Interesting he apologises to Farage and Reform but not to Sunak?
A volunteer Reform UK canvasser has been filmed calling Rishi Sunak a “f---ing P---” by an undercover reporter.
Channel 4 News filmed the remarks in Clacton, where Nigel Farage is running to be MP, by Andrew Parker.
“I’ve always been a Tory voter,” he said. “But what annoys me is that f---ing P--- we’ve got in. What good is he? You tell me, you know. He’s just wet. F---ing useless.”
In a statement, Mr Parker said: “I would like to make it clear that neither Nigel Farage personally or the Reform Party are aware of my personal views on immigration.”
He added: “I would therefore like to apologise profusely to Nigel Farage and the Reform Party if my personal views have reflected badly on them and brought them into disrepute as this was not my intention.
Mr Farage said: “I am dismayed by the reported comments of a handful of people associated with my local campaign, particularly those who are volunteers. They will no longer be with the campaign.”
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
Question - what is the difference between "socialist government" and the Conservatives?
Punative taxes to record levels? Tick Wasting billions on crap public services? Tick Open door migration letting anyone in? Tick Nanny state nonsense about what we eat and smoke? Tick
People don't fear "socialist government" or any of the idiotic threats Sunak and the press team are making, because we live that every day already.
The Overton window is so narrow there is almost nothing substantive to discuss. Once you have a welfare state, free state education, NHS, industrial policy, consumer protection, regulation about everything, and a few other things a social democrat state with highly regulated capitalism is the only option. State managed expenditure has increased every year and this will continue. It is unavoidable.
The left have one further option - this + socialist state control of all commerce too. No serious right wing option has emerged with a working model in Europe yet. This is one of the most remarkable and underestimated facts of political policy. The Conservative party's two biggest fails since the war are: Lack of European statecraft, leading to the disaster of Brexit; and the failure to practice conservatism in any respects at all.
Not something I advocate by any means just an observation on all governements of the past
Wars used to cull the poor, now we no longer really have mass casualty wars its a new problem for governements of all stripes to have a burgeoning underclass and they have no idea how to deal with it
More broadly we have a terrible problem with dependency, chiefly due to a combination of low paid employment and ridiculous housing costs (meaning that many working people end up reliant on social security) and vast numbers of pensioners. The situation is theoretically recoverable, but some of the measures required - especially millions of houses and attendant infrastructure, and requiring people to work until 70 or possibly slightly beyond that - are so unpopular that they'll probably never get done. I'll certainly be surprised in a good way of Labour manages to meet its building commitments, and astonished if the houses are decent rather than shoddily constructed little identikit rabbit hutches marooned amidst acres of car parking.
Labour won't meet those targets even if it is their deepest desire, simple fact is there aren't enough construction workers nor the supply of building materials. The problem is exacerbated by the fact we are over the 50% mark for people who take more from the state than they give. For those people voting for more is a no brainer.
As many might have noted I tend rightwards . However I do believe there should be a safety net, free education to 18 and a health service which is free at point of use.
I also believe though that the state does too much and we should trim back what we do. I would rather the state did less but funded it properly than it tries to do too much and half arses everything.
For starters I would do a clawback on state pensions, every 5£ over say 5k private pension should mean 1£ off your state pension
NI on pensions
A lifetime health care costs cap with an insurance based top off
As examples
There is no shortage of skilled tradies in this country who could be building homes if they were easily able to do so without planning restrictions.
Sorry but there is, firms are poaching workers off each other because they can't get enough for example brickies and yes because we don't train enough
Firms poaching off each other is the free market in action.
Nobody has a divine right to minimum wage labour.
Brickies aren't min wage for a while, there just arent enough here to build 300k houses a year, average wage for a brickie now is 20 an hour
We've just been discussing, a quick search for apprentice brickie posts is advertising at £5.28 per hour.
Maybe apprentices should be £12/h and average wages £25?
If you're not able to fill your vacancies, that's because you're either not paying enough, or not offering good enough terms of service.
Thats apprentices and yes to low however you aren't going to ask an apprentice to build a house. We have an apprentice at work and he is a good guy, however we arent getting him to build any software that is going to go anywhere near a customer....same I would imagine for an apprentice brickie, you are teaching him how to not letting him near somewhere someone is going to live in and rely on not falling down. Till he is trained enough he is not an asset but a cost
Not by themselves they won't, but they will go near it yes and do simple work, that's how people learn is by doing under supervision and learning more and more. Starting with the simplest tasks and moving on.
Either way, the only reason that any firm is struggling to hire is its not paying a market rate on wages that meets sees supply of labour meet demand.
But you are talking bollocks by going on about apprentices pay rates when pay rates for actual brickies is 20 an hour on average....now by all means argue apprentice brickies should be paid more to encourage more brickies however actual time served brickies are making reasonable money
Why is £20 "reasonable money" for what we've agreed is a skilled, in-demand job?
Sorry but if you can't fill your shortages, you may need to pay more.
That's supply and demand in action. The free market in action.
20 might not be reasonable money as you state the fact is the last year it has climbed ever higher because there are less brickies than people trying to employ them.
That indicates to me which was the point of my original post that there just aren't enough brickies to build 300k houses. Like fully trained doctors you can't just magic them out of thin air and that is before you even look at the shortage of materials to actually build with.
You can only build as many houses as you have workers and materials for
Correct. And if the bulk of them are coming off two year apprenticeships at £6.40 an hour, then you'll get the quality of housing stock you pay for.
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
Question - what is the difference between "socialist government" and the Conservatives?
Punative taxes to record levels? Tick Wasting billions on crap public services? Tick Open door migration letting anyone in? Tick Nanny state nonsense about what we eat and smoke? Tick
People don't fear "socialist government" or any of the idiotic threats Sunak and the press team are making, because we live that every day already.
The Overton window is so narrow there is almost nothing substantive to discuss. Once you have a welfare state, free state education, NHS, industrial policy, consumer protection, regulation about everything, and a few other things a social democrat state with highly regulated capitalism is the only option. State managed expenditure has increased every year and this will continue. It is unavoidable.
The left have one further option - this + socialist state control of all commerce too. No serious right wing option has emerged with a working model in Europe yet. This is one of the most remarkable and underestimated facts of political policy. The Conservative party's two biggest fails since the war are: Lack of European statecraft, leading to the disaster of Brexit; and the failure to practice conservatism in any respects at all.
Not something I advocate by any means just an observation on all governements of the past
Wars used to cull the poor, now we no longer really have mass casualty wars its a new problem for governements of all stripes to have a burgeoning underclass and they have no idea how to deal with it
More broadly we have a terrible problem with dependency, chiefly due to a combination of low paid employment and ridiculous housing costs (meaning that many working people end up reliant on social security) and vast numbers of pensioners. The situation is theoretically recoverable, but some of the measures required - especially millions of houses and attendant infrastructure, and requiring people to work until 70 or possibly slightly beyond that - are so unpopular that they'll probably never get done. I'll certainly be surprised in a good way of Labour manages to meet its building commitments, and astonished if the houses are decent rather than shoddily constructed little identikit rabbit hutches marooned amidst acres of car parking.
Labour won't meet those targets even if it is their deepest desire, simple fact is there aren't enough construction workers nor the supply of building materials. The problem is exacerbated by the fact we are over the 50% mark for people who take more from the state than they give. For those people voting for more is a no brainer.
As many might have noted I tend rightwards . However I do believe there should be a safety net, free education to 18 and a health service which is free at point of use.
I also believe though that the state does too much and we should trim back what we do. I would rather the state did less but funded it properly than it tries to do too much and half arses everything.
For starters I would do a clawback on state pensions, every 5£ over say 5k private pension should mean 1£ off your state pension
NI on pensions
A lifetime health care costs cap with an insurance based top off
As examples
There is no shortage of skilled tradies in this country who could be building homes if they were easily able to do so without planning restrictions.
Sorry but there is, firms are poaching workers off each other because they can't get enough for example brickies and yes because we don't train enough
Firms poaching off each other is the free market in action.
Nobody has a divine right to minimum wage labour.
Brickies aren't min wage for a while, there just arent enough here to build 300k houses a year, average wage for a brickie now is 20 an hour
We've just been discussing, a quick search for apprentice brickie posts is advertising at £5.28 per hour.
Maybe apprentices should be £12/h and average wages £25?
If you're not able to fill your vacancies, that's because you're either not paying enough, or not offering good enough terms of service.
Thats apprentices and yes to low however you aren't going to ask an apprentice to build a house. We have an apprentice at work and he is a good guy, however we arent getting him to build any software that is going to go anywhere near a customer....same I would imagine for an apprentice brickie, you are teaching him how to not letting him near somewhere someone is going to live in and rely on not falling down. Till he is trained enough he is not an asset but a cost
Not by themselves they won't, but they will go near it yes and do simple work, that's how people learn is by doing under supervision and learning more and more. Starting with the simplest tasks and moving on.
Either way, the only reason that any firm is struggling to hire is its not paying a market rate on wages that meets sees supply of labour meet demand.
But you are talking bollocks by going on about apprentices pay rates when pay rates for actual brickies is 20 an hour on average....now by all means argue apprentice brickies should be paid more to encourage more brickies however actual time served brickies are making reasonable money
Why is £20 "reasonable money" for what we've agreed is a skilled, in-demand job?
Sorry but if you can't fill your shortages, you may need to pay more.
That's supply and demand in action. The free market in action.
20 might not be reasonable money as you state the fact is the last year it has climbed ever higher because there are less brickies than people trying to employ them.
That indicates to me which was the point of my original post that there just aren't enough brickies to build 300k houses. Like fully trained doctors you can't just magic them out of thin air and that is before you even look at the shortage of materials to actually build with.
You can only build as many houses as you have workers and materials for
Been there before. Prefabs, factory made concrete building systems, now this: printing houses with concrete.
The only chance he has of staying out of jail, is throwing the whole PO management under the bus.
I don’t think that will help - it may have done on Tuesday but yesterday and today was Jenkins being destroyed email by email
No, he was bang to rights well before his appearance before the Inquiry. Simply giving false testimony as an expert witness would be enough to get you on a perjury charge. Even the Plod have noticed this and have interviewed him as a suspect. The only reason he hasn't been charged is because they have been waiting for the Inquiry to conclude. In his testimony too he has perjured himself again numerous times, so it's hard to see why the police would not charge him as he walks out of the hearing tomorrow afternoon. It's a very simple nick if they want it.
He could have turned King's evidence of course. He may yet do that when he is charged. (i think it is when, not if.) He may be a bit more forthcoming in front of a judge and jury. He was plainly being used as a Patsy, albeit a willing one. He could get quite a lot off his sentence if he were to identify more clearly who exactly was playing him. However, so far his strategy has been to hide what he thought he could get away with.
it hasn't worked very well, so maybe it's time for him to try a different approach.
This is the Milgram experiment but for real. I am pretty sure many of the perps had private misgivings but thought they had to go along with the instructions of the grown ups.
That's very perceptive.
It may well go a long way towards explaining Jenkins' behaviour, and indeed many others. There are some however who appear to have been plainly cynical if not malicious. Off the top of my head I would cite Alice Perkins and John Scott. Numerous lawyers, in-house and external (some very senior), fit the bill. Vennells is probably borderline - more of an overpromoted middle-manager who was intoxicated by landing the top job and blinkered herself to the ugly reality of what was going on in the firm.
At the end of the day though, what they all did was wrong and they should all be charged. It will be a massively difficult and a hit-or-miss process but if it is not done it gives the green light to far too much casual misconduct in the workplace, and disregard for consequences.
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
Question - what is the difference between "socialist government" and the Conservatives?
Punative taxes to record levels? Tick Wasting billions on crap public services? Tick Open door migration letting anyone in? Tick Nanny state nonsense about what we eat and smoke? Tick
People don't fear "socialist government" or any of the idiotic threats Sunak and the press team are making, because we live that every day already.
The Overton window is so narrow there is almost nothing substantive to discuss. Once you have a welfare state, free state education, NHS, industrial policy, consumer protection, regulation about everything, and a few other things a social democrat state with highly regulated capitalism is the only option. State managed expenditure has increased every year and this will continue. It is unavoidable.
The left have one further option - this + socialist state control of all commerce too. No serious right wing option has emerged with a working model in Europe yet. This is one of the most remarkable and underestimated facts of political policy. The Conservative party's two biggest fails since the war are: Lack of European statecraft, leading to the disaster of Brexit; and the failure to practice conservatism in any respects at all.
Not something I advocate by any means just an observation on all governements of the past
Wars used to cull the poor, now we no longer really have mass casualty wars its a new problem for governements of all stripes to have a burgeoning underclass and they have no idea how to deal with it
More broadly we have a terrible problem with dependency, chiefly due to a combination of low paid employment and ridiculous housing costs (meaning that many working people end up reliant on social security) and vast numbers of pensioners. The situation is theoretically recoverable, but some of the measures required - especially millions of houses and attendant infrastructure, and requiring people to work until 70 or possibly slightly beyond that - are so unpopular that they'll probably never get done. I'll certainly be surprised in a good way of Labour manages to meet its building commitments, and astonished if the houses are decent rather than shoddily constructed little identikit rabbit hutches marooned amidst acres of car parking.
Labour won't meet those targets even if it is their deepest desire, simple fact is there aren't enough construction workers nor the supply of building materials. The problem is exacerbated by the fact we are over the 50% mark for people who take more from the state than they give. For those people voting for more is a no brainer.
As many might have noted I tend rightwards . However I do believe there should be a safety net, free education to 18 and a health service which is free at point of use.
I also believe though that the state does too much and we should trim back what we do. I would rather the state did less but funded it properly than it tries to do too much and half arses everything.
For starters I would do a clawback on state pensions, every 5£ over say 5k private pension should mean 1£ off your state pension
NI on pensions
A lifetime health care costs cap with an insurance based top off
As examples
The problem with doing that with state pensions is that it discourages saving for your pension: why bother putting money away if it just gets clawed back?
And the UK's savings rate is already low by international standards.
that is why I set the clawback to only occur after 5k and then at a 1 in 5 ratio
currently you get state pension + 10k, after you get state + 9k is losing 1k enough to deter saving?
That's still an incremental 20% take rate. And don't forget, you are already paying income tax on that pension.
Obesity is also an issue for Brits. If you’re a fat lazy twat, and many of us are, then you can’t be bothered walking into town waddling under your own weight, you get it all delivered or jump in your car, like the super-obese Americans. Thus you get even fatter and even less inclined to walk and so on and so forth
We need a minister and ministry of walking. Including silly walks
I was being done at the Doctors for my annual check a fortnight ago. They measured me and discovered I am 2cm taller than they thought, which helps !
If we want walking, we have to start by creating an environment which facilitates and encourages active travel - that will need fundamental changes to give equal importance to all modes of travel. IMO what it actually needs is the DNA of Local Highways Authorities to be rewritten at a statutory level; they were created to build roads to prioritise motor vehicles over everything, so that it was they continue to do, and everyone else can go and f*ck themselves.
As an example, in my town all the people who want to cycle can't use the cycleways because they were all barriered off just after they were built. On my local 1km of landscaped, street-lit cycleway you have to get off your cycle 5 times in 1km. So we are all forced onto either the old A1 (12k a day AADT with many pinch points), the new A38 (50mph limit, single carriageway, 25k a day AADT), or onto the shared footpaths which in places are only 4ft wide.
But the pavements are blocked everywhere by selfish wazzocks who park their motor vehicles all over them.
That's ingrowing carbrain (aka motor-normativity) which creates unnecessary risk and conflict - a basic equality issue and a culture problem in the LHA.
Disagree massively with the idea that the Lib Dems getting 40-50 seats would be an excellent result.
With all the fundamentals as they are you want LOTO Ed Davey or bust.
If you can’t finish 2nd from here then what exactly is the point of the Lib Dems?
If they get 40 to 50 seats thats a failure for democracy
That would be 6-7% of seats on something like 10-12% of the vote, so not proportionate but not as bad as it could be, on their own terms.
It would highlight the fact that the electorate can't be depended on to use their vote wisely
Is that a failure for democracy? Surely part of the point is to risk that we won't choose wisely, even though most of the time we do, since the alternative is not to allow a choice (or not a real or free one).
The only chance he has of staying out of jail, is throwing the whole PO management under the bus.
I don’t think that will help - it may have done on Tuesday but yesterday and today was Jenkins being destroyed email by email
No, he was bang to rights well before his appearance before the Inquiry. Simply giving false testimony as an expert witness would be enough to get you on a perjury charge. Even the Plod have noticed this and have interviewed him as a suspect. The only reason he hasn't been charged is because they have been waiting for the Inquiry to conclude. In his testimony too he has perjured himself again numerous times, so it's hard to see why the police would not charge him as he walks out of the hearing tomorrow afternoon. It's a very simple nick if they want it.
He could have turned King's evidence of course. He may yet do that when he is charged. (i think it is when, not if.) He may be a bit more forthcoming in front of a judge and jury. He was plainly being used as a Patsy, albeit a willing one. He could get quite a lot off his sentence if he were to identify more clearly who exactly was playing him. However, so far his strategy has been to hide what he thought he could get away with.
it hasn't worked very well, so maybe it's time for him to try a different approach.
This is the Milgram experiment but for real. I am pretty sure many of the perps had private misgivings but thought they had to go along with the instructions of the grown ups.
That's very perceptive.
It may well go a long way towards explaining Jenkins' behaviour, and indeed many others. There are some however who appear to have been plainly cynical if not malicious. Off the top of my head I would cite Alice Perkins and John Scott. Numerous lawyers, in-house and external (some very senior), fit the bill. Vennells is probably borderline - more of an overpromoted middle-manager who was intoxicated by landing the top job and blinkered herself to the ugly reality of what was going on in the firm.
At the end of the day though, what they all did was wrong and they should all be charged. It will be a massively difficult and a hit-or-miss process but if it is not done it gives the green light to far too much casual misconduct in the workplace, and disregard for consequences.
Ah yes, Alice Perkins who lives in New Zealand now and, amazingly, refused to cooperate with the inquiry, even though it would been easy to do so via video link.
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
Question - what is the difference between "socialist government" and the Conservatives?
Punative taxes to record levels? Tick Wasting billions on crap public services? Tick Open door migration letting anyone in? Tick Nanny state nonsense about what we eat and smoke? Tick
People don't fear "socialist government" or any of the idiotic threats Sunak and the press team are making, because we live that every day already.
The Overton window is so narrow there is almost nothing substantive to discuss. Once you have a welfare state, free state education, NHS, industrial policy, consumer protection, regulation about everything, and a few other things a social democrat state with highly regulated capitalism is the only option. State managed expenditure has increased every year and this will continue. It is unavoidable.
The left have one further option - this + socialist state control of all commerce too. No serious right wing option has emerged with a working model in Europe yet. This is one of the most remarkable and underestimated facts of political policy. The Conservative party's two biggest fails since the war are: Lack of European statecraft, leading to the disaster of Brexit; and the failure to practice conservatism in any respects at all.
Not something I advocate by any means just an observation on all governements of the past
Wars used to cull the poor, now we no longer really have mass casualty wars its a new problem for governements of all stripes to have a burgeoning underclass and they have no idea how to deal with it
More broadly we have a terrible problem with dependency, chiefly due to a combination of low paid employment and ridiculous housing costs (meaning that many working people end up reliant on social security) and vast numbers of pensioners. The situation is theoretically recoverable, but some of the measures required - especially millions of houses and attendant infrastructure, and requiring people to work until 70 or possibly slightly beyond that - are so unpopular that they'll probably never get done. I'll certainly be surprised in a good way of Labour manages to meet its building commitments, and astonished if the houses are decent rather than shoddily constructed little identikit rabbit hutches marooned amidst acres of car parking.
Labour won't meet those targets even if it is their deepest desire, simple fact is there aren't enough construction workers nor the supply of building materials. The problem is exacerbated by the fact we are over the 50% mark for people who take more from the state than they give. For those people voting for more is a no brainer.
As many might have noted I tend rightwards . However I do believe there should be a safety net, free education to 18 and a health service which is free at point of use.
I also believe though that the state does too much and we should trim back what we do. I would rather the state did less but funded it properly than it tries to do too much and half arses everything.
For starters I would do a clawback on state pensions, every 5£ over say 5k private pension should mean 1£ off your state pension
NI on pensions
A lifetime health care costs cap with an insurance based top off
As examples
There is no shortage of skilled tradies in this country who could be building homes if they were easily able to do so without planning restrictions.
Sorry but there is, firms are poaching workers off each other because they can't get enough for example brickies and yes because we don't train enough
Firms poaching off each other is the free market in action.
Nobody has a divine right to minimum wage labour.
Brickies aren't min wage for a while, there just arent enough here to build 300k houses a year, average wage for a brickie now is 20 an hour
We've just been discussing, a quick search for apprentice brickie posts is advertising at £5.28 per hour.
Maybe apprentices should be £12/h and average wages £25?
If you're not able to fill your vacancies, that's because you're either not paying enough, or not offering good enough terms of service.
Thats apprentices and yes to low however you aren't going to ask an apprentice to build a house. We have an apprentice at work and he is a good guy, however we arent getting him to build any software that is going to go anywhere near a customer....same I would imagine for an apprentice brickie, you are teaching him how to not letting him near somewhere someone is going to live in and rely on not falling down. Till he is trained enough he is not an asset but a cost
Not by themselves they won't, but they will go near it yes and do simple work, that's how people learn is by doing under supervision and learning more and more. Starting with the simplest tasks and moving on.
Either way, the only reason that any firm is struggling to hire is its not paying a market rate on wages that meets sees supply of labour meet demand.
But you are talking bollocks by going on about apprentices pay rates when pay rates for actual brickies is 20 an hour on average....now by all means argue apprentice brickies should be paid more to encourage more brickies however actual time served brickies are making reasonable money
Why is £20 "reasonable money" for what we've agreed is a skilled, in-demand job?
Sorry but if you can't fill your shortages, you may need to pay more.
That's supply and demand in action. The free market in action.
20 might not be reasonable money as you state the fact is the last year it has climbed ever higher because there are less brickies than people trying to employ them.
That indicates to me which was the point of my original post that there just aren't enough brickies to build 300k houses. Like fully trained doctors you can't just magic them out of thin air and that is before you even look at the shortage of materials to actually build with.
You can only build as many houses as you have workers and materials for
Been there before. Prefabs, factory made concrete building systems, now this: printing houses with concrete.
I am in favour of building a lot more than 300k houses a year I am in favour of paying apprentices more to show them uni is not the only route I am in favour of a more balanced view on how to progress when you leave school where hands on is on a par with academics I am in favour of schools teaching lessons on how to run a small business and trade skills being an option at school
I am just casting doubt that even with a gung ho governement actually committed to building houses we could currently build 300k houses
The only chance he has of staying out of jail, is throwing the whole PO management under the bus.
I don’t think that will help - it may have done on Tuesday but yesterday and today was Jenkins being destroyed email by email
No, he was bang to rights well before his appearance before the Inquiry. Simply giving false testimony as an expert witness would be enough to get you on a perjury charge. Even the Plod have noticed this and have interviewed him as a suspect. The only reason he hasn't been charged is because they have been waiting for the Inquiry to conclude. In his testimony too he has perjured himself again numerous times, so it's hard to see why the police would not charge him as he walks out of the hearing tomorrow afternoon. It's a very simple nick if they want it.
He could have turned King's evidence of course. He may yet do that when he is charged. (i think it is when, not if.) He may be a bit more forthcoming in front of a judge and jury. He was plainly being used as a Patsy, albeit a willing one. He could get quite a lot off his sentence if he were to identify more clearly who exactly was playing him. However, so far his strategy has been to hide what he thought he could get away with.
it hasn't worked very well, so maybe it's time for him to try a different approach.
This is the Milgram experiment but for real. I am pretty sure many of the perps had private misgivings but thought they had to go along with the instructions of the grown ups.
That's very perceptive.
It may well go a long way towards explaining Jenkins' behaviour, and indeed many others. There are some however who appear to have been plainly cynical if not malicious. Off the top of my head I would cite Alice Perkins and John Scott. Numerous lawyers, in-house and external (some very senior), fit the bill. Vennells is probably borderline - more of an overpromoted middle-manager who was intoxicated by landing the top job and blinkered herself to the ugly reality of what was going on in the firm.
At the end of the day though, what they all did was wrong and they should all be charged. It will be a massively difficult and a hit-or-miss process but if it is not done it gives the green light to far too much casual misconduct in the workplace, and disregard for consequences.
Expert witnesses know perfectly well that their duty is to the court and the truth, and not to the prosecution or defence. The criminal system cannot survive without this discipline.
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
Question - what is the difference between "socialist government" and the Conservatives?
Punative taxes to record levels? Tick Wasting billions on crap public services? Tick Open door migration letting anyone in? Tick Nanny state nonsense about what we eat and smoke? Tick
People don't fear "socialist government" or any of the idiotic threats Sunak and the press team are making, because we live that every day already.
The Overton window is so narrow there is almost nothing substantive to discuss. Once you have a welfare state, free state education, NHS, industrial policy, consumer protection, regulation about everything, and a few other things a social democrat state with highly regulated capitalism is the only option. State managed expenditure has increased every year and this will continue. It is unavoidable.
The left have one further option - this + socialist state control of all commerce too. No serious right wing option has emerged with a working model in Europe yet. This is one of the most remarkable and underestimated facts of political policy. The Conservative party's two biggest fails since the war are: Lack of European statecraft, leading to the disaster of Brexit; and the failure to practice conservatism in any respects at all.
Not something I advocate by any means just an observation on all governements of the past
Wars used to cull the poor, now we no longer really have mass casualty wars its a new problem for governements of all stripes to have a burgeoning underclass and they have no idea how to deal with it
More broadly we have a terrible problem with dependency, chiefly due to a combination of low paid employment and ridiculous housing costs (meaning that many working people end up reliant on social security) and vast numbers of pensioners. The situation is theoretically recoverable, but some of the measures required - especially millions of houses and attendant infrastructure, and requiring people to work until 70 or possibly slightly beyond that - are so unpopular that they'll probably never get done. I'll certainly be surprised in a good way of Labour manages to meet its building commitments, and astonished if the houses are decent rather than shoddily constructed little identikit rabbit hutches marooned amidst acres of car parking.
Labour won't meet those targets even if it is their deepest desire, simple fact is there aren't enough construction workers nor the supply of building materials. The problem is exacerbated by the fact we are over the 50% mark for people who take more from the state than they give. For those people voting for more is a no brainer.
As many might have noted I tend rightwards . However I do believe there should be a safety net, free education to 18 and a health service which is free at point of use.
I also believe though that the state does too much and we should trim back what we do. I would rather the state did less but funded it properly than it tries to do too much and half arses everything.
For starters I would do a clawback on state pensions, every 5£ over say 5k private pension should mean 1£ off your state pension
NI on pensions
A lifetime health care costs cap with an insurance based top off
As examples
There is no shortage of skilled tradies in this country who could be building homes if they were easily able to do so without planning restrictions.
Sorry but there is, firms are poaching workers off each other because they can't get enough for example brickies and yes because we don't train enough
Firms poaching off each other is the free market in action.
Nobody has a divine right to minimum wage labour.
Brickies aren't min wage for a while, there just arent enough here to build 300k houses a year, average wage for a brickie now is 20 an hour
We've just been discussing, a quick search for apprentice brickie posts is advertising at £5.28 per hour.
Maybe apprentices should be £12/h and average wages £25?
If you're not able to fill your vacancies, that's because you're either not paying enough, or not offering good enough terms of service.
Thats apprentices and yes to low however you aren't going to ask an apprentice to build a house. We have an apprentice at work and he is a good guy, however we arent getting him to build any software that is going to go anywhere near a customer....same I would imagine for an apprentice brickie, you are teaching him how to not letting him near somewhere someone is going to live in and rely on not falling down. Till he is trained enough he is not an asset but a cost
Not by themselves they won't, but they will go near it yes and do simple work, that's how people learn is by doing under supervision and learning more and more. Starting with the simplest tasks and moving on.
Either way, the only reason that any firm is struggling to hire is its not paying a market rate on wages that meets sees supply of labour meet demand.
But you are talking bollocks by going on about apprentices pay rates when pay rates for actual brickies is 20 an hour on average....now by all means argue apprentice brickies should be paid more to encourage more brickies however actual time served brickies are making reasonable money
Why is £20 "reasonable money" for what we've agreed is a skilled, in-demand job?
Sorry but if you can't fill your shortages, you may need to pay more.
That's supply and demand in action. The free market in action.
20 might not be reasonable money as you state the fact is the last year it has climbed ever higher because there are less brickies than people trying to employ them.
That indicates to me which was the point of my original post that there just aren't enough brickies to build 300k houses. Like fully trained doctors you can't just magic them out of thin air and that is before you even look at the shortage of materials to actually build with.
You can only build as many houses as you have workers and materials for
You can get more workers.
You can train them, by offering more than a fiver an hour to apprentices, who unlike Dixie's dad are nowadays (rightly or wrongly be as it may) qualified after 2 years).
5 years is more than long enough to hire people and get them through a 2 year apprenticeship and get them to work all from start to finish.
So no, its just feeble-mouthed excuses. Pay people a decent rate and they'll do the job.
The only chance he has of staying out of jail, is throwing the whole PO management under the bus.
I don’t think that will help - it may have done on Tuesday but yesterday and today was Jenkins being destroyed email by email
No, he was bang to rights well before his appearance before the Inquiry. Simply giving false testimony as an expert witness would be enough to get you on a perjury charge. Even the Plod have noticed this and have interviewed him as a suspect. The only reason he hasn't been charged is because they have been waiting for the Inquiry to conclude. In his testimony too he has perjured himself again numerous times, so it's hard to see why the police would not charge him as he walks out of the hearing tomorrow afternoon. It's a very simple nick if they want it.
He could have turned King's evidence of course. He may yet do that when he is charged. (i think it is when, not if.) He may be a bit more forthcoming in front of a judge and jury. He was plainly being used as a Patsy, albeit a willing one. He could get quite a lot off his sentence if he were to identify more clearly who exactly was playing him. However, so far his strategy has been to hide what he thought he could get away with.
it hasn't worked very well, so maybe it's time for him to try a different approach.
This is the Milgram experiment but for real. I am pretty sure many of the perps had private misgivings but thought they had to go along with the instructions of the grown ups.
Everyone knows it is a serious crime to lie under oath. Expert witnesses have special additional duties because for them the hearsay rules are relaxed (you can form and express an opinion because you have read all the academic papers not only from your own direct experience).
Sure. You sound as if you think I am trying to minimise, where actually I am just trying to explain.
No acknowledgement? If not, then Labour ought to do a plagiarism thing on him. (But, I trust, do it better than the Slab MSP who complained that the SNP were quoting people inaccurately in their reports: they were leaving words out and putting '[...]' instead.)
To expand the conversation on from brickies, part of the issue is the gutting of FE and the need for any courses to run at a profit. Regular readers will be aware of my pointing out the plight of teaching assistants. Paid at the same rate as cleaners. Plenty of my colleagues would love to be trained up to fill the specialist support roles in education which are desperately needed, and impossible to fill. Therapies, OT, trauma counselling and the like. But they are asked to shell out thousands to qualify on a basically minimum wage (it's over a grand for a level three counselling course. A year of evening and weekend study when you're doing an incredibly stressful full time job in an SEN school. And if you have your own SEN kids, as most of them do...And you're still one level below being qualified for a role which won't result in that much of a pay rise anyways). No great surprise the roles remain unfilled.
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
Question - what is the difference between "socialist government" and the Conservatives?
Punative taxes to record levels? Tick Wasting billions on crap public services? Tick Open door migration letting anyone in? Tick Nanny state nonsense about what we eat and smoke? Tick
People don't fear "socialist government" or any of the idiotic threats Sunak and the press team are making, because we live that every day already.
The Overton window is so narrow there is almost nothing substantive to discuss. Once you have a welfare state, free state education, NHS, industrial policy, consumer protection, regulation about everything, and a few other things a social democrat state with highly regulated capitalism is the only option. State managed expenditure has increased every year and this will continue. It is unavoidable.
The left have one further option - this + socialist state control of all commerce too. No serious right wing option has emerged with a working model in Europe yet. This is one of the most remarkable and underestimated facts of political policy. The Conservative party's two biggest fails since the war are: Lack of European statecraft, leading to the disaster of Brexit; and the failure to practice conservatism in any respects at all.
Not something I advocate by any means just an observation on all governements of the past
Wars used to cull the poor, now we no longer really have mass casualty wars its a new problem for governements of all stripes to have a burgeoning underclass and they have no idea how to deal with it
More broadly we have a terrible problem with dependency, chiefly due to a combination of low paid employment and ridiculous housing costs (meaning that many working people end up reliant on social security) and vast numbers of pensioners. The situation is theoretically recoverable, but some of the measures required - especially millions of houses and attendant infrastructure, and requiring people to work until 70 or possibly slightly beyond that - are so unpopular that they'll probably never get done. I'll certainly be surprised in a good way of Labour manages to meet its building commitments, and astonished if the houses are decent rather than shoddily constructed little identikit rabbit hutches marooned amidst acres of car parking.
Labour won't meet those targets even if it is their deepest desire, simple fact is there aren't enough construction workers nor the supply of building materials. The problem is exacerbated by the fact we are over the 50% mark for people who take more from the state than they give. For those people voting for more is a no brainer.
As many might have noted I tend rightwards . However I do believe there should be a safety net, free education to 18 and a health service which is free at point of use.
I also believe though that the state does too much and we should trim back what we do. I would rather the state did less but funded it properly than it tries to do too much and half arses everything.
For starters I would do a clawback on state pensions, every 5£ over say 5k private pension should mean 1£ off your state pension
NI on pensions
A lifetime health care costs cap with an insurance based top off
As examples
There is no shortage of skilled tradies in this country who could be building homes if they were easily able to do so without planning restrictions.
Sorry but there is, firms are poaching workers off each other because they can't get enough for example brickies and yes because we don't train enough
Firms poaching off each other is the free market in action.
Nobody has a divine right to minimum wage labour.
Maybe the builders can hire more apprentices, instead of complaining about a lack of skilled workers or asking government for more immigrants.
Just Googled bricklaying apprenticeships and I see some being advertised . . . with a wage of £5.28 per hour.
My sympathies for those who can't find employees at £5.28 per hour.
Presumably they’re looking for 16-year-olds with no bricklaying skills, in which case that’s not too bad. But after a couple of years, they’ll be getting £15-£20 as bricklayers?
You'd think so, but no, this is for 19 year old apprentices with 2 A levels and 5+ GCSEs including Maths and English.
Absolutely no sympathies for anyone struggling to recruit. Increase your pay to a rate that fills your vacancies, its not like you need a 7 year course before you can start laying your first brick.
My Dad did a seven year bricklaying apprenticeship.
I think you underestimate the skills that go into most "craft" skills.....laying your first brick is simple, putting up a house wall that will still be standing in 40 years is quite another. For example I have done a lot of diy that involved a little plastering, probably several months experience all told....first time I plastered a whole wall looked good and smooth in the next morning it had all fallen off the wall
Plastering is one of those dark arts.
Electrics, plumbing, no problem. But plastering, hell no.
Bits of plastering are fine. But for a lot of it you need SHOULDERS - and ideally several industrial dehumidifiers.
One thing that is underestimated is paint spraying - I have an airless paint sprayer (it's on its own trolley) which was about £800, and you can do a whole house 2 coats in a day - once you have spent a day masking it up. It runs through paint at a ferocious rate.
It affects the order of refurb, but it is always possible to double or halve the amount of work or the price of *any* job by careful thought.
"A man has been arrested on suspicion of assault after an election agent for a Conservative parliamentary candidate was attacked while out canvassing.
Councillor Garry Burchett was left with black eyes and a suspected broken nose while delivering leaflets in Ford, in Shropshire on Thursday morning, Tory candidate Daniel Kawczynski said.
Another volunteer was left in tears, he added.
West Mercia Police said officers had arrested a 59-year-old man from Shropshire on suspicion of assault and assault of an emergency worker, and that he remained in custody."
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
Question - what is the difference between "socialist government" and the Conservatives?
Punative taxes to record levels? Tick Wasting billions on crap public services? Tick Open door migration letting anyone in? Tick Nanny state nonsense about what we eat and smoke? Tick
People don't fear "socialist government" or any of the idiotic threats Sunak and the press team are making, because we live that every day already.
The Overton window is so narrow there is almost nothing substantive to discuss. Once you have a welfare state, free state education, NHS, industrial policy, consumer protection, regulation about everything, and a few other things a social democrat state with highly regulated capitalism is the only option. State managed expenditure has increased every year and this will continue. It is unavoidable.
The left have one further option - this + socialist state control of all commerce too. No serious right wing option has emerged with a working model in Europe yet. This is one of the most remarkable and underestimated facts of political policy. The Conservative party's two biggest fails since the war are: Lack of European statecraft, leading to the disaster of Brexit; and the failure to practice conservatism in any respects at all.
Not something I advocate by any means just an observation on all governements of the past
Wars used to cull the poor, now we no longer really have mass casualty wars its a new problem for governements of all stripes to have a burgeoning underclass and they have no idea how to deal with it
More broadly we have a terrible problem with dependency, chiefly due to a combination of low paid employment and ridiculous housing costs (meaning that many working people end up reliant on social security) and vast numbers of pensioners. The situation is theoretically recoverable, but some of the measures required - especially millions of houses and attendant infrastructure, and requiring people to work until 70 or possibly slightly beyond that - are so unpopular that they'll probably never get done. I'll certainly be surprised in a good way of Labour manages to meet its building commitments, and astonished if the houses are decent rather than shoddily constructed little identikit rabbit hutches marooned amidst acres of car parking.
Labour won't meet those targets even if it is their deepest desire, simple fact is there aren't enough construction workers nor the supply of building materials. The problem is exacerbated by the fact we are over the 50% mark for people who take more from the state than they give. For those people voting for more is a no brainer.
As many might have noted I tend rightwards . However I do believe there should be a safety net, free education to 18 and a health service which is free at point of use.
I also believe though that the state does too much and we should trim back what we do. I would rather the state did less but funded it properly than it tries to do too much and half arses everything.
For starters I would do a clawback on state pensions, every 5£ over say 5k private pension should mean 1£ off your state pension
NI on pensions
A lifetime health care costs cap with an insurance based top off
As examples
The problem with doing that with state pensions is that it discourages saving for your pension: why bother putting money away if it just gets clawed back?
And the UK's savings rate is already low by international standards.
that is why I set the clawback to only occur after 5k and then at a 1 in 5 ratio
currently you get state pension + 10k, after you get state + 9k is losing 1k enough to deter saving?
That's still an incremental 20% take rate. And don't forget, you are already paying income tax on that pension.
No National Insurance.
No Student Loan Graduate Tax.
Young workers are paying 20% of their wages in those taxes that pensioners aren't paying, so it would just level the playing field and not penalise anyone any more than what workers already pay.
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
Question - what is the difference between "socialist government" and the Conservatives?
Punative taxes to record levels? Tick Wasting billions on crap public services? Tick Open door migration letting anyone in? Tick Nanny state nonsense about what we eat and smoke? Tick
People don't fear "socialist government" or any of the idiotic threats Sunak and the press team are making, because we live that every day already.
The Overton window is so narrow there is almost nothing substantive to discuss. Once you have a welfare state, free state education, NHS, industrial policy, consumer protection, regulation about everything, and a few other things a social democrat state with highly regulated capitalism is the only option. State managed expenditure has increased every year and this will continue. It is unavoidable.
The left have one further option - this + socialist state control of all commerce too. No serious right wing option has emerged with a working model in Europe yet. This is one of the most remarkable and underestimated facts of political policy. The Conservative party's two biggest fails since the war are: Lack of European statecraft, leading to the disaster of Brexit; and the failure to practice conservatism in any respects at all.
Not something I advocate by any means just an observation on all governements of the past
Wars used to cull the poor, now we no longer really have mass casualty wars its a new problem for governements of all stripes to have a burgeoning underclass and they have no idea how to deal with it
More broadly we have a terrible problem with dependency, chiefly due to a combination of low paid employment and ridiculous housing costs (meaning that many working people end up reliant on social security) and vast numbers of pensioners. The situation is theoretically recoverable, but some of the measures required - especially millions of houses and attendant infrastructure, and requiring people to work until 70 or possibly slightly beyond that - are so unpopular that they'll probably never get done. I'll certainly be surprised in a good way of Labour manages to meet its building commitments, and astonished if the houses are decent rather than shoddily constructed little identikit rabbit hutches marooned amidst acres of car parking.
Labour won't meet those targets even if it is their deepest desire, simple fact is there aren't enough construction workers nor the supply of building materials. The problem is exacerbated by the fact we are over the 50% mark for people who take more from the state than they give. For those people voting for more is a no brainer.
As many might have noted I tend rightwards . However I do believe there should be a safety net, free education to 18 and a health service which is free at point of use.
I also believe though that the state does too much and we should trim back what we do. I would rather the state did less but funded it properly than it tries to do too much and half arses everything.
For starters I would do a clawback on state pensions, every 5£ over say 5k private pension should mean 1£ off your state pension
NI on pensions
A lifetime health care costs cap with an insurance based top off
As examples
There is no shortage of skilled tradies in this country who could be building homes if they were easily able to do so without planning restrictions.
Sorry but there is, firms are poaching workers off each other because they can't get enough for example brickies and yes because we don't train enough
Firms poaching off each other is the free market in action.
Nobody has a divine right to minimum wage labour.
Brickies aren't min wage for a while, there just arent enough here to build 300k houses a year, average wage for a brickie now is 20 an hour
We've just been discussing, a quick search for apprentice brickie posts is advertising at £5.28 per hour.
Maybe apprentices should be £12/h and average wages £25?
If you're not able to fill your vacancies, that's because you're either not paying enough, or not offering good enough terms of service.
Thats apprentices and yes to low however you aren't going to ask an apprentice to build a house. We have an apprentice at work and he is a good guy, however we arent getting him to build any software that is going to go anywhere near a customer....same I would imagine for an apprentice brickie, you are teaching him how to not letting him near somewhere someone is going to live in and rely on not falling down. Till he is trained enough he is not an asset but a cost
Not by themselves they won't, but they will go near it yes and do simple work, that's how people learn is by doing under supervision and learning more and more. Starting with the simplest tasks and moving on.
Either way, the only reason that any firm is struggling to hire is its not paying a market rate on wages that meets sees supply of labour meet demand.
But you are talking bollocks by going on about apprentices pay rates when pay rates for actual brickies is 20 an hour on average....now by all means argue apprentice brickies should be paid more to encourage more brickies however actual time served brickies are making reasonable money
Why is £20 "reasonable money" for what we've agreed is a skilled, in-demand job?
Sorry but if you can't fill your shortages, you may need to pay more.
That's supply and demand in action. The free market in action.
20 might not be reasonable money as you state the fact is the last year it has climbed ever higher because there are less brickies than people trying to employ them.
That indicates to me which was the point of my original post that there just aren't enough brickies to build 300k houses. Like fully trained doctors you can't just magic them out of thin air and that is before you even look at the shortage of materials to actually build with.
You can only build as many houses as you have workers and materials for
You can get more workers.
You can train them, by offering more than a fiver an hour to apprentices, who unlike Dixie's dad are nowadays (rightly or wrongly be as it may) qualified after 2 years).
5 years is more than long enough to hire people and get them through a 2 year apprenticeship and get them to work all from start to finish.
So no, its just feeble-mouthed excuses. Pay people a decent rate and they'll do the job.
And, for many trades, mechanise and automate and get more productivity from the workers you have.
(Both simple and difficult to do. Simple in the sense that there are plenty of templates worldwide of how to do this. Difficult because... something is getting in the way and I don't think we know what? A fetishisation of hard work over smart work? A construction model made up of little monopoly projects where there's not much benefit from getting the work done quickly, cheaply and well?)
Actually, this is a good point. If Farage is “political Marmite”, what was Hitler?
For me he was “political Nutella”. Personally, I can’t stand Nutella, but a lot of people like it, especially Germans
vegemite surely as he was a vegetarian
Farage is a veggie?!
I’m talking about Hitler being political Nutella. And I think that’s pretty spot on, and if any Nutella execs are reading, they can have this for free, and swap it around for their advertising
“Nutella, it’s the Hitler of spreads! Not for everyone, but Germans like it”
Watching Gareth Jenkins today, you actually feel slightly sorry for him. He comes across as a rather sympathetic and naive figure.
There has just been a long conversation about this in the PtP household, Andy!
I'll spare you the details but I definitely agree wth Nick Wallis's obsevation that he was either criminally negligent or an unholy fool. The weight of evidence points to the former. As Wallis has pointed out, if you or I were given any kind of evidence which could have a bearing on someone going to prison, we would be very careful to give a balanced as well as accurate account. We would do so simply as a matter of civilised courtesy and honesty, regardless of whether we were 'special' witnesses or not. Yet he quite literally sat by whilst SPMs were arraigned with evidence he knew fell well short of the whole truth.
Last week it was pro russia appeasement and groveling for Putin, this week it is full on hard nazi style racism and homophobia from main people within reform caught on C4 news hidden camera. I was very disturbed by plans to turn the police into paramilitary, hoping for attacks on Bradford, whating for soldiers to shoot at boats in the channel, references to gassing ethnic minorities... reform is what you get when nazism rebrands itself and puts on a suit. Dear me.
I'd be curious if @state_go_away could watch that and repeat his assertion that me calling Reform a "nasty party of racist bigots" was in his words "hysterical".
There is nothing "hysterical" about calling all that a nasty party of racist bigots, if anything I was far too polite.
They are straight up nazis is suits...
They’re nowhere NEAR as well dressed as the Nazis
Say what you like about the Nazis, and they are certainly political “Marmite”, and a lot of people dislike them, and they’re never going to be everyone’s “cup of tea“, but they were always snappy dressers. Hugo Boss did not strive in vain
Hugo Boss the company did indeed manufacture Nazi and Wehrmacht uniforms, but it’s a total myth that Hugo Boss designed them.
Actually, this is a good point. If Farage is “political Marmite”, what was Hitler?
For me he was “political Nutella”. Personally, I can’t stand Nutella, but a lot of people like it, especially Germans
vegemite surely as he was a vegetarian
Er, Marmite is vegan. You're perhaps thinking of Bovril. Invented just down the road from Roslin CHapel of Da Vinci infamy BTW.
Marmite is not vegan its a yeast extract and yeast there is a debate about if its animal, plant or fungus
I thought determined yeast was fungus, which is classed as vegan even though amusingly fungi are in many respects biologically closer to animals than plants.
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
Question - what is the difference between "socialist government" and the Conservatives?
Punative taxes to record levels? Tick Wasting billions on crap public services? Tick Open door migration letting anyone in? Tick Nanny state nonsense about what we eat and smoke? Tick
People don't fear "socialist government" or any of the idiotic threats Sunak and the press team are making, because we live that every day already.
The Overton window is so narrow there is almost nothing substantive to discuss. Once you have a welfare state, free state education, NHS, industrial policy, consumer protection, regulation about everything, and a few other things a social democrat state with highly regulated capitalism is the only option. State managed expenditure has increased every year and this will continue. It is unavoidable.
The left have one further option - this + socialist state control of all commerce too. No serious right wing option has emerged with a working model in Europe yet. This is one of the most remarkable and underestimated facts of political policy. The Conservative party's two biggest fails since the war are: Lack of European statecraft, leading to the disaster of Brexit; and the failure to practice conservatism in any respects at all.
Not something I advocate by any means just an observation on all governements of the past
Wars used to cull the poor, now we no longer really have mass casualty wars its a new problem for governements of all stripes to have a burgeoning underclass and they have no idea how to deal with it
More broadly we have a terrible problem with dependency, chiefly due to a combination of low paid employment and ridiculous housing costs (meaning that many working people end up reliant on social security) and vast numbers of pensioners. The situation is theoretically recoverable, but some of the measures required - especially millions of houses and attendant infrastructure, and requiring people to work until 70 or possibly slightly beyond that - are so unpopular that they'll probably never get done. I'll certainly be surprised in a good way of Labour manages to meet its building commitments, and astonished if the houses are decent rather than shoddily constructed little identikit rabbit hutches marooned amidst acres of car parking.
Labour won't meet those targets even if it is their deepest desire, simple fact is there aren't enough construction workers nor the supply of building materials. The problem is exacerbated by the fact we are over the 50% mark for people who take more from the state than they give. For those people voting for more is a no brainer.
As many might have noted I tend rightwards . However I do believe there should be a safety net, free education to 18 and a health service which is free at point of use.
I also believe though that the state does too much and we should trim back what we do. I would rather the state did less but funded it properly than it tries to do too much and half arses everything.
For starters I would do a clawback on state pensions, every 5£ over say 5k private pension should mean 1£ off your state pension
NI on pensions
A lifetime health care costs cap with an insurance based top off
As examples
There is no shortage of skilled tradies in this country who could be building homes if they were easily able to do so without planning restrictions.
Sorry but there is, firms are poaching workers off each other because they can't get enough for example brickies and yes because we don't train enough
Firms poaching off each other is the free market in action.
Nobody has a divine right to minimum wage labour.
Brickies aren't min wage for a while, there just arent enough here to build 300k houses a year, average wage for a brickie now is 20 an hour
We've just been discussing, a quick search for apprentice brickie posts is advertising at £5.28 per hour.
Maybe apprentices should be £12/h and average wages £25?
If you're not able to fill your vacancies, that's because you're either not paying enough, or not offering good enough terms of service.
Thats apprentices and yes to low however you aren't going to ask an apprentice to build a house. We have an apprentice at work and he is a good guy, however we arent getting him to build any software that is going to go anywhere near a customer....same I would imagine for an apprentice brickie, you are teaching him how to not letting him near somewhere someone is going to live in and rely on not falling down. Till he is trained enough he is not an asset but a cost
Not by themselves they won't, but they will go near it yes and do simple work, that's how people learn is by doing under supervision and learning more and more. Starting with the simplest tasks and moving on.
Either way, the only reason that any firm is struggling to hire is its not paying a market rate on wages that meets sees supply of labour meet demand.
But you are talking bollocks by going on about apprentices pay rates when pay rates for actual brickies is 20 an hour on average....now by all means argue apprentice brickies should be paid more to encourage more brickies however actual time served brickies are making reasonable money
Why is £20 "reasonable money" for what we've agreed is a skilled, in-demand job?
Sorry but if you can't fill your shortages, you may need to pay more.
That's supply and demand in action. The free market in action.
20 might not be reasonable money as you state the fact is the last year it has climbed ever higher because there are less brickies than people trying to employ them.
That indicates to me which was the point of my original post that there just aren't enough brickies to build 300k houses. Like fully trained doctors you can't just magic them out of thin air and that is before you even look at the shortage of materials to actually build with.
You can only build as many houses as you have workers and materials for
You can get more workers.
You can train them, by offering more than a fiver an hour to apprentices, who unlike Dixie's dad are nowadays (rightly or wrongly be as it may) qualified after 2 years).
5 years is more than long enough to hire people and get them through a 2 year apprenticeship and get them to work all from start to finish.
So no, its just feeble-mouthed excuses. Pay people a decent rate and they'll do the job.
As I have said not arguing about paying apprentices a bit more, however I don't know enough about bricklaying to know if they can be trained in 2 years to the standard you let them loose on a house...I doubt you do either. I assume the 7 year apprenticeships was for a reason
ITV News: Labour worried about a dozen seats with large Muslim electorates where they're concerned their majority may be slashed or even lost altogether.
The debate about tatty Taunton and hollowed out British market towns occurred as I was walking around Le Conquet in north Finistere. ANOTHER beautiful French town with a thriving centre and not an empty shop to be seen
So this is in some ways a British thing. Or don’t the French use the internet?
It’s happened in rural France too but in a slightly different way more redolent of Counties like Kent and Sussex.
One settlement in an area - usually either the prettiest or most accessible - becomes a hub with the restaurants, decent shops and weekly market. These towns do much better than most of their English counterparts. The other similarly sized settlements in the immediate area get hollowed out and become dormitories with one or two bar-Tabacs and a proximarche.
So around us Cluny and Cormatin - which are both pretty and well connected - get the market, the festivals, the restaurants and boutiques, and the tourists. Others like St Gengoux, St Bonnet de Joux, Salornay-sur-Guye make do with one of two shops (though Salornay does have a decent boulangerie a pizzeria).
That’s interesting - merci
I do wonder if Brittany is doing exceptionally well, even within France. It all seems so kempt and clean and affluent, even the grotty bits would be nice bits - sadly - inmany parts of the UK
I’ve now been all over it for three weeks - driving in, through and around, the most rundown town I’ve seen is Douarnanez which is still rather attractive and about as nice as, say, Truro. Towns like Vannes, Dinan or Pont Aven ooze opulence. Someone downthread says my comparison twixt Taunton and Le Conquet is unfair because size, well then take Quimper, it has almost the exact same population as Taunton - circa 60,000 - and Quimper is thriving and I saw no empty shops
Tourism is pulling in vast amounts of money, I sense, and a lot of wealthy Parisians are moving here full time or buying second homes
Perhaps its rich Parisians you're seeing in Brittany rather than actual Bretons.
Brittany might be the French equivalent of Cornwall.
Nice for tourists but not so nice for locals who want to buy a house.
What are the house prices and wages there ?
You need top stop looking at churches and instead look in employment and estate agency's windows.
I go everywhere and look at everything, and my journeys take me through all kinds of places, cities, towns, villages, some super touristy and some barely visited (generallly in the interior, pretty much all of the coast is popular and prosperous)
I can see with my own eyes that it is doing well. I can also compare it with much poorer parts of France, eg Lozere which I toured last year for ten days (the emptiest department in France). In relatively impoverished Lozere you DO find rundown towns with loads of empty shops, as in Britain, I took photos of them at the time and posted them on here. However even Lozere, overall, feels no worse off than, say, Wiltshire - it doesn’t feel shite like some God forsaken part of the English north or the Scottish rustbelt
I can drive around Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire mining districts and make the area look affluent and then I can do a different route and make it look deprived.
You can do that to varying extents in most places.
But that's only imagery.
Its the combination of wages and cost of living there which is vital.
Padstow looks lovely in June but its that loveliness which has caused serious socioeconomic problems.
I’ve just given you the stats, Brittany has the lowest unemployment rate in France (by region). It is also the fourth or fifth highest region by GDP per capita (which is seriously impressive given how much of it is rural/small town, and the relative lack of industry)
So, no, I am not imagining it nor am I “simply looking in churches”
I’ve been doing this shit for three and a half decades and I can now quite skilfully juice the truth of a country in about 6 minutes
So what you're saying then is one of the richest parts of France looks rich ?
I dare say you'd get a similar experience by driving through the Cotswolds.
But as you're in France you could visit some banlieues and discover if they're a bit dangerous or visit the northern rustbelt and see if old coal towns feel a bit deprived.
But I didn’t realise Brittany is doing so well. Did you? Obviously not. so this is fresh and valuable socio-economic information for both of us, which is always good on a political betting website
Meanwhile, I’ve been in Picardy recently, the worst of it looks quite like the semi-rougher bits of Kent, I’ve also been in Paris and noted that Paris is looking seriously fucked up (and it is, as is London), a sequence of remarks which caused outrage on here from the Paris-is-fine people
The idea I am floating around tourist heaven being fed tarte tatin and never bothering to look at the shite places is simply nonsense. I LIKE shite places, they are interesting. As we have discussed I was recently in Moldova, Transnistria and Ukraine
I go out and about all the time and all over the world - more than any other PBer, for sure - and I honestly report what I see. Feel free to ignore it, but who knows, sometimes I might be on the money, and you might benefit therefrom
You like places which are different, exciting, come with bragging rights and have noom.
Shite places tend to be dull. Perhaps safe and comfortable but mundane.
To expand the conversation on from brickies, part of the issue is the gutting of FE and the need for any courses to run at a profit. Regular readers will be aware of my pointing out the plight of teaching assistants. Paid at the same rate as cleaners. Plenty of my colleagues would love to be trained up to fill the specialist support roles in education which are desperately needed, and impossible to fill. Therapies, OT, trauma counselling and the like. But they are asked to shell out thousands to qualify on a basically minimum wage (it's over a grand for a level three counselling course. A year of evening and weekend study when you're doing an incredibly stressful full time job in an SEN school. And if you have your own SEN kids, as most of them do...And you're still one level below being qualified for a role which won't result in that much of a pay rise anyways). No great surprise the roles remain unfilled.
Surely the course should be being covered by the Apprenticeship Levy…
While most individual schools won’t have a big enough wage bill to hit the £3m trigger most academy chains will hit that figure
Watching Gareth Jenkins today, you actually feel slightly sorry for him. He comes across as a rather sympathetic and naive figure.
There has just been a long conversation about this in the PtP household, Andy!
I'll spare you the details but I definitely agree wth Nick Wallis's obsevation that he was either criminally negligent or an unholy fool. The weight of evidence points to the former. As Wallis has pointed out, if you or I were given any kind of evidence which could have a bearing on someone going to prison, we would be very careful to give a balanced as well as accurate account. We would do so simply as a matter of civilised courtesy and honesty, regardless of whether we were 'special' witnesses or not. Yet he quite literally sat by whilst SPMs were arraigned with evidence he knew fell well short of the whole truth.
Damned by his own testimony, I'm afraid.
Peter, forgive my obtuseness, for I have an urgent question to ask of your fine mind.
You're one of the sharper punters on the site.
How screwed are the British right in the medium/long term?
I might also ask @AlastairMeeks formerly(?) of this parish. Smart chap. Taught me a lot. Iirc, @Sunil_Prasannan chased him away from the site?
Even David Cameron lost 18-24s in 2010 and 2015, if you are that age you normally either vote Labour or Green as a protest vote, if you are voting Tory you are normally considered a Hague like oddball.
It is 35-65 year olds who the Tories need to win back in likely opposition as they are the category they have lost since 2019 to Labour and to Reform and who decide general elections. The Tories still lead with pensioners but that is nowhere near enough to win overall
The only chance he has of staying out of jail, is throwing the whole PO management under the bus.
I don’t think that will help - it may have done on Tuesday but yesterday and today was Jenkins being destroyed email by email
No, he was bang to rights well before his appearance before the Inquiry. Simply giving false testimony as an expert witness would be enough to get you on a perjury charge. Even the Plod have noticed this and have interviewed him as a suspect. The only reason he hasn't been charged is because they have been waiting for the Inquiry to conclude. In his testimony too he has perjured himself again numerous times, so it's hard to see why the police would not charge him as he walks out of the hearing tomorrow afternoon. It's a very simple nick if they want it.
He could have turned King's evidence of course. He may yet do that when he is charged. (i think it is when, not if.) He may be a bit more forthcoming in front of a judge and jury. He was plainly being used as a Patsy, albeit a willing one. He could get quite a lot off his sentence if he were to identify more clearly who exactly was playing him. However, so far his strategy has been to hide what he thought he could get away with.
it hasn't worked very well, so maybe it's time for him to try a different approach.
This is the Milgram experiment but for real. I am pretty sure many of the perps had private misgivings but thought they had to go along with the instructions of the grown ups.
That's very perceptive.
It may well go a long way towards explaining Jenkins' behaviour, and indeed many others. There are some however who appear to have been plainly cynical if not malicious. Off the top of my head I would cite Alice Perkins and John Scott. Numerous lawyers, in-house and external (some very senior), fit the bill. Vennells is probably borderline - more of an overpromoted middle-manager who was intoxicated by landing the top job and blinkered herself to the ugly reality of what was going on in the firm.
At the end of the day though, what they all did was wrong and they should all be charged. It will be a massively difficult and a hit-or-miss process but if it is not done it gives the green light to far too much casual misconduct in the workplace, and disregard for consequences.
Expert witnesses know perfectly well that their duty is to the court and the truth, and not to the prosecution or defence. The criminal system cannot survive without this discipline.
More to the point, how could this man be regarded as a disinterested or neutral witness when called to offer an opinion on the reliability of a system that he constructed himself - or, not being well versed in the minutiae of the PO debacle myself, is there something obvious that I'm missing here?
At which point I will be sorely tempted to head to bed to wake early and enjoy the fun from say 6 am. But I will probably open a new bottle of whisky and settle in…
The only chance he has of staying out of jail, is throwing the whole PO management under the bus.
I don’t think that will help - it may have done on Tuesday but yesterday and today was Jenkins being destroyed email by email
No, he was bang to rights well before his appearance before the Inquiry. Simply giving false testimony as an expert witness would be enough to get you on a perjury charge. Even the Plod have noticed this and have interviewed him as a suspect. The only reason he hasn't been charged is because they have been waiting for the Inquiry to conclude. In his testimony too he has perjured himself again numerous times, so it's hard to see why the police would not charge him as he walks out of the hearing tomorrow afternoon. It's a very simple nick if they want it.
He could have turned King's evidence of course. He may yet do that when he is charged. (i think it is when, not if.) He may be a bit more forthcoming in front of a judge and jury. He was plainly being used as a Patsy, albeit a willing one. He could get quite a lot off his sentence if he were to identify more clearly who exactly was playing him. However, so far his strategy has been to hide what he thought he could get away with.
it hasn't worked very well, so maybe it's time for him to try a different approach.
This is the Milgram experiment but for real. I am pretty sure many of the perps had private misgivings but thought they had to go along with the instructions of the grown ups.
That's very perceptive.
It may well go a long way towards explaining Jenkins' behaviour, and indeed many others. There are some however who appear to have been plainly cynical if not malicious. Off the top of my head I would cite Alice Perkins and John Scott. Numerous lawyers, in-house and external (some very senior), fit the bill. Vennells is probably borderline - more of an overpromoted middle-manager who was intoxicated by landing the top job and blinkered herself to the ugly reality of what was going on in the firm.
At the end of the day though, what they all did was wrong and they should all be charged. It will be a massively difficult and a hit-or-miss process but if it is not done it gives the green light to far too much casual misconduct in the workplace, and disregard for consequences.
Expert witnesses know perfectly well that their duty is to the court and the truth, and not to the prosecution or defence. The criminal system cannot survive without this discipline.
From what I’ve seen of his testimony his defence seems to be that although he was an expert witness he wasn’t an expert witness.
Watching Gareth Jenkins today, you actually feel slightly sorry for him. He comes across as a rather sympathetic and naive figure.
How much of that is the act desperately trying to save his neck?
As I said earlier that was Tuesday - yesterday and today there was evidence where anyone in IT would have ran away on seeing the email - take the email I used as my picture of the day earlier.
Sentence 1 - the audit trail looks dodgy with duplicate lines. Sentence 2 - but we can blame the tool that copied it..
Sentence 2 makes no sense, sentence 1 would have had me out the door in seconds…
Last week it was pro russia appeasement and groveling for Putin, this week it is full on hard nazi style racism and homophobia from main people within reform caught on C4 news hidden camera. I was very disturbed by plans to turn the police into paramilitary, hoping for attacks on Bradford, whating for soldiers to shoot at boats in the channel, references to gassing ethnic minorities... reform is what you get when nazism rebrands itself and puts on a suit. Dear me.
I'd be curious if @state_go_away could watch that and repeat his assertion that me calling Reform a "nasty party of racist bigots" was in his words "hysterical".
There is nothing "hysterical" about calling all that a nasty party of racist bigots, if anything I was far too polite.
They are straight up nazis is suits...
They’re nowhere NEAR as well dressed as the Nazis
Say what you like about the Nazis, and they are certainly political “Marmite”, and a lot of people dislike them, and they’re never going to be everyone’s “cup of tea“, but they were always snappy dressers. Hugo Boss did not strive in vain
The thing I never understand with Nazis is the sideways deflating-balloon trousers, as if they were pretending they had pumped-up bubble-butts and thunder-thighs before these became fashionable.
Do we have any fashion historians here? I'm sure it's related to some historical gesture from the past.
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
Question - what is the difference between "socialist government" and the Conservatives?
Punative taxes to record levels? Tick Wasting billions on crap public services? Tick Open door migration letting anyone in? Tick Nanny state nonsense about what we eat and smoke? Tick
People don't fear "socialist government" or any of the idiotic threats Sunak and the press team are making, because we live that every day already.
The Overton window is so narrow there is almost nothing substantive to discuss. Once you have a welfare state, free state education, NHS, industrial policy, consumer protection, regulation about everything, and a few other things a social democrat state with highly regulated capitalism is the only option. State managed expenditure has increased every year and this will continue. It is unavoidable.
The left have one further option - this + socialist state control of all commerce too. No serious right wing option has emerged with a working model in Europe yet. This is one of the most remarkable and underestimated facts of political policy. The Conservative party's two biggest fails since the war are: Lack of European statecraft, leading to the disaster of Brexit; and the failure to practice conservatism in any respects at all.
Not something I advocate by any means just an observation on all governements of the past
Wars used to cull the poor, now we no longer really have mass casualty wars its a new problem for governements of all stripes to have a burgeoning underclass and they have no idea how to deal with it
More broadly we have a terrible problem with dependency, chiefly due to a combination of low paid employment and ridiculous housing costs (meaning that many working people end up reliant on social security) and vast numbers of pensioners. The situation is theoretically recoverable, but some of the measures required - especially millions of houses and attendant infrastructure, and requiring people to work until 70 or possibly slightly beyond that - are so unpopular that they'll probably never get done. I'll certainly be surprised in a good way of Labour manages to meet its building commitments, and astonished if the houses are decent rather than shoddily constructed little identikit rabbit hutches marooned amidst acres of car parking.
Labour won't meet those targets even if it is their deepest desire, simple fact is there aren't enough construction workers nor the supply of building materials. The problem is exacerbated by the fact we are over the 50% mark for people who take more from the state than they give. For those people voting for more is a no brainer.
As many might have noted I tend rightwards . However I do believe there should be a safety net, free education to 18 and a health service which is free at point of use.
I also believe though that the state does too much and we should trim back what we do. I would rather the state did less but funded it properly than it tries to do too much and half arses everything.
For starters I would do a clawback on state pensions, every 5£ over say 5k private pension should mean 1£ off your state pension
NI on pensions
A lifetime health care costs cap with an insurance based top off
As examples
There is no shortage of skilled tradies in this country who could be building homes if they were easily able to do so without planning restrictions.
Sorry but there is, firms are poaching workers off each other because they can't get enough for example brickies and yes because we don't train enough
Firms poaching off each other is the free market in action.
Nobody has a divine right to minimum wage labour.
Maybe the builders can hire more apprentices, instead of complaining about a lack of skilled workers or asking government for more immigrants.
Just Googled bricklaying apprenticeships and I see some being advertised . . . with a wage of £5.28 per hour.
My sympathies for those who can't find employees at £5.28 per hour.
Presumably they’re looking for 16-year-olds with no bricklaying skills, in which case that’s not too bad. But after a couple of years, they’ll be getting £15-£20 as bricklayers?
You'd think so, but no, this is for 19 year old apprentices with 2 A levels and 5+ GCSEs including Maths and English.
Absolutely no sympathies for anyone struggling to recruit. Increase your pay to a rate that fills your vacancies, its not like you need a 7 year course before you can start laying your first brick.
My Dad did a seven year bricklaying apprenticeship.
I think you underestimate the skills that go into most "craft" skills.....laying your first brick is simple, putting up a house wall that will still be standing in 40 years is quite another. For example I have done a lot of diy that involved a little plastering, probably several months experience all told....first time I plastered a whole wall looked good and smooth in the next morning it had all fallen off the wall
Plastering is one of those dark arts.
Electrics, plumbing, no problem. But plastering, hell no.
Bits of plastering are fine. But for a lot of it you need SHOULDERS - and ideally several industrial dehumidifiers.
One thing that is underestimated is paint spraying - I have an airless paint sprayer (it's on its own trolley) which was about £800, and you can do a whole house 2 coats in a day - once you have spent a day masking it up. It runs through paint at a ferocious rate.
It affects the order of refurb, but it is always possible to double or halve the amount of work or the price of *any* job by careful thought.
It took me about 5 years learning to spraypaint a car competently without instructors pointing out flaws, I was about average some took much longer. A lot of things that look simple really aren't.
Same when I worked trawlers and we took on apprentice deck hands we only let them near the lower value fish first couple of years
To expand the conversation on from brickies, part of the issue is the gutting of FE and the need for any courses to run at a profit. Regular readers will be aware of my pointing out the plight of teaching assistants. Paid at the same rate as cleaners. Plenty of my colleagues would love to be trained up to fill the specialist support roles in education which are desperately needed, and impossible to fill. Therapies, OT, trauma counselling and the like. But they are asked to shell out thousands to qualify on a basically minimum wage (it's over a grand for a level three counselling course. A year of evening and weekend study when you're doing an incredibly stressful full time job in an SEN school. And if you have your own SEN kids, as most of them do...And you're still one level below being qualified for a role which won't result in that much of a pay rise anyways). No great surprise the roles remain unfilled.
Surely the course should be being covered by the Apprenticeship Levy…
While most individual schools won’t have a big enough wage bill to hit the £3m trigger most academy chains will hit that figure
But these aren't apprentices. The costs are simply not being recycled through. There's a simple fear that any training will lead to staff being lost to the private sector.
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
Question - what is the difference between "socialist government" and the Conservatives?
Punative taxes to record levels? Tick Wasting billions on crap public services? Tick Open door migration letting anyone in? Tick Nanny state nonsense about what we eat and smoke? Tick
People don't fear "socialist government" or any of the idiotic threats Sunak and the press team are making, because we live that every day already.
The Overton window is so narrow there is almost nothing substantive to discuss. Once you have a welfare state, free state education, NHS, industrial policy, consumer protection, regulation about everything, and a few other things a social democrat state with highly regulated capitalism is the only option. State managed expenditure has increased every year and this will continue. It is unavoidable.
The left have one further option - this + socialist state control of all commerce too. No serious right wing option has emerged with a working model in Europe yet. This is one of the most remarkable and underestimated facts of political policy. The Conservative party's two biggest fails since the war are: Lack of European statecraft, leading to the disaster of Brexit; and the failure to practice conservatism in any respects at all.
Not something I advocate by any means just an observation on all governements of the past
Wars used to cull the poor, now we no longer really have mass casualty wars its a new problem for governements of all stripes to have a burgeoning underclass and they have no idea how to deal with it
More broadly we have a terrible problem with dependency, chiefly due to a combination of low paid employment and ridiculous housing costs (meaning that many working people end up reliant on social security) and vast numbers of pensioners. The situation is theoretically recoverable, but some of the measures required - especially millions of houses and attendant infrastructure, and requiring people to work until 70 or possibly slightly beyond that - are so unpopular that they'll probably never get done. I'll certainly be surprised in a good way of Labour manages to meet its building commitments, and astonished if the houses are decent rather than shoddily constructed little identikit rabbit hutches marooned amidst acres of car parking.
Labour won't meet those targets even if it is their deepest desire, simple fact is there aren't enough construction workers nor the supply of building materials. The problem is exacerbated by the fact we are over the 50% mark for people who take more from the state than they give. For those people voting for more is a no brainer.
As many might have noted I tend rightwards . However I do believe there should be a safety net, free education to 18 and a health service which is free at point of use.
I also believe though that the state does too much and we should trim back what we do. I would rather the state did less but funded it properly than it tries to do too much and half arses everything.
For starters I would do a clawback on state pensions, every 5£ over say 5k private pension should mean 1£ off your state pension
NI on pensions
A lifetime health care costs cap with an insurance based top off
As examples
There is no shortage of skilled tradies in this country who could be building homes if they were easily able to do so without planning restrictions.
Sorry but there is, firms are poaching workers off each other because they can't get enough for example brickies and yes because we don't train enough
Firms poaching off each other is the free market in action.
Nobody has a divine right to minimum wage labour.
Brickies aren't min wage for a while, there just arent enough here to build 300k houses a year, average wage for a brickie now is 20 an hour
We've just been discussing, a quick search for apprentice brickie posts is advertising at £5.28 per hour.
Maybe apprentices should be £12/h and average wages £25?
If you're not able to fill your vacancies, that's because you're either not paying enough, or not offering good enough terms of service.
Thats apprentices and yes to low however you aren't going to ask an apprentice to build a house. We have an apprentice at work and he is a good guy, however we arent getting him to build any software that is going to go anywhere near a customer....same I would imagine for an apprentice brickie, you are teaching him how to not letting him near somewhere someone is going to live in and rely on not falling down. Till he is trained enough he is not an asset but a cost
Not by themselves they won't, but they will go near it yes and do simple work, that's how people learn is by doing under supervision and learning more and more. Starting with the simplest tasks and moving on.
Either way, the only reason that any firm is struggling to hire is its not paying a market rate on wages that meets sees supply of labour meet demand.
But you are talking bollocks by going on about apprentices pay rates when pay rates for actual brickies is 20 an hour on average....now by all means argue apprentice brickies should be paid more to encourage more brickies however actual time served brickies are making reasonable money
Why is £20 "reasonable money" for what we've agreed is a skilled, in-demand job?
Sorry but if you can't fill your shortages, you may need to pay more.
That's supply and demand in action. The free market in action.
20 might not be reasonable money as you state the fact is the last year it has climbed ever higher because there are less brickies than people trying to employ them.
That indicates to me which was the point of my original post that there just aren't enough brickies to build 300k houses. Like fully trained doctors you can't just magic them out of thin air and that is before you even look at the shortage of materials to actually build with.
You can only build as many houses as you have workers and materials for
You can get more workers.
You can train them, by offering more than a fiver an hour to apprentices, who unlike Dixie's dad are nowadays (rightly or wrongly be as it may) qualified after 2 years).
5 years is more than long enough to hire people and get them through a 2 year apprenticeship and get them to work all from start to finish.
So no, its just feeble-mouthed excuses. Pay people a decent rate and they'll do the job.
And, for many trades, mechanise and automate and get more productivity from the workers you have.
(Both simple and difficult to do. Simple in the sense that there are plenty of templates worldwide of how to do this. Difficult because... something is getting in the way and I don't think we know what? A fetishisation of hard work over smart work? A construction model made up of little monopoly projects where there's not much benefit from getting the work done quickly, cheaply and well?)
Bingo!
I know someone who went from being a roofer to building houses, he got enough land to build 3 houses, sold 2 and kept the other 1 and basically made enough from the 2 sold to cover his own house. Like most tradies, he knew and had good working relationships with plenty of other tradies to get things done and not being tied to a monopoly project there were no restrictions, just getting the job done.
There's are plenty of skilled tradies who could be taking the lead in constructing individual homes in this country if we didn't have the planning system that gives consent to Barratt Homes to have a monopoly in the area rather than simply letting everyone who wants to build a home just f***ing do it.
There's nearly 800k people working self-employed in the construction sector alone today. Before any recruitment or apprenticeships.
How long until Rishi concedes the loss? He may not want to wait for his own declaration, since he might not win even there.
Of course he will wait until his own declaration, even Major did in 1997 and Corbyn did in 2019. He might privately phone Starmer before to concede but that is it. Sunak will hold his seat anyway reasonably comfortably on the latest polls
Watching Gareth Jenkins today, you actually feel slightly sorry for him. He comes across as a rather sympathetic and naive figure.
There has just been a long conversation about this in the PtP household, Andy!
I'll spare you the details but I definitely agree wth Nick Wallis's obsevation that he was either criminally negligent or an unholy fool. The weight of evidence points to the former. As Wallis has pointed out, if you or I were given any kind of evidence which could have a bearing on someone going to prison, we would be very careful to give a balanced as well as accurate account. We would do so simply as a matter of civilised courtesy and honesty, regardless of whether we were 'special' witnesses or not. Yet he quite literally sat by whilst SPMs were arraigned with evidence he knew fell well short of the whole truth.
Damned by his own testimony, I'm afraid.
I agree with you here PtP - criminally negligent is my view. Agree that he was served very badly by the Post Office and Fujitsu Lawyers and others - and his culpability shouldn't diminish that of others. However, his actions are akin to shooting a loaded rifle in a built-up area because someone asked him to and he was focused on the trigger mechanism without any regard to the wider consequences. Regardless of it being blindness or wilful blindness - the potential consequences are so obvious to any normal person that it's still criminally negligent.
As does my 85 year old dad, but an inability to understand statistics, population data and why Biden may not have all his marbles even though he’s younger may be a thing…
ITV News: Labour worried about a dozen seats with large Muslim electorates where they're concerned their majority may be slashed or even lost altogether.
I'm sure they'll survive it.
Who will they lose their seats to though? Greens? Galloway's mob?
Watching Gareth Jenkins today, you actually feel slightly sorry for him. He comes across as a rather sympathetic and naive figure.
There has just been a long conversation about this in the PtP household, Andy!
I'll spare you the details but I definitely agree wth Nick Wallis's obsevation that he was either criminally negligent or an unholy fool. The weight of evidence points to the former. As Wallis has pointed out, if you or I were given any kind of evidence which could have a bearing on someone going to prison, we would be very careful to give a balanced as well as accurate account. We would do so simply as a matter of civilised courtesy and honesty, regardless of whether we were 'special' witnesses or not. Yet he quite literally sat by whilst SPMs were arraigned with evidence he knew fell well short of the whole truth.
Damned by his own testimony, I'm afraid.
Peter, forgive my obtuseness, for I have an urgent question to ask of your fine mind.
You're one of the sharper punters on the site.
How screwed are the British right in the medium/long term?
Gosh, thanks for the compliment but what a question!
Who knows, is the only honest answer. I'd have to think long and hard to come up with anything better. I do believe however that this election is likely to be a watershed moment, and much will depend on the extent of the shellacking. If it's not too bad - say 100-150 MPs returned - it will probably be business as usual under a new leader. Lower than that and it gets very unpredictable.
Sorry, best I can do at this hour and without considerable notice!
ITV News: Labour worried about a dozen seats with large Muslim electorates where they're concerned their majority may be slashed or even lost altogether.
Although Gaza has been much less in the news during the campaign, which may help.
How long until Rishi concedes the loss? He may not want to wait for his own declaration, since he might not win even there.
Of course he will wait until his own declaration, even Major did in 1997 and Corbyn did in 2019. He might privately phone Starmer before to concede but that is it. Sunak will hold his seat anyway reasonably comfortably on the latest polls
Neither of those was in danger of losing their seats. He should hold his, but if they are at 50-75 seats he probably won't. And that's not my prediction, but it's just as likely as Major's result in 1997, if not more likely.
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
The only problem with 10 years of socialist government is that it isn't 20 years of socialist government.
I know you are a natural conservative, but we aren't really that scary. We want a better society, where all can prosper. A nation at ease with itself. And, importantly to you, we are fundamentally Unionist. It is the SNP who have raised your taxes, not us!
Don't believe all of the nonsense being spewed out by Sunak and the children at CCHQ (I don't think you do); a Labour government, in the hands of a lawyer and a city insider, in the form of Starmer and Reeves, isn't going to do anything madcap. And, with a "super-majority", they can ignore the lefty fringe on the back benches. Twenty rebels? So what?
You should also be contented in the demise of the SNP, something to be repeated in the next Holyrood elections, I suspect.
The conservatives will regroup. It will take a decade, but a sensible centre-right alternative to Labour will re-emerge. The Tories won't be controlled by Farage; perhaps by Priti or Suella in the short term, but common sense will prevail. You'll get your party back.
Much in that I agree with. Particularly the breaking of the SNP monopoly in Scotland. I also agree Starmer and Reeves are no Corbyn and Macdonald. I expect quite centrist policies from them.
I also think the Tories are intellectually exhausted and need a break. But you can still have too much of a good thing!
"monopoly"
As a good Unionist, you should be looking at Westminster as a whole. As for Holyrood, if this is a monopoly, what happ[ens when it isn't a minority administration, I wonder?
Anyone who thinks it a monopoly hasn't got a clue. It's just a person trying to scrabble around for something bad to say because they got the wrong result. Sorry, but it's an operation with diminishing returns to complain about one party doing well because they're popular. If there one thing to connect four opposition parties it's that they haven't been able to get over losing so many elections in a row.
Isn’t Scotland simply the maths of one party on one side of a political divide and multiple parties on the other. Something which gives extreme results in FPTP but is also helpful in PR as coalitions are easier.
The question is whether that’s a stable equilibrium. The Conservatives have benefited from this pattern in England and Wales since Brexit and arguably for much of the post-war period, but Reform potentially disrupts it. So far Alba and the Scottish Greens haven’t really disrupted the SNP hegemony but will someone eventually? In this social media era I think it’s more likely than not.
We could call this Zuma’s law. The tendency that if one party enjoys control of one half of a political divide, it will eventually face a challenger on its own side. Zuma’s law because eventually, after a few decades of ANC rule, its control of black majority votes in S Africa is starting to fracture.
Not if the polling is to be believed. There was considerable movement from Labour to SNP in 2015, and now some of that looks like it's washing back.
My take is that it's a die-hard anti-Tory vote that has seen the SNP as the best anti-Tory vehicle and is now divided between SNP and Labour as the best vehicle.
It looks likely that the votes for indy parties will come in well under the support that indy has. This is only a surprise if you think Scottish votes are motivated only by for/against indy.
Makes you wonder what might happen if the anti-Tory motive is removed, i.e. the Conservative Party sinks, doesn't recover and is replaced by something else that Scots might find more palatable?
As does my 85 year old dad, but an inability to understand statistics, population data and why Biden may not have all his marbles even though he’s younger may be a thing…
My father would be great at governing the country...his dementia is advanced enough for him to forget he is in fact governing the country so no new laws, regulations etc
His binaries/wedge politics, that work so well in Australia, don't translate.
Dunno why the British right insist on outsourcing their campaigns to foreigners who don't have our countries best interests at heart.
Lynton Crosby used his successful election strategies for John Howard to advise Cameron in 2015 and Johnson in Mayoral elections in London in 2008 and 2012 to majorities in election victories
Actually, this is a good point. If Farage is “political Marmite”, what was Hitler?
For me he was “political Nutella”. Personally, I can’t stand Nutella, but a lot of people like it, especially Germans
vegemite surely as he was a vegetarian
Farage is a veggie?!
I’m talking about Hitler being political Nutella. And I think that’s pretty spot on, and if any Nutella execs are reading, they can have this for free, and swap it around for their advertising
“Nutella, it’s the Hitler of spreads! Not for everyone, but Germans like it”
And various members of the British aristocracy.
‘Unity will not put anything in her mouth unless it’s slathered with it!’
Actually, this is a good point. If Farage is “political Marmite”, what was Hitler?
For me he was “political Nutella”. Personally, I can’t stand Nutella, but a lot of people like it, especially Germans
vegemite surely as he was a vegetarian
Farage is a veggie?!
I’m talking about Hitler being political Nutella. And I think that’s pretty spot on, and if any Nutella execs are reading, they can have this for free, and swap it around for their advertising
“Nutella, it’s the Hitler of spreads! Not for everyone, but Germans like it”
Here's one I shot earlier for Germany. Unfortunately my model is not available at the moment!
At which point I will be sorely tempted to head to bed to wake early and enjoy the fun from say 6 am. But I will probably open a new bottle of whisky and settle in…
I am tempted to do similar. Go to bed at 10pm sharp and wake up at 3-4am for a flurry of results.
But I will inevitably stay awake until 2am, see a few early results, then wake up at 6am tired and having missed most the action!
Despite talking about Afro-Eurasia, I'd spring for five myself. But I'm not getting into submerged continents or microcontinents. Though what hapened to Oceania? When I was at school they told us to use that instead of Australasia.
Oh yes. The continent with the highest density of bakeries on the planet.
Never liked the pasties.
It's not the pasties.
It's because everyone from Cornwall is really into bread.
Difficult crowd here
I actually get a lot of satisfaction from slipping a joke past people. 0 likes is better than 10 for this kind of thing.
Not me, I'm a slave to the likes. How else will I have self worth?
Really. Are you serious?
That’s ridiculous. I can sometimes go several hours without checking my like to comment ratio.
If I don't get 3 or 4 likes within 5 minutes of posting a comment, I delete it.
Got to maximize that ratio.
If I’m not spontaneously mentioned every six minutes on PB by people who strenuously claim to ignore me and my comments, then I go into an existential panic
However, this has not happened yet - as I am always mentioned by these people who apparently pay no heed to my remarks
Hope you're feeling better now.
I only really want likes when I've written a substantial comment.
Actually, this is a good point. If Farage is “political Marmite”, what was Hitler?
For me he was “political Nutella”. Personally, I can’t stand Nutella, but a lot of people like it, especially Germans
vegemite surely as he was a vegetarian
Farage is a veggie?!
I’m talking about Hitler being political Nutella. And I think that’s pretty spot on, and if any Nutella execs are reading, they can have this for free, and swap it around for their advertising
“Nutella, it’s the Hitler of spreads! Not for everyone, but Germans like it”
.....and another one ! shot a year earlier. Not a tampon in sight
Actually, this is a good point. If Farage is “political Marmite”, what was Hitler?
For me he was “political Nutella”. Personally, I can’t stand Nutella, but a lot of people like it, especially Germans
vegemite surely as he was a vegetarian
Farage is a veggie?!
I’m talking about Hitler being political Nutella. And I think that’s pretty spot on, and if any Nutella execs are reading, they can have this for free, and swap it around for their advertising
“Nutella, it’s the Hitler of spreads! Not for everyone, but Germans like it”
Here's one I shot earlier for Germany. Unfortunately my model is not available at the moment!
I know most of PB hates him, and he certainly knows how to deliver an outlying poll, but actually Matt Goodwin is a pretty decent public speaker. And he’s smart, young, telegenic, and well informed
As the future leader of an actually right wing right wing party, to replace the Tories, he’d be a pretty good choice. I wonder if he has thought about going into politics, rather than just commenting off stage
Last week it was pro russia appeasement and groveling for Putin, this week it is full on hard nazi style racism and homophobia from main people within reform caught on C4 news hidden camera. I was very disturbed by plans to turn the police into paramilitary, hoping for attacks on Bradford, whating for soldiers to shoot at boats in the channel, references to gassing ethnic minorities... reform is what you get when nazism rebrands itself and puts on a suit. Dear me.
I'd be curious if @state_go_away could watch that and repeat his assertion that me calling Reform a "nasty party of racist bigots" was in his words "hysterical".
There is nothing "hysterical" about calling all that a nasty party of racist bigots, if anything I was far too polite.
They are straight up nazis is suits...
They’re nowhere NEAR as well dressed as the Nazis
Say what you like about the Nazis, and they are certainly political “Marmite”, and a lot of people dislike them, and they’re never going to be everyone’s “cup of tea“, but they were always snappy dressers. Hugo Boss did not strive in vain
The thing I never understand with Nazis is the sideways deflating-balloon trousers, as if they were pretending they had pumped-up bubble-butts and thunder-thighs before these became fashionable.
Do we have any fashion historians here? I'm sure it's related to some historical gesture from the past.
Checking - early jodhpurs, perhaps, since they liked to look back to the Prussian Officer tradition and pretend they had inherited it, rather than being thugs? For Nazis, just like all other symbolic stuff they pinched from elsewhere.
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
The only problem with 10 years of socialist government is that it isn't 20 years of socialist government.
I know you are a natural conservative, but we aren't really that scary. We want a better society, where all can prosper. A nation at ease with itself. And, importantly to you, we are fundamentally Unionist. It is the SNP who have raised your taxes, not us!
Don't believe all of the nonsense being spewed out by Sunak and the children at CCHQ (I don't think you do); a Labour government, in the hands of a lawyer and a city insider, in the form of Starmer and Reeves, isn't going to do anything madcap. And, with a "super-majority", they can ignore the lefty fringe on the back benches. Twenty rebels? So what?
You should also be contented in the demise of the SNP, something to be repeated in the next Holyrood elections, I suspect.
The conservatives will regroup. It will take a decade, but a sensible centre-right alternative to Labour will re-emerge. The Tories won't be controlled by Farage; perhaps by Priti or Suella in the short term, but common sense will prevail. You'll get your party back.
Much in that I agree with. Particularly the breaking of the SNP monopoly in Scotland. I also agree Starmer and Reeves are no Corbyn and Macdonald. I expect quite centrist policies from them.
I also think the Tories are intellectually exhausted and need a break. But you can still have too much of a good thing!
"monopoly"
As a good Unionist, you should be looking at Westminster as a whole. As for Holyrood, if this is a monopoly, what happ[ens when it isn't a minority administration, I wonder?
Anyone who thinks it a monopoly hasn't got a clue. It's just a person trying to scrabble around for something bad to say because they got the wrong result. Sorry, but it's an operation with diminishing returns to complain about one party doing well because they're popular. If there one thing to connect four opposition parties it's that they haven't been able to get over losing so many elections in a row.
Isn’t Scotland simply the maths of one party on one side of a political divide and multiple parties on the other. Something which gives extreme results in FPTP but is also helpful in PR as coalitions are easier.
The question is whether that’s a stable equilibrium. The Conservatives have benefited from this pattern in England and Wales since Brexit and arguably for much of the post-war period, but Reform potentially disrupts it. So far Alba and the Scottish Greens haven’t really disrupted the SNP hegemony but will someone eventually? In this social media era I think it’s more likely than not.
We could call this Zuma’s law. The tendency that if one party enjoys control of one half of a political divide, it will eventually face a challenger on its own side. Zuma’s law because eventually, after a few decades of ANC rule, its control of black majority votes in S Africa is starting to fracture.
Not if the polling is to be believed. There was considerable movement from Labour to SNP in 2015, and now some of that looks like it's washing back.
My take is that it's a die-hard anti-Tory vote that has seen the SNP as the best anti-Tory vehicle and is now divided between SNP and Labour as the best vehicle.
It looks likely that the votes for indy parties will come in well under the support that indy has. This is only a surprise if you think Scottish votes are motivated only by for/against indy.
That’s surely Zuma’s law but on the Tory / anti-Tory dimension.
Labour was dominant in Scotland as the anti-Tory vote, like the ANC in SA with just a couple of oddities like the Lib Dems in the far North akin to DA in the Western Cape. Eventually a new challenger emerged on its side: the SNP.
So you have the two dimensions, and Zuma’s law as a testable hypothesis on both.
See also new far right parties emerging in France after decades when it was only the Le Pen clan.
ITV News: Labour worried about a dozen seats with large Muslim electorates where they're concerned their majority may be slashed or even lost altogether.
Although Gaza has been much less in the news during the campaign, which may help.
Doubt it. Plenty of social media to be shared around.
He likes hanging around with the bad boys too much.
On Levido, I think we need a bit of politically incorrect honesty. Can you really be an effective campaign strategist in a foreign country? Or at least one you haven't spent a substantial proportion of your life in? How confident would you be understanding politics in Australia and New Zealand?
Watching Gareth Jenkins today, you actually feel slightly sorry for him. He comes across as a rather sympathetic and naive figure.
There has just been a long conversation about this in the PtP household, Andy!
I'll spare you the details but I definitely agree wth Nick Wallis's obsevation that he was either criminally negligent or an unholy fool. The weight of evidence points to the former. As Wallis has pointed out, if you or I were given any kind of evidence which could have a bearing on someone going to prison, we would be very careful to give a balanced as well as accurate account. We would do so simply as a matter of civilised courtesy and honesty, regardless of whether we were 'special' witnesses or not. Yet he quite literally sat by whilst SPMs were arraigned with evidence he knew fell well short of the whole truth.
Damned by his own testimony, I'm afraid.
Peter, forgive my obtuseness, for I have an urgent question to ask of your fine mind.
You're one of the sharper punters on the site.
How screwed are the British right in the medium/long term?
I might also ask @AlastairMeeks formerly(?) of this parish. Smart chap. Taught me a lot. Iirc, @Sunil_Prasannan chased him away from the site?
If we are talking the Tory party - the issue is the audience they are targeting is dying off and so they need a new target audience. Whether they can identify a coherent group of voters and then create policies that attract those voters is the great unknown.
I know most of PB hates him, and he certainly knows how to deliver an outlying poll, but actually Matt Goodwin is a pretty decent public speaker. And he’s smart, young, telegenic, and well informed
As the future leader of an actually right wing right wing party, to replace the Tories, he’d be a pretty good choice. I wonder if he has thought about going into politics, rather than just commenting off stage
He could be all of those things, but the issue seems to be the not uncommon fate of minor celebrities, in that they get high on the attention and chase adoration/hate attention.
Actually, this is a good point. If Farage is “political Marmite”, what was Hitler?
For me he was “political Nutella”. Personally, I can’t stand Nutella, but a lot of people like it, especially Germans
vegemite surely as he was a vegetarian
Farage is a veggie?!
I’m talking about Hitler being political Nutella. And I think that’s pretty spot on, and if any Nutella execs are reading, they can have this for free, and swap it around for their advertising
“Nutella, it’s the Hitler of spreads! Not for everyone, but Germans like it”
And various members of the British aristocracy.
‘Unity will not put anything in her mouth unless it’s slathered with it!’
Nutella of course being invented in fascist Italy as a response to the loss of access to the cocoa market during WW2. The hazelnut groves orchards of the Piedmont providing a great chocolate substitute.
I was given a fascinating history of the Ferrero company when I visited their HQ in Alba years ago, during truffle season. They were thinking of going in with Hersheys on a joint bid for Cadburys, just before Kraft snapped them up. Lovely place, Alba. The Ferrero factory is listed.
Actually, this is a good point. If Farage is “political Marmite”, what was Hitler?
For me he was “political Nutella”. Personally, I can’t stand Nutella, but a lot of people like it, especially Germans
vegemite surely as he was a vegetarian
Farage is a veggie?!
I’m talking about Hitler being political Nutella. And I think that’s pretty spot on, and if any Nutella execs are reading, they can have this for free, and swap it around for their advertising
“Nutella, it’s the Hitler of spreads! Not for everyone, but Germans like it”
And here's one shot in Maui which I'm sure you know well. This time with the world champion wind surfer. Bjorn D. I'll suggest your line to Nutella!
The only chance he has of staying out of jail, is throwing the whole PO management under the bus.
I don’t think that will help - it may have done on Tuesday but yesterday and today was Jenkins being destroyed email by email
No, he was bang to rights well before his appearance before the Inquiry. Simply giving false testimony as an expert witness would be enough to get you on a perjury charge. Even the Plod have noticed this and have interviewed him as a suspect. The only reason he hasn't been charged is because they have been waiting for the Inquiry to conclude. In his testimony too he has perjured himself again numerous times, so it's hard to see why the police would not charge him as he walks out of the hearing tomorrow afternoon. It's a very simple nick if they want it.
He could have turned King's evidence of course. He may yet do that when he is charged. (i think it is when, not if.) He may be a bit more forthcoming in front of a judge and jury. He was plainly being used as a Patsy, albeit a willing one. He could get quite a lot off his sentence if he were to identify more clearly who exactly was playing him. However, so far his strategy has been to hide what he thought he could get away with.
it hasn't worked very well, so maybe it's time for him to try a different approach.
This is the Milgram experiment but for real. I am pretty sure many of the perps had private misgivings but thought they had to go along with the instructions of the grown ups.
That's very perceptive.
It may well go a long way towards explaining Jenkins' behaviour, and indeed many others. There are some however who appear to have been plainly cynical if not malicious. Off the top of my head I would cite Alice Perkins and John Scott. Numerous lawyers, in-house and external (some very senior), fit the bill. Vennells is probably borderline - more of an overpromoted middle-manager who was intoxicated by landing the top job and blinkered herself to the ugly reality of what was going on in the firm.
At the end of the day though, what they all did was wrong and they should all be charged. It will be a massively difficult and a hit-or-miss process but if it is not done it gives the green light to far too much casual misconduct in the workplace, and disregard for consequences.
Expert witnesses know perfectly well that their duty is to the court and the truth, and not to the prosecution or defence. The criminal system cannot survive without this discipline.
From what I’ve seen of his testimony his defence seems to be that although he was an expert witness he wasn’t an expert witness.
I engaged an Expert Witness in a recent court case and I can tell you he was very aware of his responsibilities to the Court. It would have been inconceivable to try and lead him by the nose in the way the PO did with Jenkins.
But in a way the 'expert' bit is a red herring. You testify in any capacity and you try to be balanced and fair. Jenkins appears not have to have been.
I do wonder why there are many millions sitting above e.g. "labour most seats" on Betfair for a couple of levels. The market hasn't traded enough that they can all be 'free'. So there's an opportunity cost in that money sitting there. Even though sure, it's logically value if you can get on on 1.02/1.03/1.04. I'd rather have a bot market making constitutencies or something than that.
(This isn't the same as the hilarious situation after the 2020 US elections where I'm sure like many others here I was getting free money betting on the election after it occurred... there is actually more than counterparty risk here so you can't treat it as a savings account).
Absolutely piles of arbs in the betfair markets atm too if anyone can be bothered, for those who enjoy picking up pennies.
Last week it was pro russia appeasement and groveling for Putin, this week it is full on hard nazi style racism and homophobia from main people within reform caught on C4 news hidden camera. I was very disturbed by plans to turn the police into paramilitary, hoping for attacks on Bradford, whating for soldiers to shoot at boats in the channel, references to gassing ethnic minorities... reform is what you get when nazism rebrands itself and puts on a suit. Dear me.
I'd be curious if @state_go_away could watch that and repeat his assertion that me calling Reform a "nasty party of racist bigots" was in his words "hysterical".
There is nothing "hysterical" about calling all that a nasty party of racist bigots, if anything I was far too polite.
They are straight up nazis is suits...
They’re nowhere NEAR as well dressed as the Nazis
Say what you like about the Nazis, and they are certainly political “Marmite”, and a lot of people dislike them, and they’re never going to be everyone’s “cup of tea“, but they were always snappy dressers. Hugo Boss did not strive in vain
The thing I never understand with Nazis is the sideways deflating-balloon trousers, as if they were pretending they had pumped-up bubble-butts and thunder-thighs before these became fashionable.
Do we have any fashion historians here? I'm sure it's related to some historical gesture from the past.
Checking - early jodhpurs, perhaps, since they liked to look back to the Prussian Officer tradition and pretend they had inherited it, rather than being thugs? For Nazis, just like all other symbolic stuff they pinched from elsewhere.
He likes hanging around with the bad boys too much.
On Levido, I think we need a bit of politically incorrect honesty. Can you really be an effective campaign strategist in a foreign country? Or at least one you haven't spent a substantial proportion of your life in? How confident would you be understanding politics in Australia and New Zealand?
Confident enough to demand a $247,369.17 retainer! Plus double-expenses!!
ITV News: Labour worried about a dozen seats with large Muslim electorates where they're concerned their majority may be slashed or even lost altogether.
Send people from Bangladesh home not winning votes in my local "Indian" tonight.
ITV News: Labour worried about a dozen seats with large Muslim electorates where they're concerned their majority may be slashed or even lost altogether.
Although Gaza has been much less in the news during the campaign, which may help.
Much less on the mainstream news, but on various satellite channels watched by minorities it is front and centre.
I think Shockhat Adam will do well in Leicester South, but nowhere near taking the seat.
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
The only problem with 10 years of socialist government is that it isn't 20 years of socialist government.
I know you are a natural conservative, but we aren't really that scary. We want a better society, where all can prosper. A nation at ease with itself. And, importantly to you, we are fundamentally Unionist. It is the SNP who have raised your taxes, not us!
Don't believe all of the nonsense being spewed out by Sunak and the children at CCHQ (I don't think you do); a Labour government, in the hands of a lawyer and a city insider, in the form of Starmer and Reeves, isn't going to do anything madcap. And, with a "super-majority", they can ignore the lefty fringe on the back benches. Twenty rebels? So what?
You should also be contented in the demise of the SNP, something to be repeated in the next Holyrood elections, I suspect.
The conservatives will regroup. It will take a decade, but a sensible centre-right alternative to Labour will re-emerge. The Tories won't be controlled by Farage; perhaps by Priti or Suella in the short term, but common sense will prevail. You'll get your party back.
Much in that I agree with. Particularly the breaking of the SNP monopoly in Scotland. I also agree Starmer and Reeves are no Corbyn and Macdonald. I expect quite centrist policies from them.
I also think the Tories are intellectually exhausted and need a break. But you can still have too much of a good thing!
"monopoly"
As a good Unionist, you should be looking at Westminster as a whole. As for Holyrood, if this is a monopoly, what happ[ens when it isn't a minority administration, I wonder?
Anyone who thinks it a monopoly hasn't got a clue. It's just a person trying to scrabble around for something bad to say because they got the wrong result. Sorry, but it's an operation with diminishing returns to complain about one party doing well because they're popular. If there one thing to connect four opposition parties it's that they haven't been able to get over losing so many elections in a row.
Isn’t Scotland simply the maths of one party on one side of a political divide and multiple parties on the other. Something which gives extreme results in FPTP but is also helpful in PR as coalitions are easier.
The question is whether that’s a stable equilibrium. The Conservatives have benefited from this pattern in England and Wales since Brexit and arguably for much of the post-war period, but Reform potentially disrupts it. So far Alba and the Scottish Greens haven’t really disrupted the SNP hegemony but will someone eventually? In this social media era I think it’s more likely than not.
We could call this Zuma’s law. The tendency that if one party enjoys control of one half of a political divide, it will eventually face a challenger on its own side. Zuma’s law because eventually, after a few decades of ANC rule, its control of black majority votes in S Africa is starting to fracture.
Not if the polling is to be believed. There was considerable movement from Labour to SNP in 2015, and now some of that looks like it's washing back.
My take is that it's a die-hard anti-Tory vote that has seen the SNP as the best anti-Tory vehicle and is now divided between SNP and Labour as the best vehicle.
It looks likely that the votes for indy parties will come in well under the support that indy has. This is only a surprise if you think Scottish votes are motivated only by for/against indy.
Makes you wonder what might happen if the anti-Tory motive is removed, i.e. the Conservative Party sinks, doesn't recover and is replaced by something else that Scots might find more palatable?
The increasing doctrinal split between Slab and SKSLab is something to keep an eye on. May not come to much, but even 1-2 years ago they had to advocate *SNP* policies to win a by election. And SKS has moved more to the Tory side since.
We were interested to see Nigel Farage hiring the devil's own law firm, Carter-Ruck, to respond to the Mail on Sunday's story that claimed Farage was personally "infected with Putinism".
While Farage doesn't look out of place on Carter-Ruck's client list (The Church Of Scientology, Simon Cowell, Chelsea FC, Qatar, etc) we're not sure they're the best firm to hire if you're looking to scrub the taint of Putin.
Not least because, Carter-Ruck head honcho Nigel Tait was specifically named in the House of Commons in 2022 as one of the "amoral" lawyers in the profession aiding Russian interests in the UK courts at the expense of British citizens.
Hiring them is an admission it is true. At the very least it is acceptable as a general characterisation without being literal, since politics allows for such things.
Comments
And if the bulk of them are coming off two year apprenticeships at £6.40 an hour, then you'll get the quality of housing stock you pay for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL2KoMNzGTo
It may well go a long way towards explaining Jenkins' behaviour, and indeed many others. There are some however who appear to have been plainly cynical if not malicious. Off the top of my head I would cite Alice Perkins and John Scott. Numerous lawyers, in-house and external (some very senior), fit the bill. Vennells is probably borderline - more of an overpromoted middle-manager who was intoxicated by landing the top job and blinkered herself to the ugly reality of what was going on in the firm.
At the end of the day though, what they all did was wrong and they should all be charged. It will be a massively difficult and a hit-or-miss process but if it is not done it gives the green light to far too much casual misconduct in the workplace, and disregard for consequences.
For me he was “political Nutella”. Personally, I can’t stand Nutella, but a lot of people like it, especially Germans
If we want walking, we have to start by creating an environment which facilitates and encourages active travel - that will need fundamental changes to give equal importance to all modes of travel. IMO what it actually needs is the DNA of Local Highways Authorities to be rewritten at a statutory level; they were created to build roads to prioritise motor vehicles over everything, so that it was they continue to do, and everyone else can go and f*ck themselves.
As an example, in my town all the people who want to cycle can't use the cycleways because they were all barriered off just after they were built. On my local 1km of landscaped, street-lit cycleway you have to get off your cycle 5 times in 1km. So we are all forced onto either the old A1 (12k a day AADT with many pinch points), the new A38 (50mph limit, single carriageway, 25k a day AADT), or onto the shared footpaths which in places are only 4ft wide.
But the pavements are blocked everywhere by selfish wazzocks who park their motor vehicles all over them.
That's ingrowing carbrain (aka motor-normativity) which creates unnecessary risk and conflict - a basic equality issue and a culture problem in the LHA.
I am in favour of building a lot more than 300k houses a year
I am in favour of paying apprentices more to show them uni is not the only route
I am in favour of a more balanced view on how to progress when you leave school where hands on is on a par with academics
I am in favour of schools teaching lessons on how to run a small business and trade skills being an option at school
I am just casting doubt that even with a gung ho governement actually committed to building houses we could currently build 300k houses
Liam Booth-Smith was questioned by investigators last week as they look to establish who knew about the timing of the snap election in advance.
The 37-year-old is considered to be the Prime Minister’s closest ally and as such would have been heavily involved in planning the announcement.
He is not a suspect in the gambling watchdog’s investigation, it is understood, and was instead asked to help with its inquiries as a witness.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/06/27/rishi-sunak-liam-booth-smith-questioned-gambling-commission/
Nigel Farage is a Putin appeaser, says Sunak
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/06/27/rishi-sunak-interview-election-conservatives-nigel-farage/
You can train them, by offering more than a fiver an hour to apprentices, who unlike Dixie's dad are nowadays (rightly or wrongly be as it may) qualified after 2 years).
5 years is more than long enough to hire people and get them through a 2 year apprenticeship and get them to work all from start to finish.
So no, its just feeble-mouthed excuses. Pay people a decent rate and they'll do the job.
Dick Van Dyke dismisses Biden age concerns: I’m 98, and ‘I’ve got all my marbles’
https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/4743743-dick-van-dyke-biden-age-trump-bernie-sanders/
Regular readers will be aware of my pointing out the plight of teaching assistants. Paid at the same rate as cleaners.
Plenty of my colleagues would love to be trained up to fill the specialist support roles in education which are desperately needed, and impossible to fill. Therapies, OT, trauma counselling and the like.
But they are asked to shell out thousands to qualify on a basically minimum wage (it's over a grand for a level three counselling course. A year of evening and weekend study when you're doing an incredibly stressful full time job in an SEN school. And if you have your own SEN kids, as most of them do...And you're still one level below being qualified for a role which won't result in that much of a pay rise anyways).
No great surprise the roles remain unfilled.
I fear it will not be very effective, hwoever, since even if it works a little, will those people go back toward Sunak? They have other options now.
One thing that is underestimated is paint spraying - I have an airless paint sprayer (it's on its own trolley) which was about £800, and you can do a whole house 2 coats in a day - once you have spent a day masking it up. It runs through paint at a ferocious rate.
It affects the order of refurb, but it is always possible to double or halve the amount of work or the price of *any* job by careful thought.
Councillor Garry Burchett was left with black eyes and a suspected broken nose while delivering leaflets in Ford, in Shropshire on Thursday morning, Tory candidate Daniel Kawczynski said.
Another volunteer was left in tears, he added.
West Mercia Police said officers had arrested a 59-year-old man from Shropshire on suspicion of assault and assault of an emergency worker, and that he remained in custody."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ck5gj907n7lo
No Student Loan Graduate Tax.
Young workers are paying 20% of their wages in those taxes that pensioners aren't paying, so it would just level the playing field and not penalise anyone any more than what workers already pay.
(Both simple and difficult to do. Simple in the sense that there are plenty of templates worldwide of how to do this. Difficult because... something is getting in the way and I don't think we know what? A fetishisation of hard work over smart work? A construction model made up of little monopoly projects where there's not much benefit from getting the work done quickly, cheaply and well?)
I’m talking about Hitler being political Nutella. And I think that’s pretty spot on, and if any Nutella execs are reading, they can have this for free, and swap it around for their advertising
“Nutella, it’s the Hitler of spreads! Not for everyone, but Germans like it”
I'll spare you the details but I definitely agree wth Nick Wallis's obsevation that he was either criminally negligent or an unholy fool. The weight of evidence points to the former. As Wallis has pointed out, if you or I were given any kind of evidence which could have a bearing on someone going to prison, we would be very careful to give a balanced as well as accurate account. We would do so simply as a matter of civilised courtesy and honesty, regardless of whether we were 'special' witnesses or not. Yet he quite literally sat by whilst SPMs were arraigned with evidence he knew fell well short of the whole truth.
Damned by his own testimony, I'm afraid.
Shite places tend to be dull. Perhaps safe and comfortable but mundane.
While most individual schools won’t have a big enough wage bill to hit the £3m trigger most academy chains will hit that figure
You're one of the sharper punters on the site.
How screwed are the British right in the medium/long term?
I might also ask @AlastairMeeks formerly(?) of this parish. Smart chap. Taught me a lot. Iirc, @Sunil_Prasannan chased him away from the site?
In other news, I’m thinking of having a second glass of wine
It is 35-65 year olds who the Tories need to win back in likely opposition as they are the category they have lost since 2019 to Labour and to Reform and who decide general elections. The Tories still lead with pensioners but that is nowhere near enough to win overall
Though the term covers quite a wide range of fungal species, there's no question that's what they are.
Sentence 1 - the audit trail looks dodgy with duplicate lines.
Sentence 2 - but we can blame the tool that copied it..
Sentence 2 makes no sense, sentence 1 would have had me out the door in seconds…
Do we have any fashion historians here? I'm sure it's related to some historical gesture from the past.
Same when I worked trawlers and we took on apprentice deck hands we only let them near the lower value fish first couple of years
I know someone who went from being a roofer to building houses, he got enough land to build 3 houses, sold 2 and kept the other 1 and basically made enough from the 2 sold to cover his own house. Like most tradies, he knew and had good working relationships with plenty of other tradies to get things done and not being tied to a monopoly project there were no restrictions, just getting the job done.
There's are plenty of skilled tradies who could be taking the lead in constructing individual homes in this country if we didn't have the planning system that gives consent to Barratt Homes to have a monopoly in the area rather than simply letting everyone who wants to build a home just f***ing do it.
There's nearly 800k people working self-employed in the construction sector alone today. Before any recruitment or apprenticeships.
Almost no-one thought it was a good idea to go now, except Sunak.
He makes shit decisions.
Who will they lose their seats to though? Greens? Galloway's mob?
Who knows, is the only honest answer. I'd have to think long and hard to come up with anything better. I do believe however that this election is likely to be a watershed moment, and much will depend on the extent of the shellacking. If it's not too bad - say 100-150 MPs returned - it will probably be business as usual under a new leader. Lower than that and it gets very unpredictable.
Sorry, best I can do at this hour and without considerable notice!
‘Unity will not put anything in her mouth unless it’s slathered with it!’
They are meaningless.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP-FqtPFSV0
The only sane time to have gone would have been May with the locals,..
But I will inevitably stay awake until 2am, see a few early results, then wake up at 6am tired and having missed most the action!
I only really want likes when I've written a substantial comment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puhbPEDSPe8
As the future leader of an actually right wing right wing party, to replace the Tories, he’d be a pretty good choice. I wonder if he has thought about going into politics, rather than just commenting off stage
Labour was dominant in Scotland as the anti-Tory vote, like the ANC in SA with just a couple of oddities like the Lib Dems in the far North akin to DA in the Western Cape. Eventually a new challenger emerged on its side: the SNP.
So you have the two dimensions, and Zuma’s law as a testable hypothesis on both.
See also new far right parties emerging in France after decades when it was only the Le Pen clan.
However, they do run to over 10000 words.
On Levido, I think we need a bit of politically incorrect honesty. Can you really be an effective campaign strategist in a foreign country? Or at least one you haven't spent a substantial proportion of your life in? How confident would you be understanding politics in Australia and New Zealand?
I was given a fascinating history of the Ferrero company when I visited their HQ in Alba years ago, during truffle season. They were thinking of going in with Hersheys on a joint bid for Cadburys, just before Kraft snapped them up. Lovely place, Alba. The Ferrero factory is listed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDLGlvOav6M
But in a way the 'expert' bit is a red herring. You testify in any capacity and you try to be balanced and fair. Jenkins appears not have to have been.
Why not?
(Actually not that accurate a summary depending on interpretation).
(This isn't the same as the hilarious situation after the 2020 US elections where I'm sure like many others here I was getting free money betting on the election after it occurred... there is actually more than counterparty risk here so you can't treat it as a savings account).
Absolutely piles of arbs in the betfair markets atm too if anyone can be bothered, for those who enjoy picking up pennies.
I think Shockhat Adam will do well in Leicester South, but nowhere near taking the seat.
Guilty as Fuck