They need to win back the headbangers now happily installed in the home of headbangers; they need to win over those who fled to the sensible shores of Labour and Lib Dems; they need to stop their residual voters dying.
Should be easy.
One Nationers should take over the Lib Dems.
Question to our Lib Dem members, how many in the voluntary party support the Orange Book policies now?
Possibly the 2015 election was disastrous in that it destroyed Orange Book Liberalism and left a party barely distinguishable from SKS Labour.
Clegg's problem in 2015 was Cameron was already offering Orange Book Liberalism in all but name anyway, while the social democrats who had voted for his party before defected to Ed Miliband's Labour Party
Tuition fees. And not to so much what was done as the way it was done.
Orange Book LDs back tuition fees and ideally based on the graduate premium from and cost of the degree. Social Democrat LDs however largely want university education to be free
That's me told then; I've always been against tuition fees. Although I was a Liberal before I was a LibDem.
Tuition fees are arguably the greatest unforced error in the history of the universe.
Not a small claim when you consider that includes Operation Barabarossa, Alexander's trek through Gedrosia and the Emperor inviting the Rebellion to attack the second Death Star.
Not only did they nearly destroy the Lib Dems, they are actually a disaster in terms of funding HE.
They aren't, their problem is they are one size fits all not set at market rate.
If they were then economics at Cambridge or law at Oxford or medicine at Imperial for example would have the highest fees and arts degrees would be cheapest
You clearly don't have a clue how markets work (but then again nor did anyone else who implemented the scheme).
Because no university is going to charge less than the full rate because
1) it implies their course is less good than other courses 2) it leaves money they could otherwise get 3) the money is borrowed so it's never going to be fully repaid in many cases anyway...
See also: private school fees.
It's not just Stella Artois where expensive=reassurance.
The parallels between universities and private schools and universities are interesting. Note that Labour politicians seem less keen on taxing the bastions of privilege personified by the privately run, enormously wealthy, Oxbridge colleges that are massively more snobby than the snobbiest of private schools. The reason? Because so many of them went there themselves, including Starmer (albeit as a postgrad). Oxbridge has been very effective at being left alone by many Labour governments. If Rachel Reeves is serious about raising a bit of revenue and sharing out the privilege , then how about starting to ask why it is necessary for colleges to own huge land and business interests and maybe sharing it out amongst the cash strapped "lesser" universities (as the uber-snob HYUFD might describe them). No? Labour always looks after their own.
You appear to equate all universities with Oxbridge, which is very, very silly. There are 164 universities in the UK. Approximately 1% of students going to university go to Oxbridge.
Also, having been to Oxbridge, the snobbiest private schools are snobbier than Cambridge and some Oxford colleges, although, sure, some Oxford colleges can out-snob the snobbiest,
Trinity and Magdalene colleges in Cambridge and Balliol and Christ Church and Magdalene colleges in Oxford are snobbier than your average private school, not least as plenty of their undergraduates still come from Eton, Westminster, Winchester and Harrow
Magdalen Oxford.
When you spout this sort of undiluted bilge to people with first hand knowledge of the matter it puts more than a little doubt over your equally authoritative pronouncements about US politics. And everything else
Well if you want to quibble, Trinity College Oxford has the highest percentage of ex private school students at 52% followed by Christ Church, Queen's, Magdalen, Christ Church and Keble at 50%.
Robinson College Cambridge has the highest percentage of private school pupils at 50%, tied with St John's, followed by Gonville and Caius at 46% and Trinity at 44%.
UK productivity no longer matches the US Annualised growth in GDP per hour worked
Depressing that government has neglected the importance of manufacturing for at least the last decade.
It could have been very different.
Decade ?
Are you serious.
I have worked in manufacturing since 1982 and it has been neglected all of the time I have been working and, at least Osborne did recognise this with his Northern Powerhouse push and march of the makers which fell when he did.
It has tumbled as a percentage of GDP over that time even if output still rose.
The recent tax benefit for investing in plant and machinery was one of the very few pro-industrial policies I can recall.
David Gauke, the former justice secretary, has announced he has rejoined the Conservative Party.
A return purely in order to vote in the leadership election, and to provide the following ringing endorsement:
"This time, it may be a shorter period of membership (I clicked on the option to join for one year only rather than renewing automatically). But, for the moment, I am a Tory member again."
I strongly suspect he won't be a member this time next year, given his wing of the party's job is to lose leadership elections. But who knows - maybe enough will do likewise to make a difference.
I am not rejoining at this stage just to vote in a contest with such poor candidates
If the conservative party puts Reform behind it and promotes integrity, sound money, and fairness then that will be a different matter
Would you settle for two out of three?
Seriously, hope that you are able to return to your regular party allegiance.
They need to win back the headbangers now happily installed in the home of headbangers; they need to win over those who fled to the sensible shores of Labour and Lib Dems; they need to stop their residual voters dying.
Should be easy.
One Nationers should take over the Lib Dems.
Question to our Lib Dem members, how many in the voluntary party support the Orange Book policies now?
Possibly the 2015 election was disastrous in that it destroyed Orange Book Liberalism and left a party barely distinguishable from SKS Labour.
Clegg's problem in 2015 was Cameron was already offering Orange Book Liberalism in all but name anyway, while the social democrats who had voted for his party before defected to Ed Miliband's Labour Party
Tuition fees. And not to so much what was done as the way it was done.
Orange Book LDs back tuition fees and ideally based on the graduate premium from and cost of the degree. Social Democrat LDs however largely want university education to be free
That's me told then; I've always been against tuition fees. Although I was a Liberal before I was a LibDem.
Tuition fees are arguably the greatest unforced error in the history of the universe.
Not a small claim when you consider that includes Operation Barabarossa, Alexander's trek through Gedrosia and the Emperor inviting the Rebellion to attack the second Death Star.
Not only did they nearly destroy the Lib Dems, they are actually a disaster in terms of funding HE.
They aren't, their problem is they are one size fits all not set at market rate.
If they were then economics at Cambridge or law at Oxford or medicine at Imperial for example would have the highest fees and arts degrees would be cheapest
You clearly don't have a clue how markets work (but then again nor did anyone else who implemented the scheme).
Because no university is going to charge less than the full rate because
1) it implies their course is less good than other courses 2) it leaves money they could otherwise get 3) the money is borrowed so it's never going to be fully repaid in many cases anyway...
See also: private school fees.
It's not just Stella Artois where expensive=reassurance.
The parallels between universities and private schools and universities are interesting. Note that Labour politicians seem less keen on taxing the bastions of privilege personified by the privately run, enormously wealthy, Oxbridge colleges that are massively more snobby than the snobbiest of private schools. The reason? Because so many of them went there themselves, including Starmer (albeit as a postgrad). Oxbridge has been very effective at being left alone by many Labour governments. If Rachel Reeves is serious about raising a bit of revenue and sharing out the privilege , then how about starting to ask why it is necessary for colleges to own huge land and business interests and maybe sharing it out amongst the cash strapped "lesser" universities (as the uber-snob HYUFD might describe them). No? Labour always looks after their own.
You appear to equate all universities with Oxbridge, which is very, very silly. There are 164 universities in the UK. Approximately 1% of students going to university go to Oxbridge.
Also, having been to Oxbridge, the snobbiest private schools are snobbier than Cambridge and some Oxford colleges, although, sure, some Oxford colleges can out-snob the snobbiest,
Trinity and Magdalene colleges in Cambridge and Balliol and Christ Church and Magdalene colleges in Oxford are snobbier than your average private school, not least as plenty of their undergraduates still come from Eton, Westminster, Winchester and Harrow
Magdalen Oxford.
When you spout this sort of undiluted bilge to people with first hand knowledge of the matter it puts more than a little doubt over your equally authoritative pronouncements about US politics. And everything else
Well if you want to quibble, Trinity College Oxford has the highest percentage of ex private school students at 52% followed by Christ Church, Queen's, Magdalen, Christ Church and Keble at 50%.
Robinson College Cambridge has the highest percentage of private school pupils at 50%, tied with St John's, followed by Gonville and Caius at 46% and Trinity at 44%.
They need to win back the headbangers now happily installed in the home of headbangers; they need to win over those who fled to the sensible shores of Labour and Lib Dems; they need to stop their residual voters dying.
Should be easy.
One Nationers should take over the Lib Dems.
Question to our Lib Dem members, how many in the voluntary party support the Orange Book policies now?
Possibly the 2015 election was disastrous in that it destroyed Orange Book Liberalism and left a party barely distinguishable from SKS Labour.
Clegg's problem in 2015 was Cameron was already offering Orange Book Liberalism in all but name anyway, while the social democrats who had voted for his party before defected to Ed Miliband's Labour Party
Tuition fees. And not to so much what was done as the way it was done.
Orange Book LDs back tuition fees and ideally based on the graduate premium from and cost of the degree. Social Democrat LDs however largely want university education to be free
That's me told then; I've always been against tuition fees. Although I was a Liberal before I was a LibDem.
Tuition fees are arguably the greatest unforced error in the history of the universe.
Not a small claim when you consider that includes Operation Barabarossa, Alexander's trek through Gedrosia and the Emperor inviting the Rebellion to attack the second Death Star.
Not only did they nearly destroy the Lib Dems, they are actually a disaster in terms of funding HE.
They aren't, their problem is they are one size fits all not set at market rate.
If they were then economics at Cambridge or law at Oxford or medicine at Imperial for example would have the highest fees and arts degrees would be cheapest
You clearly don't have a clue how markets work (but then again nor did anyone else who implemented the scheme).
Because no university is going to charge less than the full rate because
1) it implies their course is less good than other courses 2) it leaves money they could otherwise get 3) the money is borrowed so it's never going to be fully repaid in many cases anyway...
See also: private school fees.
It's not just Stella Artois where expensive=reassurance.
The parallels between universities and private schools and universities are interesting. Note that Labour politicians seem less keen on taxing the bastions of privilege personified by the privately run, enormously wealthy, Oxbridge colleges that are massively more snobby than the snobbiest of private schools. The reason? Because so many of them went there themselves, including Starmer (albeit as a postgrad). Oxbridge has been very effective at being left alone by many Labour governments. If Rachel Reeves is serious about raising a bit of revenue and sharing out the privilege , then how about starting to ask why it is necessary for colleges to own huge land and business interests and maybe sharing it out amongst the cash strapped "lesser" universities (as the uber-snob HYUFD might describe them). No? Labour always looks after their own.
You appear to equate all universities with Oxbridge, which is very, very silly. There are 164 universities in the UK. Approximately 1% of students going to university go to Oxbridge.
Also, having been to Oxbridge, the snobbiest private schools are snobbier than Cambridge and some Oxford colleges, although, sure, some Oxford colleges can out-snob the snobbiest,
Trinity and Magdalene colleges in Cambridge and Balliol and Christ Church and Magdalene colleges in Oxford are snobbier than your average private school, not least as plenty of their undergraduates still come from Eton, Westminster, Winchester and Harrow
Magdalen Oxford.
When you spout this sort of undiluted bilge to people with first hand knowledge of the matter it puts more than a little doubt over your equally authoritative pronouncements about US politics. And everything else
Well if you want to quibble, Trinity College Oxford has the highest percentage of ex private school students at 52% followed by Christ Church, Queen's, Magdalen, Christ Church and Keble at 50%.
Robinson College Cambridge has the highest percentage of private school pupils at 50%, tied with St John's, followed by Gonville and Caius at 46% and Trinity at 44%.
Mitch Daniels showed how large US public universities should be governed. For example: "Tuition at Purdue, prior to Daniels' arrival, had increased every year since 1976.[184] Two months after Daniels assumed his role as president, Purdue announced it would freeze tuition for two years, eventually extending the freeze for ten years, through 2023. As a result, multiple graduating classes will leave Purdue having never experienced a tuition increase. Annual student borrowing is down a third and the Purdue loan default rate is 2.2% versus 7.1% for the average borrower from a four-year public university and 5.1% for Purdue borrowers prior to the tuition freeze. The university claims that students and families will have saved over a billion dollars over the course of the ten years.[185] No student fees[186][187] have been approved since the tuition freeze was enacted, although a mandatory student wellness fee that students lobbied for prior to Daniels' arrival at Purdue was allowed to take effect[188] but was later reduced under Daniels' direction.[189] The total cost of attending Purdue has fallen since Daniels assumed Purdue's presidency. However, revenue per student increased modestly despite the freeze, partially because the number of foreign and out-of-state students increased, most significantly among graduate students." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Daniels#President_of_Purdue_University
It is possible, thanks to his reforms, for a student to work their way through Purdue, without borrowing. Daniels understands that Purdue -- and similar universities -- should not try to emulate Harvard.
UK productivity no longer matches the US Annualised growth in GDP per hour worked
Depressing that government has neglected the importance of manufacturing for at least the last decade.
It could have been very different.
Decade ?
Are you serious.
I have worked in manufacturing since 1982 and it has been neglected all of the time I have been working and, at least Osborne did recognise this with his Northern Powerhouse push and march of the makers which fell when he did.
It has tumbled as a percentage of GDP over that time even if output still rose.
I'm in this game as well - want manufacturers broadly want (I think, let me know if you disagree) is
✅ Broad alignment with the EU ✅ BoE to be slightly more dovish than the Fed and ECB (Not happening I think) ✅ Simpler tax book. ✅ No budget wizard wheezes.
They need to win back the headbangers now happily installed in the home of headbangers; they need to win over those who fled to the sensible shores of Labour and Lib Dems; they need to stop their residual voters dying.
Should be easy.
One Nationers should take over the Lib Dems.
Question to our Lib Dem members, how many in the voluntary party support the Orange Book policies now?
Possibly the 2015 election was disastrous in that it destroyed Orange Book Liberalism and left a party barely distinguishable from SKS Labour.
Clegg's problem in 2015 was Cameron was already offering Orange Book Liberalism in all but name anyway, while the social democrats who had voted for his party before defected to Ed Miliband's Labour Party
Tuition fees. And not to so much what was done as the way it was done.
Orange Book LDs back tuition fees and ideally based on the graduate premium from and cost of the degree. Social Democrat LDs however largely want university education to be free
That's me told then; I've always been against tuition fees. Although I was a Liberal before I was a LibDem.
Tuition fees are arguably the greatest unforced error in the history of the universe.
Not a small claim when you consider that includes Operation Barabarossa, Alexander's trek through Gedrosia and the Emperor inviting the Rebellion to attack the second Death Star.
Not only did they nearly destroy the Lib Dems, they are actually a disaster in terms of funding HE.
They aren't, their problem is they are one size fits all not set at market rate.
If they were then economics at Cambridge or law at Oxford or medicine at Imperial for example would have the highest fees and arts degrees would be cheapest
You clearly don't have a clue how markets work (but then again nor did anyone else who implemented the scheme).
Because no university is going to charge less than the full rate because
1) it implies their course is less good than other courses 2) it leaves money they could otherwise get 3) the money is borrowed so it's never going to be fully repaid in many cases anyway...
See also: private school fees.
It's not just Stella Artois where expensive=reassurance.
The parallels between universities and private schools and universities are interesting. Note that Labour politicians seem less keen on taxing the bastions of privilege personified by the privately run, enormously wealthy, Oxbridge colleges that are massively more snobby than the snobbiest of private schools. The reason? Because so many of them went there themselves, including Starmer (albeit as a postgrad). Oxbridge has been very effective at being left alone by many Labour governments. If Rachel Reeves is serious about raising a bit of revenue and sharing out the privilege , then how about starting to ask why it is necessary for colleges to own huge land and business interests and maybe sharing it out amongst the cash strapped "lesser" universities (as the uber-snob HYUFD might describe them). No? Labour always looks after their own.
You appear to equate all universities with Oxbridge, which is very, very silly. There are 164 universities in the UK. Approximately 1% of students going to university go to Oxbridge.
Also, having been to Oxbridge, the snobbiest private schools are snobbier than Cambridge and some Oxford colleges, although, sure, some Oxford colleges can out-snob the snobbiest,
Trinity and Magdalene colleges in Cambridge and Balliol and Christ Church and Magdalene colleges in Oxford are snobbier than your average private school, not least as plenty of their undergraduates still come from Eton, Westminster, Winchester and Harrow
Magdalen Oxford.
When you spout this sort of undiluted bilge to people with first hand knowledge of the matter it puts more than a little doubt over your equally authoritative pronouncements about US politics. And everything else
Well if you want to quibble, Trinity College Oxford has the highest percentage of ex private school students at 52% followed by Christ Church, Queen's, Magdalen, Christ Church and Keble at 50%.
Robinson College Cambridge has the highest percentage of private school pupils at 50%, tied with St John's, followed by Gonville and Caius at 46% and Trinity at 44%.
Rishi is certainly doing everything he can to get Tom Tug to win the members' vote, if we see Ted Heath voted we will know something is up...
Rishi Sunak started the fightback on the morning of July 5th with his apology outside No.10 Downing Street. I suspect we're going to hear a lot of apologising from the Conservatives in the coming months as they attempt to wipe the slate clean with the public.
I look forward to hearing a mea culpa from Kemi Badenoch (who sat round the same Cabinet table, collective responsibility) and perhaps Robert Jenrick - will I have a long wait?
The actual fight back can begin when he pisses off to America.
University academics have seen a similar fall in relative pay to medics. We've been offered 2.5%...
If this is the offer the doctors will be expected to deliver on sorting backlogs etc (whether those are their fault or not).
We just recruited a post doc. I idly ran the BoE inflation calculator and found the starting salary was down about £3k (~8%) in real terms* on mine on the same grading structure as when I started at the same point about ten years ago.
The much derided increments enable the university sector (and other sectors where annual increments apply) to hide a lot of real terms pay cuts as many individuals in many years get real terms increases even as the scale itself drops in real terms.
*rather more than -8% compared to things like mortgage affordability for a similar house, presumably
I ran similar calcs a few months ago. PhD stipends are massively below where they were 20 year ago when i did mine in real terms. If i remember correctly what i got should now be £27k a year and my post-doc should be £50k+.
When i talk to academics now they say most of their PhDs do second jobs to make the money required to live. When i did mine, i wasn't rolling in it, but i never thought about money. It was less than a real job, but not by much and student discounts, etc etc etc, meant only a real top job out of uni bettered it.
They need to win back the headbangers now happily installed in the home of headbangers; they need to win over those who fled to the sensible shores of Labour and Lib Dems; they need to stop their residual voters dying.
Should be easy.
One Nationers should take over the Lib Dems.
Question to our Lib Dem members, how many in the voluntary party support the Orange Book policies now?
Possibly the 2015 election was disastrous in that it destroyed Orange Book Liberalism and left a party barely distinguishable from SKS Labour.
Clegg's problem in 2015 was Cameron was already offering Orange Book Liberalism in all but name anyway, while the social democrats who had voted for his party before defected to Ed Miliband's Labour Party
Tuition fees. And not to so much what was done as the way it was done.
Orange Book LDs back tuition fees and ideally based on the graduate premium from and cost of the degree. Social Democrat LDs however largely want university education to be free
That's me told then; I've always been against tuition fees. Although I was a Liberal before I was a LibDem.
Tuition fees are arguably the greatest unforced error in the history of the universe.
Not a small claim when you consider that includes Operation Barabarossa, Alexander's trek through Gedrosia and the Emperor inviting the Rebellion to attack the second Death Star.
Not only did they nearly destroy the Lib Dems, they are actually a disaster in terms of funding HE.
They aren't, their problem is they are one size fits all not set at market rate.
If they were then economics at Cambridge or law at Oxford or medicine at Imperial for example would have the highest fees and arts degrees would be cheapest
You clearly don't have a clue how markets work (but then again nor did anyone else who implemented the scheme).
Because no university is going to charge less than the full rate because
1) it implies their course is less good than other courses 2) it leaves money they could otherwise get 3) the money is borrowed so it's never going to be fully repaid in many cases anyway...
See also: private school fees.
It's not just Stella Artois where expensive=reassurance.
The parallels between universities and private schools and universities are interesting. Note that Labour politicians seem less keen on taxing the bastions of privilege personified by the privately run, enormously wealthy, Oxbridge colleges that are massively more snobby than the snobbiest of private schools. The reason? Because so many of them went there themselves, including Starmer (albeit as a postgrad). Oxbridge has been very effective at being left alone by many Labour governments. If Rachel Reeves is serious about raising a bit of revenue and sharing out the privilege , then how about starting to ask why it is necessary for colleges to own huge land and business interests and maybe sharing it out amongst the cash strapped "lesser" universities (as the uber-snob HYUFD might describe them). No? Labour always looks after their own.
You appear to equate all universities with Oxbridge, which is very, very silly. There are 164 universities in the UK. Approximately 1% of students going to university go to Oxbridge.
Also, having been to Oxbridge, the snobbiest private schools are snobbier than Cambridge and some Oxford colleges, although, sure, some Oxford colleges can out-snob the snobbiest,
I don't have a problem with Oxbridge, indeed I think it is a wonderful thing that we have two of the greatest and most historic universities in the world. I was simply pointing out that Labour is not asking questions about why these institutions are so massively wealthy and I have provided a possible answer. The fact that you think that using an example is silly is *very silly* of you!
Question: How can you tell when there is an Oxbridge graduate in a chatroom? Answer: You will know because they will have already told you!
Oxbridge are strange, in good and bad ways. The Govt does need policy around Oxbridge. But we were talking about university policy in general and whatever you do or don’t do with Oxbridge doesn’t answer the broader questions of undergraduate funding.
The question that should be asked IMO is why such institutions need to charge fees at all and why they need government funding. https://www.ft.com/content/f1126d04-c0fc-11df-99c4-00144feab49a (note this article refers to "Cambridge University". More interesting is to look at the wealth of colleges, eg. Trinity.
Colleges like Trinity also have centuries old, grade listed historic buildings to maintain which doesn't apply to newer universities
Trinity Cambridge owns, amongst much else, the freehold to the UKs biggest container port. It’ll cope.
Can you still walk from Oxford to Cambridge without stepping off land owned by one of the colleges?
A local farm I often cycle past is apparently owned by Univ. Why they have land up here I have no idea - presumably inherited.
Bequest
This is why Big Henry broke up the monasteries. If people leave everything to an institution it stays there.
Presumably with a covenant so they can't sell it.
Bit daft really.
The local wildlife trust gets left land in a similar vein and then people get annoyed when they try and get rid of it.
Of course they have limited resources to do management work so unless it is an outstanding site it just becomes a liability. I don't imagine there is a lot of income from these random bits of land (unless someone builds a container port, obvs).
You can't stitch up land so it's unsellable. English land law is a multi century war between poshos trying to do that and parliament thwarting them. See under entail, fines and recoveries, settled land act etc
But if it's a nice big productive farm why as a college would you want to? If your investing horizon is for ever you have to be careful you aren't still all in on railway shares when the clever money has rotated into horseless carriages. Land is land.
Excellent news that Labour have reached a deal with junior doctors unions. Fingers crossed that gets accepted by members.
Under the Tories: dispute meanders on for two years without any meaningful progress. Under Labour: Streeting resolves it (hopefully) in less than three weeks.
As I keep repeating, JD Vance 2014 was not a bad guy.
JD Vance on Justice Scalia in 2014. "He's become a very shrill old man. I used to really like him, and I used to believe all of his stuff about judicial minimalism was sincere. Now I see it as a political charade." https://x.com/JoshMBlackman/status/1817581641214398877
Trumpism has driven significant chunk of the Republican party completely insane.
Trump is as much symptom as cause: they were going this way anyway.
I think he started out as a symptom and has now graduated to being a cause. Are there examples of this in the domain of nasty diseases? If there are he's like that.
He cerainly seems to have graduated from chancre to full blown tertiary syphilis. Can Penicillin Kamala save the USA (and the rest of us)?
God I hope so. This is *such* a big election, isn't it. I can't recall any as important. It's just so stark and binary. We're either getting the first female president, a sane and competent woman, or we're getting Donald Trump back. I feel tense about it now, 3 months out, so christ knows how I'll be when it's upon us. It'd be good if she could pull out a nice stable lead in the polls. That might take the edge off slightly.
It’s has long been a semi-joking belief of mine that Trump carries a virus that turns intelligent people into dribbling morons.
Look at Giuliani….
Make sure you separate your hope casting for Harris from your betting. It’s still slightly in Trumps favour - 55% chance of him winning on the polls combined with the voting distribution, I think.
I'm not that prone to hopecasting. The bias I have to guard against in my betting is the other way. I have a tendency, for emotional hedge reasons, to overstate the chances of something I dread happening. In this case Trump2.
But as it happens I make him 2nd fav now. Say around 40%. Before Joe bowed out I had him more like 80%. That announcement had me punching the sofa almost as many times as when Jude did his last gasp overhead kick.
So, yet another British administration takes the easy option of taking an axe to infrastructure (thus harming our long-term productivity and growth prospects) to help fund current commitments rather investing strategically in what we need.
I hope all the people who voted Labour thinking they'd be "oh so different" to Rishi and the Conservatives have taken note.
Well the doctors did their bit to get rid of the Tories, so I guess that's their payment for services rendered?
This administration will do exactly the same as the Tories on infrastructure but, rather than using the savings to cut taxes, will use it to raise public sector pay instead.
UK productivity no longer matches the US Annualised growth in GDP per hour worked
Depressing that government has neglected the importance of manufacturing for at least the last decade.
It could have been very different.
Decade ?
Are you serious.
I have worked in manufacturing since 1982 and it has been neglected all of the time I have been working and, at least Osborne did recognise this with his Northern Powerhouse push and march of the makers which fell when he did.
It has tumbled as a percentage of GDP over that time even if output still rose.
I'm in this game as well - want manufacturers broadly want (I think, let me know if you disagree) is
✅ Broad alignment with the EU ✅ BoE to be slightly more dovish than the Fed and ECB (Not happening I think) ✅ Simpler tax book. ✅ No budget wizard wheezes.
I do not disagree at all. Regulatory alignment with the EU, certainly, especially in industries that are heavily regulated anyway, such as Pharmaceuticals and The automotive industry. It makes absolutely no sense to have duplicate standards that is just an extra cost burden. For example having RHD cars for the UK versus LHD cars for the UK makes for an additional cost burden. You duplicate tooling, part numbers, validation and other fixed costs. The cost of red tape is often spoken of as being a problem with the EU but if we still want to sell into these markets regulatory alignment with them makes perfect sense and that is part of ease of access to overseas markets. The Brexit deal has only had a minor impact on us so far however other overseas markets do not seem really to have opened up apart from part of the middle East. But the mood music from the last lot was not outward looking. We need to encourage exporting and also inward investment.
Training and proper apprenticeships. Offer discounts on Engineering degrees. As Engineering has been less valued in this country fewer people have wanted to enter it and it is an ageing demographic. We need to inspire the next generation and for them to see it as interesting. One good thing that happens now is our business, along with others, takes graduates for 12 month placements. Works really well. Gives them real work experience, but also gets them embedded in manufacturing.
Focussing on high value, high skills manufacturing.
No budget shocks for certain and a far simpler tax book would be great and, as for the BOE, no shocks there either. A currency that is stable rather than up and down. It worries me when I see talk of Trump/Vance looking to use the USD as a weapon and devalue it to make their exports cheaper.
Excellent news that Labour have reached a deal with junior doctors unions. Fingers crossed that gets accepted by members.
Under the Tories: dispute meanders on for two years without any meaningful progress. Under Labour: Streeting resolves it (hopefully) in less than three weeks.
Yes, nothing at all political about the strike of course.
Excellent news that Labour have reached a deal with junior doctors unions. Fingers crossed that gets accepted by members.
Under the Tories: dispute meanders on for two years without any meaningful progress. Under Labour: Streeting resolves it (hopefully) in less than three weeks.
Yes, nothing at all political about the strike of course.
Noithing at all political about Conservative intransigence, either, of course.
Excellent news that Labour have reached a deal with junior doctors unions. Fingers crossed that gets accepted by members.
Under the Tories: dispute meanders on for two years without any meaningful progress. Under Labour: Streeting resolves it (hopefully) in less than three weeks.
Rishi is certainly doing everything he can to get Tom Tug to win the members' vote, if we see Ted Heath voted we will know something is up...
This is silly. Tom Tugendhat isn't Ted Heath.
There seems to still be some weird cultural dynamic at play amongst aspects of the Conservative membership to divine the least strident leadership candidate as a secret Wet, regardless of who it is and what they say. And that seems to go back nearly 45 years.
Excellent news that Labour have reached a deal with junior doctors unions. Fingers crossed that gets accepted by members.
Under the Tories: dispute meanders on for two years without any meaningful progress. Under Labour: Streeting resolves it (hopefully) in less than three weeks.
Yes, nothing at all political about the strike of course.
Everything is political. IF a non-dom leaves the country because they are less well off under Labour that's political. If doctors go on strike because they are less well off under Tories, that's political. It's all political.
So, yet another British administration takes the easy option of taking an axe to infrastructure (thus harming our long-term productivity and growth prospects) to help fund current commitments rather investing strategically in what we need.
I hope all the people who voted Labour thinking they'd be "oh so different" to Rishi and the Conservatives have taken note.
It will be disappointing indeed if that turns out to be the case. But I await the detail.
Excellent news that Labour have reached a deal with junior doctors unions. Fingers crossed that gets accepted by members.
Under the Tories: dispute meanders on for two years without any meaningful progress. Under Labour: Streeting resolves it (hopefully) in less than three weeks.
Giving-in tends to resolve strikes...for a bit.
Well, they're not getting the 35% they demanded, are they?
Might as well wait till 1500 for it from Ms Reeves, instead of made up stuff in Sky and DT whioch is driving our PB rightwingers mad. Mind, it sure works as clickbait.
I really do not accept your rejection of Sky's reporting nor that the doctors are considering putting it to their members
It seems an offer has been made and I am not sure even why you are so upset about it
Not the offer - the way in which people here are so willing to accept speculation as fact.
Excellent news that Labour have reached a deal with junior doctors unions. Fingers crossed that gets accepted by members.
Under the Tories: dispute meanders on for two years without any meaningful progress. Under Labour: Streeting resolves it (hopefully) in less than three weeks.
Giving-in tends to resolve strikes...for a bit.
Well, they're not getting the 35% they demanded, are they?
I thought they asked for 35% over five years? So 20% over two years kicks the can but I assume they'll be back in a couple of years asking for the rest.
Excellent news that Labour have reached a deal with junior doctors unions. Fingers crossed that gets accepted by members.
Under the Tories: dispute meanders on for two years without any meaningful progress. Under Labour: Streeting resolves it (hopefully) in less than three weeks.
Be interesting to compare direct costs of the strike (agency workers, consultants on overtime etc) with the settlement. Even more fun to do a full economic analysis on costs of delayed ops, QALYs lost etc from the strike compared to the settlement.
As I keep repeating, JD Vance 2014 was not a bad guy.
JD Vance on Justice Scalia in 2014. "He's become a very shrill old man. I used to really like him, and I used to believe all of his stuff about judicial minimalism was sincere. Now I see it as a political charade." https://x.com/JoshMBlackman/status/1817581641214398877
Trumpism has driven significant chunk of the Republican party completely insane.
Trump is as much symptom as cause: they were going this way anyway.
I think he started out as a symptom and has now graduated to being a cause. Are there examples of this in the domain of nasty diseases? If there are he's like that.
He cerainly seems to have graduated from chancre to full blown tertiary syphilis. Can Penicillin Kamala save the USA (and the rest of us)?
God I hope so. This is *such* a big election, isn't it. I can't recall any as important. It's just so stark and binary. We're either getting the first female president, a sane and competent woman, or we're getting Donald Trump back. I feel tense about it now, 3 months out, so christ knows how I'll be when it's upon us. It'd be good if she could pull out a nice stable lead in the polls. That might take the edge off slightly.
It’s has long been a semi-joking belief of mine that Trump carries a virus that turns intelligent people into dribbling morons.
Look at Giuliani….
Make sure you separate your hope casting for Harris from your betting. It’s still slightly in Trumps favour - 55% chance of him winning on the polls combined with the voting distribution, I think.
I'm not that prone to hopecasting. The bias I have to guard against in my betting is the other way. I have a tendency, for emotional hedge reasons, to overstate the chances of something I dread happening. In this case Trump2.
But as it happens I make him 2nd fav now. Say around 40%. Before Joe bowed out I had him more like 80%. That announcement had me punching the sofa almost as many times as when Jude did his last gasp overhead kick.
That’s hope casting. The classic.
Before Trump was approach 60% probability of a win. Still a tight race.
If the poll movements mean anything, Harris has pulled that back - slightly. But to get to 60% would mean that she was clearly ahead in EVs.
They need to win back the headbangers now happily installed in the home of headbangers; they need to win over those who fled to the sensible shores of Labour and Lib Dems; they need to stop their residual voters dying.
Should be easy.
One Nationers should take over the Lib Dems.
Question to our Lib Dem members, how many in the voluntary party support the Orange Book policies now?
Possibly the 2015 election was disastrous in that it destroyed Orange Book Liberalism and left a party barely distinguishable from SKS Labour.
Clegg's problem in 2015 was Cameron was already offering Orange Book Liberalism in all but name anyway, while the social democrats who had voted for his party before defected to Ed Miliband's Labour Party
Tuition fees. And not to so much what was done as the way it was done.
Orange Book LDs back tuition fees and ideally based on the graduate premium from and cost of the degree. Social Democrat LDs however largely want university education to be free
That's me told then; I've always been against tuition fees. Although I was a Liberal before I was a LibDem.
Tuition fees are arguably the greatest unforced error in the history of the universe.
Not a small claim when you consider that includes Operation Barabarossa, Alexander's trek through Gedrosia and the Emperor inviting the Rebellion to attack the second Death Star.
Not only did they nearly destroy the Lib Dems, they are actually a disaster in terms of funding HE.
They aren't, their problem is they are one size fits all not set at market rate.
If they were then economics at Cambridge or law at Oxford or medicine at Imperial for example would have the highest fees and arts degrees would be cheapest
You clearly don't have a clue how markets work (but then again nor did anyone else who implemented the scheme).
Because no university is going to charge less than the full rate because
1) it implies their course is less good than other courses 2) it leaves money they could otherwise get 3) the money is borrowed so it's never going to be fully repaid in many cases anyway...
See also: private school fees.
It's not just Stella Artois where expensive=reassurance.
The parallels between universities and private schools and universities are interesting. Note that Labour politicians seem less keen on taxing the bastions of privilege personified by the privately run, enormously wealthy, Oxbridge colleges that are massively more snobby than the snobbiest of private schools. The reason? Because so many of them went there themselves, including Starmer (albeit as a postgrad). Oxbridge has been very effective at being left alone by many Labour governments. If Rachel Reeves is serious about raising a bit of revenue and sharing out the privilege , then how about starting to ask why it is necessary for colleges to own huge land and business interests and maybe sharing it out amongst the cash strapped "lesser" universities (as the uber-snob HYUFD might describe them). No? Labour always looks after their own.
You appear to equate all universities with Oxbridge, which is very, very silly. There are 164 universities in the UK. Approximately 1% of students going to university go to Oxbridge.
Also, having been to Oxbridge, the snobbiest private schools are snobbier than Cambridge and some Oxford colleges, although, sure, some Oxford colleges can out-snob the snobbiest,
I don't have a problem with Oxbridge, indeed I think it is a wonderful thing that we have two of the greatest and most historic universities in the world. I was simply pointing out that Labour is not asking questions about why these institutions are so massively wealthy and I have provided a possible answer. The fact that you think that using an example is silly is *very silly* of you!
Question: How can you tell when there is an Oxbridge graduate in a chatroom? Answer: You will know because they will have already told you!
Oxbridge are strange, in good and bad ways. The Govt does need policy around Oxbridge. But we were talking about university policy in general and whatever you do or don’t do with Oxbridge doesn’t answer the broader questions of undergraduate funding.
The question that should be asked IMO is why such institutions need to charge fees at all and why they need government funding. https://www.ft.com/content/f1126d04-c0fc-11df-99c4-00144feab49a (note this article refers to "Cambridge University". More interesting is to look at the wealth of colleges, eg. Trinity.
Colleges like Trinity also have centuries old, grade listed historic buildings to maintain which doesn't apply to newer universities
Trinity Cambridge owns, amongst much else, the freehold to the UKs biggest container port. It’ll cope.
Can you still walk from Oxford to Cambridge without stepping off land owned by one of the colleges?
A local farm I often cycle past is apparently owned by Univ. Why they have land up here I have no idea - presumably inherited.
Bequest
This is why Big Henry broke up the monasteries. If people leave everything to an institution it stays there.
Presumably with a covenant so they can't sell it.
Bit daft really.
The local wildlife trust gets left land in a similar vein and then people get annoyed when they try and get rid of it.
Of course they have limited resources to do management work so unless it is an outstanding site it just becomes a liability. I don't imagine there is a lot of income from these random bits of land (unless someone builds a container port, obvs).
You can't stitch up land so it's unsellable. English land law is a multi century war between poshos trying to do that and parliament thwarting them. See under entail, fines and recoveries, settled land act etc
But if it's a nice big productive farm why as a college would you want to? If your investing horizon is for ever you have to be careful you aren't still all in on railway shares when the clever money has rotated into horseless carriages. Land is land.
You have a point - why try and invest the asset in the latest trend when you can just sit on it for 400 years? It is currently set up as a chicken farm but how much input the college has I'm not sure.
I know you can get covenants removed but it isn't always a good look if you are a charity hoping for future bequests.
Excellent news that Labour have reached a deal with junior doctors unions. Fingers crossed that gets accepted by members.
Under the Tories: dispute meanders on for two years without any meaningful progress. Under Labour: Streeting resolves it (hopefully) in less than three weeks.
Giving-in tends to resolve strikes...for a bit.
Well, they're not getting the 35% they demanded, are they?
So I should bloody hope! 35% was an anchor bid. Madness to give it any credence.
And I remain unconvinced that giving in to strikes stops strikes.
So, yet another British administration takes the easy option of taking an axe to infrastructure (thus harming our long-term productivity and growth prospects) to help fund current commitments rather investing strategically in what we need.
I hope all the people who voted Labour thinking they'd be "oh so different" to Rishi and the Conservatives have taken note.
It will be disappointing indeed if that turns out to be the case. But I await the detail.
It’s worth remembering the journalists confidently stating that there was going to be no COVID support for anyone, up till Rishi got up to announce….
Excellent news that Labour have reached a deal with junior doctors unions. Fingers crossed that gets accepted by members.
Under the Tories: dispute meanders on for two years without any meaningful progress. Under Labour: Streeting resolves it (hopefully) in less than three weeks.
Yes, nothing at all political about the strike of course.
Noithing at all political about Conservative intransigence, either, of course.
I confess to severe disappointment that Labour are seemingly going to 'pause' infrastructure projects like the A303 Stonehenge and A27 Arundel bypasses; I can't see how that's going to help the economy grow.
Would much rather see higher taxes on the wealthy (myself included).
Still, a focus on balancing the books is to be applauded, and not quite in line with the "IMF bail-out by 2027" line being punted by Labour critics on here.
Well, this is the point, isn't it? Most governments in this country at least don't seem to grasp the fundamental difference between paying money on things that will then make money later and paying money to keep things going.
So, for example, HS2 to Euston, Leeds and Manchester will pay for itself six times over. HS2 from Old Oak Common to Crewe will make a loss. But the latter is a headline spending cut so is GOOD!
A new road around Newport would create a huge amount of wealth in South Wales by unclogging that key artery from Newport to Cardiff and allowing people and goods to be transported quickly and reliably. Lots of lovely tax revenue. But - it needs money so BAAD!
I'm not sure whether to blame Thatcher/Major with their tight monetary policies and suspicion of government intervention, or Brown with his stupid decision to call all his spending 'investment' even though most of his non-PFI stuff was current account spending.
The Brynglas Tunnels were a major bottleneck from the day the new Severn Bridge opened in the ‘90s, and their replacement or bypass really should have been thought about at the same time.
The A303 past Stonehenge has been a massive bottleneck for even longer, especially in the summer evenings. I remember being in the queue for what felt like hours as a kid in the ‘80s. Someone needs to decide to either start digging the tunnel or dual the existing road, then JFDI.
So much of the national infrastructure can be improved by eliminating a small number of these transport pinch points.
I used to work at the Bell Inn in Winterbourne Stoke (last pub on the A303 before the motorway going East, and the last going West for a fair while. Some of you may have used it. This was in 1992. My boss, who leased it, bailed in about 1994 because he was convinced that the bypass was going through imminently. Indeed the route (to the East of the village was set out and ready). In 1992.
My Dad is 85. He has been waiting for two epochal events in his life since the 1990's - the duelling of the A303 and Bath to actually build the new stadium that's been talked of since the 1990's. I used to think he would see both in his lifetime, but I am no longer sure of either.
Is there a lot of fencing when you're duelling a main road?
They need to win back the headbangers now happily installed in the home of headbangers; they need to win over those who fled to the sensible shores of Labour and Lib Dems; they need to stop their residual voters dying.
Should be easy.
One Nationers should take over the Lib Dems.
Question to our Lib Dem members, how many in the voluntary party support the Orange Book policies now?
Possibly the 2015 election was disastrous in that it destroyed Orange Book Liberalism and left a party barely distinguishable from SKS Labour.
Clegg's problem in 2015 was Cameron was already offering Orange Book Liberalism in all but name anyway, while the social democrats who had voted for his party before defected to Ed Miliband's Labour Party
Tuition fees. And not to so much what was done as the way it was done.
Orange Book LDs back tuition fees and ideally based on the graduate premium from and cost of the degree. Social Democrat LDs however largely want university education to be free
That's me told then; I've always been against tuition fees. Although I was a Liberal before I was a LibDem.
Tuition fees are arguably the greatest unforced error in the history of the universe.
Not a small claim when you consider that includes Operation Barabarossa, Alexander's trek through Gedrosia and the Emperor inviting the Rebellion to attack the second Death Star.
Not only did they nearly destroy the Lib Dems, they are actually a disaster in terms of funding HE.
They aren't, their problem is they are one size fits all not set at market rate.
If they were then economics at Cambridge or law at Oxford or medicine at Imperial for example would have the highest fees and arts degrees would be cheapest
You clearly don't have a clue how markets work (but then again nor did anyone else who implemented the scheme).
Because no university is going to charge less than the full rate because
1) it implies their course is less good than other courses 2) it leaves money they could otherwise get 3) the money is borrowed so it's never going to be fully repaid in many cases anyway...
See also: private school fees.
It's not just Stella Artois where expensive=reassurance.
The parallels between universities and private schools and universities are interesting. Note that Labour politicians seem less keen on taxing the bastions of privilege personified by the privately run, enormously wealthy, Oxbridge colleges that are massively more snobby than the snobbiest of private schools. The reason? Because so many of them went there themselves, including Starmer (albeit as a postgrad). Oxbridge has been very effective at being left alone by many Labour governments. If Rachel Reeves is serious about raising a bit of revenue and sharing out the privilege , then how about starting to ask why it is necessary for colleges to own huge land and business interests and maybe sharing it out amongst the cash strapped "lesser" universities (as the uber-snob HYUFD might describe them). No? Labour always looks after their own.
You appear to equate all universities with Oxbridge, which is very, very silly. There are 164 universities in the UK. Approximately 1% of students going to university go to Oxbridge.
Also, having been to Oxbridge, the snobbiest private schools are snobbier than Cambridge and some Oxford colleges, although, sure, some Oxford colleges can out-snob the snobbiest,
I don't have a problem with Oxbridge, indeed I think it is a wonderful thing that we have two of the greatest and most historic universities in the world. I was simply pointing out that Labour is not asking questions about why these institutions are so massively wealthy and I have provided a possible answer. The fact that you think that using an example is silly is *very silly* of you!
Question: How can you tell when there is an Oxbridge graduate in a chatroom? Answer: You will know because they will have already told you!
Oxbridge are strange, in good and bad ways. The Govt does need policy around Oxbridge. But we were talking about university policy in general and whatever you do or don’t do with Oxbridge doesn’t answer the broader questions of undergraduate funding.
The question that should be asked IMO is why such institutions need to charge fees at all and why they need government funding. https://www.ft.com/content/f1126d04-c0fc-11df-99c4-00144feab49a (note this article refers to "Cambridge University". More interesting is to look at the wealth of colleges, eg. Trinity.
Colleges like Trinity also have centuries old, grade listed historic buildings to maintain which doesn't apply to newer universities
Trinity Cambridge owns, amongst much else, the freehold to the UKs biggest container port. It’ll cope.
Can you still walk from Oxford to Cambridge without stepping off land owned by one of the colleges?
A local farm I often cycle past is apparently owned by Univ. Why they have land up here I have no idea - presumably inherited.
Bequest
This is why Big Henry broke up the monasteries. If people leave everything to an institution it stays there.
Presumably with a covenant so they can't sell it.
Bit daft really.
The local wildlife trust gets left land in a similar vein and then people get annoyed when they try and get rid of it.
Of course they have limited resources to do management work so unless it is an outstanding site it just becomes a liability. I don't imagine there is a lot of income from these random bits of land (unless someone builds a container port, obvs).
You can't stitch up land so it's unsellable. English land law is a multi century war between poshos trying to do that and parliament thwarting them. See under entail, fines and recoveries, settled land act etc
But if it's a nice big productive farm why as a college would you want to? If your investing horizon is for ever you have to be careful you aren't still all in on railway shares when the clever money has rotated into horseless carriages. Land is land.
You have a point - why try and invest the asset in the latest trend when you can just sit on it for 400 years? It is currently set up as a chicken farm but how much input the college has I'm not sure.
I know you can get covenants removed but it isn't always a good look if you are a charity hoping for future bequests.
Not as controversial as removing statues, mind...
IIRC St John’s is perfectly happy owning a bunch of farmland, which it lets on very long agreements to farmers who’ve been there for generations.
UK productivity no longer matches the US Annualised growth in GDP per hour worked
Depressing that government has neglected the importance of manufacturing for at least the last decade.
It could have been very different.
Decade ?
Are you serious.
I have worked in manufacturing since 1982 and it has been neglected all of the time I have been working and, at least Osborne did recognise this with his Northern Powerhouse push and march of the makers which fell when he did.
It has tumbled as a percentage of GDP over that time even if output still rose.
I'm in this game as well - want manufacturers broadly want (I think, let me know if you disagree) is
✅ Broad alignment with the EU ✅ BoE to be slightly more dovish than the Fed and ECB (Not happening I think) ✅ Simpler tax book. ✅ No budget wizard wheezes.
I do not disagree at all. Regulatory alignment with the EU, certainly, especially in industries that are heavily regulated anyway, such as Pharmaceuticals and The automotive industry. It makes absolutely no sense to have duplicate standards that is just an extra cost burden. For example having RHD cars for the UK versus LHD cars for the UK makes for an additional cost burden. You duplicate tooling, part numbers, validation and other fixed costs. The cost of red tape is often spoken of as being a problem with the EU but if we still want to sell into these markets regulatory alignment with them makes perfect sense and that is part of ease of access to overseas markets. The Brexit deal has only had a minor impact on us so far however other overseas markets do not seem really to have opened up apart from part of the middle East. But the mood music from the last lot was not outward looking. We need to encourage exporting and also inward investment.
Training and proper apprenticeships. Offer discounts on Engineering degrees. As Engineering has been less valued in this country fewer people have wanted to enter it and it is an ageing demographic. We need to inspire the next generation and for them to see it as interesting. One good thing that happens now is our business, along with others, takes graduates for 12 month placements. Works really well. Gives them real work experience, but also gets them embedded in manufacturing.
Focussing on high value, high skills manufacturing.
No budget shocks for certain and a far simpler tax book would be great and, as for the BOE, no shocks there either. A currency that is stable rather than up and down. It worries me when I see talk of Trump/Vance looking to use the USD as a weapon and devalue it to make their exports cheaper.
I would also add a favourable planning regime and favourable, pro business, local govt. Too often I have heard local govt being hostile towards potential new businesses who will be the driver of jobs and wealth in the area.
I confess to severe disappointment that Labour are seemingly going to 'pause' infrastructure projects like the A303 Stonehenge and A27 Arundel bypasses; I can't see how that's going to help the economy grow.
Would much rather see higher taxes on the wealthy (myself included).
Still, a focus on balancing the books is to be applauded, and not quite in line with the "IMF bail-out by 2027" line being punted by Labour critics on here.
Well, this is the point, isn't it? Most governments in this country at least don't seem to grasp the fundamental difference between paying money on things that will then make money later and paying money to keep things going.
So, for example, HS2 to Euston, Leeds and Manchester will pay for itself six times over. HS2 from Old Oak Common to Crewe will make a loss. But the latter is a headline spending cut so is GOOD!
A new road around Newport would create a huge amount of wealth in South Wales by unclogging that key artery from Newport to Cardiff and allowing people and goods to be transported quickly and reliably. Lots of lovely tax revenue. But - it needs money so BAAD!
I'm not sure whether to blame Thatcher/Major with their tight monetary policies and suspicion of government intervention, or Brown with his stupid decision to call all his spending 'investment' even though most of his non-PFI stuff was current account spending.
The Brynglas Tunnels were a major bottleneck from the day the new Severn Bridge opened in the ‘90s, and their replacement or bypass really should have been thought about at the same time.
The A303 past Stonehenge has been a massive bottleneck for even longer, especially in the summer evenings. I remember being in the queue for what felt like hours as a kid in the ‘80s. Someone needs to decide to either start digging the tunnel or dual the existing road, then JFDI.
So much of the national infrastructure can be improved by eliminating a small number of these transport pinch points.
I used to work at the Bell Inn in Winterbourne Stoke (last pub on the A303 before the motorway going East, and the last going West for a fair while. Some of you may have used it. This was in 1992. My boss, who leased it, bailed in about 1994 because he was convinced that the bypass was going through imminently. Indeed the route (to the East of the village was set out and ready). In 1992.
My Dad is 85. He has been waiting for two epochal events in his life since the 1990's - the duelling of the A303 and Bath to actually build the new stadium that's been talked of since the 1990's. I used to think he would see both in his lifetime, but I am no longer sure of either.
Is there a lot of fencing when you're duelling a main road?
A roads tend to use pistols, B roads go for the epee.
UK productivity no longer matches the US Annualised growth in GDP per hour worked
Depressing that government has neglected the importance of manufacturing for at least the last decade.
It could have been very different.
Decade ?
Are you serious.
I have worked in manufacturing since 1982 and it has been neglected all of the time I have been working and, at least Osborne did recognise this with his Northern Powerhouse push and march of the makers which fell when he did.
It has tumbled as a percentage of GDP over that time even if output still rose.
I'm in this game as well - want manufacturers broadly want (I think, let me know if you disagree) is
✅ Broad alignment with the EU ✅ BoE to be slightly more dovish than the Fed and ECB (Not happening I think) ✅ Simpler tax book. ✅ No budget wizard wheezes.
I do not disagree at all. Regulatory alignment with the EU, certainly, especially in industries that are heavily regulated anyway, such as Pharmaceuticals and The automotive industry. It makes absolutely no sense to have duplicate standards that is just an extra cost burden. For example having RHD cars for the UK versus LHD cars for the UK makes for an additional cost burden. You duplicate tooling, part numbers, validation and other fixed costs. The cost of red tape is often spoken of as being a problem with the EU but if we still want to sell into these markets regulatory alignment with them makes perfect sense and that is part of ease of access to overseas markets. The Brexit deal has only had a minor impact on us so far however other overseas markets do not seem really to have opened up apart from part of the middle East. But the mood music from the last lot was not outward looking. We need to encourage exporting and also inward investment.
Training and proper apprenticeships. Offer discounts on Engineering degrees. As Engineering has been less valued in this country fewer people have wanted to enter it and it is an ageing demographic. We need to inspire the next generation and for them to see it as interesting. One good thing that happens now is our business, along with others, takes graduates for 12 month placements. Works really well. Gives them real work experience, but also gets them embedded in manufacturing.
Focussing on high value, high skills manufacturing.
No budget shocks for certain and a far simpler tax book would be great and, as for the BOE, no shocks there either. A currency that is stable rather than up and down. It worries me when I see talk of Trump/Vance looking to use the USD as a weapon and devalue it to make their exports cheaper.
I would also add a favourable planning regime and favourable, pro business, local govt. Too often I have heard local govt being hostile towards potential new businesses who will be the driver of jobs and wealth in the area.
The last paragraph - chap I knew tried pitching a factory in what used to be the Red Wall. Got told to go away, pretty much. So it went to the Far East.
I confess to severe disappointment that Labour are seemingly going to 'pause' infrastructure projects like the A303 Stonehenge and A27 Arundel bypasses; I can't see how that's going to help the economy grow.
Would much rather see higher taxes on the wealthy (myself included).
Still, a focus on balancing the books is to be applauded, and not quite in line with the "IMF bail-out by 2027" line being punted by Labour critics on here.
Well, this is the point, isn't it? Most governments in this country at least don't seem to grasp the fundamental difference between paying money on things that will then make money later and paying money to keep things going.
So, for example, HS2 to Euston, Leeds and Manchester will pay for itself six times over. HS2 from Old Oak Common to Crewe will make a loss. But the latter is a headline spending cut so is GOOD!
A new road around Newport would create a huge amount of wealth in South Wales by unclogging that key artery from Newport to Cardiff and allowing people and goods to be transported quickly and reliably. Lots of lovely tax revenue. But - it needs money so BAAD!
I'm not sure whether to blame Thatcher/Major with their tight monetary policies and suspicion of government intervention, or Brown with his stupid decision to call all his spending 'investment' even though most of his non-PFI stuff was current account spending.
The Brynglas Tunnels were a major bottleneck from the day the new Severn Bridge opened in the ‘90s, and their replacement or bypass really should have been thought about at the same time.
The A303 past Stonehenge has been a massive bottleneck for even longer, especially in the summer evenings. I remember being in the queue for what felt like hours as a kid in the ‘80s. Someone needs to decide to either start digging the tunnel or dual the existing road, then JFDI.
So much of the national infrastructure can be improved by eliminating a small number of these transport pinch points.
I used to work at the Bell Inn in Winterbourne Stoke (last pub on the A303 before the motorway going East, and the last going West for a fair while. Some of you may have used it. This was in 1992. My boss, who leased it, bailed in about 1994 because he was convinced that the bypass was going through imminently. Indeed the route (to the East of the village was set out and ready). In 1992.
My Dad is 85. He has been waiting for two epochal events in his life since the 1990's - the duelling of the A303 and Bath to actually build the new stadium that's been talked of since the 1990's. I used to think he would see both in his lifetime, but I am no longer sure of either.
Is there a lot of fencing when you're duelling a main road?
A roads tend to use pistols, B roads go for the epee.
As I keep repeating, JD Vance 2014 was not a bad guy.
JD Vance on Justice Scalia in 2014. "He's become a very shrill old man. I used to really like him, and I used to believe all of his stuff about judicial minimalism was sincere. Now I see it as a political charade." https://x.com/JoshMBlackman/status/1817581641214398877
Trumpism has driven significant chunk of the Republican party completely insane.
Trump is as much symptom as cause: they were going this way anyway.
I think he started out as a symptom and has now graduated to being a cause. Are there examples of this in the domain of nasty diseases? If there are he's like that.
He cerainly seems to have graduated from chancre to full blown tertiary syphilis. Can Penicillin Kamala save the USA (and the rest of us)?
God I hope so. This is *such* a big election, isn't it. I can't recall any as important. It's just so stark and binary. We're either getting the first female president, a sane and competent woman, or we're getting Donald Trump back. I feel tense about it now, 3 months out, so christ knows how I'll be when it's upon us. It'd be good if she could pull out a nice stable lead in the polls. That might take the edge off slightly.
It’s has long been a semi-joking belief of mine that Trump carries a virus that turns intelligent people into dribbling morons.
Look at Giuliani….
Make sure you separate your hope casting for Harris from your betting. It’s still slightly in Trumps favour - 55% chance of him winning on the polls combined with the voting distribution, I think.
I'm not that prone to hopecasting. The bias I have to guard against in my betting is the other way. I have a tendency, for emotional hedge reasons, to overstate the chances of something I dread happening. In this case Trump2.
But as it happens I make him 2nd fav now. Say around 40%. Before Joe bowed out I had him more like 80%. That announcement had me punching the sofa almost as many times as when Jude did his last gasp overhead kick.
That’s hope casting. The classic.
Before Trump was approach 60% probability of a win. Still a tight race.
If the poll movements mean anything, Harris has pulled that back - slightly. But to get to 60% would mean that she was clearly ahead in EVs.
Nope. It's me assessing the event as best as I can using a mix of analysis and big picture intuition. That it differs in Harris's favour from the current odds doesn't make it hopecasting. Note that before Biden pulled out I had Trump's chances as better than the betting consensus.
You seem to be just going by whatever the odds and polls are saying at any given time. That's not the best approach imo. You need to try and anticipate where things are going. My view is they will move towards Harris and away from Trump. Disagree by all means but don't give me that 'hopecasting' nonsense. As I say, I'm not prone to that.
Good news: Russian artillery losses reaching a new high. 74 reported for the day, 1,477 for the month of July so far.
Bad news: A British government reaching for cuts to infrastructure spending, again, as a temporary expedient to balance the books, and because they're incapable of making the case to the public of the necessity to invest for the future, at the cost of tax rises or cuts to current spending, in the present. Cowards.
Meanwhile in Ireland, the word is that the government will give voters another cash bung in the form of a credit on their electricity bills. How everyone will wish this money was more wisely spent when the corporation tax bonanza dries up.
Excellent news on Ukraine.
Not so excellent on infrastructure. I am willing to believe the previous government announced things they did not budget for but it seems as if current spending continues to trump everything. Huge mistake.
Rishi is certainly doing everything he can to get Tom Tug to win the members' vote, if we see Ted Heath voted we will know something is up...
This is silly. Tom Tugendhat isn't Ted Heath.
There seems to still be some weird cultural dynamic at play amongst aspects of the Conservative membership to divine the least strident leadership candidate as a secret Wet, regardless of who it is and what they say. And that seems to go back nearly 45 years.
Tom Tug isn't a wet.
He was a Remainer though, as were Jenrick and Stride
Rishi is certainly doing everything he can to get Tom Tug to win the members' vote, if we see Ted Heath voted we will know something is up...
This is silly. Tom Tugendhat isn't Ted Heath.
There seems to still be some weird cultural dynamic at play amongst aspects of the Conservative membership to divine the least strident leadership candidate as a secret Wet, regardless of who it is and what they say. And that seems to go back nearly 45 years.
Tom Tug isn't a wet.
He was a Remainer though, along with Jenrick and Stride
Look, it's not my party at the moment, but if the Conservatives continue to be concerned with Which Side Were You On in a campaign that will soon be over a decade ago, they deserve every bit of irrelevance that's coming to them.
Rishi is certainly doing everything he can to get Tom Tug to win the members' vote, if we see Ted Heath voted we will know something is up...
This is silly. Tom Tugendhat isn't Ted Heath.
There seems to still be some weird cultural dynamic at play amongst aspects of the Conservative membership to divine the least strident leadership candidate as a secret Wet, regardless of who it is and what they say. And that seems to go back nearly 45 years.
Tom Tug isn't a wet.
He was a Remainer though, along with Jenrick and Stride
Look, it's not my party at the moment, but if the Conservatives continue to be concerned with Which Side Were You On in a campaign that will soon be over a decade ago, they deserve every bit of irrelevance that's coming to them.
It remains relevant though, on 4th July most Remainers voted Labour, LD, Green or SNP and most Leavers voted Tory or RefUK.
Though Labour won more Leavers than the Tories won Remainers whereas in 2019 the Conservatives had won more Remainers than Labour had won Leavers
They need to win back the headbangers now happily installed in the home of headbangers; they need to win over those who fled to the sensible shores of Labour and Lib Dems; they need to stop their residual voters dying.
Should be easy.
One Nationers should take over the Lib Dems.
Question to our Lib Dem members, how many in the voluntary party support the Orange Book policies now?
Possibly the 2015 election was disastrous in that it destroyed Orange Book Liberalism and left a party barely distinguishable from SKS Labour.
Clegg's problem in 2015 was Cameron was already offering Orange Book Liberalism in all but name anyway, while the social democrats who had voted for his party before defected to Ed Miliband's Labour Party
Tuition fees. And not to so much what was done as the way it was done.
Orange Book LDs back tuition fees and ideally based on the graduate premium from and cost of the degree. Social Democrat LDs however largely want university education to be free
That's me told then; I've always been against tuition fees. Although I was a Liberal before I was a LibDem.
Tuition fees are arguably the greatest unforced error in the history of the universe.
Not a small claim when you consider that includes Operation Barabarossa, Alexander's trek through Gedrosia and the Emperor inviting the Rebellion to attack the second Death Star.
Not only did they nearly destroy the Lib Dems, they are actually a disaster in terms of funding HE.
They aren't, their problem is they are one size fits all not set at market rate.
If they were then economics at Cambridge or law at Oxford or medicine at Imperial for example would have the highest fees and arts degrees would be cheapest
You clearly don't have a clue how markets work (but then again nor did anyone else who implemented the scheme).
Because no university is going to charge less than the full rate because
1) it implies their course is less good than other courses 2) it leaves money they could otherwise get 3) the money is borrowed so it's never going to be fully repaid in many cases anyway...
See also: private school fees.
It's not just Stella Artois where expensive=reassurance.
The parallels between universities and private schools and universities are interesting. Note that Labour politicians seem less keen on taxing the bastions of privilege personified by the privately run, enormously wealthy, Oxbridge colleges that are massively more snobby than the snobbiest of private schools. The reason? Because so many of them went there themselves, including Starmer (albeit as a postgrad). Oxbridge has been very effective at being left alone by many Labour governments. If Rachel Reeves is serious about raising a bit of revenue and sharing out the privilege , then how about starting to ask why it is necessary for colleges to own huge land and business interests and maybe sharing it out amongst the cash strapped "lesser" universities (as the uber-snob HYUFD might describe them). No? Labour always looks after their own.
You appear to equate all universities with Oxbridge, which is very, very silly. There are 164 universities in the UK. Approximately 1% of students going to university go to Oxbridge.
Also, having been to Oxbridge, the snobbiest private schools are snobbier than Cambridge and some Oxford colleges, although, sure, some Oxford colleges can out-snob the snobbiest,
Trinity and Magdalene colleges in Cambridge and Balliol and Christ Church and Magdalene colleges in Oxford are snobbier than your average private school, not least as plenty of their undergraduates still come from Eton, Westminster, Winchester and Harrow
Magdalen Oxford.
When you spout this sort of undiluted bilge to people with first hand knowledge of the matter it puts more than a little doubt over your equally authoritative pronouncements about US politics. And everything else
Well if you want to quibble, Trinity College Oxford has the highest percentage of ex private school students at 52% followed by Christ Church, Queen's, Magdalen, Christ Church and Keble at 50%.
Robinson College Cambridge has the highest percentage of private school pupils at 50%, tied with St John's, followed by Gonville and Caius at 46% and Trinity at 44%.
Given that the intake of Trinity is of the order of 100 pa, that's a rounding error.
Helpful hint: people come in round numbers.
I went to Trinity and attended a grammar school. That’s all I’ve to add to this discussion.
My sympathies.
It’s a tough life but someone has to live it
You seem to be spending a lot of time floating around in the Thames. Just yesterday a seal was trying to board a rowing boat at Hammersmith bridge.
Probably a Tab. Us Oxford educated seals prefer to spend our days productively balancing large balls on our noses
For balance, I would say that many Cambridge graduates also spend a good deal of time balancing large balls on their noses, or at least would like to given the chance.
Excellent news that Labour have reached a deal with junior doctors unions. Fingers crossed that gets accepted by members.
Under the Tories: dispute meanders on for two years without any meaningful progress. Under Labour: Streeting resolves it (hopefully) in less than three weeks.
Giving-in tends to resolve strikes...for a bit.
Sometimes things are so obvious they are not even worth pointing out. But anyway, the deal from Labour so far looks like cuts to roads, rail, infrastructure etc and increases in unionised public sector pay. The impression is there is no 'radical plan', it is instead a superficially comforting image of 'stable management' that will shatter in to a thousand pieces upon encountering its first serious challenge, of which there will be many. The analogy is more 1979 than 1997.
Good news: Russian artillery losses reaching a new high. 74 reported for the day, 1,477 for the month of July so far.
Bad news: A British government reaching for cuts to infrastructure spending, again, as a temporary expedient to balance the books, and because they're incapable of making the case to the public of the necessity to invest for the future, at the cost of tax rises or cuts to current spending, in the present. Cowards.
Meanwhile in Ireland, the word is that the government will give voters another cash bung in the form of a credit on their electricity bills. How everyone will wish this money was more wisely spent when the corporation tax bonanza dries up.
Excellent news on Ukraine.
Not so excellent on infrastructure. I am willing to believe the previous government announced things they did not budget for but it seems as if current spending continues to trump everything. Huge mistake.
I really have absolutely no handle on how the war in Ukraine is going at the moment. For a long time it felt like Ukraine was winning - or, at least, not losing. And then it felt like Russia was winning. But I've genuinely no idea now. I would be as unsurprised if Ukraine found it had expended the last man of fighting age and Russia advanced through the whole country as I would if it turned out Russia had finally exhausted its reserves of everything and collapsed as a functioning state. Wherabouts on that continuum are we?
As I keep repeating, JD Vance 2014 was not a bad guy.
JD Vance on Justice Scalia in 2014. "He's become a very shrill old man. I used to really like him, and I used to believe all of his stuff about judicial minimalism was sincere. Now I see it as a political charade." https://x.com/JoshMBlackman/status/1817581641214398877
Trumpism has driven significant chunk of the Republican party completely insane.
Trump is as much symptom as cause: they were going this way anyway.
I think he started out as a symptom and has now graduated to being a cause. Are there examples of this in the domain of nasty diseases? If there are he's like that.
He cerainly seems to have graduated from chancre to full blown tertiary syphilis. Can Penicillin Kamala save the USA (and the rest of us)?
God I hope so. This is *such* a big election, isn't it. I can't recall any as important. It's just so stark and binary. We're either getting the first female president, a sane and competent woman, or we're getting Donald Trump back. I feel tense about it now, 3 months out, so christ knows how I'll be when it's upon us. It'd be good if she could pull out a nice stable lead in the polls. That might take the edge off slightly.
It’s has long been a semi-joking belief of mine that Trump carries a virus that turns intelligent people into dribbling morons.
Look at Giuliani….
Make sure you separate your hope casting for Harris from your betting. It’s still slightly in Trumps favour - 55% chance of him winning on the polls combined with the voting distribution, I think.
I'm not that prone to hopecasting. The bias I have to guard against in my betting is the other way. I have a tendency, for emotional hedge reasons, to overstate the chances of something I dread happening. In this case Trump2.
But as it happens I make him 2nd fav now. Say around 40%. Before Joe bowed out I had him more like 80%. That announcement had me punching the sofa almost as many times as when Jude did his last gasp overhead kick.
That’s hope casting. The classic.
Before Trump was approach 60% probability of a win. Still a tight race.
If the poll movements mean anything, Harris has pulled that back - slightly. But to get to 60% would mean that she was clearly ahead in EVs.
Nope. It's me assessing the event as best as I can using a mix of analysis and big picture intuition. That it differs in Harris's favour from the current odds doesn't make it hopecasting. Note that before Biden pulled out I had Trump's chances as better than the betting consensus.
You seem to be just going by whatever the odds and polls are saying at any given time. That's not the best approach imo. You need to try and anticipate where things are going. My view is they will move towards Harris and away from Trump. Disagree by all means but don't give me that 'hopecasting' nonsense. As I say, I'm not prone to that.
Grrrr.
There’s no sign of Harris pulling it back in a massive shift.
Rishi is certainly doing everything he can to get Tom Tug to win the members' vote, if we see Ted Heath voted we will know something is up...
This is silly. Tom Tugendhat isn't Ted Heath.
There seems to still be some weird cultural dynamic at play amongst aspects of the Conservative membership to divine the least strident leadership candidate as a secret Wet, regardless of who it is and what they say. And that seems to go back nearly 45 years.
Tom Tug isn't a wet.
He was a Remainer though, along with Jenrick and Stride
Look, it's not my party at the moment, but if the Conservatives continue to be concerned with Which Side Were You On in a campaign that will soon be over a decade ago, they deserve every bit of irrelevance that's coming to them.
Moreover, it shouldn't be madly surprising to us that an MP supported the side championed by the leader of that party. Remain was sort of the default option. It shouldn't render that person forever beyond the pale.
As I keep repeating, JD Vance 2014 was not a bad guy.
JD Vance on Justice Scalia in 2014. "He's become a very shrill old man. I used to really like him, and I used to believe all of his stuff about judicial minimalism was sincere. Now I see it as a political charade." https://x.com/JoshMBlackman/status/1817581641214398877
Trumpism has driven significant chunk of the Republican party completely insane.
Trump is as much symptom as cause: they were going this way anyway.
I think he started out as a symptom and has now graduated to being a cause. Are there examples of this in the domain of nasty diseases? If there are he's like that.
He cerainly seems to have graduated from chancre to full blown tertiary syphilis. Can Penicillin Kamala save the USA (and the rest of us)?
God I hope so. This is *such* a big election, isn't it. I can't recall any as important. It's just so stark and binary. We're either getting the first female president, a sane and competent woman, or we're getting Donald Trump back. I feel tense about it now, 3 months out, so christ knows how I'll be when it's upon us. It'd be good if she could pull out a nice stable lead in the polls. That might take the edge off slightly.
It’s has long been a semi-joking belief of mine that Trump carries a virus that turns intelligent people into dribbling morons.
Look at Giuliani….
Make sure you separate your hope casting for Harris from your betting. It’s still slightly in Trumps favour - 55% chance of him winning on the polls combined with the voting distribution, I think.
I'm not that prone to hopecasting. The bias I have to guard against in my betting is the other way. I have a tendency, for emotional hedge reasons, to overstate the chances of something I dread happening. In this case Trump2.
But as it happens I make him 2nd fav now. Say around 40%. Before Joe bowed out I had him more like 80%. That announcement had me punching the sofa almost as many times as when Jude did his last gasp overhead kick.
That’s hope casting. The classic.
Before Trump was approach 60% probability of a win. Still a tight race.
If the poll movements mean anything, Harris has pulled that back - slightly. But to get to 60% would mean that she was clearly ahead in EVs.
Nope. It's me assessing the event as best as I can using a mix of analysis and big picture intuition. That it differs in Harris's favour from the current odds doesn't make it hopecasting. Note that before Biden pulled out I had Trump's chances as better than the betting consensus.
You seem to be just going by whatever the odds and polls are saying at any given time. That's not the best approach imo. You need to try and anticipate where things are going. My view is they will move towards Harris and away from Trump. Disagree by all means but don't give me that 'hopecasting' nonsense. As I say, I'm not prone to that.
Grrrr.
I don't think voters will really start applying themselves until after the Dem convention and Kamala's veep choice. Once all the pieces are in play we'll get a much better idea of voter sentiment.
This isn't Clinton vs Dole, or Reagan vs Mondale, or Obama vs Romney, when it was pretty obvious months out who was going to win.
Six candidates have made it onto the ballot to succeed Rishi Sunak as Tory leader
They are: Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel, Mel Stride and Tom Tugendhat
As an appetiser, before the UK leader vote, we have the Scots Tory leadership contest.
Runners and riders at the moment are Russell Findlay (former investigative journalist who was, famously, victim of a doorstep acid attack), and Brian Whittle (former Olympic athlete). Findlay the strong favourite.
Good news: Russian artillery losses reaching a new high. 74 reported for the day, 1,477 for the month of July so far.
Bad news: A British government reaching for cuts to infrastructure spending, again, as a temporary expedient to balance the books, and because they're incapable of making the case to the public of the necessity to invest for the future, at the cost of tax rises or cuts to current spending, in the present. Cowards.
Meanwhile in Ireland, the word is that the government will give voters another cash bung in the form of a credit on their electricity bills. How everyone will wish this money was more wisely spent when the corporation tax bonanza dries up.
Excellent news on Ukraine.
Not so excellent on infrastructure. I am willing to believe the previous government announced things they did not budget for but it seems as if current spending continues to trump everything. Huge mistake.
I really have absolutely no handle on how the war in Ukraine is going at the moment. For a long time it felt like Ukraine was winning - or, at least, not losing. And then it felt like Russia was winning. But I've genuinely no idea now. I would be as unsurprised if Ukraine found it had expended the last man of fighting age and Russia advanced through the whole country as I would if it turned out Russia had finally exhausted its reserves of everything and collapsed as a functioning state. Wherabouts on that continuum are we?
Nobody is going anywhere. The front lines haven't moved significantly for nearly two years.
Six candidates have made it onto the ballot to succeed Rishi Sunak as Tory leader
They are: Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel, Mel Stride and Tom Tugendhat
So all 6 go through, Braverman had already pulled out having lacked the numbers
Must be strong likelihood that Suella will decamp. Will make Reform parliamentary group meetings interesting. Not a place for shrinking violets. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Nige handed over to Suella at some point. (You read this here first.)
UK productivity no longer matches the US Annualised growth in GDP per hour worked
Depressing that government has neglected the importance of manufacturing for at least the last decade.
It could have been very different.
Decade ?
Are you serious.
I have worked in manufacturing since 1982 and it has been neglected all of the time I have been working and, at least Osborne did recognise this with his Northern Powerhouse push and march of the makers which fell when he did.
It has tumbled as a percentage of GDP over that time even if output still rose.
>at least< the last decade. I'm quite happy to go back and excoriate the mistakes of the Thatcher government, and its successors (as I do from time to time), but most of today's voters (or cabinet ministers) weren't around at the time to make any kind of difference.
They need to win back the headbangers now happily installed in the home of headbangers; they need to win over those who fled to the sensible shores of Labour and Lib Dems; they need to stop their residual voters dying.
Should be easy.
One Nationers should take over the Lib Dems.
Question to our Lib Dem members, how many in the voluntary party support the Orange Book policies now?
Possibly the 2015 election was disastrous in that it destroyed Orange Book Liberalism and left a party barely distinguishable from SKS Labour.
Clegg's problem in 2015 was Cameron was already offering Orange Book Liberalism in all but name anyway, while the social democrats who had voted for his party before defected to Ed Miliband's Labour Party
Tuition fees. And not to so much what was done as the way it was done.
Orange Book LDs back tuition fees and ideally based on the graduate premium from and cost of the degree. Social Democrat LDs however largely want university education to be free
That's me told then; I've always been against tuition fees. Although I was a Liberal before I was a LibDem.
Tuition fees are arguably the greatest unforced error in the history of the universe.
Not a small claim when you consider that includes Operation Barabarossa, Alexander's trek through Gedrosia and the Emperor inviting the Rebellion to attack the second Death Star.
Not only did they nearly destroy the Lib Dems, they are actually a disaster in terms of funding HE.
They aren't, their problem is they are one size fits all not set at market rate.
If they were then economics at Cambridge or law at Oxford or medicine at Imperial for example would have the highest fees and arts degrees would be cheapest
You clearly don't have a clue how markets work (but then again nor did anyone else who implemented the scheme).
Because no university is going to charge less than the full rate because
1) it implies their course is less good than other courses 2) it leaves money they could otherwise get 3) the money is borrowed so it's never going to be fully repaid in many cases anyway...
See also: private school fees.
It's not just Stella Artois where expensive=reassurance.
The parallels between universities and private schools and universities are interesting. Note that Labour politicians seem less keen on taxing the bastions of privilege personified by the privately run, enormously wealthy, Oxbridge colleges that are massively more snobby than the snobbiest of private schools. The reason? Because so many of them went there themselves, including Starmer (albeit as a postgrad). Oxbridge has been very effective at being left alone by many Labour governments. If Rachel Reeves is serious about raising a bit of revenue and sharing out the privilege , then how about starting to ask why it is necessary for colleges to own huge land and business interests and maybe sharing it out amongst the cash strapped "lesser" universities (as the uber-snob HYUFD might describe them). No? Labour always looks after their own.
You appear to equate all universities with Oxbridge, which is very, very silly. There are 164 universities in the UK. Approximately 1% of students going to university go to Oxbridge.
Also, having been to Oxbridge, the snobbiest private schools are snobbier than Cambridge and some Oxford colleges, although, sure, some Oxford colleges can out-snob the snobbiest,
Trinity and Magdalene colleges in Cambridge and Balliol and Christ Church and Magdalene colleges in Oxford are snobbier than your average private school, not least as plenty of their undergraduates still come from Eton, Westminster, Winchester and Harrow
Magdalen Oxford.
When you spout this sort of undiluted bilge to people with first hand knowledge of the matter it puts more than a little doubt over your equally authoritative pronouncements about US politics. And everything else
Well if you want to quibble, Trinity College Oxford has the highest percentage of ex private school students at 52% followed by Christ Church, Queen's, Magdalen, Christ Church and Keble at 50%.
Robinson College Cambridge has the highest percentage of private school pupils at 50%, tied with St John's, followed by Gonville and Caius at 46% and Trinity at 44%.
They need to win back the headbangers now happily installed in the home of headbangers; they need to win over those who fled to the sensible shores of Labour and Lib Dems; they need to stop their residual voters dying.
Should be easy.
One Nationers should take over the Lib Dems.
Question to our Lib Dem members, how many in the voluntary party support the Orange Book policies now?
Possibly the 2015 election was disastrous in that it destroyed Orange Book Liberalism and left a party barely distinguishable from SKS Labour.
Clegg's problem in 2015 was Cameron was already offering Orange Book Liberalism in all but name anyway, while the social democrats who had voted for his party before defected to Ed Miliband's Labour Party
Tuition fees. And not to so much what was done as the way it was done.
Orange Book LDs back tuition fees and ideally based on the graduate premium from and cost of the degree. Social Democrat LDs however largely want university education to be free
That's me told then; I've always been against tuition fees. Although I was a Liberal before I was a LibDem.
Tuition fees are arguably the greatest unforced error in the history of the universe.
Not a small claim when you consider that includes Operation Barabarossa, Alexander's trek through Gedrosia and the Emperor inviting the Rebellion to attack the second Death Star.
Not only did they nearly destroy the Lib Dems, they are actually a disaster in terms of funding HE.
They aren't, their problem is they are one size fits all not set at market rate.
If they were then economics at Cambridge or law at Oxford or medicine at Imperial for example would have the highest fees and arts degrees would be cheapest
You clearly don't have a clue how markets work (but then again nor did anyone else who implemented the scheme).
Because no university is going to charge less than the full rate because
1) it implies their course is less good than other courses 2) it leaves money they could otherwise get 3) the money is borrowed so it's never going to be fully repaid in many cases anyway...
See also: private school fees.
It's not just Stella Artois where expensive=reassurance.
The parallels between universities and private schools and universities are interesting. Note that Labour politicians seem less keen on taxing the bastions of privilege personified by the privately run, enormously wealthy, Oxbridge colleges that are massively more snobby than the snobbiest of private schools. The reason? Because so many of them went there themselves, including Starmer (albeit as a postgrad). Oxbridge has been very effective at being left alone by many Labour governments. If Rachel Reeves is serious about raising a bit of revenue and sharing out the privilege , then how about starting to ask why it is necessary for colleges to own huge land and business interests and maybe sharing it out amongst the cash strapped "lesser" universities (as the uber-snob HYUFD might describe them). No? Labour always looks after their own.
You appear to equate all universities with Oxbridge, which is very, very silly. There are 164 universities in the UK. Approximately 1% of students going to university go to Oxbridge.
Also, having been to Oxbridge, the snobbiest private schools are snobbier than Cambridge and some Oxford colleges, although, sure, some Oxford colleges can out-snob the snobbiest,
Trinity and Magdalene colleges in Cambridge and Balliol and Christ Church and Magdalene colleges in Oxford are snobbier than your average private school, not least as plenty of their undergraduates still come from Eton, Westminster, Winchester and Harrow
Magdalen Oxford.
When you spout this sort of undiluted bilge to people with first hand knowledge of the matter it puts more than a little doubt over your equally authoritative pronouncements about US politics. And everything else
Well if you want to quibble, Trinity College Oxford has the highest percentage of ex private school students at 52% followed by Christ Church, Queen's, Magdalen, Christ Church and Keble at 50%.
Robinson College Cambridge has the highest percentage of private school pupils at 50%, tied with St John's, followed by Gonville and Caius at 46% and Trinity at 44%.
Good news: Russian artillery losses reaching a new high. 74 reported for the day, 1,477 for the month of July so far.
Bad news: A British government reaching for cuts to infrastructure spending, again, as a temporary expedient to balance the books, and because they're incapable of making the case to the public of the necessity to invest for the future, at the cost of tax rises or cuts to current spending, in the present. Cowards.
Meanwhile in Ireland, the word is that the government will give voters another cash bung in the form of a credit on their electricity bills. How everyone will wish this money was more wisely spent when the corporation tax bonanza dries up.
Excellent news on Ukraine.
Not so excellent on infrastructure. I am willing to believe the previous government announced things they did not budget for but it seems as if current spending continues to trump everything. Huge mistake.
I really have absolutely no handle on how the war in Ukraine is going at the moment. For a long time it felt like Ukraine was winning - or, at least, not losing. And then it felt like Russia was winning. But I've genuinely no idea now. I would be as unsurprised if Ukraine found it had expended the last man of fighting age and Russia advanced through the whole country as I would if it turned out Russia had finally exhausted its reserves of everything and collapsed as a functioning state. Wherabouts on that continuum are we?
Nobody is going anywhere. The front lines haven't moved significantly for nearly two years.
Theresa May could have a promising career as a reporter on the Ukraine-Russia war.
Rishi is certainly doing everything he can to get Tom Tug to win the members' vote, if we see Ted Heath voted we will know something is up...
This is silly. Tom Tugendhat isn't Ted Heath.
There seems to still be some weird cultural dynamic at play amongst aspects of the Conservative membership to divine the least strident leadership candidate as a secret Wet, regardless of who it is and what they say. And that seems to go back nearly 45 years.
Rishi is certainly doing everything he can to get Tom Tug to win the members' vote, if we see Ted Heath voted we will know something is up...
This is silly. Tom Tugendhat isn't Ted Heath.
There seems to still be some weird cultural dynamic at play amongst aspects of the Conservative membership to divine the least strident leadership candidate as a secret Wet, regardless of who it is and what they say. And that seems to go back nearly 45 years.
Tom Tug isn't a wet.
He was a Remainer though, along with Jenrick and Stride
Look, it's not my party at the moment, but if the Conservatives continue to be concerned with Which Side Were You On in a campaign that will soon be over a decade ago, they deserve every bit of irrelevance that's coming to them.
Moreover, it shouldn't be madly surprising to us that an MP supported the side championed by the leader of that party. Remain was sort of the default option. It shouldn't render that person forever beyond the pale.
Indeed. The recent general election also suggests that being a realistic ex-remainer is not a huge political liability in the eyes of the general public!
I confess to severe disappointment that Labour are seemingly going to 'pause' infrastructure projects like the A303 Stonehenge and A27 Arundel bypasses; I can't see how that's going to help the economy grow.
Would much rather see higher taxes on the wealthy (myself included).
Still, a focus on balancing the books is to be applauded, and not quite in line with the "IMF bail-out by 2027" line being punted by Labour critics on here.
Well, this is the point, isn't it? Most governments in this country at least don't seem to grasp the fundamental difference between paying money on things that will then make money later and paying money to keep things going.
So, for example, HS2 to Euston, Leeds and Manchester will pay for itself six times over. HS2 from Old Oak Common to Crewe will make a loss. But the latter is a headline spending cut so is GOOD!
A new road around Newport would create a huge amount of wealth in South Wales by unclogging that key artery from Newport to Cardiff and allowing people and goods to be transported quickly and reliably. Lots of lovely tax revenue. But - it needs money so BAAD!
I'm not sure whether to blame Thatcher/Major with their tight monetary policies and suspicion of government intervention, or Brown with his stupid decision to call all his spending 'investment' even though most of his non-PFI stuff was current account spending.
The Brynglas Tunnels were a major bottleneck from the day the new Severn Bridge opened in the ‘90s, and their replacement or bypass really should have been thought about at the same time.
The A303 past Stonehenge has been a massive bottleneck for even longer, especially in the summer evenings. I remember being in the queue for what felt like hours as a kid in the ‘80s. Someone needs to decide to either start digging the tunnel or dual the existing road, then JFDI.
So much of the national infrastructure can be improved by eliminating a small number of these transport pinch points.
I used to work at the Bell Inn in Winterbourne Stoke (last pub on the A303 before the motorway going East, and the last going West for a fair while. Some of you may have used it. This was in 1992. My boss, who leased it, bailed in about 1994 because he was convinced that the bypass was going through imminently. Indeed the route (to the East of the village was set out and ready). In 1992.
My Dad is 85. He has been waiting for two epochal events in his life since the 1990's - the duelling of the A303 and Bath to actually build the new stadium that's been talked of since the 1990's. I used to think he would see both in his lifetime, but I am no longer sure of either.
Is there a lot of fencing when you're duelling a main road?
“Nicolás Maduro, my brother, your victory – which is the victory of the Bolivarian and chavista people – has cleanly and unequivocally vanquished the pro-imperialist opposition,” said Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel.
“And it has also defeated the meddling, Monroeist regional right. The people spoke and the revolution won.”
----
The "Monroeist regional right"? I'd vote for them in a heartbeat!
Good news: Russian artillery losses reaching a new high. 74 reported for the day, 1,477 for the month of July so far.
Bad news: A British government reaching for cuts to infrastructure spending, again, as a temporary expedient to balance the books, and because they're incapable of making the case to the public of the necessity to invest for the future, at the cost of tax rises or cuts to current spending, in the present. Cowards.
Meanwhile in Ireland, the word is that the government will give voters another cash bung in the form of a credit on their electricity bills. How everyone will wish this money was more wisely spent when the corporation tax bonanza dries up.
Excellent news on Ukraine.
Not so excellent on infrastructure. I am willing to believe the previous government announced things they did not budget for but it seems as if current spending continues to trump everything. Huge mistake.
I really have absolutely no handle on how the war in Ukraine is going at the moment. For a long time it felt like Ukraine was winning - or, at least, not losing. And then it felt like Russia was winning. But I've genuinely no idea now. I would be as unsurprised if Ukraine found it had expended the last man of fighting age and Russia advanced through the whole country as I would if it turned out Russia had finally exhausted its reserves of everything and collapsed as a functioning state. Wherabouts on that continuum are we?
Nobody is going anywhere. The front lines haven't moved significantly for nearly two years.
Well geographically, yes. But without claiming to be an expert, I understand that that's often the case in land wars. And then suddenly one side runs out of resources and collapses. But I really can't tell which side that's going to be. Or will we be stuck in this situation indefinitely?
As I keep repeating, JD Vance 2014 was not a bad guy.
JD Vance on Justice Scalia in 2014. "He's become a very shrill old man. I used to really like him, and I used to believe all of his stuff about judicial minimalism was sincere. Now I see it as a political charade." https://x.com/JoshMBlackman/status/1817581641214398877
Trumpism has driven significant chunk of the Republican party completely insane.
Trump is as much symptom as cause: they were going this way anyway.
I think he started out as a symptom and has now graduated to being a cause. Are there examples of this in the domain of nasty diseases? If there are he's like that.
He cerainly seems to have graduated from chancre to full blown tertiary syphilis. Can Penicillin Kamala save the USA (and the rest of us)?
God I hope so. This is *such* a big election, isn't it. I can't recall any as important. It's just so stark and binary. We're either getting the first female president, a sane and competent woman, or we're getting Donald Trump back. I feel tense about it now, 3 months out, so christ knows how I'll be when it's upon us. It'd be good if she could pull out a nice stable lead in the polls. That might take the edge off slightly.
It’s has long been a semi-joking belief of mine that Trump carries a virus that turns intelligent people into dribbling morons.
Look at Giuliani….
Make sure you separate your hope casting for Harris from your betting. It’s still slightly in Trumps favour - 55% chance of him winning on the polls combined with the voting distribution, I think.
I'm not that prone to hopecasting. The bias I have to guard against in my betting is the other way. I have a tendency, for emotional hedge reasons, to overstate the chances of something I dread happening. In this case Trump2.
But as it happens I make him 2nd fav now. Say around 40%. Before Joe bowed out I had him more like 80%. That announcement had me punching the sofa almost as many times as when Jude did his last gasp overhead kick.
That’s hope casting. The classic.
Before Trump was approach 60% probability of a win. Still a tight race.
If the poll movements mean anything, Harris has pulled that back - slightly. But to get to 60% would mean that she was clearly ahead in EVs.
Nope. It's me assessing the event as best as I can using a mix of analysis and big picture intuition. That it differs in Harris's favour from the current odds doesn't make it hopecasting. Note that before Biden pulled out I had Trump's chances as better than the betting consensus.
You seem to be just going by whatever the odds and polls are saying at any given time. That's not the best approach imo. You need to try and anticipate where things are going. My view is they will move towards Harris and away from Trump. Disagree by all means but don't give me that 'hopecasting' nonsense. As I say, I'm not prone to that.
Grrrr.
I don't think voters will really start applying themselves until after the Dem convention and Kamala's veep choice. Once all the pieces are in play we'll get a much better idea of voter sentiment.
This isn't Clinton vs Dole, or Reagan vs Mondale, or Obama vs Romney, when it was pretty obvious months out who was going to win.
It wasn't as obvious in Obama v Romney as Obama v McCain or the other 2 you mention or indeed Bush v Dukakis. Indeed Romney led a number of polls v Obama and won the first debate between the 2.
They need to win back the headbangers now happily installed in the home of headbangers; they need to win over those who fled to the sensible shores of Labour and Lib Dems; they need to stop their residual voters dying.
Should be easy.
One Nationers should take over the Lib Dems.
Question to our Lib Dem members, how many in the voluntary party support the Orange Book policies now?
Possibly the 2015 election was disastrous in that it destroyed Orange Book Liberalism and left a party barely distinguishable from SKS Labour.
Clegg's problem in 2015 was Cameron was already offering Orange Book Liberalism in all but name anyway, while the social democrats who had voted for his party before defected to Ed Miliband's Labour Party
Tuition fees. And not to so much what was done as the way it was done.
Orange Book LDs back tuition fees and ideally based on the graduate premium from and cost of the degree. Social Democrat LDs however largely want university education to be free
That's me told then; I've always been against tuition fees. Although I was a Liberal before I was a LibDem.
Tuition fees are arguably the greatest unforced error in the history of the universe.
Not a small claim when you consider that includes Operation Barabarossa, Alexander's trek through Gedrosia and the Emperor inviting the Rebellion to attack the second Death Star.
Not only did they nearly destroy the Lib Dems, they are actually a disaster in terms of funding HE.
They aren't, their problem is they are one size fits all not set at market rate.
If they were then economics at Cambridge or law at Oxford or medicine at Imperial for example would have the highest fees and arts degrees would be cheapest
You clearly don't have a clue how markets work (but then again nor did anyone else who implemented the scheme).
Because no university is going to charge less than the full rate because
1) it implies their course is less good than other courses 2) it leaves money they could otherwise get 3) the money is borrowed so it's never going to be fully repaid in many cases anyway...
They would cut fees soon enough if it was that or not fill the places.
Rationing student loans for fees by performance with only people with 3 A's able to borrow the full amount and proportionate amount for lower grades down to £3,000 for 2 E's would concentrate their minds.
And force the lower grade ones to shut or return to focusing on vocational qualifications.
So you force the closure of the university which a pride and joy of the local area.
1) how do you deal with the economic fallout of doing so 2) how do you handle the local MPs who know they've just lost any chance of re-election...
Yes. About 40% of the capacity is a job creation scheme for acadamics administrators and sundry hangers on, teaching weak subjects that are pointless to do a degree in and vocational subjects like Nursing and Policing that should never have required a degree in the first place.
Shut them.
1) Same way as Liverpool in the 80s. Through transition grants etc. The better ones can be supported to revert to being Politechnics and Technical Colleges concentrating principally on vocational non degree courses and day release courses for apprentices.
2) Tell them tough.
The whole sector will implode once some entrepreneur gets their act together for online courses at a fraction of current fees in any case.
£9,250 a year for six hours of lecturers (which is about it for many arts/humanities subjects and use of a library is outrageous.
Use the money saved to increase the number of engineering, science and Medical Doctor Places and reduce the fees.
John Major has a lot to answer for by destroying the Polytechnics and turning them into Poundshop Univesities.
Well the doctors did their bit to get rid of the Tories, so I guess that's their payment for services rendered?
Great, massive payrise for public sector workers with protected pensions... I'm sure the NHS is fixed now we've spent a shedton more money on wages.
We have significant shortages in, for example, teaching and healthcare. Basic market principles dictate that salaries should go up.
How much of the shortage in healthcare is due to limits on training, and how much is due to limits on salary?
When the BMA voted to stop “overproduction of doctors with limited career opportunities” surely that can't have helped?
Teaching might be different.
The BMA is, more or less, a trade union. I don't blame them for fighting for doctors' interests. The government decides on training numbers, not the BMA. If past governments didn't do enough to increase training numbers, blame them. This government has to live with the decisions made by past governments. I'm all for an increase in training numbers.
I don't know how much limits on training have impacted on current staff shortages. We've always (well, >50 years) relied on importing healthcare staff from the rest of the world. Indeed, that's the approach of most of the West. We still do that. That provides a supply of recruits. I think the problem now is more low pay and poor conditions.
As I keep repeating, JD Vance 2014 was not a bad guy.
JD Vance on Justice Scalia in 2014. "He's become a very shrill old man. I used to really like him, and I used to believe all of his stuff about judicial minimalism was sincere. Now I see it as a political charade." https://x.com/JoshMBlackman/status/1817581641214398877
Trumpism has driven significant chunk of the Republican party completely insane.
Trump is as much symptom as cause: they were going this way anyway.
I think he started out as a symptom and has now graduated to being a cause. Are there examples of this in the domain of nasty diseases? If there are he's like that.
He cerainly seems to have graduated from chancre to full blown tertiary syphilis. Can Penicillin Kamala save the USA (and the rest of us)?
God I hope so. This is *such* a big election, isn't it. I can't recall any as important. It's just so stark and binary. We're either getting the first female president, a sane and competent woman, or we're getting Donald Trump back. I feel tense about it now, 3 months out, so christ knows how I'll be when it's upon us. It'd be good if she could pull out a nice stable lead in the polls. That might take the edge off slightly.
It’s has long been a semi-joking belief of mine that Trump carries a virus that turns intelligent people into dribbling morons.
Look at Giuliani….
Make sure you separate your hope casting for Harris from your betting. It’s still slightly in Trumps favour - 55% chance of him winning on the polls combined with the voting distribution, I think.
I'm not that prone to hopecasting. The bias I have to guard against in my betting is the other way. I have a tendency, for emotional hedge reasons, to overstate the chances of something I dread happening. In this case Trump2.
But as it happens I make him 2nd fav now. Say around 40%. Before Joe bowed out I had him more like 80%. That announcement had me punching the sofa almost as many times as when Jude did his last gasp overhead kick.
That’s hope casting. The classic.
Before Trump was approach 60% probability of a win. Still a tight race.
If the poll movements mean anything, Harris has pulled that back - slightly. But to get to 60% would mean that she was clearly ahead in EVs.
Nope. It's me assessing the event as best as I can using a mix of analysis and big picture intuition. That it differs in Harris's favour from the current odds doesn't make it hopecasting. Note that before Biden pulled out I had Trump's chances as better than the betting consensus.
You seem to be just going by whatever the odds and polls are saying at any given time. That's not the best approach imo. You need to try and anticipate where things are going. My view is they will move towards Harris and away from Trump. Disagree by all means but don't give me that 'hopecasting' nonsense. As I say, I'm not prone to that.
Grrrr.
I don't think voters will really start applying themselves until after the Dem convention and Kamala's veep choice. Once all the pieces are in play we'll get a much better idea of voter sentiment.
This isn't Clinton vs Dole, or Reagan vs Mondale, or Obama vs Romney, when it was pretty obvious months out who was going to win.
It wasn't as obvious in Obama v Romney as Obama v McCain or the other 2 you mention or indeed Bush v Dukakis. Indeed Romney led a number of polls v Obama and won the first debate between the 2.
My recollection is that despite Obama's opinion lead over McCain there was some doubt at the time whether Americans really would go for a non-white leader whatever they said to pollsters. Particularly when the alternative was a genuine war hero. Once he'd won he was always going to be re-elected.
We could get medals upgraded in the individual eventing, it'd be harsh but Mikael Jung removed his helmet whilst in the arena he was/is in gold after winning the event. It's against FEI rules. They could yellow card him
UK productivity no longer matches the US Annualised growth in GDP per hour worked
Depressing that government has neglected the importance of manufacturing for at least the last decade.
It could have been very different.
Decade ?
Are you serious.
I have worked in manufacturing since 1982 and it has been neglected all of the time I have been working and, at least Osborne did recognise this with his Northern Powerhouse push and march of the makers which fell when he did.
It has tumbled as a percentage of GDP over that time even if output still rose.
I'm in this game as well - want manufacturers broadly want (I think, let me know if you disagree) is
✅ Broad alignment with the EU ✅ BoE to be slightly more dovish than the Fed and ECB (Not happening I think) ✅ Simpler tax book. ✅ No budget wizard wheezes.
I do not disagree at all. Regulatory alignment with the EU, certainly, especially in industries that are heavily regulated anyway, such as Pharmaceuticals and The automotive industry. It makes absolutely no sense to have duplicate standards that is just an extra cost burden. For example having RHD cars for the UK versus LHD cars for the UK makes for an additional cost burden. You duplicate tooling, part numbers, validation and other fixed costs. The cost of red tape is often spoken of as being a problem with the EU but if we still want to sell into these markets regulatory alignment with them makes perfect sense and that is part of ease of access to overseas markets. The Brexit deal has only had a minor impact on us so far however other overseas markets do not seem really to have opened up apart from part of the middle East. But the mood music from the last lot was not outward looking. We need to encourage exporting and also inward investment.
Training and proper apprenticeships. Offer discounts on Engineering degrees. As Engineering has been less valued in this country fewer people have wanted to enter it and it is an ageing demographic. We need to inspire the next generation and for them to see it as interesting. One good thing that happens now is our business, along with others, takes graduates for 12 month placements. Works really well. Gives them real work experience, but also gets them embedded in manufacturing.
Focussing on high value, high skills manufacturing.
No budget shocks for certain and a far simpler tax book would be great and, as for the BOE, no shocks there either. A currency that is stable rather than up and down. It worries me when I see talk of Trump/Vance looking to use the USD as a weapon and devalue it to make their exports cheaper.
I would also add a favourable planning regime and favourable, pro business, local govt. Too often I have heard local govt being hostile towards potential new businesses who will be the driver of jobs and wealth in the area.
The last paragraph - chap I knew tried pitching a factory in what used to be the Red Wall. Got told to go away, pretty much. So it went to the Far East.
This is also part of the issue with huge pressure to build houses on brownfield land. Every time an industrial site closes, it ends up as houses. Try getting a new site for heavy industrial through planning...!
The net result is that people who might start industrial businesss don't, and people who might expand industrial businesses* don't, and the economy suffers accordingly. But don't worry, because we can all work as diversity officers from our spare bedrooms or something. Who needs to actually *make* stuff in this day and age.
*I'm in exactly this position. I'm employing 5 people, and my industrial business is rapidly running out of room. I can't really take on more staff without more space, so I'd like to find a bigger site. I've been keeping half an eye on the commercial properties available in the area for the last year or so - nothing even halfway suitable has come up, never mind at a price I could afford. Why? Because every scrap of vacant brownfield round here instantly becomes houses.
Makes a pretty comprehensive nonsense of those claims that Harris becoming the nominee was an outcome foisted on an unwilling Democratic base. by party elites.
University academics have seen a similar fall in relative pay to medics. We've been offered 2.5%...
If this is the offer the doctors will be expected to deliver on sorting backlogs etc (whether those are their fault or not).
We just recruited a post doc. I idly ran the BoE inflation calculator and found the starting salary was down about £3k (~8%) in real terms* on mine on the same grading structure as when I started at the same point about ten years ago.
The much derided increments enable the university sector (and other sectors where annual increments apply) to hide a lot of real terms pay cuts as many individuals in many years get real terms increases even as the scale itself drops in real terms.
*rather more than -8% compared to things like mortgage affordability for a similar house, presumably
I ran similar calcs a few months ago. PhD stipends are massively below where they were 20 year ago when i did mine in real terms. If i remember correctly what i got should now be £27k a year and my post-doc should be £50k+.
When i talk to academics now they say most of their PhDs do second jobs to make the money required to live. When i did mine, i wasn't rolling in it, but i never thought about money. It was less than a real job, but not by much and student discounts, etc etc etc, meant only a real top job out of uni bettered it.
Ditto.
We've had a period of high inflation and the previous government put off a lot of difficult decisions and held numbers the same, be those undergraduate tuition fees or PhD stipends. This is not viable long term. I work (sometimes) in health AI. Good postdocs are hard to come by: they can go to industry and make much more.
Not that a big pay rise for medical doctors are going to make us happy. We pay academics who are medical doctors much more than the computer scientists, when the latter are more in demand!
Good news: Russian artillery losses reaching a new high. 74 reported for the day, 1,477 for the month of July so far.
Bad news: A British government reaching for cuts to infrastructure spending, again, as a temporary expedient to balance the books, and because they're incapable of making the case to the public of the necessity to invest for the future, at the cost of tax rises or cuts to current spending, in the present. Cowards.
Meanwhile in Ireland, the word is that the government will give voters another cash bung in the form of a credit on their electricity bills. How everyone will wish this money was more wisely spent when the corporation tax bonanza dries up.
Excellent news on Ukraine.
Not so excellent on infrastructure. I am willing to believe the previous government announced things they did not budget for but it seems as if current spending continues to trump everything. Huge mistake.
I really have absolutely no handle on how the war in Ukraine is going at the moment. For a long time it felt like Ukraine was winning - or, at least, not losing. And then it felt like Russia was winning. But I've genuinely no idea now. I would be as unsurprised if Ukraine found it had expended the last man of fighting age and Russia advanced through the whole country as I would if it turned out Russia had finally exhausted its reserves of everything and collapsed as a functioning state. Wherabouts on that continuum are we?
Nobody is going anywhere. The front lines haven't moved significantly for nearly two years.
Well geographically, yes. But without claiming to be an expert, I understand that that's often the case in land wars. And then suddenly one side runs out of resources and collapses. But I really can't tell which side that's going to be. Or will we be stuck in this situation indefinitely?
Who the fuck knows? Neither side looks remotely like running out of resources as long as the EU/US keep shovelling money in and India/China continue to support Russia. I read in the NYT that Russia is now operating 6,000 shell companies in Hong Kong to obtain electronics, etc. that are sanctioned through China. So the idea that either side is going to run out of pile ointment and AA batteries then give up is fanciful.
It's more likely that the political regime in either country will collapse and bring matters to a head. VVP could have a massive gripper and drop down dead. Green T-Shirt is also on a sticky wicket because his Servant of the People party has split into highly antagonistic factions. He can only get legislation through parliament by relying on the votes of the ex-members of the now banned pro-Russia parties by dangling threats of treason prosecutions.
I've been to both Russia and Ukraine since the start of the SMO and neither particularly feels like a country at war. The control of the media is very effective in Ukraine so public expressions of war fatigue are almost unknown apart from conscription staff getting beat up. There is a much wider range of opinion in Russian media but it's almost all pro-SMO with the main dissension being that it is being prosecuted with insufficient aggression and competence.
In conclusion, at the moment, both countries want to and are able to keep fighting for zero gain.
Comments
Seriously, hope that you are able to return to your regular party allegiance.
Or rather that Conservative Party returns to you.
But I'd still go for that time he tried telling @Richard_Tyndall what the qualifications required for a career in engineering were.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/3415662/#Comment_3415662
"Tuition at Purdue, prior to Daniels' arrival, had increased every year since 1976.[184] Two months after Daniels assumed his role as president, Purdue announced it would freeze tuition for two years, eventually extending the freeze for ten years, through 2023. As a result, multiple graduating classes will leave Purdue having never experienced a tuition increase. Annual student borrowing is down a third and the Purdue loan default rate is 2.2% versus 7.1% for the average borrower from a four-year public university and 5.1% for Purdue borrowers prior to the tuition freeze. The university claims that students and families will have saved over a billion dollars over the course of the ten years.[185] No student fees[186][187] have been approved since the tuition freeze was enacted, although a mandatory student wellness fee that students lobbied for prior to Daniels' arrival at Purdue was allowed to take effect[188] but was later reduced under Daniels' direction.[189] The total cost of attending Purdue has fallen since Daniels assumed Purdue's presidency. However, revenue per student increased modestly despite the freeze, partially because the number of foreign and out-of-state students increased, most significantly among graduate students."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Daniels#President_of_Purdue_University
It is possible, thanks to his reforms, for a student to work their way through Purdue, without borrowing. Daniels understands that Purdue -- and similar universities -- should not try to emulate Harvard.
✅ Broad alignment with the EU
✅ BoE to be slightly more dovish than the Fed and ECB (Not happening I think)
✅ Simpler tax book.
✅ No budget wizard wheezes.
When i talk to academics now they say most of their PhDs do second jobs to make the money required to live. When i did mine, i wasn't rolling in it, but i never thought about money. It was less than a real job, but not by much and student discounts, etc etc etc, meant only a real top job out of uni bettered it.
But if it's a nice big productive farm why as a college would you want to? If your investing horizon is for ever you have to be careful you aren't still all in on railway shares when the clever money has rotated into horseless carriages. Land is land.
Under Labour: Streeting resolves it (hopefully) in less than three weeks.
But as it happens I make him 2nd fav now. Say around 40%. Before Joe bowed out I had him more like 80%. That announcement had me punching the sofa almost as many times as when Jude did his last gasp overhead kick.
I hope all the people who voted Labour thinking they'd be "oh so different" to Rishi and the Conservatives have taken note.
Training and proper apprenticeships. Offer discounts on Engineering degrees. As Engineering has been less valued in this country fewer people have wanted to enter it and it is an ageing demographic. We need to inspire the next generation and for them to see it as interesting. One good thing that happens now is our business, along with others, takes graduates for 12 month placements. Works really well. Gives them real work experience, but also gets them embedded in manufacturing.
Focussing on high value, high skills manufacturing.
No budget shocks for certain and a far simpler tax book would be great and, as for the BOE, no shocks there either. A currency that is stable rather than up and down. It worries me when I see talk of Trump/Vance looking to use the USD as a weapon and devalue it to make their exports cheaper.
There seems to still be some weird cultural dynamic at play amongst aspects of the Conservative membership to divine the least strident leadership candidate as a secret Wet, regardless of who it is and what they say. And that seems to go back nearly 45 years.
Tom Tug isn't a wet.
Before Trump was approach 60% probability of a win. Still a tight race.
If the poll movements mean anything, Harris has pulled that back - slightly. But to get to 60% would mean that she was clearly ahead in EVs.
I know you can get covenants removed but it isn't always a good look if you are a charity hoping for future bequests.
Not as controversial as removing statues, mind...
And I remain unconvinced that giving in to strikes stops strikes.
You seem to be just going by whatever the odds and polls are saying at any given time. That's not the best approach imo. You need to try and anticipate where things are going. My view is they will move towards Harris and away from Trump. Disagree by all means but don't give me that 'hopecasting' nonsense. As I say, I'm not prone to that.
Grrrr.
Harris 48%
Atlas Intel A+ - 1980 RV - 7/25
https://x.com/PpollingNumbers/status/1817374967152975884
Harris 44% (+2)
Trump 42%
Angus Raid #B - 1743 RV - 7/25
https://x.com/PpollingNumbers/status/1817883520892649937
Not so excellent on infrastructure. I am willing to believe the previous government announced things they did not budget for but it seems as if current spending continues to trump everything. Huge mistake.
Though Labour won more Leavers than the Tories won Remainers whereas in 2019 the Conservatives had won more Remainers than Labour had won Leavers
Six candidates have made it onto the ballot to succeed Rishi Sunak as Tory leader
They are: Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel, Mel Stride and Tom Tugendhat
This isn't Clinton vs Dole, or Reagan vs Mondale, or Obama vs Romney, when it was pretty obvious months out who was going to win.
Runners and riders at the moment are Russell Findlay (former investigative journalist who was, famously, victim of a doorstep acid attack), and Brian Whittle (former Olympic athlete). Findlay the strong favourite.
I'm quite happy to go back and excoriate the mistakes of the Thatcher government, and its successors (as I do from time to time), but most of today's voters (or cabinet ministers) weren't around at the time to make any kind of difference.
Though he does look a bit of a drip.
“Nicolás Maduro, my brother, your victory – which is the victory of the Bolivarian and chavista people – has cleanly and unequivocally vanquished the pro-imperialist opposition,” said Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel.
“And it has also defeated the meddling, Monroeist regional right. The people spoke and the revolution won.”
----
The "Monroeist regional right"? I'd vote for them in a heartbeat!
NEW THREAD
Shut them.
1) Same way as Liverpool in the 80s. Through transition grants etc. The better ones can be supported to revert to being Politechnics and Technical Colleges concentrating principally on vocational non degree courses and day release courses for apprentices.
2) Tell them tough.
The whole sector will implode once some entrepreneur gets their act together for online courses at a fraction of current fees in any case.
£9,250 a year for six hours of lecturers (which is about it for many arts/humanities subjects and use of a library is outrageous.
Use the money saved to increase the number of engineering, science and Medical Doctor Places and reduce the fees.
John Major has a lot to answer for by destroying the Polytechnics and turning them into Poundshop Univesities.
I don't know how much limits on training have impacted on current staff shortages. We've always (well, >50 years) relied on importing healthcare staff from the rest of the world. Indeed, that's the approach of most of the West. We still do that. That provides a supply of recruits. I think the problem now is more low pay and poor conditions.
Here's precedent:
https://www.noellefloyd.com/blogs/archives/brazil-s-carlos-ribas-punished-by-fei-for-helmet-removal-at-mechelen-six-bar
If he was to be eliminated, then our 3rd and 4th would move to 2nd and 3rd.
The downside is it'd mean a gold for Australia.
The net result is that people who might start industrial businesss don't, and people who might expand industrial businesses* don't, and the economy suffers accordingly. But don't worry, because we can all work as diversity officers from our spare bedrooms or something. Who needs to actually *make* stuff in this day and age.
*I'm in exactly this position. I'm employing 5 people, and my industrial business is rapidly running out of room. I can't really take on more staff without more space, so I'd like to find a bigger site. I've been keeping half an eye on the commercial properties available in the area for the last year or so - nothing even halfway suitable has come up, never mind at a price I could afford. Why? Because every scrap of vacant brownfield round here instantly becomes houses.
https://split-ticket.org/2024/07/17/we-polled-black-voters-heres-what-we-found/
Makes a pretty comprehensive nonsense of those claims that Harris becoming the nominee was an outcome foisted on an unwilling Democratic base. by party elites.
We've had a period of high inflation and the previous government put off a lot of difficult decisions and held numbers the same, be those undergraduate tuition fees or PhD stipends. This is not viable long term. I work (sometimes) in health AI. Good postdocs are hard to come by: they can go to industry and make much more.
Not that a big pay rise for medical doctors are going to make us happy.
It's more likely that the political regime in either country will collapse and bring matters to a head. VVP could have a massive gripper and drop down dead. Green T-Shirt is also on a sticky wicket because his Servant of the People party has split into highly antagonistic factions. He can only get legislation through parliament by relying on the votes of the ex-members of the now banned pro-Russia parties by dangling threats of treason prosecutions.
I've been to both Russia and Ukraine since the start of the SMO and neither particularly feels like a country at war. The control of the media is very effective in Ukraine so public expressions of war fatigue are almost unknown apart from conscription staff getting beat up. There is a much wider range of opinion in Russian media but it's almost all pro-SMO with the main dissension being that it is being prosecuted with insufficient aggression and competence.
In conclusion, at the moment, both countries want to and are able to keep fighting for zero gain.