. So he gets to do silly things.
That is a problem for employers to resolve. If they are missing out on talent then they will lose out.
It isn't the fault of the students or universities. When there is only one game in town you have to play it.
I carefully reduced all my little piccies into one place and screenshot them into 1, yes just 1, picture and put them up here. They weren’t 5 miniature photos. Just 1 photo screenshot. And that was my first photo of the day.
Boo
Anyway I was saying how wonderful the Munch collection is at the National museum of Oslo and it’s worth going there before you go to the new Munch museum.
@rcs1000 ? Unless I hit cancel by mistake?!
Could blow up badly of course, but if EU Parliament results were predictive of subsequent domestic Parliament elections the Tories would have won neither 2015 nor 2019.
It isn't the fault of the students or universities. When there is only one game in town you have to play it.
Why would employers solve it, its not hurting them. The people it is hurting is people like me when I first went to work who instead of having my choices they are now condemned forever to crap jobs because they refused the debt
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3ggn7g466go
Of course there is also a huge, raucous mass of people who affect to hate learning of every sort; I know loads of them and live in just such a place. Many of them have fabulous expertise in practical and useful skills which they don't think of as education or learning at all. That's part of the class system we didn't make but are all born into.
Munchen Munch Munchies.
It brings me pleasure to watch him squirm.
Hell I have applied for jobs in software engineering and been told that despite 30 years experience I am not qualified because no degree
https://conservativehome.com/2024/06/09/conservatives-should-seek-the-common-ground-not-the-centre-ground/
https://x.com/Otto_English/status/1799856905478619239
The last person to carp so incessantly on TV about his ‘plan’ was Baldrick.
But, still, more education (assuming done right) generally produces a better educated workforce, which is generally a more productive workforce, which is generally a wealthier country.
Yet a lot of people are suspicious of it in Britain.
Sadly though it has now become a gatekeeper for jobs, no longer do they ask can you do the job but can you do the job and have a degree for far too many jobs
Due to the shortage of teachers, classes are increasingly being covered (and increasingly permanently led) by non-graduate HLTA's.
On as little as less than £23k.
I do not pretend to understand who is who in European elections but seems the right are making gains, especially in Germany and France, and Macron has called an unexpected election
I expect Farage to be all over this and it is not helpful to those worried about the right and his part in the UK
Munchen Moenchengladbach Munch Munchies.
Xylitol is prothrombotic and associated with cardiovascular risk
https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/eurheartj/ehae244/7683453
He is a commentator from the right as far as I understand, but I do not read anything he publishes just the same as I ignore the hard left
I'm glad it's not just me. He really is great at it, isn't he? I often read his posts, and my hackles getup. Then I see the author and have a wry chuckle to myself.
Also, in Ireland, if you had large numbers of graduates not finding work at the right level for their qualifications, they'd go and find work in Australia/Canada/US/Britain/etc that paid better and they were qualified for. I know Britain has a larger population than Ireland, and so there are more graduates looking for work, but why aren't they finding work in other Anglophone countries?
What's coming?
I'm suspicious