The natural resonance of views like that should be between 8-15% of the population, max.
The fact it's now between 30-35% should be of grave concern to all, and an indication something is seriously wrong.
The most likely response is simply that a bigger proportion of the population simply gets written off as racist and quasi-fash, and everything continues precisely as before.
Before we make generalisations about the general population, what are the number for DKs/did not say?
Surely those are questions for which even 'don't know' should be an unacceptable response. I see no way to emiliorate or mitigate those numbers. The idea that a third of our citizens think it is acceptable to attack refugees to get the attention of polticians is mind blowing.
Can you not understand how it has happened? How we have reached this appalling state of affairs?
Britons have consistently voted for much much lower migration for decades, and it has never happened. No government has delivered it. The brexit vote itself was a cry of pain, from many, on this issue. And AGAIN it was ignored, indeed the stupid Tories TRIPLED immigration
All that plus the boats, and various integration problems, many of them horrendous
You and I both revile these answers, I cannot wrap my head around them, but they tell us we need - finally - to actually do what the public wants. Get migration down under 100,000. Stop the boats. We cannot wish this polling away with fainting fits
If you get migration down to under 100,000 then this country collapses. Do you not get this? The asylum seeker numbers are tiny compared to legal migration and the legal migration numbers are where they are because we NEED those people.
Whether they come from India or Poland, it doesn't matter. We NEED the immigration just to keep the country, and particularly our NHS and social care, running. If you want someone to wipe your arse in a decade when you are drooling in a bath chair then you, personally, NEED those immigrants. If you want someone to try and fix that alcohol raddled liver and deal with your terminal flatulance then you NEED those immigrants.
There are many things we and the politicians can do to improve integration - as I have said before, look at Norway - but we won't do them as long as we see immigration as a curse rather than a necessity and a benefit.
It’s not need. It’s choices.
80% of arse wipers in old age homes are U.K. born.
We chose not to educate 100% of the medical staff the NHS requires. The government mandates the number of places to educate and train doctors and nurses.
We chose to have an economy built on cheap labour. When, during COVID, the conditions in the Leicester garment trade were exposed, actual politicians said we can’t enforce health and safety or minimum wage without damaging the business.
We chose a taxation system that favours cheap labour over investment in productivity.
Choices, eh?
Im so old I can remember when the country aimed for a high wage high productivity economy.
That's never been more than a platitude. The politician is not yet born who would say the goal is a low wage low productivity economy.
Why do they need to say it ? It's what they have produced.
You seemed to be saying there were some good old days when we aimed for the fabled "high wage high skill" economy as opposed to now where we don't.
Yes.
Too many now consider pay rises a bad thing. That was not always the case.
Pay rises are a good thing if they are paid for by productivity increases. They are sharing the gains. But wage increases in the absence of increased productivity is simply inflationary. What troubles me at the moment is that productivity doesn't seem to feature in the public sector wage increases that are being handed out.
You are touching on something called Baumol's cost disease.
The natural resonance of views like that should be between 8-15% of the population, max.
The fact it's now between 30-35% should be of grave concern to all, and an indication something is seriously wrong.
The most likely response is simply that a bigger proportion of the population simply gets written off as racist and quasi-fash, and everything continues precisely as before.
Before we make generalisations about the general population, what are the number for DKs/did not say?
Surely those are questions for which even 'don't know' should be an unacceptable response. I see no way to emiliorate or mitigate those numbers. The idea that a third of our citizens think it is acceptable to attack refugees to get the attention of polticians is mind blowing.
Can you not understand how it has happened? How we have reached this appalling state of affairs?
Britons have consistently voted for much much lower migration for decades, and it has never happened. No government has delivered it. The brexit vote itself was a cry of pain, from many, on this issue. And AGAIN it was ignored, indeed the stupid Tories TRIPLED immigration
All that plus the boats, and various integration problems, many of them horrendous
You and I both revile these answers, I cannot wrap my head around them, but they tell us we need - finally - to actually do what the public wants. Get migration down under 100,000. Stop the boats. We cannot wish this polling away with fainting fits
If you get migration down to under 100,000 then this country collapses. Do you not get this? The asylum seeker numbers are tiny compared to legal migration and the legal migration numbers are where they are because we NEED those people.
Whether they come from India or Poland, it doesn't matter. We NEED the immigration just to keep the country, and particularly our NHS and social care, running. If you want someone to wipe your arse in a decade when you are drooling in a bath chair then you, personally, NEED those immigrants. If you want someone to try and fix that alcohol raddled liver and deal with your terminal flatulance then you NEED those immigrants.
There are many things we and the politicians can do to improve integration - as I have said before, look at Norway - but we won't do them as long as we see immigration as a curse rather than a necessity and a benefit.
It’s not need. It’s choices.
80% of arse wipers in old age homes are U.K. born.
We chose not to educate 100% of the medical staff the NHS requires. The government mandates the number of places to educate and train doctors and nurses.
We chose to have an economy built on cheap labour. When, during COVID, the conditions in the Leicester garment trade were exposed, actual politicians said we can’t enforce health and safety or minimum wage without damaging the business.
We chose a taxation system that favours cheap labour over investment in productivity.
Choices, eh?
Im so old I can remember when the country aimed for a high wage high productivity economy.
That's never been more than a platitude. The politician is not yet born who would say the goal is a low wage low productivity economy.
Why do they need to say it ? It's what they have produced.
You seemed to be saying there were some good old days when we aimed for the fabled "high wage high skill" economy as opposed to now where we don't.
Yes.
Too many now consider pay rises a bad thing. That was not always the case.
Pay rises are a good thing if they are paid for by productivity increases. They are sharing the gains. But wage increases in the absence of increased productivity is simply inflationary. What troubles me at the moment is that productivity doesn't seem to feature in the public sector wage increases that are being handed out.
One begets the other though.
We have full employment, so supply and demand should see wages rising and the least efficient jobs that can not afford to pay for higher wages get culled as a result.
Simply adding more and more unskilled people in order to "fill the vacancies" won't do that, and will just create new jobs. Letting wages rise and the least productive jobs die will boost our productivity in and of itself - as well as then motivating employers to engage in automation.
The natural resonance of views like that should be between 8-15% of the population, max.
The fact it's now between 30-35% should be of grave concern to all, and an indication something is seriously wrong.
The most likely response is simply that a bigger proportion of the population simply gets written off as racist and quasi-fash, and everything continues precisely as before.
Before we make generalisations about the general population, what are the number for DKs/did not say?
Surely those are questions for which even 'don't know' should be an unacceptable response. I see no way to emiliorate or mitigate those numbers. The idea that a third of our citizens think it is acceptable to attack refugees to get the attention of polticians is mind blowing.
Can you not understand how it has happened? How we have reached this appalling state of affairs?
Britons have consistently voted for much much lower migration for decades, and it has never happened. No government has delivered it. The brexit vote itself was a cry of pain, from many, on this issue. And AGAIN it was ignored, indeed the stupid Tories TRIPLED immigration
All that plus the boats, and various integration problems, many of them horrendous
You and I both revile these answers, I cannot wrap my head around them, but they tell us we need - finally - to actually do what the public wants. Get migration down under 100,000. Stop the boats. We cannot wish this polling away with fainting fits
If you get migration down to under 100,000 then this country collapses. Do you not get this? The asylum seeker numbers are tiny compared to legal migration and the legal migration numbers are where they are because we NEED those people.
Whether they come from India or Poland, it doesn't matter. We NEED the immigration just to keep the country, and particularly our NHS and social care, running. If you want someone to wipe your arse in a decade when you are drooling in a bath chair then you, personally, NEED those immigrants. If you want someone to try and fix that alcohol raddled liver and deal with your terminal flatulance then you NEED those immigrants.
There are many things we and the politicians can do to improve integration - as I have said before, look at Norway - but we won't do them as long as we see immigration as a curse rather than a necessity and a benefit.
It’s not need. It’s choices.
80% of arse wipers in old age homes are U.K. born.
We chose not to educate 100% of the medical staff the NHS requires. The government mandates the number of places to educate and train doctors and nurses.
We chose to have an economy built on cheap labour. When, during COVID, the conditions in the Leicester garment trade were exposed, actual politicians said we can’t enforce health and safety or minimum wage without damaging the business.
We chose a taxation system that favours cheap labour over investment in productivity.
Choices, eh?
Im so old I can remember when the country aimed for a high wage high productivity economy.
That's never been more than a platitude. The politician is not yet born who would say the goal is a low wage low productivity economy.
Why do they need to say it ? It's what they have produced.
You seemed to be saying there were some good old days when we aimed for the fabled "high wage high skill" economy as opposed to now where we don't.
We actually used to. In the old style - apprenticeships etc.
But these fell out of fashion. The New Plan was everyone would go to uni and everyone would have a high powered job at Goldman Sachs. The factories would all be automated. See the Economist in about 1988.
The breakdown of the class and financial barriers between The Professions and the flat ‘at world came just as the polys and unis merged.
So now we have a world where a plumber earns more than many graduates. What we have a vast demand for is a hybrid - working with hands but with skills. Think CNC operator vs old style lathe work. Which is exactly what we don’t teach or train.
Instead we have people getting degrees to do jobs which weren’t degree credentialed very long ago. At high cost to them.
More polls out that show Harris with a large lead in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. If she carries all 3, she should win the election. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/
The natural resonance of views like that should be between 8-15% of the population, max.
The fact it's now between 30-35% should be of grave concern to all, and an indication something is seriously wrong.
The most likely response is simply that a bigger proportion of the population simply gets written off as racist and quasi-fash, and everything continues precisely as before.
Before we make generalisations about the general population, what are the number for DKs/did not say?
Surely those are questions for which even 'don't know' should be an unacceptable response. I see no way to emiliorate or mitigate those numbers. The idea that a third of our citizens think it is acceptable to attack refugees to get the attention of polticians is mind blowing.
Can you not understand how it has happened? How we have reached this appalling state of affairs?
Britons have consistently voted for much much lower migration for decades, and it has never happened. No government has delivered it. The brexit vote itself was a cry of pain, from many, on this issue. And AGAIN it was ignored, indeed the stupid Tories TRIPLED immigration
All that plus the boats, and various integration problems, many of them horrendous
You and I both revile these answers, I cannot wrap my head around them, but they tell us we need - finally - to actually do what the public wants. Get migration down under 100,000. Stop the boats. We cannot wish this polling away with fainting fits
If you get migration down to under 100,000 then this country collapses. Do you not get this? The asylum seeker numbers are tiny compared to legal migration and the legal migration numbers are where they are because we NEED those people.
Whether they come from India or Poland, it doesn't matter. We NEED the immigration just to keep the country, and particularly our NHS and social care, running. If you want someone to wipe your arse in a decade when you are drooling in a bath chair then you, personally, NEED those immigrants. If you want someone to try and fix that alcohol raddled liver and deal with your terminal flatulance then you NEED those immigrants.
There are many things we and the politicians can do to improve integration - as I have said before, look at Norway - but we won't do them as long as we see immigration as a curse rather than a necessity and a benefit.
It’s not need. It’s choices.
80% of arse wipers in old age homes are U.K. born.
We chose not to educate 100% of the medical staff the NHS requires. The government mandates the number of places to educate and train doctors and nurses.
We chose to have an economy built on cheap labour. When, during COVID, the conditions in the Leicester garment trade were exposed, actual politicians said we can’t enforce health and safety or minimum wage without damaging the business.
We chose a taxation system that favours cheap labour over investment in productivity.
Choices, eh?
Im so old I can remember when the country aimed for a high wage high productivity economy.
That's never been more than a platitude. The politician is not yet born who would say the goal is a low wage low productivity economy.
Why do they need to say it ? It's what they have produced.
You seemed to be saying there were some good old days when we aimed for the fabled "high wage high skill" economy as opposed to now where we don't.
Yes.
Too many now consider pay rises a bad thing. That was not always the case.
Pay rises are a good thing if they are paid for by productivity increases. They are sharing the gains. But wage increases in the absence of increased productivity is simply inflationary. What troubles me at the moment is that productivity doesn't seem to feature in the public sector wage increases that are being handed out.
You are touching on something called Baumol's cost disease.
Yes, that is definitely a feature. If the NHS wants to retain dentists, for example, it needs to pay the going rate for a dentist even if those doing NHS work are not improving their productivity (this example is very much in my mind because I have got a letter from my dentist today saying that she can no longer offer NHS treatment). Hey ho.
Based on this graphic We Think also appear to be conflating refugees with immigrants.
Yet the British people think a reduction in immigration in health and social care s a bad thing. Even Conservative and Reform voters.
To say that Britons are conflicted over immigration is an understatement.
We want doctors. Not the extended family of students.
The vast majority of these are not doctors, they are working in carehomes etc.
Though, again, 81% of care workers are British.
If care homes want to attract more people, they should pay better wages.
I have every respect for wait staff, but its ridiculous that people wiping bums and taking care of people for a living pays less than eg waiting on tables does.
You've hit on the central problem with discussion of immigration, which is politicians/media never wanting to properly discuss tradeoffs and choices rather than a moral test of whether you're a "good person" and like it/dislike it, and vice versa.
Lots of social care is paid for by councils, which bore the brunt of post-2010 cuts, and many of which are in financial difficulty. So they're going to commission the care they have to pay for by law on the cheap. Which will mean it generally comes from contractors who don't pay well so they can win a contract by lowballing the costs. So if you want to make care an attractive permanent career we probably have to pay a bit more in tax.
Similarly, if you want fewer foreign students here then either we let a load of universities go under and significantly cut places, we put up tuition fees, or we provide funds from central government.
Or whisper it quietly, but being in the EU and having free movement may have helped keep immigration numbers lower (after an initial influx in 2004) than are now as people who can come and go to work as they pleased from Europe tended to move back.
Now, a problem we have is that politicians have long echoed voters' overall sentiments - which broadly want to cut immigration. Without being honest about the ways you'd do that, what they'd mean, why you might want to differ, and offering that choice. So you end up in the ludicrous situation whereby the Tories get a reputation for being thoroughly beastly to immigrants, while trebling immigration.
If you want to seriously cut immigration you can, but it's probably by rejigging our economy and social sphere so it's less dependent on it being able to plug gaps, rather than blood and thunder statements about sending boats (a small proportion of overall numbers, if one that causes outsized difficulties) back.
Based on this graphic We Think also appear to be conflating refugees with immigrants.
Yet the British people think a reduction in immigration in health and social care s a bad thing. Even Conservative and Reform voters.
To say that Britons are conflicted over immigration is an understatement.
We want doctors. Not the extended family of students.
If you want qualified experienced doctors you need accept their family otherwise they won't come.
Equally if you want the £75,000 or so it costs a student to come to the UK to study for a degree there may be a quid pro quo involved.
Reading the papers over the weekend it does seem that many people are happy to pay £20,000+ to get a work permit in the UK, it's just a shame that the last Government wasn't bright enough to collect the money itself and instead like "agents" overseas pocket the money instead.
if we want qualified experienced doctors we should train more and stop importing them
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
More polls out that show Harris with a large lead in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. If she carries all 3, she should win the election. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/
The natural resonance of views like that should be between 8-15% of the population, max.
The fact it's now between 30-35% should be of grave concern to all, and an indication something is seriously wrong.
The most likely response is simply that a bigger proportion of the population simply gets written off as racist and quasi-fash, and everything continues precisely as before.
Anyone who said yes to any of those questions is racist and quasi-fash and should be written off.
Aaaaaand.. there we have it.
You disagree?
You think that someone answering that it is acceptable to use violence is not racist?
It doesn't mean they are racist at all in fact. If your governement won't do what the majority wants then you have two choices. Bullet box or ballot box. If the ballot box doesn't work then you only have the former option. Doesn't matter what the topic is...if you ignore a sizeable majority and what they ask of you sooner or later they will stop voting and start hitting
And if they start hitting foreigners, or using bullets, then yes they are racists.
I did not claim they always aimed right I was merely observing that when your vote doesn't seem to matter no matter what you vote for then violence is the only option. A violence that is often however misplaced and aimed at the wrong targets
Just arrived home. God it's good to be back. Two highlights of the journey: 1) Red Kites in the Chilterns on the M40. I've done this journey periodically over the last 15 years - they appear to be much more widely spread than in previous years; there was a good 10 mile gap between the first and last ones I saw. 2) Seeing some hills: after a week in the low countries, Kent looked Alpine. My goodness this country is beautiful. 3) The sunset - which conveniently timed itself to arrive just as I arrived at the start of home home i.e. where Staffordshire runs into Cheshire. It was a symphony: pale blues and plums and pinks and peaches and purples and gold and fire; and it went on for the rest of the journey home. I was mesmerised. It seemed a pity to have to turn away from it at Junction 19, but it was still there in the west when we turned onto the M60.
It wasn't all idyllic of course. One daughter had to hild a tissue under another's nose to stem a nose bleed in the back seat, and there was cat sick all over the landing when we got home. But still. Good to be back.
Based on this graphic We Think also appear to be conflating refugees with immigrants.
Regardless the poll makes for depressing reading . Wtf has happened to this country ?
Mass immigration happened.
Immigration from the wrong non EU countries happened . There’s a reluctance for many in the media to just say it out loud.
What precisely are the wrong non EU countries?
These recent riots are anti Muslim. And of course their ire is directed at those communities and by extension those coming on boats who they clump together as all being Muslim .
At the moment those on the boats mostly are Muslim: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria are the main sources, I believe
For a while there was a wave of Vietnamese but that seems to have stopped
Yep, fleeing tyrannical governments and war zones.
So this seems to be the explanation/excuse for the reduction in gold medals:
UK Sport chair Katherine Grainger says Great Britain's success in Paris is "extraordinary", but Team GB have moved past the era of "winning at all costs".
The five-time Olympic medal winner says creating a positive environment for the athletes is just as important as finishing on the podium.
"It is about winning well, not winning at any cost," Grainger, who leads the body responsible for allocating funding to sports for each Olympic cycle.
Pretty atrocious attitude. It seems Team GB should move on from the era of Katherine Grainger - and fast.
British Rowing essentially told her (and her ilk) to do one. And brought back heavy end seat racing*. Hence the golds.
*The practise of swapping people in and out of the boat and in different positions to see if it goes faster. Considered fairly brutal since you can be dropped from the boat at any time, if someone makes the boat go faster.
Is her whoe job to dribble around making Team GB not win gold medals?
Think DfE - her job is for team GB to win gold medals.
However….
Time to get rid. She should be pleased to be let go - tell her it's the equivalent of receiving a bronze medal.
£2.5 billion a year on providing hotels for asylum seekers.
It's not a huge amount in Government terms - Newham alone spends £40 million a year on the provision of temporary accommodation for homeless British people.
I've yet to hear a coherent answer to the primary question of how you "stop the boats". The toughest of Tory Home Secretaries failed miserably and with Rwanda (or similar) seemingly off the table what is or should be the solution?
I'm sure plenty have draconian solutions and the real immigration question is the level of legal immigration about which we can do something (if Starmer so wished).
There is clearly a need for a much more rapid processing of asylum applications which seemed to atrophy in the last months of the previous Government (Rwanda?).
They were not tough Home Secretaries. And though some were inclined to be tough, they were undermined by the wider Government, in the forms of the Prime Minister/s and the Home Office. We were left with grandstanding and performative harshness, like Jenrick's painted-over murals and May's 'Go Home' vans.
The natural resonance of views like that should be between 8-15% of the population, max.
The fact it's now between 30-35% should be of grave concern to all, and an indication something is seriously wrong.
The most likely response is simply that a bigger proportion of the population simply gets written off as racist and quasi-fash, and everything continues precisely as before.
Anyone who said yes to any of those questions is racist and quasi-fash and should be written off.
Aaaaaand.. there we have it.
You disagree?
You think that someone answering that it is acceptable to use violence is not racist?
It doesn't mean they are racist at all in fact. If your governement won't do what the majority wants then you have two choices. Bullet box or ballot box. If the ballot box doesn't work then you only have the former option. Doesn't matter what the topic is...if you ignore a sizeable majority and what they ask of you sooner or later they will stop voting and start hitting
And if they start hitting foreigners, or using bullets, then yes they are racists.
I did not claim they always aimed right I was merely observing that when your vote doesn't seem to matter no matter what you vote for then violence is the only option. A violence that is often however misplaced and aimed at the wrong targets
Your vote does matter.
Its just that the racists lost the last election, they didn't win it.
The natural resonance of views like that should be between 8-15% of the population, max.
The fact it's now between 30-35% should be of grave concern to all, and an indication something is seriously wrong.
The most likely response is simply that a bigger proportion of the population simply gets written off as racist and quasi-fash, and everything continues precisely as before.
Anyone who said yes to any of those questions is racist and quasi-fash and should be written off.
Aaaaaand.. there we have it.
You disagree?
You think that someone answering that it is acceptable to use violence is not racist?
It doesn't mean they are racist at all in fact. If your governement won't do what the majority wants then you have two choices. Bullet box or ballot box. If the ballot box doesn't work then you only have the former option. Doesn't matter what the topic is...if you ignore a sizeable majority and what they ask of you sooner or later they will stop voting and start hitting
And if they start hitting foreigners, or using bullets, then yes they are racists.
I did not claim they always aimed right I was merely observing that when your vote doesn't seem to matter no matter what you vote for then violence is the only option. A violence that is often however misplaced and aimed at the wrong targets
Just arrived home. God it's good to be back. Two highlights of the journey: 1) Red Kites in the Chilterns on the M40. I've done this journey periodically over the last 15 years - they appear to be much more widely spread than in previous years; there was a good 10 mile gap between the first and last ones I saw. 2) Seeing some hills: after a week in the low countries, Kent looked Alpine. My goodness this country is beautiful. 3) The sunset - which conveniently timed itself to arrive just as I arrived at the start of home home i.e. where Staffordshire runs into Cheshire. It was a symphony: pale blues and plums and pinks and peaches and purples and gold and fire; and it went on for the rest of the journey home. I was mesmerised. It seemed a pity to have to turn away from it at Junction 19, but it was still there in the west when we turned onto the M60.
It wasn't all idyllic of course. One daughter had to hild a tissue under another's nose to stem a nose bleed in the back seat, and there was cat sick all over the landing when we got home. But still. Good to be back.
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
It's not depressingly accurate though.
We don't have China like censorship. We have rules against incitement of mob violence.
The natural resonance of views like that should be between 8-15% of the population, max.
The fact it's now between 30-35% should be of grave concern to all, and an indication something is seriously wrong.
The most likely response is simply that a bigger proportion of the population simply gets written off as racist and quasi-fash, and everything continues precisely as before.
Before we make generalisations about the general population, what are the number for DKs/did not say?
Surely those are questions for which even 'don't know' should be an unacceptable response. I see no way to emiliorate or mitigate those numbers. The idea that a third of our citizens think it is acceptable to attack refugees to get the attention of polticians is mind blowing.
Can you not understand how it has happened? How we have reached this appalling state of affairs?
Britons have consistently voted for much much lower migration for decades, and it has never happened. No government has delivered it. The brexit vote itself was a cry of pain, from many, on this issue. And AGAIN it was ignored, indeed the stupid Tories TRIPLED immigration
All that plus the boats, and various integration problems, many of them horrendous
You and I both revile these answers, I cannot wrap my head around them, but they tell us we need - finally - to actually do what the public wants. Get migration down under 100,000. Stop the boats. We cannot wish this polling away with fainting fits
If you get migration down to under 100,000 then this country collapses. Do you not get this? The asylum seeker numbers are tiny compared to legal migration and the legal migration numbers are where they are because we NEED those people.
Whether they come from India or Poland, it doesn't matter. We NEED the immigration just to keep the country, and particularly our NHS and social care, running. If you want someone to wipe your arse in a decade when you are drooling in a bath chair then you, personally, NEED those immigrants. If you want someone to try and fix that alcohol raddled liver and deal with your terminal flatulance then you NEED those immigrants.
There are many things we and the politicians can do to improve integration - as I have said before, look at Norway - but we won't do them as long as we see immigration as a curse rather than a necessity and a benefit.
It’s not need. It’s choices.
80% of arse wipers in old age homes are U.K. born.
We chose not to educate 100% of the medical staff the NHS requires. The government mandates the number of places to educate and train doctors and nurses.
We chose to have an economy built on cheap labour. When, during COVID, the conditions in the Leicester garment trade were exposed, actual politicians said we can’t enforce health and safety or minimum wage without damaging the business.
We chose a taxation system that favours cheap labour over investment in productivity.
Choices, eh?
Im so old I can remember when the country aimed for a high wage high productivity economy.
That's never been more than a platitude. The politician is not yet born who would say the goal is a low wage low productivity economy.
Why do they need to say it ? It's what they have produced.
You seemed to be saying there were some good old days when we aimed for the fabled "high wage high skill" economy as opposed to now where we don't.
Yes.
Too many now consider pay rises a bad thing. That was not always the case.
Pay rises are a good thing if they are paid for by productivity increases. They are sharing the gains. But wage increases in the absence of increased productivity is simply inflationary. What troubles me at the moment is that productivity doesn't seem to feature in the public sector wage increases that are being handed out.
One begets the other though.
We have full employment, so supply and demand should see wages rising and the least efficient jobs that can not afford to pay for higher wages get culled as a result.
Simply adding more and more unskilled people in order to "fill the vacancies" won't do that, and will just create new jobs. Letting wages rise and the least productive jobs die will boost our productivity in and of itself - as well as then motivating employers to engage in automation.
Except we don't have full employment in reality. We have something like 9m people of working age who are not working. For some this is a choice because they have care responsibilities for the young or the old but for too many it seems to be almost giving up and persuading themselves that they can't.
I agree that we want better wages to incentivise those people back into the workforce. We need to widen the gap between a life on benefits and a life in work. We need to stop subsidising very low paid work with state benefits. Increasing the elasticity of the supply of labour, as we did with freedom of movement, accentuates all of these problems and removes the drive you describe to improve the productivity of labour.
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
The natural resonance of views like that should be between 8-15% of the population, max.
The fact it's now between 30-35% should be of grave concern to all, and an indication something is seriously wrong.
The most likely response is simply that a bigger proportion of the population simply gets written off as racist and quasi-fash, and everything continues precisely as before.
Anyone who said yes to any of those questions is racist and quasi-fash and should be written off.
Aaaaaand.. there we have it.
You disagree?
You think that someone answering that it is acceptable to use violence is not racist?
It doesn't mean they are racist at all in fact. If your governement won't do what the majority wants then you have two choices. Bullet box or ballot box. If the ballot box doesn't work then you only have the former option. Doesn't matter what the topic is...if you ignore a sizeable majority and what they ask of you sooner or later they will stop voting and start hitting
And if they start hitting foreigners, or using bullets, then yes they are racists.
I did not claim they always aimed right I was merely observing that when your vote doesn't seem to matter no matter what you vote for then violence is the only option. A violence that is often however misplaced and aimed at the wrong targets
Your vote does matter.
Its just that the racists lost the last election, they didn't win it.
Both labour and tories have promised to be tough on immigration, I probably don't need to cite tory stuff but Ed millibrand even commissioned a mug for it. Then they had the votes and did exactly the opposite....thats a vote counting is it in your world. In mine if vote because they say they will do A and not B then after the votes are counted they do B anyway......well thats my vote not counting
Just arrived home. God it's good to be back. Two highlights of the journey: 1) Red Kites in the Chilterns on the M40. I've done this journey periodically over the last 15 years - they appear to be much more widely spread than in previous years; there was a good 10 mile gap between the first and last ones I saw. 2) Seeing some hills: after a week in the low countries, Kent looked Alpine. My goodness this country is beautiful. 3) The sunset - which conveniently timed itself to arrive just as I arrived at the start of home home i.e. where Staffordshire runs into Cheshire. It was a symphony: pale blues and plums and pinks and peaches and purples and gold and fire; and it went on for the rest of the journey home. I was mesmerised. It seemed a pity to have to turn away from it at Junction 19, but it was still there in the west when we turned onto the M60.
It wasn't all idyllic of course. One daughter had to hild a tissue under another's nose to stem a nose bleed in the back seat, and there was cat sick all over the landing when we got home. But still. Good to be back.
Red Kites seem to love the M40 at the Chilterns. There's a patch of the A6 in Leices the same,
It's on a bit of slope of an escarpment, so I think generates an updraft for them.
"At Plymouth Crown Court, a man who grabbed a police officer's baton and ran off with it was jailed for three years. Guy Sullivan, 43, of New George Street, Plymouth, admitted a charge of violent disorder relating to the violence in the city on 5 August. The court heard a lone officer had been using his baton to push back protesters around him, when Sullivan came behind the officer and grabbed the baton out of his hands."
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
No it isn't.
Get a bloody grip.
Feels EXACTLY like that, to me. That is where we are headed
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
It's not depressingly accurate though.
We don't have China like censorship. We have rules against incitement of mob violence.
Chinese social media is a cesspit. I doubt it's any better than X/Twitter.
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
It's not depressingly accurate though.
We don't have China like censorship. We have rules against incitement of mob violence.
Chinese social media is a cesspit. I doubt it's any better than X/Twitter.
The natural resonance of views like that should be between 8-15% of the population, max.
The fact it's now between 30-35% should be of grave concern to all, and an indication something is seriously wrong.
The most likely response is simply that a bigger proportion of the population simply gets written off as racist and quasi-fash, and everything continues precisely as before.
Before we make generalisations about the general population, what are the number for DKs/did not say?
Surely those are questions for which even 'don't know' should be an unacceptable response. I see no way to emiliorate or mitigate those numbers. The idea that a third of our citizens think it is acceptable to attack refugees to get the attention of polticians is mind blowing.
Can you not understand how it has happened? How we have reached this appalling state of affairs?
Britons have consistently voted for much much lower migration for decades, and it has never happened. No government has delivered it. The brexit vote itself was a cry of pain, from many, on this issue. And AGAIN it was ignored, indeed the stupid Tories TRIPLED immigration
All that plus the boats, and various integration problems, many of them horrendous
You and I both revile these answers, I cannot wrap my head around them, but they tell us we need - finally - to actually do what the public wants. Get migration down under 100,000. Stop the boats. We cannot wish this polling away with fainting fits
If you get migration down to under 100,000 then this country collapses. Do you not get this? The asylum seeker numbers are tiny compared to legal migration and the legal migration numbers are where they are because we NEED those people.
Whether they come from India or Poland, it doesn't matter. We NEED the immigration just to keep the country, and particularly our NHS and social care, running. If you want someone to wipe your arse in a decade when you are drooling in a bath chair then you, personally, NEED those immigrants. If you want someone to try and fix that alcohol raddled liver and deal with your terminal flatulance then you NEED those immigrants.
There are many things we and the politicians can do to improve integration - as I have said before, look at Norway - but we won't do them as long as we see immigration as a curse rather than a necessity and a benefit.
It’s not need. It’s choices.
80% of arse wipers in old age homes are U.K. born.
We chose not to educate 100% of the medical staff the NHS requires. The government mandates the number of places to educate and train doctors and nurses.
We chose to have an economy built on cheap labour. When, during COVID, the conditions in the Leicester garment trade were exposed, actual politicians said we can’t enforce health and safety or minimum wage without damaging the business.
We chose a taxation system that favours cheap labour over investment in productivity.
Choices, eh?
Im so old I can remember when the country aimed for a high wage high productivity economy.
That's never been more than a platitude. The politician is not yet born who would say the goal is a low wage low productivity economy.
Why do they need to say it ? It's what they have produced.
You seemed to be saying there were some good old days when we aimed for the fabled "high wage high skill" economy as opposed to now where we don't.
Yes.
Too many now consider pay rises a bad thing. That was not always the case.
Pay rises are a good thing if they are paid for by productivity increases. They are sharing the gains. But wage increases in the absence of increased productivity is simply inflationary. What troubles me at the moment is that productivity doesn't seem to feature in the public sector wage increases that are being handed out.
One begets the other though.
We have full employment, so supply and demand should see wages rising and the least efficient jobs that can not afford to pay for higher wages get culled as a result.
Simply adding more and more unskilled people in order to "fill the vacancies" won't do that, and will just create new jobs. Letting wages rise and the least productive jobs die will boost our productivity in and of itself - as well as then motivating employers to engage in automation.
Except we don't have full employment in reality. We have something like 9m people of working age who are not working. For some this is a choice because they have care responsibilities for the young or the old but for too many it seems to be almost giving up and persuading themselves that they can't.
I agree that we want better wages to incentivise those people back into the workforce. We need to widen the gap between a life on benefits and a life in work. We need to stop subsidising very low paid work with state benefits. Increasing the elasticity of the supply of labour, as we did with freedom of movement, accentuates all of these problems and removes the drive you describe to improve the productivity of labour.
Is it really better for society to have unpaid carers forced into the paid economy, to look after other people's children and old folks rather than their own families?
"At Plymouth Crown Court, a man who grabbed a police officer's baton and ran off with it was jailed for three years. Guy Sullivan, 43, of New George Street, Plymouth, admitted a charge of violent disorder relating to the violence in the city on 5 August. The court heard a lone officer had been using his baton to push back protesters around him, when Sullivan came behind the officer and grabbed the baton out of his hands."
The appeal courts are going to be quite busy. Of course, if removing the baton put that police officer at any kind of risk....
"At Plymouth Crown Court, a man who grabbed a police officer's baton and ran off with it was jailed for three years. Guy Sullivan, 43, of New George Street, Plymouth, admitted a charge of violent disorder relating to the violence in the city on 5 August. The court heard a lone officer had been using his baton to push back protesters around him, when Sullivan came behind the officer and grabbed the baton out of his hands."
The appeal courts are going to be quite busy. Of course, if removing the baton put that police officer at any kind of risk....
Presumably appealing against the sentence, as he did plead guilty so can't appeal against the conviction.
"At Plymouth Crown Court, a man who grabbed a police officer's baton and ran off with it was jailed for three years. Guy Sullivan, 43, of New George Street, Plymouth, admitted a charge of violent disorder relating to the violence in the city on 5 August. The court heard a lone officer had been using his baton to push back protesters around him, when Sullivan came behind the officer and grabbed the baton out of his hands."
The appeal courts are going to be quite busy. Of course, if removing the baton put that police officer at any kind of risk....
On the face of it that does seem a pretty harsh sentence . But you’re unlikely to get much sympathy from the public .
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
No it isn't.
Get a bloody grip.
Feels EXACTLY like that, to me. That is where we are headed
Thank God you're not a person predisposed to any kind of wild overreaction.
"At Plymouth Crown Court, a man who grabbed a police officer's baton and ran off with it was jailed for three years. Guy Sullivan, 43, of New George Street, Plymouth, admitted a charge of violent disorder relating to the violence in the city on 5 August. The court heard a lone officer had been using his baton to push back protesters around him, when Sullivan came behind the officer and grabbed the baton out of his hands."
The appeal courts are going to be quite busy. Of course, if removing the baton put that police officer at any kind of risk....
On the face of it that does seem a pretty harsh sentence . But you’re unlikely to get much sympathy from the public .
Apart from the 39% of the public who think it's justified to attack refugees if it makes politicians pay attention
The natural resonance of views like that should be between 8-15% of the population, max.
The fact it's now between 30-35% should be of grave concern to all, and an indication something is seriously wrong.
The most likely response is simply that a bigger proportion of the population simply gets written off as racist and quasi-fash, and everything continues precisely as before.
Before we make generalisations about the general population, what are the number for DKs/did not say?
Surely those are questions for which even 'don't know' should be an unacceptable response. I see no way to emiliorate or mitigate those numbers. The idea that a third of our citizens think it is acceptable to attack refugees to get the attention of polticians is mind blowing.
Can you not understand how it has happened? How we have reached this appalling state of affairs?
Britons have consistently voted for much much lower migration for decades, and it has never happened. No government has delivered it. The brexit vote itself was a cry of pain, from many, on this issue. And AGAIN it was ignored, indeed the stupid Tories TRIPLED immigration
All that plus the boats, and various integration problems, many of them horrendous
You and I both revile these answers, I cannot wrap my head around them, but they tell us we need - finally - to actually do what the public wants. Get migration down under 100,000. Stop the boats. We cannot wish this polling away with fainting fits
If you get migration down to under 100,000 then this country collapses. Do you not get this? The asylum seeker numbers are tiny compared to legal migration and the legal migration numbers are where they are because we NEED those people.
Whether they come from India or Poland, it doesn't matter. We NEED the immigration just to keep the country, and particularly our NHS and social care, running. If you want someone to wipe your arse in a decade when you are drooling in a bath chair then you, personally, NEED those immigrants. If you want someone to try and fix that alcohol raddled liver and deal with your terminal flatulance then you NEED those immigrants.
There are many things we and the politicians can do to improve integration - as I have said before, look at Norway - but we won't do them as long as we see immigration as a curse rather than a necessity and a benefit.
It’s not need. It’s choices.
80% of arse wipers in old age homes are U.K. born.
We chose not to educate 100% of the medical staff the NHS requires. The government mandates the number of places to educate and train doctors and nurses.
We chose to have an economy built on cheap labour. When, during COVID, the conditions in the Leicester garment trade were exposed, actual politicians said we can’t enforce health and safety or minimum wage without damaging the business.
We chose a taxation system that favours cheap labour over investment in productivity.
Choices, eh?
Im so old I can remember when the country aimed for a high wage high productivity economy.
That's never been more than a platitude. The politician is not yet born who would say the goal is a low wage low productivity economy.
Why do they need to say it ? It's what they have produced.
You seemed to be saying there were some good old days when we aimed for the fabled "high wage high skill" economy as opposed to now where we don't.
Yes.
Too many now consider pay rises a bad thing. That was not always the case.
Pay rises are a good thing if they are paid for by productivity increases. They are sharing the gains. But wage increases in the absence of increased productivity is simply inflationary. What troubles me at the moment is that productivity doesn't seem to feature in the public sector wage increases that are being handed out.
One begets the other though.
We have full employment, so supply and demand should see wages rising and the least efficient jobs that can not afford to pay for higher wages get culled as a result.
Simply adding more and more unskilled people in order to "fill the vacancies" won't do that, and will just create new jobs. Letting wages rise and the least productive jobs die will boost our productivity in and of itself - as well as then motivating employers to engage in automation.
Except we don't have full employment in reality. We have something like 9m people of working age who are not working. For some this is a choice because they have care responsibilities for the young or the old but for too many it seems to be almost giving up and persuading themselves that they can't.
I agree that we want better wages to incentivise those people back into the workforce. We need to widen the gap between a life on benefits and a life in work. We need to stop subsidising very low paid work with state benefits. Increasing the elasticity of the supply of labour, as we did with freedom of movement, accentuates all of these problems and removes the drive you describe to improve the productivity of labour.
Wages going up while benefits are frozen is a good way to incentivise people to work.
Better than freezing wages while benefits go up.
For too long lately pay rises have been considered a bad thing, not a good one.
Prof Katherine Schofield 🇬🇧🇦🇺 @katherineschof8 · 4h Crucial reminder to A Level students & parents:
If you don’t get the grades you were expecting contact your first choice university immediately.
This year they are VERY LIKELY to take you anyway.
Don’t be discouraged! It’s an excellent year for student choice.
Good luck all!
Basically grabbing every penny they can to delay the inevitable final outcome..
The universities already have the results and will be deciding if a student is in or out well in advance of Thursday. Best to check via UCAS to see if you are in with lower than expected grades.
I've just carried out some private polling, as follows:
You are obliged to punch somebody in the face - you have no choice. But you can choose whether to punch: a) a random refugee, or b) Nigel Farage. What's your choice?
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
It's not depressingly accurate though.
We don't have China like censorship. We have rules against incitement of mob violence.
Chinese social media is a cesspit. I doubt it's any better than X/Twitter.
But its a cesspit of right think not wrong think
A Chinese colleague, at work, showed me some of the staggering racism that is prevalent on Chinese social media.
EDIT: very unsurprisingly, the Chinese state doesn't seem to have any problem with pronounced Islamaphobia.
I've just carried out some private polling, as follows:
You are obliged to punch somebody in the face - you have no choice. But you can choose whether to punch: a) a random refugee, or b) Nigel Farage. What's your choice?
I've just carried out some private polling, as follows:
You are obliged to punch somebody in the face - you have no choice. But you can choose whether to punch: a) a random refugee, or b) Nigel Farage. What's your choice?
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
No it isn't.
Get a bloody grip.
Feels EXACTLY like that, to me. That is where we are headed
Thank God you're not a person predisposed to any kind of wild overreaction.
Tell that to the Alien AI overlords from the EU who overtook us at least twice in the past year!
I've just carried out some private polling, as follows:
You are obliged to punch somebody in the face - you have no choice. But you can choose whether to punch: a) a random refugee, or b) Nigel Farage. What's your choice?
99.4% said b).
What does private polling mean?
In this instance, it means I am trying to make some desperately poor cringeworthy joke and I am failing
Prof Katherine Schofield 🇬🇧🇦🇺 @katherineschof8 · 4h Crucial reminder to A Level students & parents:
If you don’t get the grades you were expecting contact your first choice university immediately.
This year they are VERY LIKELY to take you anyway.
Don’t be discouraged! It’s an excellent year for student choice.
Good luck all!
Basically grabbing every penny they can to delay the inevitable final outcome..
The universities already have the results and will be deciding if a student is in or out well in advance of Thursday. Best to check via UCAS to see if you are in with lower than expected grades.
Yes, many universities would rather accept "near misses" who actually want to be on the course than put the place into the lottery of clearing.
The Universities got the results yesterday, and will get the second choices tomorrow, so will know how many places are filled by Thursday when the candidates get their results.
The natural resonance of views like that should be between 8-15% of the population, max.
The fact it's now between 30-35% should be of grave concern to all, and an indication something is seriously wrong.
The most likely response is simply that a bigger proportion of the population simply gets written off as racist and quasi-fash, and everything continues precisely as before.
Before we make generalisations about the general population, what are the number for DKs/did not say?
Surely those are questions for which even 'don't know' should be an unacceptable response. I see no way to emiliorate or mitigate those numbers. The idea that a third of our citizens think it is acceptable to attack refugees to get the attention of polticians is mind blowing.
Can you not understand how it has happened? How we have reached this appalling state of affairs?
Britons have consistently voted for much much lower migration for decades, and it has never happened. No government has delivered it. The brexit vote itself was a cry of pain, from many, on this issue. And AGAIN it was ignored, indeed the stupid Tories TRIPLED immigration
All that plus the boats, and various integration problems, many of them horrendous
You and I both revile these answers, I cannot wrap my head around them, but they tell us we need - finally - to actually do what the public wants. Get migration down under 100,000. Stop the boats. We cannot wish this polling away with fainting fits
If you get migration down to under 100,000 then this country collapses. Do you not get this? The asylum seeker numbers are tiny compared to legal migration and the legal migration numbers are where they are because we NEED those people.
Whether they come from India or Poland, it doesn't matter. We NEED the immigration just to keep the country, and particularly our NHS and social care, running. If you want someone to wipe your arse in a decade when you are drooling in a bath chair then you, personally, NEED those immigrants. If you want someone to try and fix that alcohol raddled liver and deal with your terminal flatulance then you NEED those immigrants.
There are many things we and the politicians can do to improve integration - as I have said before, look at Norway - but we won't do them as long as we see immigration as a curse rather than a necessity and a benefit.
I disagree, but at least you are willing to have the argument, tho you could drop the pointless ad hominem
I think the costs in cohesion and crime etc are now too great. We have to accept the economic pain that comes with severely limited migration, and the government needs to be honest with the public. "OK we will bring it down, but it will be painful"
Mass migration was always a ponzi scheme in the end, bound to collapse, especially in a crowded country like the UK
The ad hominem was to make you feel relaxed and at home given it is your normal modus operandi on here. I thought you would appreciate the gesture
I've just carried out some private polling, as follows:
You are obliged to punch somebody in the face - you have no choice. But you can choose whether to punch: a) a random refugee, or b) Nigel Farage. What's your choice?
99.4% said b).
Even joking about violence towards either groups (refugees and politicians) is pretty low.
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
No it isn't.
Get a bloody grip.
Feels EXACTLY like that, to me. That is where we are headed
Thank God you're not a person predisposed to any kind of wild overreaction.
The natural resonance of views like that should be between 8-15% of the population, max.
The fact it's now between 30-35% should be of grave concern to all, and an indication something is seriously wrong.
The most likely response is simply that a bigger proportion of the population simply gets written off as racist and quasi-fash, and everything continues precisely as before.
Before we make generalisations about the general population, what are the number for DKs/did not say?
Surely those are questions for which even 'don't know' should be an unacceptable response. I see no way to emiliorate or mitigate those numbers. The idea that a third of our citizens think it is acceptable to attack refugees to get the attention of polticians is mind blowing.
Can you not understand how it has happened? How we have reached this appalling state of affairs?
Britons have consistently voted for much much lower migration for decades, and it has never happened. No government has delivered it. The brexit vote itself was a cry of pain, from many, on this issue. And AGAIN it was ignored, indeed the stupid Tories TRIPLED immigration
All that plus the boats, and various integration problems, many of them horrendous
You and I both revile these answers, I cannot wrap my head around them, but they tell us we need - finally - to actually do what the public wants. Get migration down under 100,000. Stop the boats. We cannot wish this polling away with fainting fits
If you get migration down to under 100,000 then this country collapses. Do you not get this? The asylum seeker numbers are tiny compared to legal migration and the legal migration numbers are where they are because we NEED those people.
Whether they come from India or Poland, it doesn't matter. We NEED the immigration just to keep the country, and particularly our NHS and social care, running. If you want someone to wipe your arse in a decade when you are drooling in a bath chair then you, personally, NEED those immigrants. If you want someone to try and fix that alcohol raddled liver and deal with your terminal flatulance then you NEED those immigrants.
There are many things we and the politicians can do to improve integration - as I have said before, look at Norway - but we won't do them as long as we see immigration as a curse rather than a necessity and a benefit.
It’s not need. It’s choices.
80% of arse wipers in old age homes are U.K. born.
We chose not to educate 100% of the medical staff the NHS requires. The government mandates the number of places to educate and train doctors and nurses.
We chose to have an economy built on cheap labour. When, during COVID, the conditions in the Leicester garment trade were exposed, actual politicians said we can’t enforce health and safety or minimum wage without damaging the business.
We chose a taxation system that favours cheap labour over investment in productivity.
Choices, eh?
Im so old I can remember when the country aimed for a high wage high productivity economy.
That's never been more than a platitude. The politician is not yet born who would say the goal is a low wage low productivity economy.
Why do they need to say it ? It's what they have produced.
You seemed to be saying there were some good old days when we aimed for the fabled "high wage high skill" economy as opposed to now where we don't.
Yes.
Too many now consider pay rises a bad thing. That was not always the case.
Pay rises are a good thing if they are paid for by productivity increases. They are sharing the gains. But wage increases in the absence of increased productivity is simply inflationary. What troubles me at the moment is that productivity doesn't seem to feature in the public sector wage increases that are being handed out.
One begets the other though.
We have full employment, so supply and demand should see wages rising and the least efficient jobs that can not afford to pay for higher wages get culled as a result.
Simply adding more and more unskilled people in order to "fill the vacancies" won't do that, and will just create new jobs. Letting wages rise and the least productive jobs die will boost our productivity in and of itself - as well as then motivating employers to engage in automation.
Except we don't have full employment in reality. We have something like 9m people of working age who are not working. For some this is a choice because they have care responsibilities for the young or the old but for too many it seems to be almost giving up and persuading themselves that they can't.
I agree that we want better wages to incentivise those people back into the workforce. We need to widen the gap between a life on benefits and a life in work. We need to stop subsidising very low paid work with state benefits. Increasing the elasticity of the supply of labour, as we did with freedom of movement, accentuates all of these problems and removes the drive you describe to improve the productivity of labour.
Is it really better for society to have unpaid carers forced into the paid economy, to look after other people's children and old folks rather than their own families?
Obviously. Otherwise the market would have found a more optimal solution.
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
No it isn't.
Get a bloody grip.
Feels EXACTLY like that, to me. That is where we are headed
Thank God you're not a person predisposed to any kind of wild overreaction.
Was it an overreaction?
Those dentists were probably really hot.
I'm sorry, but I'm not familiar with that part of YouPorn
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
No it isn't.
Get a bloody grip.
Feels EXACTLY like that, to me. That is where we are headed
Thank God you're not a person predisposed to any kind of wild overreaction.
The correct reaction to the last month in Britain is, unfortunately, deep gloom and bleak pessimism, verging on despair. If anything I is bein' a bit too cheery
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
No it isn't.
Get a bloody grip.
Feels EXACTLY like that, to me. That is where we are headed
Thank God you're not a person predisposed to any kind of wild overreaction.
Was it an overreaction?
Those dentists were probably really hot.
I'm sorry, but I'm not familiar with that part of YouPorn
The natural resonance of views like that should be between 8-15% of the population, max.
The fact it's now between 30-35% should be of grave concern to all, and an indication something is seriously wrong.
The most likely response is simply that a bigger proportion of the population simply gets written off as racist and quasi-fash, and everything continues precisely as before.
Before we make generalisations about the general population, what are the number for DKs/did not say?
Surely those are questions for which even 'don't know' should be an unacceptable response. I see no way to emiliorate or mitigate those numbers. The idea that a third of our citizens think it is acceptable to attack refugees to get the attention of polticians is mind blowing.
Can you not understand how it has happened? How we have reached this appalling state of affairs?
Britons have consistently voted for much much lower migration for decades, and it has never happened. No government has delivered it. The brexit vote itself was a cry of pain, from many, on this issue. And AGAIN it was ignored, indeed the stupid Tories TRIPLED immigration
All that plus the boats, and various integration problems, many of them horrendous
You and I both revile these answers, I cannot wrap my head around them, but they tell us we need - finally - to actually do what the public wants. Get migration down under 100,000. Stop the boats. We cannot wish this polling away with fainting fits
If you get migration down to under 100,000 then this country collapses. Do you not get this? The asylum seeker numbers are tiny compared to legal migration and the legal migration numbers are where they are because we NEED those people.
Whether they come from India or Poland, it doesn't matter. We NEED the immigration just to keep the country, and particularly our NHS and social care, running. If you want someone to wipe your arse in a decade when you are drooling in a bath chair then you, personally, NEED those immigrants. If you want someone to try and fix that alcohol raddled liver and deal with your terminal flatulance then you NEED those immigrants.
There are many things we and the politicians can do to improve integration - as I have said before, look at Norway - but we won't do them as long as we see immigration as a curse rather than a necessity and a benefit.
It’s not need. It’s choices.
80% of arse wipers in old age homes are U.K. born.
We chose not to educate 100% of the medical staff the NHS requires. The government mandates the number of places to educate and train doctors and nurses.
We chose to have an economy built on cheap labour. When, during COVID, the conditions in the Leicester garment trade were exposed, actual politicians said we can’t enforce health and safety or minimum wage without damaging the business.
We chose a taxation system that favours cheap labour over investment in productivity.
Choices, eh?
Im so old I can remember when the country aimed for a high wage high productivity economy.
That's never been more than a platitude. The politician is not yet born who would say the goal is a low wage low productivity economy.
Why do they need to say it ? It's what they have produced.
You seemed to be saying there were some good old days when we aimed for the fabled "high wage high skill" economy as opposed to now where we don't.
Yes.
Too many now consider pay rises a bad thing. That was not always the case.
Pay rises are a good thing if they are paid for by productivity increases. They are sharing the gains. But wage increases in the absence of increased productivity is simply inflationary. What troubles me at the moment is that productivity doesn't seem to feature in the public sector wage increases that are being handed out.
One begets the other though.
We have full employment, so supply and demand should see wages rising and the least efficient jobs that can not afford to pay for higher wages get culled as a result.
Simply adding more and more unskilled people in order to "fill the vacancies" won't do that, and will just create new jobs. Letting wages rise and the least productive jobs die will boost our productivity in and of itself - as well as then motivating employers to engage in automation.
Except we don't have full employment in reality. We have something like 9m people of working age who are not working. For some this is a choice because they have care responsibilities for the young or the old but for too many it seems to be almost giving up and persuading themselves that they can't.
I agree that we want better wages to incentivise those people back into the workforce. We need to widen the gap between a life on benefits and a life in work. We need to stop subsidising very low paid work with state benefits. Increasing the elasticity of the supply of labour, as we did with freedom of movement, accentuates all of these problems and removes the drive you describe to improve the productivity of labour.
Is it really better for society to have unpaid carers forced into the paid economy, to look after other people's children and old folks rather than their own families?
DavidL said: "Except we don't have full employment in reality. We have something like 9m people of working age who are not working."
In the US, we have a similar problem. Most of those not working are men, who have checked out of a productive life. Possibly a sore point: Is something similar happening in th UK?
(For the numbers check out Nicholas Eberstadt's Post-Pandemic Edition of "Men without Work".)
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
No it isn't.
Get a bloody grip.
Feels EXACTLY like that, to me. That is where we are headed
Thank God you're not a person predisposed to any kind of wild overreaction.
The correct reaction to the last month in Britain is, unfortunately, deep gloom and bleak pessimism, verging on despair. If anything I is bein' a bit too cheery
Hilariously Humza Yousaf is still trying to harangue Musk and Musk is now threatening to reveal private messages by Yousaf which show him to be an “even greater racist in private”
So there is some entertainment as the entire nation collapses
I've just carried out some private polling, as follows:
You are obliged to punch somebody in the face - you have no choice. But you can choose whether to punch: a) a random refugee, or b) Nigel Farage. What's your choice?
99.4% said b).
Even joking about violence towards either groups (refugees and politicians) is pretty low.
Not nearly as low as trying to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers and staff. At least mine was a joke, clearly.
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
No it isn't.
Get a bloody grip.
Feels EXACTLY like that, to me. That is where we are headed
Thank God you're not a person predisposed to any kind of wild overreaction.
The correct reaction to the last month in Britain is, unfortunately, deep gloom and bleak pessimism, verging on despair. If anything I is bein' a bit too cheery
Characteristic bollocks from you, as normal.
We have seen in the past month an horrific crime, to which the attacker was arrested and charged - and a once-a-decade riot that has seen rioters get arrested and go to jail. Just like in 2011.
Nothing pessimistic about that, just part and parcel of living in a free society that sometimes crime happens and the criminal justice system has to do its job.
Meanwhile for the rest of the population life goes on, the Olympics have been entertaining, Britain has won lots of medals - and oh yes, did I mention that life goes on?
Enjoy the last of the summer weather, because before long it will be autumn and then we'll be heading towards Christmas, with life still going on and these summer riots behind us once more.
DavidL said: "Except we don't have full employment in reality. We have something like 9m people of working age who are not working."
In the US, we have a similar problem. Most of those not working are men, who have checked out of a productive life. Possibly a sore point: Is something similar happening in th UK?
(For the numbers check out Nicholas Eberstadt's Post-Pandemic Edition of "Men without Work".)
No, employment rate for men in the UK in May 2024 was 77.1% for men, 71.7% for women.
These are pretty close to all time highs. We are only beaten by the Dutch, the Germans, New Zealand, Japan and Scandinavia.
DavidL said: "Except we don't have full employment in reality. We have something like 9m people of working age who are not working."
In the US, we have a similar problem. Most of those not working are men, who have checked out of a productive life. Possibly a sore point: Is something similar happening in th UK?
(For the numbers check out Nicholas Eberstadt's Post-Pandemic Edition of "Men without Work".)
Yes, and it has been much more marked or noticed since Covid. A lot of it seems to be connected with chronic conditions that get worse as the delays for treatment grow ever longer but I also wonder if there were a lot of people who had really boring jobs that they would have carried on if their lives had not been disrupted by Covid close downs and really can't face going back.
Hilariously Humza Yousaf is still trying to harangue Musk and Musk is now threatening to reveal private messages by Yousaf which show him to be an “even greater racist in private”
So there is some entertainment as the entire nation collapses
I think if Musk does that, then twitter is dead. His somewhat cra-cra lawsuits over the past couple of weeks have been odd enough - but if ever politician, celeb, journalist and regular pleb think their DM's are fair game to him, then I think it's all over.
DavidL said: "Except we don't have full employment in reality. We have something like 9m people of working age who are not working."
In the US, we have a similar problem. Most of those not working are men, who have checked out of a productive life. Possibly a sore point: Is something similar happening in th UK?
(For the numbers check out Nicholas Eberstadt's Post-Pandemic Edition of "Men without Work".)
Yes, and it has been much more marked or noticed since Covid. A lot of it seems to be connected with chronic conditions that get worse as the delays for treatment grow ever longer but I also wonder if there were a lot of people who had really boring jobs that they would have carried on if their lives had not been disrupted by Covid close downs and really can't face going back.
So those who do actually work for a living getting a pay rise for working is a good thing, then, is it not?
The natural resonance of views like that should be between 8-15% of the population, max.
The fact it's now between 30-35% should be of grave concern to all, and an indication something is seriously wrong.
The most likely response is simply that a bigger proportion of the population simply gets written off as racist and quasi-fash, and everything continues precisely as before.
Before we make generalisations about the general population, what are the number for DKs/did not say?
Surely those are questions for which even 'don't know' should be an unacceptable response. I see no way to emiliorate or mitigate those numbers. The idea that a third of our citizens think it is acceptable to attack refugees to get the attention of polticians is mind blowing.
Can you not understand how it has happened? How we have reached this appalling state of affairs?
Britons have consistently voted for much much lower migration for decades, and it has never happened. No government has delivered it. The brexit vote itself was a cry of pain, from many, on this issue. And AGAIN it was ignored, indeed the stupid Tories TRIPLED immigration
All that plus the boats, and various integration problems, many of them horrendous
You and I both revile these answers, I cannot wrap my head around them, but they tell us we need - finally - to actually do what the public wants. Get migration down under 100,000. Stop the boats. We cannot wish this polling away with fainting fits
If you get migration down to under 100,000 then this country collapses. Do you not get this? The asylum seeker numbers are tiny compared to legal migration and the legal migration numbers are where they are because we NEED those people.
Whether they come from India or Poland, it doesn't matter. We NEED the immigration just to keep the country, and particularly our NHS and social care, running. If you want someone to wipe your arse in a decade when you are drooling in a bath chair then you, personally, NEED those immigrants. If you want someone to try and fix that alcohol raddled liver and deal with your terminal flatulance then you NEED those immigrants.
There are many things we and the politicians can do to improve integration - as I have said before, look at Norway - but we won't do them as long as we see immigration as a curse rather than a necessity and a benefit.
It’s not need. It’s choices.
80% of arse wipers in old age homes are U.K. born.
We chose not to educate 100% of the medical staff the NHS requires. The government mandates the number of places to educate and train doctors and nurses.
We chose to have an economy built on cheap labour. When, during COVID, the conditions in the Leicester garment trade were exposed, actual politicians said we can’t enforce health and safety or minimum wage without damaging the business.
We chose a taxation system that favours cheap labour over investment in productivity.
Choices, eh?
Im so old I can remember when the country aimed for a high wage high productivity economy.
That's never been more than a platitude. The politician is not yet born who would say the goal is a low wage low productivity economy.
Why do they need to say it ? It's what they have produced.
You seemed to be saying there were some good old days when we aimed for the fabled "high wage high skill" economy as opposed to now where we don't.
Yes.
Too many now consider pay rises a bad thing. That was not always the case.
Pay rises are a good thing if they are paid for by productivity increases. They are sharing the gains. But wage increases in the absence of increased productivity is simply inflationary. What troubles me at the moment is that productivity doesn't seem to feature in the public sector wage increases that are being handed out.
One begets the other though.
We have full employment, so supply and demand should see wages rising and the least efficient jobs that can not afford to pay for higher wages get culled as a result.
Simply adding more and more unskilled people in order to "fill the vacancies" won't do that, and will just create new jobs. Letting wages rise and the least productive jobs die will boost our productivity in and of itself - as well as then motivating employers to engage in automation.
Except we don't have full employment in reality. We have something like 9m people of working age who are not working. For some this is a choice because they have care responsibilities for the young or the old but for too many it seems to be almost giving up and persuading themselves that they can't.
I agree that we want better wages to incentivise those people back into the workforce. We need to widen the gap between a life on benefits and a life in work. We need to stop subsidising very low paid work with state benefits. Increasing the elasticity of the supply of labour, as we did with freedom of movement, accentuates all of these problems and removes the drive you describe to improve the productivity of labour.
Is it really better for society to have unpaid carers forced into the paid economy, to look after other people's children and old folks rather than their own families?
Incentivised does not equal forced.
Like all things there is a balance to be struck.
Incentivised sounds a lot like forced in this context.
The natural resonance of views like that should be between 8-15% of the population, max.
The fact it's now between 30-35% should be of grave concern to all, and an indication something is seriously wrong.
The most likely response is simply that a bigger proportion of the population simply gets written off as racist and quasi-fash, and everything continues precisely as before.
Before we make generalisations about the general population, what are the number for DKs/did not say?
Surely those are questions for which even 'don't know' should be an unacceptable response. I see no way to emiliorate or mitigate those numbers. The idea that a third of our citizens think it is acceptable to attack refugees to get the attention of polticians is mind blowing.
Can you not understand how it has happened? How we have reached this appalling state of affairs?
Britons have consistently voted for much much lower migration for decades, and it has never happened. No government has delivered it. The brexit vote itself was a cry of pain, from many, on this issue. And AGAIN it was ignored, indeed the stupid Tories TRIPLED immigration
All that plus the boats, and various integration problems, many of them horrendous
You and I both revile these answers, I cannot wrap my head around them, but they tell us we need - finally - to actually do what the public wants. Get migration down under 100,000. Stop the boats. We cannot wish this polling away with fainting fits
If you get migration down to under 100,000 then this country collapses. Do you not get this? The asylum seeker numbers are tiny compared to legal migration and the legal migration numbers are where they are because we NEED those people.
Whether they come from India or Poland, it doesn't matter. We NEED the immigration just to keep the country, and particularly our NHS and social care, running. If you want someone to wipe your arse in a decade when you are drooling in a bath chair then you, personally, NEED those immigrants. If you want someone to try and fix that alcohol raddled liver and deal with your terminal flatulance then you NEED those immigrants.
There are many things we and the politicians can do to improve integration - as I have said before, look at Norway - but we won't do them as long as we see immigration as a curse rather than a necessity and a benefit.
It’s not need. It’s choices.
80% of arse wipers in old age homes are U.K. born.
We chose not to educate 100% of the medical staff the NHS requires. The government mandates the number of places to educate and train doctors and nurses.
We chose to have an economy built on cheap labour. When, during COVID, the conditions in the Leicester garment trade were exposed, actual politicians said we can’t enforce health and safety or minimum wage without damaging the business.
We chose a taxation system that favours cheap labour over investment in productivity.
Choices, eh?
Im so old I can remember when the country aimed for a high wage high productivity economy.
That's never been more than a platitude. The politician is not yet born who would say the goal is a low wage low productivity economy.
Why do they need to say it ? It's what they have produced.
You seemed to be saying there were some good old days when we aimed for the fabled "high wage high skill" economy as opposed to now where we don't.
Yes.
Too many now consider pay rises a bad thing. That was not always the case.
Pay rises are a good thing if they are paid for by productivity increases. They are sharing the gains. But wage increases in the absence of increased productivity is simply inflationary. What troubles me at the moment is that productivity doesn't seem to feature in the public sector wage increases that are being handed out.
One begets the other though.
We have full employment, so supply and demand should see wages rising and the least efficient jobs that can not afford to pay for higher wages get culled as a result.
Simply adding more and more unskilled people in order to "fill the vacancies" won't do that, and will just create new jobs. Letting wages rise and the least productive jobs die will boost our productivity in and of itself - as well as then motivating employers to engage in automation.
Except we don't have full employment in reality. We have something like 9m people of working age who are not working. For some this is a choice because they have care responsibilities for the young or the old but for too many it seems to be almost giving up and persuading themselves that they can't.
I agree that we want better wages to incentivise those people back into the workforce. We need to widen the gap between a life on benefits and a life in work. We need to stop subsidising very low paid work with state benefits. Increasing the elasticity of the supply of labour, as we did with freedom of movement, accentuates all of these problems and removes the drive you describe to improve the productivity of labour.
Is it really better for society to have unpaid carers forced into the paid economy, to look after other people's children and old folks rather than their own families?
Incentivised does not equal forced.
Like all things there is a balance to be struck.
Incentivised sounds a lot like forced in this context.
Not if widening the gap between work and benefits comes from paying more for working.
DavidL said: "Except we don't have full employment in reality. We have something like 9m people of working age who are not working."
In the US, we have a similar problem. Most of those not working are men, who have checked out of a productive life. Possibly a sore point: Is something similar happening in th UK?
(For the numbers check out Nicholas Eberstadt's Post-Pandemic Edition of "Men without Work".)
Yes, and it has been much more marked or noticed since Covid. A lot of it seems to be connected with chronic conditions that get worse as the delays for treatment grow ever longer but I also wonder if there were a lot of people who had really boring jobs that they would have carried on if their lives had not been disrupted by Covid close downs and really can't face going back.
I've certainly noticed a fair few of my managerial layers basically doing a 'tune in, drop out' since the pandemic. Some who just spent the lockdowns pottering about in the garden and realising it had more personal value to them than updating Gantt charts and Planners, some who have been over-ruled by post-lockdown 'professional management' brought in (at great expense and zero gain) and just think "f*ck it".
Hilariously Humza Yousaf is still trying to harangue Musk and Musk is now threatening to reveal private messages by Yousaf which show him to be an “even greater racist in private”
So there is some entertainment as the entire nation collapses
I think if Musk does that, then twitter is dead. His somewhat cra-cra lawsuits over the past couple of weeks have been odd enough - but if ever politician, celeb, journalist and regular pleb think their DM's are fair game to him, then I think it's all over.
All platforms will eventually die and at that point their only value will be the private message database, which will be sold. So if you want to send a message privately, you should only do it on a platform with end-to-end encryption. Anything in a database owned by a corporation will leak.
People will learn this eventually, if their governments don't ban end-to-end encryption first.
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
No it isn't.
Get a bloody grip.
Feels EXACTLY like that, to me. That is where we are headed
Thank God you're not a person predisposed to any kind of wild overreaction.
The correct reaction to the last month in Britain is, unfortunately, deep gloom and bleak pessimism, verging on despair. If anything I is bein' a bit too cheery
Characteristic bollocks from you, as normal.
We have seen in the past month an horrific crime, to which the attacker was arrested and charged - and a once-a-decade riot that has seen rioters get arrested and go to jail. Just like in 2011.
Nothing pessimistic about that, just part and parcel of living in a free society that sometimes crime happens and the criminal justice system has to do its job.
Meanwhile for the rest of the population life goes on, the Olympics have been entertaining, Britain has won lots of medals - and oh yes, did I mention that life goes on?
Enjoy the last of the summer weather, because before long it will be autumn and then we'll be heading towards Christmas, with life still going on and these summer riots behind us once more.
A lot of people still don’t seem to have adjusted to the fact that we have a new government. They might think it’s crap, and ignoring the problems that they diagnose (which is an attitude not exactly alien to me too, on occasion), but they need to recognise their views are, for the time being, close to irrelevant.
That will change in time, but for now Starmer, with his Parliamentary majority, gets to try what he thinks he needs to do. And Leon’s take on that, along with mine, isn’t going to make any difference.
Hilariously Humza Yousaf is still trying to harangue Musk and Musk is now threatening to reveal private messages by Yousaf which show him to be an “even greater racist in private”
So there is some entertainment as the entire nation collapses
I think if Musk does that, then twitter is dead. His somewhat cra-cra lawsuits over the past couple of weeks have been odd enough - but if ever politician, celeb, journalist and regular pleb think their DM's are fair game to him, then I think it's all over.
All platforms will eventually die and at that point their only value will be the private message database, which will be sold. So if you want to send a message privately, you should only do it on a platform with end-to-end encryption. Anything in a database owned by a corporation will leak.
People will learn this eventually, if their governments don't ban end-to-end encryption first.
Thank goodness the UK government of various hues has never tried to do that!
For the sake of the /(children|freedom|democracy|oh-what-a-give-away)/!
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
No it isn't.
Get a bloody grip.
Feels EXACTLY like that, to me. That is where we are headed
Thank God you're not a person predisposed to any kind of wild overreaction.
The correct reaction to the last month in Britain is, unfortunately, deep gloom and bleak pessimism, verging on despair. If anything I is bein' a bit too cheery
Characteristic bollocks from you, as normal.
We have seen in the past month an horrific crime, to which the attacker was arrested and charged - and a once-a-decade riot that has seen rioters get arrested and go to jail. Just like in 2011.
Nothing pessimistic about that, just part and parcel of living in a free society that sometimes crime happens and the criminal justice system has to do its job.
Meanwhile for the rest of the population life goes on, the Olympics have been entertaining, Britain has won lots of medals - and oh yes, did I mention that life goes on?
Enjoy the last of the summer weather, because before long it will be autumn and then we'll be heading towards Christmas, with life still going on and these summer riots behind us once more.
A lot of people still don’t seem to have adjusted to the fact that we have a new government. They might think it’s crap, and ignoring the problems that they diagnose (which is an attitude not exactly alien to me too, on occasion), but they need to recognise their views are, for the time being, close to irrelevant.
That will change in time, but for now Starmer, with his Parliamentary majority, gets to try what he thinks he needs to do. And Leon’s take on that, along with mine, isn’t going to make any difference.
What is the point of this comment?
Do I expect my pungent critique of Starmer to topple the government? No. Do I think Labour are already showing signs of utter incompetence mixed with Wokeness plus a total inability to address issues of migration/asylum which will probably wreck them in the end? Yes
I’m stating that political opinion. That’s what we do on here
Hilariously Humza Yousaf is still trying to harangue Musk and Musk is now threatening to reveal private messages by Yousaf which show him to be an “even greater racist in private”
So there is some entertainment as the entire nation collapses
I think if Musk does that, then twitter is dead. His somewhat cra-cra lawsuits over the past couple of weeks have been odd enough - but if ever politician, celeb, journalist and regular pleb think their DM's are fair game to him, then I think it's all over.
A very fair point. I suspect Musk knows this and he’s simply goading Yousaf
Hilariously Humza Yousaf is still trying to harangue Musk and Musk is now threatening to reveal private messages by Yousaf which show him to be an “even greater racist in private”
So there is some entertainment as the entire nation collapses
Strangely I don't find this hilarious at all. But you did tell me I was the most boring person on this site. That must be why.
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
It's not depressingly accurate though.
We don't have China like censorship. We have rules against incitement of mob violence.
Chinese social media is a cesspit. I doubt it's any better than X/Twitter.
But its a cesspit of right think not wrong think
A Chinese colleague, at work, showed me some of the staggering racism that is prevalent on Chinese social media.
EDIT: very unsurprisingly, the Chinese state doesn't seem to have any problem with pronounced Islamaphobia.
The definition of rightthink there was as approved by the chinese state
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
No it isn't.
Get a bloody grip.
Feels EXACTLY like that, to me. That is where we are headed
Thank God you're not a person predisposed to any kind of wild overreaction.
The correct reaction to the last month in Britain is, unfortunately, deep gloom and bleak pessimism, verging on despair. If anything I is bein' a bit too cheery
Characteristic bollocks from you, as normal.
We have seen in the past month an horrific crime, to which the attacker was arrested and charged - and a once-a-decade riot that has seen rioters get arrested and go to jail. Just like in 2011.
Nothing pessimistic about that, just part and parcel of living in a free society that sometimes crime happens and the criminal justice system has to do its job.
Meanwhile for the rest of the population life goes on, the Olympics have been entertaining, Britain has won lots of medals - and oh yes, did I mention that life goes on?
Enjoy the last of the summer weather, because before long it will be autumn and then we'll be heading towards Christmas, with life still going on and these summer riots behind us once more.
A lot of people still don’t seem to have adjusted to the fact that we have a new government. They might think it’s crap, and ignoring the problems that they diagnose (which is an attitude not exactly alien to me too, on occasion), but they need to recognise their views are, for the time being, close to irrelevant.
That will change in time, but for now Starmer, with his Parliamentary majority, gets to try what he thinks he needs to do. And Leon’s take on that, along with mine, isn’t going to make any difference.
What is the point of this comment?
Do I expect my pungent critique of Starmer to topple the government? No. Do I think Labour are already showing signs of utter incompetence mixed with Wokeness plus a total inability to address issues of migration/asylum which will probably wreck them in the end? Yes
I’m stating that political opinion. That’s what we do on here
It’s not just you. The pontificating earlier on tonight was just railing at the moon.
Hilariously Humza Yousaf is still trying to harangue Musk and Musk is now threatening to reveal private messages by Yousaf which show him to be an “even greater racist in private”
So there is some entertainment as the entire nation collapses
I think if Musk does that, then twitter is dead. His somewhat cra-cra lawsuits over the past couple of weeks have been odd enough - but if ever politician, celeb, journalist and regular pleb think their DM's are fair game to him, then I think it's all over.
A very fair point. I suspect Musk knows this and he’s simply goading Yousaf
Of all the people on planet Earth to goad - you'd think he'd be quite far down the list. "Who shall I troll:? Of all the failed leaders... Hrmmm... Let's go with the very dull & sub-par version of Liz Truss that even fewer people have heard of!"
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
No it isn't.
Get a bloody grip.
Feels EXACTLY like that, to me. That is where we are headed
Thank God you're not a person predisposed to any kind of wild overreaction.
Was it an overreaction?
Those dentists were probably really hot.
I'm sorry, but I'm not familiar with that part of YouPorn
I suppose the difference is you tell the dentist to "open wide".
Hilariously Humza Yousaf is still trying to harangue Musk and Musk is now threatening to reveal private messages by Yousaf which show him to be an “even greater racist in private”
So there is some entertainment as the entire nation collapses
I think if Musk does that, then twitter is dead. His somewhat cra-cra lawsuits over the past couple of weeks have been odd enough - but if ever politician, celeb, journalist and regular pleb think their DM's are fair game to him, then I think it's all over.
All platforms will eventually die and at that point their only value will be the private message database, which will be sold. So if you want to send a message privately, you should only do it on a platform with end-to-end encryption. Anything in a database owned by a corporation will leak.
People will learn this eventually, if their governments don't ban end-to-end encryption first.
I have the somewhat fatalistic assumption that any data that is entered onto a computer/recorded on any device has a non-negligible (even reasonable?) chance of ending up on the dark web, at some point.
Having never looked at the dark web, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but still the fear is there. And the future of tech points that way. And the incentives are real.
Hilariously Humza Yousaf is still trying to harangue Musk and Musk is now threatening to reveal private messages by Yousaf which show him to be an “even greater racist in private”
So there is some entertainment as the entire nation collapses
I think if Musk does that, then twitter is dead. His somewhat cra-cra lawsuits over the past couple of weeks have been odd enough - but if ever politician, celeb, journalist and regular pleb think their DM's are fair game to him, then I think it's all over.
A very fair point. I suspect Musk knows this and he’s simply goading Yousaf
Of all the people on planet Earth to goad - you'd think he'd be quite far down the list. "Who shall I troll:? Of all the failed leaders... Hrmmm... Let's go with the very dull & sub-par version of Liz Truss that even fewer people have heard of!"
Musk has had a beef with Yousaf ever since he found the notorious “whyte” speech a couple of years ago
Hilariously Humza Yousaf is still trying to harangue Musk and Musk is now threatening to reveal private messages by Yousaf which show him to be an “even greater racist in private”
So there is some entertainment as the entire nation collapses
I think if Musk does that, then twitter is dead. His somewhat cra-cra lawsuits over the past couple of weeks have been odd enough - but if ever politician, celeb, journalist and regular pleb think their DM's are fair game to him, then I think it's all over.
A very fair point. I suspect Musk knows this and he’s simply goading Yousaf
Of all the people on planet Earth to goad - you'd think he'd be quite far down the list. "Who shall I troll:? Of all the failed leaders... Hrmmm... Let's go with the very dull & sub-par version of Liz Truss that even fewer people have heard of!"
I wonder what it is about a brown skinned Muslim with some woke tendencies that attracted the attention of Musk compared to say Truss?
A friend visiting London has had their phone snatched. The phone is at a hotel six minutes walk from a police station, and the thief is using it to order delivery food, make trips on Uber, etc. He will absolutely be on CCTV.
The police have decided its not worth following up."
A friend visiting London has had their phone snatched. The phone is at a hotel six minutes walk from a police station, and the thief is using it to order delivery food, make trips on Uber, etc. He will absolutely be on CCTV.
The police have decided its not worth following up."
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
No it isn't.
Get a bloody grip.
Feels EXACTLY like that, to me. That is where we are headed
Thank God you're not a person predisposed to any kind of wild overreaction.
The correct reaction to the last month in Britain is, unfortunately, deep gloom and bleak pessimism, verging on despair. If anything I is bein' a bit too cheery
Characteristic bollocks from you, as normal.
We have seen in the past month an horrific crime, to which the attacker was arrested and charged - and a once-a-decade riot that has seen rioters get arrested and go to jail. Just like in 2011.
Nothing pessimistic about that, just part and parcel of living in a free society that sometimes crime happens and the criminal justice system has to do its job.
Meanwhile for the rest of the population life goes on, the Olympics have been entertaining, Britain has won lots of medals - and oh yes, did I mention that life goes on?
Enjoy the last of the summer weather, because before long it will be autumn and then we'll be heading towards Christmas, with life still going on and these summer riots behind us once more.
A lot of people still don’t seem to have adjusted to the fact that we have a new government. They might think it’s crap, and ignoring the problems that they diagnose (which is an attitude not exactly alien to me too, on occasion), but they need to recognise their views are, for the time being, close to irrelevant.
That will change in time, but for now Starmer, with his Parliamentary majority, gets to try what he thinks he needs to do. And Leon’s take on that, along with mine, isn’t going to make any difference.
What is the point of this comment?
Do I expect my pungent critique of Starmer to topple the government? No. Do I think Labour are already showing signs of utter incompetence mixed with Wokeness plus a total inability to address issues of migration/asylum which will probably wreck them in the end? Yes
I’m stating that political opinion. That’s what we do on here
The public are more sensible than we give them credit for. Most people rightly accept that at the moment any problems with migration and asylum are bugger all to do with the new administration. That will and should change as time goes on though.
Hilariously Humza Yousaf is still trying to harangue Musk and Musk is now threatening to reveal private messages by Yousaf which show him to be an “even greater racist in private”
So there is some entertainment as the entire nation collapses
I think if Musk does that, then twitter is dead. His somewhat cra-cra lawsuits over the past couple of weeks have been odd enough - but if ever politician, celeb, journalist and regular pleb think their DM's are fair game to him, then I think it's all over.
All platforms will eventually die and at that point their only value will be the private message database, which will be sold. So if you want to send a message privately, you should only do it on a platform with end-to-end encryption. Anything in a database owned by a corporation will leak.
People will learn this eventually, if their governments don't ban end-to-end encryption first.
I have the somewhat fatalistic assumption that any data that is entered onto a computer/recorded on any device has a non-negligible (even reasonable?) chance of ending up on the dark web, at some point.
Having never looked at the dark web, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but still the fear is there. And the future of tech points that way. And the incentives are real.
Reassure me, EiT.....?
No, I mean you're not really wrong. The dark web isn't exactly the problem; It just refers to a bunch of websites that are set up for anonymity, which is useful if you want to do something illegal, but also if you want privacy for any other purpose. If you want to illegally sell data you'd do that on the dark web where it's hard to trace you, but someone could also leak your data without anonymity, for example Elon Musk.
To leak your data they first have to get it. Somebody can get your data if 1) They get hold of your device 2) They have some software running on your device and stealing the data 3) You send your data to someone else via a third-party and the third-party leaks it 4) You send your data to someone else and that person leaks it by (1), (2), or (3)
It's really hard to be confident you're not going to fall victim to (2). There is just masses of software on a typical PC or phone, much of it is very bad, and just one mistake in the wrong place can let someone get at your data. This is particularly true if your adversary is a government agency, because they may have the ability to make whoever you get your software from send you bad software on purpose. If a government agency has your data they'll probably eventually leak it by accident as well. You can reduce the probability of this happening to you by normal IT security stuff like making sure you're getting updates and not installing weird stuff, but you can't get it to zero.
One that you should be able to control is (3). Hopefully in future all the popular software you'd normally use will have end-to-end encryption as standard, but right now almost nothing does. A good choice, which just got banned in Russia for being a good choice, is Signal.
A friend visiting London has had their phone snatched. The phone is at a hotel six minutes walk from a police station, and the thief is using it to order delivery food, make trips on Uber, etc. He will absolutely be on CCTV.
The police have decided its not worth following up."
I'm surprised. That the police didn't charge them with wasting their time by making a report, thus adding a crime to the records to make them look bad.
A friend visiting London has had their phone snatched. The phone is at a hotel six minutes walk from a police station, and the thief is using it to order delivery food, make trips on Uber, etc. He will absolutely be on CCTV.
The police have decided its not worth following up."
An entirely different person in a very similar mood
“For me it’s the government taking half the wages of my 9 hour day to subsidise zone 1 housing for the lime bike bandits that just tried to steal my phone for second time in two months & if I tweet accurately about who they or what should be done I risk going to prison”
A depressingly accurate TwiX description of the Britain that awaits us
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
No it isn't.
Get a bloody grip.
Feels EXACTLY like that, to me. That is where we are headed
Thank God you're not a person predisposed to any kind of wild overreaction.
The correct reaction to the last month in Britain is, unfortunately, deep gloom and bleak pessimism, verging on despair. If anything I is bein' a bit too cheery
Characteristic bollocks from you, as normal.
We have seen in the past month an horrific crime, to which the attacker was arrested and charged - and a once-a-decade riot that has seen rioters get arrested and go to jail. Just like in 2011.
Nothing pessimistic about that, just part and parcel of living in a free society that sometimes crime happens and the criminal justice system has to do its job.
Meanwhile for the rest of the population life goes on, the Olympics have been entertaining, Britain has won lots of medals - and oh yes, did I mention that life goes on?
Enjoy the last of the summer weather, because before long it will be autumn and then we'll be heading towards Christmas, with life still going on and these summer riots behind us once more.
A lot of people still don’t seem to have adjusted to the fact that we have a new government. They might think it’s crap, and ignoring the problems that they diagnose (which is an attitude not exactly alien to me too, on occasion), but they need to recognise their views are, for the time being, close to irrelevant.
That will change in time, but for now Starmer, with his Parliamentary majority, gets to try what he thinks he needs to do. And Leon’s take on that, along with mine, isn’t going to make any difference.
What is the point of this comment?
Do I expect my pungent critique of Starmer to topple the government? No. Do I think Labour are already showing signs of utter incompetence mixed with Wokeness plus a total inability to address issues of migration/asylum which will probably wreck them in the end? Yes
I’m stating that political opinion. That’s what we do on here
The public are more sensible than we give them credit for. Most people rightly accept that at the moment any problems with migration and asylum are bugger all to do with the new administration. That will and should change as time goes on though.
Comments
Here’s one asking which Presidential candidate is weird.
https://x.com/keithboykin/status/1823027604930379780
We have full employment, so supply and demand should see wages rising and the least efficient jobs that can not afford to pay for higher wages get culled as a result.
Simply adding more and more unskilled people in order to "fill the vacancies" won't do that, and will just create new jobs. Letting wages rise and the least productive jobs die will boost our productivity in and of itself - as well as then motivating employers to engage in automation.
But these fell out of fashion. The New Plan was everyone would go to uni and everyone would have a high powered job at Goldman Sachs. The factories would all be automated. See the Economist in about 1988.
The breakdown of the class and financial barriers between The Professions and the flat ‘at world came just as the polys and unis merged.
So now we have a world where a plumber earns more than many graduates. What we have a vast demand for is a hybrid - working with hands but with skills. Think CNC operator vs old style lathe work. Which is exactly what we don’t teach or train.
Instead we have people getting degrees to do jobs which weren’t degree credentialed very long ago. At high cost to them.
That 55% to 39% say that Trump is weird in AZ, GA, MI, NC, PA and WI is pretty damning for Trump.
https://x.com/katherineschof8/status/1823044334108774655
Prof Katherine Schofield 🇬🇧🇦🇺
@katherineschof8
·
4h
Crucial reminder to A Level students & parents:
If you don’t get the grades you were expecting contact your first choice university immediately.
This year they are VERY LIKELY to take you anyway.
Don’t be discouraged! It’s an excellent year for student choice.
Good luck all!
Basically grabbing every penny they can to delay the inevitable final outcome..
Lots of social care is paid for by councils, which bore the brunt of post-2010 cuts, and many of which are in financial difficulty. So they're going to commission the care they have to pay for by law on the cheap. Which will mean it generally comes from contractors who don't pay well so they can win a contract by lowballing the costs. So if you want to make care an attractive permanent career we probably have to pay a bit more in tax.
Similarly, if you want fewer foreign students here then either we let a load of universities go under and significantly cut places, we put up tuition fees, or we provide funds from central government.
Or whisper it quietly, but being in the EU and having free movement may have helped keep immigration numbers lower (after an initial influx in 2004) than are now as people who can come and go to work as they pleased from Europe tended to move back.
Now, a problem we have is that politicians have long echoed voters' overall sentiments - which broadly want to cut immigration. Without being honest about the ways you'd do that, what they'd mean, why you might want to differ, and offering that choice. So you end up in the ludicrous situation whereby the Tories get a reputation for being thoroughly beastly to immigrants, while trebling immigration.
If you want to seriously cut immigration you can, but it's probably by rejigging our economy and social sphere so it's less dependent on it being able to plug gaps, rather than blood and thunder statements about sending boats (a small proportion of overall numbers, if one that causes outsized difficulties) back.
"They're going to have China style censorship without any of the perks like fast trains, shiny skyscrapers, and a safe society relatively free of violent crime lol."
https://x.com/AntiToxicPeople/status/1823055951811031372
1) Red Kites in the Chilterns on the M40. I've done this journey periodically over the last 15 years - they appear to be much more widely spread than in previous years; there was a good 10 mile gap between the first and last ones I saw.
2) Seeing some hills: after a week in the low countries, Kent looked Alpine. My goodness this country is beautiful.
3) The sunset - which conveniently timed itself to arrive just as I arrived at the start of home home i.e. where Staffordshire runs into Cheshire. It was a symphony: pale blues and plums and pinks and peaches and purples and gold and fire; and it went on for the rest of the journey home. I was mesmerised. It seemed a pity to have to turn away from it at Junction 19, but it was still there in the west when we turned onto the M60.
It wasn't all idyllic of course. One daughter had to hild a tissue under another's nose to stem a nose bleed in the back seat, and there was cat sick all over the landing when we got home. But still. Good to be back.
Its just that the racists lost the last election, they didn't win it.
We don't have China like censorship. We have rules against incitement of mob violence.
I agree that we want better wages to incentivise those people back into the workforce. We need to widen the gap between a life on benefits and a life in work. We need to stop subsidising very low paid work with state benefits. Increasing the elasticity of the supply of labour, as we did with freedom of movement, accentuates all of these problems and removes the drive you describe to improve the productivity of labour.
Get a bloody grip.
It's on a bit of slope of an escarpment, so I think generates an updraft for them.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c990yn1xkxmo
"At Plymouth Crown Court, a man who grabbed a police officer's baton and ran off with it was jailed for three years. Guy Sullivan, 43, of New George Street, Plymouth, admitted a charge of violent disorder relating to the violence in the city on 5 August. The court heard a lone officer had been using his baton to push back protesters around him, when Sullivan came behind the officer and grabbed the baton out of his hands."
Better than freezing wages while benefits go up.
For too long lately pay rises have been considered a bad thing, not a good one.
You are obliged to punch somebody in the face - you have no choice. But you can choose whether to punch:
a) a random refugee, or
b) Nigel Farage.
What's your choice?
99.4% said b).
EDIT: very unsurprisingly, the Chinese state doesn't seem to have any problem with pronounced Islamaphobia.
The Universities got the results yesterday, and will get the second choices tomorrow, so will know how many places are filled by Thursday when the candidates get their results.
Those dentists were probably really hot.
...
I think that's how it works.
Like all things there is a balance to be struck.
In the US, we have a similar problem. Most of those not working are men, who have checked out of a productive life. Possibly a sore point: Is something similar happening in th UK?
(For the numbers check out Nicholas Eberstadt's Post-Pandemic Edition of "Men without Work".)
Can I suggest a little lie down?
So there is some entertainment as the entire nation collapses
At least mine was a joke, clearly.
We have seen in the past month an horrific crime, to which the attacker was arrested and charged - and a once-a-decade riot that has seen rioters get arrested and go to jail. Just like in 2011.
Nothing pessimistic about that, just part and parcel of living in a free society that sometimes crime happens and the criminal justice system has to do its job.
Meanwhile for the rest of the population life goes on, the Olympics have been entertaining, Britain has won lots of medals - and oh yes, did I mention that life goes on?
Enjoy the last of the summer weather, because before long it will be autumn and then we'll be heading towards Christmas, with life still going on and these summer riots behind us once more.
These are pretty close to all time highs. We are only beaten by the Dutch, the Germans, New Zealand, Japan and Scandinavia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_employment_rate
"UK police commissioner threatens to extradite, jail US citizens over online posts: ‘We’ll come after you’"
https://nypost.com/2024/08/10/media/uk-police-commissioner-threatens-to-extradite-jail-us-citizens-over-online-posts-well-come-after-you/
People will learn this eventually, if their governments don't ban end-to-end encryption first.
They might think it’s crap, and ignoring the problems that they diagnose (which is an attitude not exactly alien to me too, on occasion), but they need to recognise their views are, for the time being, close to irrelevant.
That will change in time, but for now Starmer, with his Parliamentary majority, gets to try what he thinks he needs to do. And Leon’s take on that, along with mine, isn’t going to make any difference.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/survey-results/daily/2024/08/12/2112e/1
For the sake of the /(children|freedom|democracy|oh-what-a-give-away)/!
Do I expect my pungent critique of Starmer to topple the government? No. Do I think Labour are already showing signs of utter incompetence mixed with Wokeness plus a total inability to address issues of migration/asylum which will probably wreck them in the end? Yes
I’m stating that political opinion. That’s what we do on here
The pontificating earlier on tonight was just railing at the moon.
On a brighter note, this is quite charming.
https://x.com/positivesideofx/status/1822729137661919255
Having never looked at the dark web, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but still the fear is there. And the future of tech points that way. And the incentives are real.
Reassure me, EiT.....?
https://x.com/MeidasTouch/status/1823103114700083625
The Miami Herald confirms that Donald Trump has in fact been using Jeffrey Epstein's plane to campaign since his plane experienced troubles.
"Sam Ashworth-Hayes
@SAshworthHayes
A friend visiting London has had their phone snatched. The phone is at a hotel six minutes walk from a police station, and the thief is using it to order delivery food, make trips on Uber, etc. He will absolutely be on CCTV.
The police have decided its not worth following up."
https://x.com/SAshworthHayes/status/1823003707174212081
Jenrick 9
Tugendhat 5
Stride 5
Badenoch 5
Cleverly 4
Patel 4
https://conservativehome.com/2024/08/12/next-tory-leader-which-mp-is-backing-whom-cleverly-surges-ahead-to-two-supporters/
To leak your data they first have to get it. Somebody can get your data if
1) They get hold of your device
2) They have some software running on your device and stealing the data
3) You send your data to someone else via a third-party and the third-party leaks it
4) You send your data to someone else and that person leaks it by (1), (2), or (3)
It's really hard to be confident you're not going to fall victim to (2). There is just masses of software on a typical PC or phone, much of it is very bad, and just one mistake in the wrong place can let someone get at your data. This is particularly true if your adversary is a government agency, because they may have the ability to make whoever you get your software from send you bad software on purpose. If a government agency has your data they'll probably eventually leak it by accident as well. You can reduce the probability of this happening to you by normal IT security stuff like making sure you're getting updates and not installing weird stuff, but you can't get it to zero.
One that you should be able to control is (3). Hopefully in future all the popular software you'd normally use will have end-to-end encryption as standard, but right now almost nothing does. A good choice, which just got banned in Russia for being a good choice, is Signal.
“For me it’s the government taking half the wages of my 9 hour day to subsidise zone 1 housing for the lime bike bandits that just tried to steal my phone for second time in two months & if I tweet accurately about who they or what should be done I risk going to prison”
https://x.com/g0adm/status/1823105907175067701?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
This feels like a vibe-shift. BAD for Starmer