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The SNP haven’t gone away you know – politicalbetting.com

SystemSystem Posts: 12,179
edited September 29 in General
The SNP haven’t gone away you know – politicalbetting.com

Constituency 2/4SNP 33%Lab 30%Con 12%Reform 9%LD 5%Green; and others picking up 2%

Read the full story here

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Comments

  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,474
    *grabs popcorn*

    (Can a good Muslim be a Scotch expert?)
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,754
    ydoethur said:

    *grabs popcorn*

    (Can a good Muslim be a Scotch expert?)

    Don't tell my mother but I have bought an awful amount of alcohol since my university days.

    Never drank it but know enough about it to be an expert.

    Like never drink lager, Guinness, or absinthe.
  • Pagan2Pagan2 Posts: 9,881
    FPT
    ohnotnow said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Cicero said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Badenoch can't do it.

    Can't do what? Make the odd witty comment at PMQs that the small percentage who really pay attention to politics might appreciate? Devise policies that will never be implemented? Watch helplessly as an overwhelming majority means that the government can do whatever it likes however irrational or self harming and all your work and smart comments are to no avail?

    Worrying about who the next Tory leader is shows that you haven't come to terms with what happened last month. They are irrelevant and will be for 10 years now. That is the price of complete failure.
    Nonsense. Snap out of it man, and grow up.

    You're facing a socialist government, and it's time to rally around and challenge it.
    Good grief Casino, how old are you?

    This is nothing like a socialist government. The only time this country has got close to a socialist government was 1945-1950 and even that was fairly mild.

    Starmer's is likely to be very much like Blair2, possibly a bit better, possibly not. But in any event, it will be a shedload better than the mismanagement we have had for the past 14 years.
    At the moment Starmer's government is far more like Brown2 than Blair2
    Starmer is a disaster.
    That comment may become true, but to state it as fact five weeks after the election is just ridiculous.
    There's plenty of evidence already that he's an absolute disaster.
    Wait until they do over the pensions in the Autumn Budget...

    And that will bite hard on not just current pensioners.
    When they repeatedly said they specifically won't raise the rate of income tax, NI or VAT it was clear to anyone who can actually listen that they were going to increase other taxes. Some reform is long overdue in pensions, lets see what they do.

    Personally I find it ludicrous that the government foregoes tax to allow people to build up multi million pound retirement pots, plus £20k per year ISAs. Subsidising savings up to around 500k per person makes a lot of sense, but beyond that it is just giving back tax to the wealthy and hiding that we are doing it by making the system very complex.
    The 'pension reform' you crave will apply to people currently in work, who will not be able to save as efficiently as existing retirees were encouraged to. They will be the losers. I genuinely want the Zedders to enjoy the same benefits as me but they seem determined to throw them away in an envious fit of pique.
    Give over.

    Our generation has had the rug pulled away every step of the way. Free university got replaced with tuition fees as it was supposedly "unaffordable" to continue with free university with so many more going than in the past.

    Well there's so many more pensioners than in the past so in the exact same way it is completely unaffordable to keep paying triple locked pensions.

    Getting pensions on an affordable footing is better to ensuring they're still there in the future than burning down the house now by pissing away every penny available then finding there's no money left.
    Empty rhetoric.
    Not remotely empty.

    Give me one good reason that free tuition
    was taken away because there were more people and it was no longer affordable that doesn't equally apply to pensioners benefits.

    There's no money left, getting spending on a sustainable footing is the best way to ensure the spending can be available in the future too.
    Because impoverished pensioners will require additional other services.

    Government should actually look at what it does in a critical light and determine if it is value added. For example it’s not clear to me that all the current students benefit from their university courses and not clear that society benefits from funding them.

    But we have this mindset that more people having tertiary education is a good thing in and of itself . That’s just not true. More people having -*value added* tertiary education is a good thing
    I told my son uni was a bad idea when he asked...he went...he got an msc and then said he never wants to work in a lab ever again and says he wished he had taken my advice and learned a trade....I didn't advise him out of snobbery....just knew he would be happier using his hands and make a lot more money that he would with his degree
    I’m not sure that either of you are quite right.

    Unfortunately many employers use tertiary education as a screening device for “graduate level” jobs (even though the jobs may not require graduate skills). So having an MSc gives your son options that he didn’t have before even if he doesn’t want to work in a lab.

    But equally there are people who are not suited for an academic path - for whom a trade would be better. There is certainly useful training that can be done - improving the NVQ model perhaps - but not necessarily 3 years and £40k of student debt…
    Having had 65+ MSc's apply for a junior PHP developer role this week - none of whom I could distinguish from another - they might as well have spent 1/4 the money getting through an undistinguished bootcamp programme.

    If anything, I'm giving a +1 to people who paid their way through a bootcamp to get out of whatever hellhole job they were in before.
    Think about this for a minute......you even put "graduate level" jobs in quotes. Should we be alright with the only way to get what are jobs that often could be done by a school leaver with A levels behind a barrier that puts someone 40k or more in debt so they can earn not much more than minimum wage?
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,687
    Curious as to when the trials of the SNP elite start. Any ideas?
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,754

    Curious as to when the trials of the SNP elite start. Any ideas?

    Not sure but the police did confirm earlier on this month that Nicola Sturgeon still under investigation by police in party finances row

    https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/nicola-sturgeon-operation-branchform-4742082
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 28,056
    Pagan2 said:

    FPT

    ohnotnow said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Cicero said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Badenoch can't do it.

    Can't do what? Make the odd witty comment at PMQs that the small percentage who really pay attention to politics might appreciate? Devise policies that will never be implemented? Watch helplessly as an overwhelming majority means that the government can do whatever it likes however irrational or self harming and all your work and smart comments are to no avail?

    Worrying about who the next Tory leader is shows that you haven't come to terms with what happened last month. They are irrelevant and will be for 10 years now. That is the price of complete failure.
    Nonsense. Snap out of it man, and grow up.

    You're facing a socialist government, and it's time to rally around and challenge it.
    Good grief Casino, how old are you?

    This is nothing like a socialist government. The only time this country has got close to a socialist government was 1945-1950 and even that was fairly mild.

    Starmer's is likely to be very much like Blair2, possibly a bit better, possibly not. But in any event, it will be a shedload better than the mismanagement we have had for the past 14 years.
    At the moment Starmer's government is far more like Brown2 than Blair2
    Starmer is a disaster.
    That comment may become true, but to state it as fact five weeks after the election is just ridiculous.
    There's plenty of evidence already that he's an absolute disaster.
    Wait until they do over the pensions in the Autumn Budget...

    And that will bite hard on not just current pensioners.
    When they repeatedly said they specifically won't raise the rate of income tax, NI or VAT it was clear to anyone who can actually listen that they were going to increase other taxes. Some reform is long overdue in pensions, lets see what they do.

    Personally I find it ludicrous that the government foregoes tax to allow people to build up multi million pound retirement pots, plus £20k per year ISAs. Subsidising savings up to around 500k per person makes a lot of sense, but beyond that it is just giving back tax to the wealthy and hiding that we are doing it by making the system very complex.
    The 'pension reform' you crave will apply to people currently in work, who will not be able to save as efficiently as existing retirees were encouraged to. They will be the losers. I genuinely want the Zedders to enjoy the same benefits as me but they seem determined to throw them away in an envious fit of pique.
    Give over.

    Our generation has had the rug pulled away every step of the way. Free university got replaced with tuition fees as it was supposedly "unaffordable" to continue with free university with so many more going than in the past.

    Well there's so many more pensioners than in the past so in the exact same way it is completely unaffordable to keep paying triple locked pensions.

    Getting pensions on an affordable footing is better to ensuring they're still there in the future than burning down the house now by pissing away every penny available then finding there's no money left.
    Empty rhetoric.
    Not remotely empty.

    Give me one good reason that free tuition
    was taken away because there were more people and it was no longer affordable that doesn't equally apply to pensioners benefits.

    There's no money left, getting spending on a sustainable footing is the best way to ensure the spending can be available in the future too.
    Because impoverished pensioners will require additional other services.

    Government should actually look at what it does in a critical light and determine if it is value added. For example it’s not clear to me that all the current students benefit from their university courses and not clear that society benefits from funding them.

    But we have this mindset that more people having tertiary education is a good thing in and of itself . That’s just not true. More people having -*value added* tertiary education is a good thing
    I told my son uni was a bad idea when he asked...he went...he got an msc and then said he never wants to work in a lab ever again and says he wished he had taken my advice and learned a trade....I didn't advise him out of snobbery....just knew he would be happier using his hands and make a lot more money that he would with his degree
    I’m not sure that either of you are quite right.

    Unfortunately many employers use tertiary education as a screening device for “graduate level” jobs (even though the jobs may not require graduate skills). So having an MSc gives your son options that he didn’t have before even if he doesn’t want to work in a lab.

    But equally there are people who are not suited for an academic path - for whom a trade would be better. There is certainly useful training that can be done - improving the NVQ model perhaps - but not necessarily 3 years and £40k of student debt…
    Having had 65+ MSc's apply for a junior PHP developer role this week - none of whom I could distinguish from another - they might as well have spent 1/4 the money getting through an undistinguished bootcamp programme.

    If anything, I'm giving a +1 to people who paid their way through a bootcamp to get out of whatever hellhole job they were in before.
    Think about this for a minute......you even put "graduate level" jobs in quotes. Should we be alright with the only way to get what are jobs that often could be done by a school leaver with A levels behind a barrier that puts someone 40k or more in debt so they can earn not much more than minimum wage?
    Also, is php still a thing? I did a php short course a few years back and used the knowledge gained precisely once to solve a customer's problem.



    If good jobs in banks still existed, that would need a degree, not four O-levels (GCSEs to younger PBers; yes, you could leave school and start a career at 16).
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 11,209

    Pagan2 said:

    FPT

    ohnotnow said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Cicero said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Badenoch can't do it.

    Can't do what? Make the odd witty comment at PMQs that the small percentage who really pay attention to politics might appreciate? Devise policies that will never be implemented? Watch helplessly as an overwhelming majority means that the government can do whatever it likes however irrational or self harming and all your work and smart comments are to no avail?

    Worrying about who the next Tory leader is shows that you haven't come to terms with what happened last month. They are irrelevant and will be for 10 years now. That is the price of complete failure.
    Nonsense. Snap out of it man, and grow up.

    You're facing a socialist government, and it's time to rally around and challenge it.
    Good grief Casino, how old are you?

    This is nothing like a socialist government. The only time this country has got close to a socialist government was 1945-1950 and even that was fairly mild.

    Starmer's is likely to be very much like Blair2, possibly a bit better, possibly not. But in any event, it will be a shedload better than the mismanagement we have had for the past 14 years.
    At the moment Starmer's government is far more like Brown2 than Blair2
    Starmer is a disaster.
    That comment may become true, but to state it as fact five weeks after the election is just ridiculous.
    There's plenty of evidence already that he's an absolute disaster.
    Wait until they do over the pensions in the Autumn Budget...

    And that will bite hard on not just current pensioners.
    When they repeatedly said they specifically won't raise the rate of income tax, NI or VAT it was clear to anyone who can actually listen that they were going to increase other taxes. Some reform is long overdue in pensions, lets see what they do.

    Personally I find it ludicrous that the government foregoes tax to allow people to build up multi million pound retirement pots, plus £20k per year ISAs. Subsidising savings up to around 500k per person makes a lot of sense, but beyond that it is just giving back tax to the wealthy and hiding that we are doing it by making the system very complex.
    The 'pension reform' you crave will apply to people currently in work, who will not be able to save as efficiently as existing retirees were encouraged to. They will be the losers. I genuinely want the Zedders to enjoy the same benefits as me but they seem determined to throw them away in an envious fit of pique.
    Give over.

    Our generation has had the rug pulled away every step of the way. Free university got replaced with tuition fees as it was supposedly "unaffordable" to continue with free university with so many more going than in the past.

    Well there's so many more pensioners than in the past so in the exact same way it is completely unaffordable to keep paying triple locked pensions.

    Getting pensions on an affordable footing is better to ensuring they're still there in the future than burning down the house now by pissing away every penny available then finding there's no money left.
    Empty rhetoric.
    Not remotely empty.

    Give me one good reason that free tuition
    was taken away because there were more people and it was no longer affordable that doesn't equally apply to pensioners benefits.

    There's no money left, getting spending on a sustainable footing is the best way to ensure the spending can be available in the future too.
    Because impoverished pensioners will require additional other services.

    Government should actually look at what it does in a critical light and determine if it is value added. For example it’s not clear to me that all the current students benefit from their university courses and not clear that society benefits from funding them.

    But we have this mindset that more people having tertiary education is a good thing in and of itself . That’s just not true. More people having -*value added* tertiary education is a good thing
    I told my son uni was a bad idea when he asked...he went...he got an msc and then said he never wants to work in a lab ever again and says he wished he had taken my advice and learned a trade....I didn't advise him out of snobbery....just knew he would be happier using his hands and make a lot more money that he would with his degree
    I’m not sure that either of you are quite right.

    Unfortunately many employers use tertiary education as a screening device for “graduate level” jobs (even though the jobs may not require graduate skills). So having an MSc gives your son options that he didn’t have before even if he doesn’t want to work in a lab.

    But equally there are people who are not suited for an academic path - for whom a trade would be better. There is certainly useful training that can be done - improving the NVQ model perhaps - but not necessarily 3 years and £40k of student debt…
    Having had 65+ MSc's apply for a junior PHP developer role this week - none of whom I could distinguish from another - they might as well have spent 1/4 the money getting through an undistinguished bootcamp programme.

    If anything, I'm giving a +1 to people who paid their way through a bootcamp to get out of whatever hellhole job they were in before.
    Think about this for a minute......you even put "graduate level" jobs in quotes. Should we be alright with the only way to get what are jobs that often could be done by a school leaver with A levels behind a barrier that puts someone 40k or more in debt so they can earn not much more than minimum wage?
    University exams should be made open, so anyone can pay a reasonable fee and take them. Where they get the knowledge and at what cost then becomes up to them, I suspect within a decade most would get it online at a fraction of the cost, often alongside full time work. .
    There are some university-run MOOCs that work this way.
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 22,915

    Pagan2 said:

    FPT

    ohnotnow said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Cicero said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Badenoch can't do it.

    Can't do what? Make the odd witty comment at PMQs that the small percentage who really pay attention to politics might appreciate? Devise policies that will never be implemented? Watch helplessly as an overwhelming majority means that the government can do whatever it likes however irrational or self harming and all your work and smart comments are to no avail?

    Worrying about who the next Tory leader is shows that you haven't come to terms with what happened last month. They are irrelevant and will be for 10 years now. That is the price of complete failure.
    Nonsense. Snap out of it man, and grow up.

    You're facing a socialist government, and it's time to rally around and challenge it.
    Good grief Casino, how old are you?

    This is nothing like a socialist government. The only time this country has got close to a socialist government was 1945-1950 and even that was fairly mild.

    Starmer's is likely to be very much like Blair2, possibly a bit better, possibly not. But in any event, it will be a shedload better than the mismanagement we have had for the past 14 years.
    At the moment Starmer's government is far more like Brown2 than Blair2
    Starmer is a disaster.
    That comment may become true, but to state it as fact five weeks after the election is just ridiculous.
    There's plenty of evidence already that he's an absolute disaster.
    Wait until they do over the pensions in the Autumn Budget...

    And that will bite hard on not just current pensioners.
    When they repeatedly said they specifically won't raise the rate of income tax, NI or VAT it was clear to anyone who can actually listen that they were going to increase other taxes. Some reform is long overdue in pensions, lets see what they do.

    Personally I find it ludicrous that the government foregoes tax to allow people to build up multi million pound retirement pots, plus £20k per year ISAs. Subsidising savings up to around 500k per person makes a lot of sense, but beyond that it is just giving back tax to the wealthy and hiding that we are doing it by making the system very complex.
    The 'pension reform' you crave will apply to people currently in work, who will not be able to save as efficiently as existing retirees were encouraged to. They will be the losers. I genuinely want the Zedders to enjoy the same benefits as me but they seem determined to throw them away in an envious fit of pique.
    Give over.

    Our generation has had the rug pulled away every step of the way. Free university got replaced with tuition fees as it was supposedly "unaffordable" to continue with free university with so many more going than in the past.

    Well there's so many more pensioners than in the past so in the exact same way it is completely unaffordable to keep paying triple locked pensions.

    Getting pensions on an affordable footing is better to ensuring they're still there in the future than burning down the house now by pissing away every penny available then finding there's no money left.
    Empty rhetoric.
    Not remotely empty.

    Give me one good reason that free tuition
    was taken away because there were more people and it was no longer affordable that doesn't equally apply to pensioners benefits.

    There's no money left, getting spending on a sustainable footing is the best way to ensure the spending can be available in the future too.
    Because impoverished pensioners will require additional other services.

    Government should actually look at what it does in a critical light and determine if it is value added. For example it’s not clear to me that all the current students benefit from their university courses and not clear that society benefits from funding them.

    But we have this mindset that more people having tertiary education is a good thing in and of itself . That’s just not true. More people having -*value added* tertiary education is a good thing
    I told my son uni was a bad idea when he asked...he went...he got an msc and then said he never wants to work in a lab ever again and says he wished he had taken my advice and learned a trade....I didn't advise him out of snobbery....just knew he would be happier using his hands and make a lot more money that he would with his degree
    I’m not sure that either of you are quite right.

    Unfortunately many employers use tertiary education as a screening device for “graduate level” jobs (even though the jobs may not require graduate skills). So having an MSc gives your son options that he didn’t have before even if he doesn’t want to work in a lab.

    But equally there are people who are not suited for an academic path - for whom a trade would be better. There is certainly useful training that can be done - improving the NVQ model perhaps - but not necessarily 3 years and £40k of student debt…
    Having had 65+ MSc's apply for a junior PHP developer role this week - none of whom I could distinguish from another - they might as well have spent 1/4 the money getting through an undistinguished bootcamp programme.

    If anything, I'm giving a +1 to people who paid their way through a bootcamp to get out of whatever hellhole job they were in before.
    Think about this for a minute......you even put "graduate level" jobs in quotes. Should we be alright with the only way to get what are jobs that often could be done by a school leaver with A levels behind a barrier that puts someone 40k or more in debt so they can earn not much more than minimum wage?
    University exams should be made open, so anyone can pay a reasonable fee and take them. Where they get the knowledge and at what cost then becomes up to them, I suspect within a decade most would get it online at a fraction of the cost, often alongside full time work. .
    There are some university-run MOOCs that work this way.
    It should be mandatory for any university getting any public funding.
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 28,056

    Pagan2 said:

    FPT

    ohnotnow said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Cicero said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Badenoch can't do it.

    Can't do what? Make the odd witty comment at PMQs that the small percentage who really pay attention to politics might appreciate? Devise policies that will never be implemented? Watch helplessly as an overwhelming majority means that the government can do whatever it likes however irrational or self harming and all your work and smart comments are to no avail?

    Worrying about who the next Tory leader is shows that you haven't come to terms with what happened last month. They are irrelevant and will be for 10 years now. That is the price of complete failure.
    Nonsense. Snap out of it man, and grow up.

    You're facing a socialist government, and it's time to rally around and challenge it.
    Good grief Casino, how old are you?

    This is nothing like a socialist government. The only time this country has got close to a socialist government was 1945-1950 and even that was fairly mild.

    Starmer's is likely to be very much like Blair2, possibly a bit better, possibly not. But in any event, it will be a shedload better than the mismanagement we have had for the past 14 years.
    At the moment Starmer's government is far more like Brown2 than Blair2
    Starmer is a disaster.
    That comment may become true, but to state it as fact five weeks after the election is just ridiculous.
    There's plenty of evidence already that he's an absolute disaster.
    Wait until they do over the pensions in the Autumn Budget...

    And that will bite hard on not just current pensioners.
    When they repeatedly said they specifically won't raise the rate of income tax, NI or VAT it was clear to anyone who can actually listen that they were going to increase other taxes. Some reform is long overdue in pensions, lets see what they do.

    Personally I find it ludicrous that the government foregoes tax to allow people to build up multi million pound retirement pots, plus £20k per year ISAs. Subsidising savings up to around 500k per person makes a lot of sense, but beyond that it is just giving back tax to the wealthy and hiding that we are doing it by making the system very complex.
    The 'pension reform' you crave will apply to people currently in work, who will not be able to save as efficiently as existing retirees were encouraged to. They will be the losers. I genuinely want the Zedders to enjoy the same benefits as me but they seem determined to throw them away in an envious fit of pique.
    Give over.

    Our generation has had the rug pulled away every step of the way. Free university got replaced with tuition fees as it was supposedly "unaffordable" to continue with free university with so many more going than in the past.

    Well there's so many more pensioners than in the past so in the exact same way it is completely unaffordable to keep paying triple locked pensions.

    Getting pensions on an affordable footing is better to ensuring they're still there in the future than burning down the house now by pissing away every penny available then finding there's no money left.
    Empty rhetoric.
    Not remotely empty.

    Give me one good reason that free tuition
    was taken away because there were more people and it was no longer affordable that doesn't equally apply to pensioners benefits.

    There's no money left, getting spending on a sustainable footing is the best way to ensure the spending can be available in the future too.
    Because impoverished pensioners will require additional other services.

    Government should actually look at what it does in a critical light and determine if it is value added. For example it’s not clear to me that all the current students benefit from their university courses and not clear that society benefits from funding them.

    But we have this mindset that more people having tertiary education is a good thing in and of itself . That’s just not true. More people having -*value added* tertiary education is a good thing
    I told my son uni was a bad idea when he asked...he went...he got an msc and then said he never wants to work in a lab ever again and says he wished he had taken my advice and learned a trade....I didn't advise him out of snobbery....just knew he would be happier using his hands and make a lot more money that he would with his degree
    I’m not sure that either of you are quite right.

    Unfortunately many employers use tertiary education as a screening device for “graduate level” jobs (even though the jobs may not require graduate skills). So having an MSc gives your son options that he didn’t have before even if he doesn’t want to work in a lab.

    But equally there are people who are not suited for an academic path - for whom a trade would be better. There is certainly useful training that can be done - improving the NVQ model perhaps - but not necessarily 3 years and £40k of student debt…
    Having had 65+ MSc's apply for a junior PHP developer role this week - none of whom I could distinguish from another - they might as well have spent 1/4 the money getting through an undistinguished bootcamp programme.

    If anything, I'm giving a +1 to people who paid their way through a bootcamp to get out of whatever hellhole job they were in before.
    Think about this for a minute......you even put "graduate level" jobs in quotes. Should we be alright with the only way to get what are jobs that often could be done by a school leaver with A levels behind a barrier that puts someone 40k or more in debt so they can earn not much more than minimum wage?
    University exams should be made open, so anyone can pay a reasonable fee and take them. Where they get the knowledge and at what cost then becomes up to them, I suspect within a decade most would get it online at a fraction of the cost, often alongside full time work. .
    There are some university-run MOOCs that work this way.
    It should be mandatory for any university getting any public funding.
    Even in the old days, you could take University of London external degrees for a few quid. (Obviously 99 per cent of students would have spent the normal number of years at home or more normally college preparing for the exams.)
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,411
    edited August 25
    The 11th Amendment.

    Good morning everyone - a sunny day in Nottinghamshire, and it is nearly bilberry season.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 123,313
    edited August 25
    On the Norstat poll the Scottish Tories would hold the balance of power at Holyrood even as the Conservatives have lost power across the UK overall. Last time the Scottish Tories held the balance of power in 2007 they gave Salmond's minority government confidence and supply not Labour.

    If the SNP narrowly win most seats I could see the next Scottish Conservative leader keeping Swinney in power therefore provided he rules out pushing indyref2. After all with Forbes as Finance Minister an SNP government would be arguably right of a Scottish Labour government
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 123,313
    edited August 25

    Pagan2 said:

    FPT

    ohnotnow said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Cicero said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Badenoch can't do it.

    Can't do what? Make the odd witty comment at PMQs that the small percentage who really pay attention to politics might appreciate? Devise policies that will never be implemented? Watch helplessly as an overwhelming majority means that the government can do whatever it likes however irrational or self harming and all your work and smart comments are to no avail?

    Worrying about who the next Tory leader is shows that you haven't come to terms with what happened last month. They are irrelevant and will be for 10 years now. That is the price of complete failure.
    Nonsense. Snap out of it man, and grow up.

    You're facing a socialist government, and it's time to rally around and challenge it.
    Good grief Casino, how old are you?

    This is nothing like a socialist government. The only time this country has got close to a socialist government was 1945-1950 and even that was fairly mild.

    Starmer's is likely to be very much like Blair2, possibly a bit better, possibly not. But in any event, it will be a shedload better than the mismanagement we have had for the past 14 years.
    At the moment Starmer's government is far more like Brown2 than Blair2
    Starmer is a disaster.
    That comment may become true, but to state it as fact five weeks after the election is just ridiculous.
    There's plenty of evidence already that he's an absolute disaster.
    Wait until they do over the pensions in the Autumn Budget...

    And that will bite hard on not just current pensioners.
    When they repeatedly said they specifically won't raise the rate of income tax, NI or VAT it was clear to anyone who can actually listen that they were going to increase other taxes. Some reform is long overdue in pensions, lets see what they do.

    Personally I find it ludicrous that the government foregoes tax to allow people to build up multi million pound retirement pots, plus £20k per year ISAs. Subsidising savings up to around 500k per person makes a lot of sense, but beyond that it is just giving back tax to the wealthy and hiding that we are doing it by making the system very complex.
    The 'pension reform' you crave will apply to people currently in work, who will not be able to save as efficiently as existing retirees were encouraged to. They will be the losers. I genuinely want the Zedders to enjoy the same benefits as me but they seem determined to throw them away in an envious fit of pique.
    Give over.

    Our generation has had the rug pulled away every step of the way. Free university got replaced with tuition fees as it was supposedly "unaffordable" to continue with free university with so many more going than in the past.

    Well there's so many more pensioners than in the past so in the exact same way it is completely unaffordable to keep paying triple locked pensions.

    Getting pensions on an affordable footing is better to ensuring they're still there in the future than burning down the house now by pissing away every penny available then finding there's no money left.
    Empty rhetoric.
    Not remotely empty.

    Give me one good reason that free tuition
    was taken away because there were more people and it was no longer affordable that doesn't equally apply to pensioners benefits.

    There's no money left, getting spending on a sustainable footing is the best way to ensure the spending can be available in the future too.
    Because impoverished pensioners will require additional other services.

    Government should actually look at what it does in a critical light and determine if it is value added. For example it’s not clear to me that all the current students benefit from their university courses and not clear that society benefits from funding them.

    But we have this mindset that more people having tertiary education is a good thing in and of itself . That’s just not true. More people having -*value added* tertiary education is a good thing
    I told my son uni was a bad idea when he asked...he went...he got an msc and then said he never wants to work in a lab ever again and says he wished he had taken my advice and learned a trade....I didn't advise him out of snobbery....just knew he would be happier using his hands and make a lot more money that he would with his degree
    I’m not sure that either of you are quite right.

    Unfortunately many employers use tertiary education as a screening device for “graduate level” jobs (even though the jobs may not require graduate skills). So having an MSc gives your son options that he didn’t have before even if he doesn’t want to work in a lab.

    But equally there are people who are not suited for an academic path - for whom a trade would be better. There is certainly useful training that can be done - improving the NVQ model perhaps - but not necessarily 3 years and £40k of student debt…
    Having had 65+ MSc's apply for a junior PHP developer role this week - none of whom I could distinguish from another - they might as well have spent 1/4 the money getting through an undistinguished bootcamp programme.

    If anything, I'm giving a +1 to people who paid their way through a bootcamp to get out of whatever hellhole job they were in before.
    Think about this for a
    minute......you even put
    "graduate level" jobs in
    quotes. Should we be alright
    with the only way to get what
    are jobs that often could be
    done by a school leaver with
    A levels behind a barrier that
    puts someone 40k or more in
    debt so they can earn not
    much more than minimum
    wage?
    Also, is php still a thing? I did
    a php short course a few
    years back and used the knowledge gained precisely
    once to solve a customer's
    problem.



    If good jobs in banks still
    existed, that would need a
    degree, not four O-levels
    (GCSEs to younger PBers;
    yes, you could leave school
    and start a career at 16).
    A degree in business studies,
    the most studied undergraduate degree of all now, which didn't exist 50 years ago as most studied a business when they first joined it as a junior or middle manager after A levels or even O levels
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 43,007
    HYUFD said:

    On the Norstat poll the Scottish Tories would hold the balance of power at Holyrood even as the Conservatives have lost power across the UK overall. Last time the Scottish Tories held the balance of power in 2007 they gave Salmond's minority government confidence and supply not Labour.

    If the SNP narrowly win most seats I could see the next Scottish Conservative leader keeping Swinney in power therefore provided he rules out pushing indyref2. After all with Forbes as Finance Minister an SNP government would be arguably right of a Scottish Labour government

    They didn't give confidence and supply. Just voted issue by issue.
  • FossFoss Posts: 1,019
    ohnotnow said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Cicero said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Badenoch can't do it.

    Can't do what? Make the odd witty comment at PMQs that the small percentage who really pay attention to politics might appreciate? Devise policies that will never be implemented? Watch helplessly as an overwhelming majority means that the government can do whatever it likes however irrational or self harming and all your work and smart comments are to no avail?

    Worrying about who the next Tory leader is shows that you haven't come to terms with what happened last month. They are irrelevant and will be for 10 years now. That is the price of complete failure.
    Nonsense. Snap out of it man, and grow up.

    You're facing a socialist government, and it's time to rally around and challenge it.
    Good grief Casino, how old are you?

    This is nothing like a socialist government. The only time this country has got close to a socialist government was 1945-1950 and even that was fairly mild.

    Starmer's is likely to be very much like Blair2, possibly a bit better, possibly not. But in any event, it will be a shedload better than the mismanagement we have had for the past 14 years.
    At the moment Starmer's government is far more like Brown2 than Blair2
    Starmer is a disaster.
    That comment may become true, but to state it as fact five weeks after the election is just ridiculous.
    There's plenty of evidence already that he's an absolute disaster.
    Wait until they do over the pensions in the Autumn Budget...

    And that will bite hard on not just current pensioners.
    When they repeatedly said they specifically won't raise the rate of income tax, NI or VAT it was clear to anyone who can actually listen that they were going to increase other taxes. Some reform is long overdue in pensions, lets see what they do.

    Personally I find it ludicrous that the government foregoes tax to allow people to build up multi million pound retirement pots, plus £20k per year ISAs. Subsidising savings up to around 500k per person makes a lot of sense, but beyond that it is just giving back tax to the wealthy and hiding that we are doing it by making the system very complex.
    The 'pension reform' you crave will apply to people currently in work, who will not be able to save as efficiently as existing retirees were encouraged to. They will be the losers. I genuinely want the Zedders to enjoy the same benefits as me but they seem determined to throw them away in an envious fit of pique.
    Give over.

    Our generation has had the rug pulled away every step of the way. Free university got replaced with tuition fees as it was supposedly "unaffordable" to continue with free university with so many more going than in the past.

    Well there's so many more pensioners than in the past so in the exact same way it is completely unaffordable to keep paying triple locked pensions.

    Getting pensions on an affordable footing is better to ensuring they're still there in the future than burning down the house now by pissing away every penny available then finding there's no money left.
    Empty rhetoric.
    Not remotely empty.

    Give me one good reason that free tuition
    was taken away because there were more people and it was no longer affordable that doesn't equally apply to pensioners benefits.

    There's no money left, getting spending on a sustainable footing is the best way to ensure the spending can be available in the future too.
    Because impoverished pensioners will require additional other services.

    Government should actually look at what it does in a critical light and determine if it is value added. For example it’s not clear to me that all the current students benefit from their university courses and not clear that society benefits from funding them.

    But we have this mindset that more people having tertiary education is a good thing in and of itself . That’s just not true. More people having -*value added* tertiary education is a good thing
    I told my son uni was a bad idea when he asked...he went...he got an msc and then said he never wants to work in a lab ever again and says he wished he had taken my advice and learned a trade....I didn't advise him out of snobbery....just knew he would be happier using his hands and make a lot more money that he would with his degree
    I’m not sure that either of you are quite right.

    Unfortunately many employers use tertiary education as a screening device for “graduate level” jobs (even though the jobs may not require graduate skills). So having an MSc gives your son options that he didn’t have before even if he doesn’t want to work in a lab.

    But equally there are people who are not suited for an academic path - for whom a trade would be better. There is certainly useful training that can be done - improving the NVQ model perhaps - but not necessarily 3 years and £40k of student debt…
    Having had 65+ MSc's apply for a junior PHP developer role this week - none of whom I could distinguish from another - they might as well have spent 1/4 the money getting through an undistinguished bootcamp programme.

    If anything, I'm giving a +1 to people who paid their way through a bootcamp to get out of whatever hellhole job they were in before.
    At least you’re still hiring junior Westerners. My $BigCorp employer seems to have given up on that and instead started grabbing Indonesians with a few years experience for less than the minimum wage.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,930
    So the SNP published their accounts to December 2023 this week: https://search.electoralcommission.org.uk/Api/Accounts/Documents/26188

    The good news for them is that they are no longer absolutely insolvent. The not so good news is that their accumulated funds amounted to £441k at the end of a year with no major elections in it. In the current year they have had a general election. In the year to December 2023 their Parliamentary levy raised £322,900. I suspect this includes both Parliaments but it is clearly going to take a heavy hit in the current year. The accounts also do not reflect the monies received by the individual MPs to employ staff and office costs.

    There was an increase in the declared income from £4.25m to £4.75m but this apparent improvement is more than made up by the fact that a branch levy charged the branches £670K compared with nothing in the previous year. If you strip that out then income actually fell. This levy is also reflected in the creditors figure (since in the previous year the central party had simply not paid the share of membership fees that should have been credited to them) which fell from £(1.23m) to £(640k). In short the entire apparent improvement in their balance sheet, plus a bit more, arises from an internal transfer of funds from the branches to the central party which did not involve actual payment of cash but a reduction in their debts to those branches.

    Mr Murrell is still due £60K.

    The fact that this apparent improvement comes from these internal transfers and effective writing off of internal debt is reflected that the cash in hand amounted £42k, down fractionally from £46k the year before. How that was supposed to pay for a GE campaign is a mystery that will only be solved next year.
  • Big_G_NorthWalesBig_G_NorthWales Posts: 63,228
    edited August 25
    HYUFD said:

    On the Norstat poll the Scottish Tories would hold the balance of power at Holyrood even as the Conservatives have lost power across the UK overall. Last time the Scottish Tories held the balance of power in 2007 they gave Salmond's minority government confidence and supply not Labour.

    If the SNP narrowly win most seats I could see the next Scottish Conservative leader keeping Swinney in power therefore provided he rules out pushing indyref2. After all with Forbes as Finance Minister an SNP government would be arguably right of a Scottish Labour government

    Good morning

    Your last paragraph will not happen

    The idea the SNP will rule out pushing for Indyref2 shows complete ignorance of their DNA and reason for their existence

    They were pushing for independence when I lived in Berwick in 1954 and nothing will change as you suggest and maybe you are just wish thinking
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,411
    FPT:
    Nigelb said:

    April 2024

    “I’d even take Biden over Junior” - DJT
    https://x.com/AesPolitics1/status/1827135045846307270

    Is Chump correct in that tweet that energy prices in Upstate NY and New England are the highest in the USA, except California ("run by Governor Newscum")?

    It sounds like another likely fabrication-from-the-hip by the Underpants Emperor in his Basement at midnight.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 123,313
    edited August 25

    HYUFD said:

    On the Norstat poll the Scottish Tories would hold the balance of power at Holyrood even as the Conservatives have lost power across the UK overall. Last time the Scottish Tories held the balance of power in 2007 they gave Salmond's minority government confidence and supply not Labour.

    If the SNP narrowly win most seats I could see the next Scottish Conservative leader keeping Swinney in power therefore provided he rules out pushing indyref2. After all with Forbes as Finance Minister an SNP government would be arguably right of a Scottish Labour government

    Good morning

    Your last paragraph will not happen

    The idea the SNP will rule out pushing for Indyref2 shows complete ignorance of their DNA and reason for their existence

    They were pushing for independence when I lived in Berwick in 1954 and nothing will change as you suggest and maybe you are just wish thinking
    Even Salmond did not push for an independence referendum in 2007 when he had a minority government reliant on Tory support to get legislation passed, only in 2011 when he got a majority
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 123,313
    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,809
    Weather looking good for scooter weekend on the Isle of Wight.


  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,930

    HYUFD said:

    On the Norstat poll the Scottish Tories would hold the balance of power at Holyrood even as the Conservatives have lost power across the UK overall. Last time the Scottish Tories held the balance of power in 2007 they gave Salmond's minority government confidence and supply not Labour.

    If the SNP narrowly win most seats I could see the next Scottish Conservative leader keeping Swinney in power therefore provided he rules out pushing indyref2. After all with Forbes as Finance Minister an SNP government would be arguably right of a Scottish Labour government

    Good morning

    Your last paragraph will not happen

    The idea the SNP will rule out pushing for Indyref2 shows complete ignorance of their DNA and reason for their existence

    They were pushing for independence when I lived in Berwick in 1954 and nothing will change as you suggest and maybe you are just wish thinking
    I think that I am with @HYUFD on this one. Obviously the party will be committed to independence, as you say that is their DNA, but they will have no problem pragmatically accepting that the conditions for a second referendum are not currently in place so it will go on the back burner.

    Yousaf's position was that the Westminster election was supposed to be a second referendum because if the SNP had won a majority of Scottish seats then they would have taken that as a basis for negotiating independence from the UK government (who would have ignored them, but there we are). The point was made moot by their failure to win a majority of seats and in 2026, unless Labour get a lot more unpopular (which is, of course, possible, especially when you look at the headlines today) they will not have a majority committed to independence in Holyrood either. In these circumstances their main object will be to stay in power, as it has been since 2015.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,411
    Foxy said:

    Weather looking good for scooter weekend on the Isle of Wight.


    Take care. You may meet Agent Anderson and the Skegby Scooter Club.
  • numbertwelvenumbertwelve Posts: 6,837
    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    Per my comment last night, I am far from convinced that people want Starmer to be telling them everything is terrible. They can see the state the country is in. They need a bit of reassurance that Labour will put it on the right trajectory.

    Even at the very nadir of Thatcher’s popularity in the 1979-1983 parliament, she was always very careful to sell the ‘why’ and to talk about what she saw as the good times ahead.

    The doom and gloom from Labour is not the “national renewal” message they campaigned on. They did not fight an election, as the Tories did in 2010, to get a mandate for unpopular (even if necessary) tax and spend decisions. They said very little, and got a huge majority out of it but now the chips are down I still think they will regret not saying enough of this at the time of the campaign.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 42,045
    Central heating switched on alert (by my partner not me I hasten to add).

    Of some relevance to the header, I told her it would be fine as I'd read Anas's lips about there being no austerity under Labour and Sir Keir had promised power bills being reduced by 'up to £300'.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,545

    Central heating switched on alert (by my partner not me I hasten to add).

    Of some relevance to the header, I told her it would be fine as I'd read Anas's lips about there being no austerity under Labour and Sir Keir had promised power bills being reduced by 'up to £300'.

    THINGS WILL GET WORSE feels like Davos-speak to me. It's 'the new normal'. The unwritten part is it's going to get worse and it's 'the new normal' because of deliberate policy. Truss was the last PM who said 'Britain's best days lie ahead' and we all know what happened to her.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,687
    DavidL said:

    HYUFD said:

    On the Norstat poll the Scottish Tories would hold the balance of power at Holyrood even as the Conservatives have lost power across the UK overall. Last time the Scottish Tories held the balance of power in 2007 they gave Salmond's minority government confidence and supply not Labour.

    If the SNP narrowly win most seats I could see the next Scottish Conservative leader keeping Swinney in power therefore provided he rules out pushing indyref2. After all with Forbes as Finance Minister an SNP government would be arguably right of a Scottish Labour government

    Good morning

    Your last paragraph will not happen

    The idea the SNP will rule out pushing for Indyref2 shows complete ignorance of their DNA and reason for their existence

    They were pushing for independence when I lived in Berwick in 1954 and nothing will change as you suggest and maybe you are just wish thinking
    I think that I am with @HYUFD on this one. Obviously the party will be committed to independence, as you say that is their DNA, but they will have no problem pragmatically accepting that the conditions for a second referendum are not currently in place so it will go on the back burner.

    Yousaf's position was that the Westminster election was supposed to be a second referendum because if the SNP had won a majority of Scottish seats then they would have taken that as a basis for negotiating independence from the UK government (who would have ignored them, but there we are). The point was made moot by their failure to win a majority of seats and in 2026, unless Labour get a lot more unpopular (which is, of course, possible, especially when you look at the headlines today) they will not have a majority committed to independence in Holyrood either. In these circumstances their main object will be to stay in power, as it has been since 2015.
    Rather more than moot. There was a massive rejection of the parties promoting independence, both the SNP and Alba.

    Independence is currently a notion more popular than the parties proposing it. Which is hardly surprising. The idea of an independent Scotland governed by the nepotistic crooks and chancers proposing it relegates it to an idea whose time is not now.
  • FairlieredFairliered Posts: 4,966
    Not sure that you can still discount Reform in Scotland. They got 18.9% of the vote in a by-election in West Lothian last week. We have racists too! https://ballotbox.scot/result-armadale-blackridge/
  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 17,293

    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    Per my comment last night, I am far from convinced that people want Starmer to be telling them everything is terrible. They can see the state the country is in. They need a bit of reassurance that Labour will put it on the right trajectory.

    Even at the very nadir of Thatcher’s popularity in the 1979-1983 parliament, she was always very careful to sell the ‘why’ and to talk about what she saw as the good times ahead.

    The doom and gloom from Labour is not the “national renewal” message they campaigned on. They did not fight an election, as the Tories did in 2010, to get a mandate for unpopular (even if necessary) tax and spend decisions. They said very little, and got a huge majority out of it but now the chips are down I still think they will regret not saying enough of this at the time of the campaign.
    The counterpoint is that the country has been in a fool's paradise situation for years, and Starmer was up against a party that was happy to pretend that paradise could continue.

    And the election is water under the bridge. If a government with a huge majority and plenty of time can't tell hard truths, who can?

    What matters is how it all looks in 2028/9. And if the Conservatives mess up their leadership selection (by picking a leader who, in your guts/you know she's nuts), you can make that 2033/4.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,687
    Foxy said:

    Weather looking good for scooter weekend on the Isle of Wight.


    Weather might be nice, but the air quality will be shite with all those noxious engines!
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,687

    Central heating switched on alert (by my partner not me I hasten to add).

    Of some relevance to the header, I told her it would be fine as I'd read Anas's lips about there being no austerity under Labour and Sir Keir had promised power bills being reduced by 'up to £300'.

    Now is the winter of our discontent made real by this son of toolmaker Starmer....
  • numbertwelvenumbertwelve Posts: 6,837
    edited August 25

    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    Per my comment last night, I am far from convinced that people want Starmer to be telling them everything is terrible. They can see the state the country is in. They need a bit of reassurance that Labour will put it on the right trajectory.

    Even at the very nadir of Thatcher’s popularity in the 1979-1983 parliament, she was always very careful to sell the ‘why’ and to talk about what she saw as the good times ahead.

    The doom and gloom from Labour is not the “national renewal” message they campaigned on. They did not fight an election, as the Tories did in 2010, to get a mandate for unpopular (even if necessary) tax and spend decisions. They said very little, and got a huge majority out of it but now the chips are down I still think they will regret not saying enough of this at the time of the campaign.
    The counterpoint is that the country has been in a fool's paradise situation for years, and Starmer was up against a party that was happy to pretend that paradise could continue.

    And the election is water under the bridge. If a government with a huge majority and plenty of time can't tell hard truths, who can?

    What matters is how it all looks in 2028/9. And if the Conservatives mess up their leadership selection (by picking a leader who, in your guts/you know she's nuts), you can make that 2033/4.
    Re the first paragraph, all true. But did Starmer do enough to lay the ground for the hard truths people needed to hear? I am doubtful.

    I agree that governments can afford hits to their popularity early in a Parliament. But if they are not able to sell the reasons why and the worthiness of the end result, there is also the risk that a government hits a death spiral from which it finds it hard to recover. The messaging is crucial here - and I think they are struggling to find the right tone.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,930

    DavidL said:

    HYUFD said:

    On the Norstat poll the Scottish Tories would hold the balance of power at Holyrood even as the Conservatives have lost power across the UK overall. Last time the Scottish Tories held the balance of power in 2007 they gave Salmond's minority government confidence and supply not Labour.

    If the SNP narrowly win most seats I could see the next Scottish Conservative leader keeping Swinney in power therefore provided he rules out pushing indyref2. After all with Forbes as Finance Minister an SNP government would be arguably right of a Scottish Labour government

    Good morning

    Your last paragraph will not happen

    The idea the SNP will rule out pushing for Indyref2 shows complete ignorance of their DNA and reason for their existence

    They were pushing for independence when I lived in Berwick in 1954 and nothing will change as you suggest and maybe you are just wish thinking
    I think that I am with @HYUFD on this one. Obviously the party will be committed to independence, as you say that is their DNA, but they will have no problem pragmatically accepting that the conditions for a second referendum are not currently in place so it will go on the back burner.

    Yousaf's position was that the Westminster election was supposed to be a second referendum because if the SNP had won a majority of Scottish seats then they would have taken that as a basis for negotiating independence from the UK government (who would have ignored them, but there we are). The point was made moot by their failure to win a majority of seats and in 2026, unless Labour get a lot more unpopular (which is, of course, possible, especially when you look at the headlines today) they will not have a majority committed to independence in Holyrood either. In these circumstances their main object will be to stay in power, as it has been since 2015.
    Rather more than moot. There was a massive rejection of the parties promoting independence, both the SNP and Alba.

    Independence is currently a notion more popular than the parties proposing it. Which is hardly surprising. The idea of an independent Scotland governed by the nepotistic crooks and chancers proposing it relegates it to an idea whose time is not now.
    Support for independence is generally lower when we have a Labour government because the argument that you didn't vote for a Tory government no longer works. I am pretty confident that will be the case now when Labour hold the majority of Scottish seats once again.

    Of course, if things get particularly grim under Starmer the idea that we might do better on our own might gain some traction but the next peak for the SNP is probably at least a decade away.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 28,449
    ...

    Central heating switched on alert (by my partner not me I hasten to add).

    Of some relevance to the header, I told her it would be fine as I'd read Anas's lips about there being no austerity under Labour and Sir Keir had promised power bills being reduced by 'up to £300'.

    Now is the winter of our discontent made real by this son of toolmaker Starmer....
    Can we have our "likes" back for your assurance not to comment on UK politics? The World of politics is full of broken promises.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 43,007

    Not sure that you can still discount Reform in Scotland. They got 18.9% of the vote in a by-election in West Lothian last week. We have racists too! https://ballotbox.scot/result-armadale-blackridge/

    Did you see that the SG has been ordered to do something about anti-Irish racism? Now if the Unionists hadn't been so difficult about doing something about it ...
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,930

    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    Per my comment last night, I am far from convinced that people want Starmer to be telling them everything is terrible. They can see the state the country is in. They need a bit of reassurance that Labour will put it on the right trajectory.

    Even at the very nadir of Thatcher’s popularity in the 1979-1983 parliament, she was always very careful to sell the ‘why’ and to talk about what she saw as the good times ahead.

    The doom and gloom from Labour is not the “national renewal” message they campaigned on. They did not fight an election, as the Tories did in 2010, to get a mandate for unpopular (even if necessary) tax and spend decisions. They said very little, and got a huge majority out of it but now the chips are down I still think they will regret not saying enough of this at the time of the campaign.
    It suited both of the major parties to ignore or hide the hideous state the government's finances were in. The Tories wanted to claim that they had done well and the future looked bright and Labour wanted to pretend that there was enough money to improve the state of public services if you let them at it.

    The reality is that for every £7 the government spends one is borrowed from our children. If this money was going into infrastructure, schools, hospitals, roads and other capital investments that they would get the benefit of that might be excusable but it is in fact going to paying current expenditure in the main because we think we are entitled to a higher standard of living as a country than we actually earn.

    Rebalancing the public finances now is going to be very nearly as challenging as it was in 2010 but, as others have pointed out, we have been sold a somewhat different fantasy.
  • ohnotnowohnotnow Posts: 3,845

    Central heating switched on alert (by my partner not me I hasten to add).

    Of some relevance to the header, I told her it would be fine as I'd read Anas's lips about there being no austerity under Labour and Sir Keir had promised power bills being reduced by 'up to £300'.

    I'm currently being stared at by my cat who is making it very clear that the temperature isn't to her liking. I think we all know how this battle of the wills is going to go.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 28,449
    edited August 25

    Foxy said:

    Weather looking good for scooter weekend on the Isle of Wight.


    Weather might be nice, but the air quality will be shite with all those noxious engines!
    Net zero commitments fail at a stroke, or in this case with just two strokes.
  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 17,293
    DavidL said:

    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    Per my comment last night, I am far from convinced that people want Starmer to be telling them everything is terrible. They can see the state the country is in. They need a bit of reassurance that Labour will put it on the right trajectory.

    Even at the very nadir of Thatcher’s popularity in the 1979-1983 parliament, she was always very careful to sell the ‘why’ and to talk about what she saw as the good times ahead.

    The doom and gloom from Labour is not the “national renewal” message they campaigned on. They did not fight an election, as the Tories did in 2010, to get a mandate for unpopular (even if necessary) tax and spend decisions. They said very little, and got a huge majority out of it but now the chips are down I still think they will regret not saying enough of this at the time of the campaign.
    It suited both of the major parties to ignore or hide the hideous state the government's finances were in. The Tories wanted to claim that they had done well and the future looked bright and Labour wanted to pretend that there was enough money to improve the state of public services if you let them at it.

    The reality is that for every £7 the government spends one is borrowed from our children. If this money was going into infrastructure, schools, hospitals, roads and other capital investments that they would get the benefit of that might be excusable but it is in fact going to paying current expenditure in the main because we think we are entitled to a higher standard of living as a country than we actually earn.

    Rebalancing the public finances now is going to be very nearly as challenging as it was in 2010 but, as others have pointed out, we have been sold a somewhat different fantasy.
    "We know what needs to be done, just not how to get elected after doing it" as the man said.

    Is Starmer up to the challenge? Remains to be seen, but anyone interested in the fortunes of the country has to hope so at this stage.

    The most patriotic thing the opposition can do might be to stay as divided and unelectable as possible for a while. Maybe they should elect Kemi B in the national interest.
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 22,915

    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    Per my comment last night, I am far from convinced that people want Starmer to be telling them everything is terrible. They can see the state the country is in. They need a bit of reassurance that Labour will put it on the right trajectory.

    Even at the very nadir of Thatcher’s popularity in the 1979-1983 parliament, she was always very careful to sell the ‘why’ and to talk about what she saw as the good times ahead.

    The doom and gloom from Labour is not the “national renewal” message they campaigned on. They did not fight an election, as the Tories did in 2010, to get a mandate for unpopular (even if necessary) tax and spend decisions. They said very little, and got a huge majority out of it but now the chips are down I still think they will regret not saying enough of this at the time of the campaign.
    The counterpoint is that the country has been in a fool's paradise situation for years, and Starmer was up against a party that was happy to pretend that paradise could continue.

    And the election is water under the bridge. If a government with a huge majority and plenty of time can't tell hard truths, who can?

    What matters is how it all looks in 2028/9. And if the Conservatives mess up their leadership selection (by picking a leader who, in your guts/you know she's nuts), you can make that 2033/4.
    Politicians telling people what they want to hear hasn't exactly worked well for either the longevity of political careers or the public. So lets bin the concept, at least outside of election years.
  • nico679nico679 Posts: 6,277
    Where exactly where the Tories going to find the extra billions to fund their pre-election NI bribe if they had won .

    Even more public service cuts would likely have been on the table .

    Brits to be blunt want great public services and don’t want to pay for them . Even with the alleged highest taxes for 70 years the tax burden on people is far lower than most other European countries .

    Until Brits wake up and accept reality then we’ll continue to have governments peddling the fantasy that you can have low taxes and great public services .
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 42,045
    ohnotnow said:

    Central heating switched on alert (by my partner not me I hasten to add).

    Of some relevance to the header, I told her it would be fine as I'd read Anas's lips about there being no austerity under Labour and Sir Keir had promised power bills being reduced by 'up to £300'.

    I'm currently being stared at by my cat who is making it very clear that the temperature isn't to her liking. I think we all know how this battle of the wills is going to go.
    Heating on AND treats.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,687

    ...

    Central heating switched on alert (by my partner not me I hasten to add).

    Of some relevance to the header, I told her it would be fine as I'd read Anas's lips about there being no austerity under Labour and Sir Keir had promised power bills being reduced by 'up to £300'.

    Now is the winter of our discontent made real by this son of toolmaker Starmer....
    Can we have our "likes" back for your assurance not to comment on UK politics? The World of politics is full of broken promises.
    Sorry, couldn't resist that one. I am still generally not commenting on UK politics. I mean, the state of politics in the UK speaks for itself...
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 28,449

    ...

    Central heating switched on alert (by my partner not me I hasten to add).

    Of some relevance to the header, I told her it would be fine as I'd read Anas's lips about there being no austerity under Labour and Sir Keir had promised power bills being reduced by 'up to £300'.

    Now is the winter of our discontent made real by this son of toolmaker Starmer....
    Can we have our "likes" back for your assurance not to comment on UK politics? The World of politics is full of broken promises.
    Sorry, couldn't resist that one. I am still generally not commenting on UK politics. I mean, the state of politics in the UK speaks for itself...
    I was joking! Comment away.
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 28,913
    DavidL said:

    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    Per my comment last night, I am far from convinced that people want Starmer to be telling them everything is terrible. They can see the state the country is in. They need a bit of reassurance that Labour will put it on the right trajectory.

    Even at the very nadir of Thatcher’s popularity in the 1979-1983 parliament, she was always very careful to sell the ‘why’ and to talk about what she saw as the good times ahead.

    The doom and gloom from Labour is not the “national renewal” message they campaigned on. They did not fight an election, as the Tories did in 2010, to get a mandate for unpopular (even if necessary) tax and spend decisions. They said very little, and got a huge majority out of it but now the chips are down I still think they will regret not saying enough of this at the time of the campaign.
    It suited both of the major parties to ignore or hide the hideous state the government's finances were in. The Tories wanted to claim that they had done well and the future looked bright and Labour wanted to pretend that there was enough money to improve the state of public services if you let them at it.

    The reality is that for every £7 the government spends one is borrowed from our children. If this money was going into infrastructure, schools, hospitals, roads and other capital investments that they would get the benefit of that might be excusable but it is in fact going to paying current expenditure in the main because we think we are entitled to a higher standard of living as a country than we actually earn.

    Rebalancing the public finances now is going to be very nearly as challenging as it was in 2010 but, as others have pointed out, we have been sold a somewhat different fantasy.
    I wouldn't want to be a Labour minister. The mess is almost impossible to navigate. I do have to point out though that the cost of not spending money is usually higher than the cost of doing it properly. As an example - school budgets get cut so staff levels get cut which gives no flex when members of staff are ill which increases the costs and frequency of emergency spending to cover holes with supply teachers. Same in the NHS. Same in council services. Etc. Etc.

    As a nation - and I do squarely blame the Conservative Party for this - we now see all spending as "cost" and not "benefit". "Who will pay" instead of who will benefit. And zero care for the cost of not spending - as if it is a zero sum decision.

    You say that we're borrowing a pound from our children. But what are we leaving our children? Towns in ruin, public services and infrastructure gone, a desperate lack of hope as grinding crushing poverty reduces millions to a life of just about managing. We need to refloat our economy so that towns can actually be viable again, letting businesses flourish and having customers for those businesses actually having spare cash to pay for their goods or services. If everyone is broke we all lose.

    What happened to the Tories? We need the return of capitalism and enterprise, and you lot keep wanting to cut to zero.
  • another_richardanother_richard Posts: 26,656

    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    Per my comment last night, I am far from convinced that people want Starmer to be telling them everything is terrible. They can see the state the country is in. They need a bit of reassurance that Labour will put it on the right trajectory.

    Even at the very nadir of Thatcher’s popularity in the 1979-1983 parliament, she was always very careful to sell the ‘why’ and to talk about what she saw as the good times ahead.

    The doom and gloom from Labour is not the “national renewal” message they campaigned on. They did not fight an election, as the Tories did in 2010, to get a mandate for unpopular (even if necessary) tax and spend decisions. They said very little, and got a huge majority out of it but now the chips are down I still think they will regret not saying enough of this at the time of the campaign.
    The counterpoint is that the country has been in a fool's paradise situation for years, and Starmer was up against a party that was happy to pretend that paradise could continue.

    And the election is water under the bridge. If a government with a huge majority and plenty of time can't tell hard truths, who can?

    What matters is how it all looks in 2028/9. And if the Conservatives mess up their leadership selection (by picking a leader who, in your guts/you know she's nuts), you can make that 2033/4.
    Is Starmer willing to tell hard truths ?

    That would include discussing public sector productivity and the trade deficit.

    And even if he is, is he also willing to do some hard actions ?

    The rich and property owners need to pay more.

    The old and poor need to receive less spending.

    The workers need to work longer and increase their productivity.

    So far the some oldies have lost WFA and some public sector workers have had a nice pay rise (without any productivity commitments).

    More of a step back than a step forward.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 28,449

    DavidL said:

    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    Per my comment last night, I am far from convinced that people want Starmer to be telling them everything is terrible. They can see the state the country is in. They need a bit of reassurance that Labour will put it on the right trajectory.

    Even at the very nadir of Thatcher’s popularity in the 1979-1983 parliament, she was always very careful to sell the ‘why’ and to talk about what she saw as the good times ahead.

    The doom and gloom from Labour is not the “national renewal” message they campaigned on. They did not fight an election, as the Tories did in 2010, to get a mandate for unpopular (even if necessary) tax and spend decisions. They said very little, and got a huge majority out of it but now the chips are down I still think they will regret not saying enough of this at the time of the campaign.
    It suited both of the major parties to ignore or hide the hideous state the government's finances were in. The Tories wanted to claim that they had done well and the future looked bright and Labour wanted to pretend that there was enough money to improve the state of public services if you let them at it.

    The reality is that for every £7 the government spends one is borrowed from our children. If this money was going into infrastructure, schools, hospitals, roads and other capital investments that they would get the benefit of that might be excusable but it is in fact going to paying current expenditure in the main because we think we are entitled to a higher standard of living as a country than we actually earn.

    Rebalancing the public finances now is going to be very nearly as challenging as it was in 2010 but, as others have pointed out, we have been sold a somewhat different fantasy.
    I wouldn't want to be a Labour minister. The mess is almost impossible to navigate. I do have to point out though that the cost of not spending money is usually higher than the cost of doing it properly. As an example - school budgets get cut so staff levels get cut which gives no flex when members of staff are ill which increases the costs and frequency of emergency spending to cover holes with supply teachers. Same in the NHS. Same in council services. Etc. Etc.

    As a nation - and I do squarely blame the Conservative Party for this - we now see all spending as "cost" and not "benefit". "Who will pay" instead of who will benefit. And zero care for the cost of not spending - as if it is a zero sum decision.

    You say that we're borrowing a pound from our children. But what are we leaving our children? Towns in ruin, public services and infrastructure gone, a desperate lack of hope as grinding crushing poverty reduces millions to a life of just about managing. We need to refloat our economy so that towns can actually be viable again, letting businesses flourish and having customers for those businesses actually having spare cash to pay for their goods or services. If everyone is broke we all lose.

    What happened to the Tories? We need the return of capitalism and enterprise, and you lot keep wanting to cut to zero.
    You don't buy the ubiquitous PB narrative that in just 7 weeks Labour have squandered the golden legacy they inherited?
  • another_richardanother_richard Posts: 26,656

    Pagan2 said:

    FPT

    ohnotnow said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Cicero said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Badenoch can't do it.

    Can't do what? Make the odd witty comment at PMQs that the small percentage who really pay attention to politics might appreciate? Devise policies that will never be implemented? Watch helplessly as an overwhelming majority means that the government can do whatever it likes however irrational or self harming and all your work and smart comments are to no avail?

    Worrying about who the next Tory leader is shows that you haven't come to terms with what happened last month. They are irrelevant and will be for 10 years now. That is the price of complete failure.
    Nonsense. Snap out of it man, and grow up.

    You're facing a socialist government, and it's time to rally around and challenge it.
    Good grief Casino, how old are you?

    This is nothing like a socialist government. The only time this country has got close to a socialist government was 1945-1950 and even that was fairly mild.

    Starmer's is likely to be very much like Blair2, possibly a bit better, possibly not. But in any event, it will be a shedload better than the mismanagement we have had for the past 14 years.
    At the moment Starmer's government is far more like Brown2 than Blair2
    Starmer is a disaster.
    That comment may become true, but to state it as fact five weeks after the election is just ridiculous.
    There's plenty of evidence already that he's an absolute disaster.
    Wait until they do over the pensions in the Autumn Budget...

    And that will bite hard on not just current pensioners.
    When they repeatedly said they specifically won't raise the rate of income tax, NI or VAT it was clear to anyone who can actually listen that they were going to increase other taxes. Some reform is long overdue in pensions, lets see what they do.

    Personally I find it ludicrous that the government foregoes tax to allow people to build up multi million pound retirement pots, plus £20k per year ISAs. Subsidising savings up to around 500k per person makes a lot of sense, but beyond that it is just giving back tax to the wealthy and hiding that we are doing it by making the system very complex.
    The 'pension reform' you crave will apply to people currently in work, who will not be able to save as efficiently as existing retirees were encouraged to. They will be the losers. I genuinely want the Zedders to enjoy the same benefits as me but they seem determined to throw them away in an envious fit of pique.
    Give over.

    Our generation has had the rug pulled away every step of the way. Free university got replaced with tuition fees as it was supposedly "unaffordable" to continue with free university with so many more going than in the past.

    Well there's so many more pensioners than in the past so in the exact same way it is completely unaffordable to keep paying triple locked pensions.

    Getting pensions on an affordable footing is better to ensuring they're still there in the future than burning down the house now by pissing away every penny available then finding there's no money left.
    Empty rhetoric.
    Not remotely empty.

    Give me one good reason that free tuition
    was taken away because there were more people and it was no longer affordable that doesn't equally apply to pensioners benefits.

    There's no money left, getting spending on a sustainable footing is the best way to ensure the spending can be available in the future too.
    Because impoverished pensioners will require additional other services.

    Government should actually look at what it does in a critical light and determine if it is value added. For example it’s not clear to me that all the current students benefit from their university courses and not clear that society benefits from funding them.

    But we have this mindset that more people having tertiary education is a good thing in and of itself . That’s just not true. More people having -*value added* tertiary education is a good thing
    I told my son uni was a bad idea when he asked...he went...he got an msc and then said he never wants to work in a lab ever again and says he wished he had taken my advice and learned a trade....I didn't advise him out of snobbery....just knew he would be happier using his hands and make a lot more money that he would with his degree
    I’m not sure that either of you are quite right.

    Unfortunately many employers use tertiary education as a screening device for “graduate level” jobs (even though the jobs may not require graduate skills). So having an MSc gives your son options that he didn’t have before even if he doesn’t want to work in a lab.

    But equally there are people who are not suited for an academic path - for whom a trade would be better. There is certainly useful training that can be done - improving the NVQ model perhaps - but not necessarily 3 years and £40k of student debt…
    Having had 65+ MSc's apply for a junior PHP developer role this week - none of whom I could distinguish from another - they might as well have spent 1/4 the money getting through an undistinguished bootcamp programme.

    If anything, I'm giving a +1 to people who paid their way through a bootcamp to get out of whatever hellhole job they were in before.
    Think about this for a minute......you even put "graduate level" jobs in quotes. Should we be alright with the only way to get what are jobs that often could be done by a school leaver with A levels behind a barrier that puts someone 40k or more in debt so they can earn not much more than minimum wage?
    University exams should be made open, so anyone can pay a reasonable fee and take them. Where they get the knowledge and at what cost then becomes up to them, I suspect within a decade most would get it online at a fraction of the cost, often alongside full time work. .
    Which is how many professional level qualifications have always been obtained.
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,405
    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    My view is that by the time of next May’s local elections, Starmer’s ratings will be similar to Sunak’s, the low twenties.

    The Conservatives may still go backwards, given how good the 2021 results were, but they’ll be ahead in NEV share.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,411
    ohnotnow said:

    Central heating switched on alert (by my partner not me I hasten to add).

    Of some relevance to the header, I told her it would be fine as I'd read Anas's lips about there being no austerity under Labour and Sir Keir had promised power bills being reduced by 'up to £300'.

    I'm currently being stared at by my cat who is making it very clear that the temperature isn't to her liking. I think we all know how this battle of the wills is going to go.
    What's going on?

    The temperature here (per Alexa) is 13C, which is just about ideal.

    Shouldn't cats have a summer fur coat (and, presumably, no knickers)?
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,411
    Another interesting video about the Bayesian sinking, looking at questions such as how did the crew escape and get in a life raft, whilst the guests were nearly all stuck in one cabin?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbdidVAbxhk
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 22,915

    DavidL said:

    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    Per my comment last night, I am far from convinced that people want Starmer to be telling them everything is terrible. They can see the state the country is in. They need a bit of reassurance that Labour will put it on the right trajectory.

    Even at the very nadir of Thatcher’s popularity in the 1979-1983 parliament, she was always very careful to sell the ‘why’ and to talk about what she saw as the good times ahead.

    The doom and gloom from Labour is not the “national renewal” message they campaigned on. They did not fight an election, as the Tories did in 2010, to get a mandate for unpopular (even if necessary) tax and spend decisions. They said very little, and got a huge majority out of it but now the chips are down I still think they will regret not saying enough of this at the time of the campaign.
    It suited both of the major parties to ignore or hide the hideous state the government's finances were in. The Tories wanted to claim that they had done well and the future looked bright and Labour wanted to pretend that there was enough money to improve the state of public services if you let them at it.

    The reality is that for every £7 the government spends one is borrowed from our children. If this money was going into infrastructure, schools, hospitals, roads and other capital investments that they would get the benefit of that might be excusable but it is in fact going to paying current expenditure in the main because we think we are entitled to a higher standard of living as a country than we actually earn.

    Rebalancing the public finances now is going to be very nearly as challenging as it was in 2010 but, as others have pointed out, we have been sold a somewhat different fantasy.
    I wouldn't want to be a Labour minister. The mess is almost impossible to navigate. I do have to point out though that the cost of not spending money is usually higher than the cost of doing it properly. As an example - school budgets get cut so staff levels get cut which gives no flex when members of staff are ill which increases the costs and frequency of emergency spending to cover holes with supply teachers. Same in the NHS. Same in council services. Etc. Etc.

    As a nation - and I do squarely blame the Conservative Party for this - we now see all spending as "cost" and not "benefit". "Who will pay" instead of who will benefit. And zero care for the cost of not spending - as if it is a zero sum decision.

    You say that we're borrowing a pound from our children. But what are we leaving our children? Towns in ruin, public services and infrastructure gone, a desperate lack of hope as grinding crushing poverty reduces millions to a life of just about managing. We need to refloat our economy so that towns can actually be viable again, letting businesses flourish and having customers for those businesses actually having spare cash to pay for their goods or services. If everyone is broke we all lose.

    What happened to the Tories? We need the return of capitalism and enterprise, and you lot keep wanting to cut to zero.
    You don't buy the ubiquitous PB narrative that in just 7 weeks Labour have squandered the golden legacy they inherited?
    We need to spend money to save money. We're spending so much dealing with the crises created by cuts, and it is all money wasted. We need more front line staff in front line roles in health, education and council services. That means spending money now to save money later.

    Again, lets do capitalism. I have a food shop with old-fashioned open chillers. A fortune in cash literally evaporating off into the air. I could save an awful lot of money on energy bills by investing in new closed door chillers.

    "Who would pay for that, how much debt are we in" say the Tories of 2024. But go back 20 years and the Tories of 2004 would be "yes, absolutely. Borrow. Invest. Gain a Return on that Investment". Capitalism.

    It is the exact same thing with the country. Borrowing to give people free cash? No. Borrowing to invest to significantly cut operating expenses and expand the economy? Absolutely.

    Seriously, today's remaining Tories need their heads examining.
    Yes everything has been driven by what works in a treasury spreadsheet budget. The voices of the people lower down who actually have to deal with the cuts, experienced staff leaving and off sick with stress, or a crumbling infrastructure around them are just ignored.

    Not all spreadsheet cuts actually end up saving money, indeed I suspect that most of those in the last ten years have ended up costing us more.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 50,515

    Pagan2 said:

    FPT

    ohnotnow said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Cicero said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Badenoch can't do it.

    Can't do what? Make the odd witty comment at PMQs that the small percentage who really pay attention to politics might appreciate? Devise policies that will never be implemented? Watch helplessly as an overwhelming majority means that the government can do whatever it likes however irrational or self harming and all your work and smart comments are to no avail?

    Worrying about who the next Tory leader is shows that you haven't come to terms with what happened last month. They are irrelevant and will be for 10 years now. That is the price of complete failure.
    Nonsense. Snap out of it man, and grow up.

    You're facing a socialist government, and it's time to rally around and challenge it.
    Good grief Casino, how old are you?

    This is nothing like a socialist government. The only time this country has got close to a socialist government was 1945-1950 and even that was fairly mild.

    Starmer's is likely to be very much like Blair2, possibly a bit better, possibly not. But in any event, it will be a shedload better than the mismanagement we have had for the past 14 years.
    At the moment Starmer's government is far more like Brown2 than Blair2
    Starmer is a disaster.
    That comment may become true, but to state it as fact five weeks after the election is just ridiculous.
    There's plenty of evidence already that he's an absolute disaster.
    Wait until they do over the pensions in the Autumn Budget...

    And that will bite hard on not just current pensioners.
    When they repeatedly said they specifically won't raise the rate of income tax, NI or VAT it was clear to anyone who can actually listen that they were going to increase other taxes. Some reform is long overdue in pensions, lets see what they do.

    Personally I find it ludicrous that the government foregoes tax to allow people to build up multi million pound retirement pots, plus £20k per year ISAs. Subsidising savings up to around 500k per person makes a lot of sense, but beyond that it is just giving back tax to the wealthy and hiding that we are doing it by making the system very complex.
    The 'pension reform' you crave will apply to people currently in work, who will not be able to save as efficiently as existing retirees were encouraged to. They will be the losers. I genuinely want the Zedders to enjoy the same benefits as me but they seem determined to throw them away in an envious fit of pique.
    Give over.

    Our generation has had the rug pulled away every step of the way. Free university got replaced with tuition fees as it was supposedly "unaffordable" to continue with free university with so many more going than in the past.

    Well there's so many more pensioners than in the past so in the exact same way it is completely unaffordable to keep paying triple locked pensions.

    Getting pensions on an affordable footing is better to ensuring they're still there in the future than burning down the house now by pissing away every penny available then finding there's no money left.
    Empty rhetoric.
    Not remotely empty.

    Give me one good reason that free tuition
    was taken away because there were more people and it was no longer affordable that doesn't equally apply to pensioners benefits.

    There's no money left, getting spending on a sustainable footing is the best way to ensure the spending can be available in the future too.
    Because impoverished pensioners will require additional other services.

    Government should actually look at what it does in a critical light and determine if it is value added. For example it’s not clear to me that all the current students benefit from their university courses and not clear that society benefits from funding them.

    But we have this mindset that more people having tertiary education is a good thing in and of itself . That’s just not true. More people having -*value added* tertiary education is a good thing
    I told my son uni was a bad idea when he asked...he went...he got an msc and then said he never wants to work in a lab ever again and says he wished he had taken my advice and learned a trade....I didn't advise him out of snobbery....just knew he would be happier using his hands and make a lot more money that he would with his degree
    I’m not sure that either of you are quite right.

    Unfortunately many employers use tertiary education as a screening device for “graduate level” jobs (even though the jobs may not require graduate skills). So having an MSc gives your son options that he didn’t have before even if he doesn’t want to work in a lab.

    But equally there are people who are not suited for an academic path - for whom a trade would be better. There is certainly useful training that can be done - improving the NVQ model perhaps - but not necessarily 3 years and £40k of student debt…
    Having had 65+ MSc's apply for a junior PHP developer role this week - none of whom I could distinguish from another - they might as well have spent 1/4 the money getting through an undistinguished bootcamp programme.

    If anything, I'm giving a +1 to people who paid their way through a bootcamp to get out of whatever hellhole job they were in before.
    Think about this for a minute......you even put "graduate level" jobs in quotes. Should we be alright with the only way to get what are jobs that often could be done by a school leaver with A levels behind a barrier that puts someone 40k or more in debt so they can earn not much more than minimum wage?
    Also, is php still a thing? I did a php short course a few years back and used the knowledge gained precisely once to solve a customer's problem.



    If good jobs in banks still existed, that would need a degree, not four O-levels (GCSEs to younger PBers; yes, you could leave school and start a career at 16).
    You can earn 6 figures, writing software in banks.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,687
    Sean_F said:

    DavidL said:

    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    Per my comment last night, I am far from convinced that people want Starmer to be telling them everything is terrible. They can see the state the country is in. They need a bit of reassurance that Labour will put it on the right trajectory.

    Even at the very nadir of Thatcher’s popularity in the 1979-1983 parliament, she was always very careful to sell the ‘why’ and to talk about what she saw as the good times ahead.

    The doom and gloom from Labour is not the “national renewal” message they campaigned on. They did not fight an election, as the Tories did in 2010, to get a mandate for unpopular (even if necessary) tax and spend decisions. They said very little, and got a huge majority out of it but now the chips are down I still think they will regret not saying enough of this at the time of the campaign.
    It suited both of the major parties to ignore or hide the hideous state the government's finances were in. The Tories wanted to claim that they had done well and the future looked bright and Labour wanted to pretend that there was enough money to improve the state of public services if you let them at it.

    The reality is that for every £7 the government spends one is borrowed from our children. If this money was going into infrastructure, schools, hospitals, roads and other capital investments that they would get the benefit of that might be excusable but it is in fact going to paying current expenditure in the main because we think we are entitled to a higher standard of living as a country than we actually earn.

    Rebalancing the public finances now is going to be very nearly as challenging as it was in 2010 but, as others have pointed out, we have been sold a somewhat different fantasy.
    I wouldn't want to be a Labour minister. The mess is almost impossible to navigate. I do have to point out though that the cost of not spending money is usually higher than the cost of doing it properly. As an example - school budgets get cut so staff levels get cut which gives no flex when members of staff are ill which increases the costs and frequency of emergency spending to cover holes with supply teachers. Same in the NHS. Same in council services. Etc. Etc.

    As a nation - and I do squarely blame the Conservative Party for this - we now see all spending as "cost" and not "benefit". "Who will pay" instead of who will benefit. And zero care for the cost of not spending - as if it is a zero sum decision.

    You say that we're borrowing a pound from our children. But what are we leaving our children? Towns in ruin, public services and infrastructure gone, a desperate lack of hope as grinding crushing poverty reduces millions to a life of just about managing. We need to refloat our economy so that towns can actually be viable again, letting businesses flourish and having customers for those businesses actually having spare cash to pay for their goods or services. If everyone is broke we all lose.

    What happened to the Tories? We need the return of capitalism and enterprise, and you lot keep wanting to cut to zero.
    You don't buy the ubiquitous PB narrative that in just 7 weeks Labour have squandered the golden legacy they inherited?
    No. There’s just no sense that this is a government taking the hard decisions that are necessary. Like its predecessor, it’s role is rewarding its core voters.
    Well, at least we should be grateful Labour only has to pander to 33% of the voters rather than the 43% that Boris had to...
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 33,525
    edited August 25

    Pagan2 said:

    FPT

    ohnotnow said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Cicero said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Badenoch can't do it.

    Can't do what? Make the odd witty comment at PMQs that the small percentage who really pay attention to politics might appreciate? Devise policies that will never be implemented? Watch helplessly as an overwhelming majority means that the government can do whatever it likes however irrational or self harming and all your work and smart comments are to no avail?

    Worrying about who the next Tory leader is shows that you haven't come to terms with what happened last month. They are irrelevant and will be for 10 years now. That is the price of complete failure.
    Nonsense. Snap out of it man, and grow up.

    You're facing a socialist government, and it's time to rally around and challenge it.
    Good grief Casino, how old are you?

    This is nothing like a socialist government. The only time this country has got close to a socialist government was 1945-1950 and even that was fairly mild.

    Starmer's is likely to be very much like Blair2, possibly a bit better, possibly not. But in any event, it will be a shedload better than the mismanagement we have had for the past 14 years.
    At the moment Starmer's government is far more like Brown2 than Blair2
    Starmer is a disaster.
    That comment may become true, but to state it as fact five weeks after the election is just ridiculous.
    There's plenty of evidence already that he's an absolute disaster.
    Wait until they do over the pensions in the Autumn Budget...

    And that will bite hard on not just current pensioners.
    When they repeatedly said they specifically won't raise the rate of income tax, NI or VAT it was clear to anyone who can actually listen that they were going to increase other taxes. Some reform is long overdue in pensions, lets see what they do.

    Personally I find it ludicrous that the government foregoes tax to allow people to build up multi million pound retirement pots, plus £20k per year ISAs. Subsidising savings up to around 500k per person makes a lot of sense, but beyond that it is just giving back tax to the wealthy and hiding that we are doing it by making the system very complex.
    The 'pension reform' you crave will apply to people currently in work, who will not be able to save as efficiently as existing retirees were encouraged to. They will be the losers. I genuinely want the Zedders to enjoy the same benefits as me but they seem determined to throw them away in an envious fit of pique.
    Give over.

    Our generation has had the rug pulled away every step of the way. Free university got replaced with tuition fees as it was supposedly "unaffordable" to continue with free university with so many more going than in the past.

    Well there's so many more pensioners than in the past so in the exact same way it is completely unaffordable to keep paying triple locked pensions.

    Getting pensions on an affordable footing is better to ensuring they're still there in the future than burning down the house now by pissing away every penny available then finding there's no money left.
    Empty rhetoric.
    Not remotely empty.

    Give me one good reason that free tuition
    was taken away because there were more people and it was no longer affordable that doesn't equally apply to pensioners benefits.

    There's no money left, getting spending on a sustainable footing is the best way to ensure the spending can be available in the future too.
    Because impoverished pensioners will require additional other services.

    Government should actually look at what it does in a critical light and determine if it is value added. For example it’s not clear to me that all the current students benefit from their university courses and not clear that society benefits from funding them.

    But we have this mindset that more people having tertiary education is a good thing in and of itself . That’s just not true. More people having -*value added* tertiary education is a good thing
    I told my son uni was a bad idea when he asked...he went...he got an msc and then said he never wants to work in a lab ever again and says he wished he had taken my advice and learned a trade....I didn't advise him out of snobbery....just knew he would be happier using his hands and make a lot more money that he would with his degree
    I’m not sure that either of you are quite right.

    Unfortunately many employers use tertiary education as a screening device for “graduate level” jobs (even though the jobs may not require graduate skills). So having an MSc gives your son options that he didn’t have before even if he doesn’t want to work in a lab.

    But equally there are people who are not suited for an academic path - for whom a trade would be better. There is certainly useful training that can be done - improving the NVQ model perhaps - but not necessarily 3 years and £40k of student debt…
    Having had 65+ MSc's apply for a junior PHP developer role this week - none of whom I could distinguish from another - they might as well have spent 1/4 the money getting through an undistinguished bootcamp programme.

    If anything, I'm giving a +1 to people who paid their way through a bootcamp to get out of whatever hellhole job they were in before.
    Think about this for a minute......you even put "graduate level" jobs in quotes. Should we be alright with the only way to get what are jobs that often could be done by a school leaver with A levels behind a barrier that puts someone 40k or more in debt so they can earn not much more than minimum wage?
    Also, is php still a thing? I did a php short course a few years back and used the knowledge gained precisely once to solve a customer's problem.



    If good jobs in banks still existed, that would need a degree, not four O-levels (GCSEs to younger PBers; yes, you could leave school and start a career at 16).
    Good morning one and all.
    Couple of years ago I ran into one of my old schoolmates; hadn't seen him for best part of 70 years. As one did then he'd left school at 16 with a clutch of decent O levels, including Spanish, which he'd enjoyed, and gone straight into a bank and after a while into the South American branch, where his Spanish was, of course, very useful. He told me he'd had a very fulfilling and enjoyable career, with lots of travelling.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 50,515
    Space comedy

    https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/its-official-nasa-calls-on-crew-dragon-to-rescue-the-starliner-astronauts/

    The inevitable happened - the astronauts are not going home on Boeing Starliner. Instead, they are staying on ISS until Feb and going home on a SpaceX Dragon.

    Huge slap in the face for Boeing.
  • JPJ2JPJ2 Posts: 380
    I suspect that we have already seen peak Labour in Scotland. A chunk of their vote at the GE was based on the fantasy, promoted particularly strongly by BBC Scotland, that people had to vote Labour in Scotland to defeat the Tories. It still only led to Labour 35% SNP 30% of the vote.

    Sarwar knows that under PR he will be hard pushed to end up with more seats than the SNP for Holyrood 2026. He expects to be reliant on the Tories, which is why he has been trialling Labour & Tory alliances taking power in multiple councils where the SNP is the largest party to see the reaction. Negative reaction has been minimal, so game on for Sarwar.

    The problems that the SNP face include: electoral weariness after 19 years, shortage of funds, the police potentially still dragging out their investigations, perceived failures in government. Their biggest problem remains the ludicrous bias in the media, especially BBC Scotland News, which would not survive any genuine examination of its supposed impartiality.

    In their favour will be comparisons with Labour run Wales, which has been badly run by Labour throughout the century. I expect this to result in a strong swing to Plaid Cymru for Senedd 2026.
    The chances of Labour being as popular in 2026 as at the GE are low, especially given their unpromising start. Significant underlying support for independence is likely to inflate the SNP vote relative to the GE.

    So, the SNP have indeed not gone away, and are the likeliest to have the largest number of seats after 2026. Who will be the First Minister is not so clear.

  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 28,913
    All work and no play makes Ian a dull boy:

    Big client offices likely to be repopulated the week after next. A busy program of activities coming up driving activities for 3 of their businesses. The bit where client business A says one specific project can't be done in less than 6 months and business B insists we do it in 6 weeks will be fun. My project work liaising between them for the needs of business C does get bemusing at times. As does the time difference now having to work with people based in Mexico and Abu Dhabi at the opposite ends of the time spectrum.

    My YouTube channel is getting stepped up from 4 videos a month to 6. A stack of rushes to edit for various pieces, a few boxes now delivered containing items to install / shoot review videos / upload. All get me income via referral programs. A Big Push through the autumn to drive towards 10k subscribers and my £1k a month revenue target.

    Our new toys business goes live next weekend. Need to shoot the sponsorship segment for next Friday's Tesla video (as one business is now sponsoring the other) - that video itself needs editing together and will take a while. And tweak the webstore / do some basic SEO tagging etc etc. And social media needs creating as haven't done them yet either

    Wifey's shop still struggling - as are other independent shops in the industry, local Aberdeenshire shops / hospitality in general because the economy is still a mess. Needs some input from me on finance stuff.

    And I assume at some point I get to sleep, see the kids etc. Hence being on PB a lot less these days.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,545
    Sean_F said:

    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    My view is that by the time of next May’s local elections, Starmer’s ratings will be similar to Sunak’s, the low twenties.

    The Conservatives may still go backwards, given how good the 2021 results were, but they’ll be ahead in NEV share.
    Agreed.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,545

    All work and no play makes Ian a dull boy:

    Big client offices likely to be repopulated the week after next. A busy program of activities coming up driving activities for 3 of their businesses. The bit where client business A says one specific project can't be done in less than 6 months and business B insists we do it in 6 weeks will be fun. My project work liaising between them for the needs of business C does get bemusing at times. As does the time difference now having to work with people based in Mexico and Abu Dhabi at the opposite ends of the time spectrum.

    My YouTube channel is getting stepped up from 4 videos a month to 6. A stack of rushes to edit for various pieces, a few boxes now delivered containing items to install / shoot review videos / upload. All get me income via referral programs. A Big Push through the autumn to drive towards 10k subscribers and my £1k a month revenue target.

    Our new toys business goes live next weekend. Need to shoot the sponsorship segment for next Friday's Tesla video (as one business is now sponsoring the other) - that video itself needs editing together and will take a while. And tweak the webstore / do some basic SEO tagging etc etc. And social media needs creating as haven't done them yet either

    Wifey's shop still struggling - as are other independent shops in the industry, local Aberdeenshire shops / hospitality in general because the economy is still a mess. Needs some input from me on finance stuff.

    And I assume at some point I get to sleep, see the kids etc. Hence being on PB a lot less these days.

    Programme.
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 28,913
    JPJ2 said:

    I suspect that we have already seen peak Labour in Scotland. A chunk of their vote at the GE was based on the fantasy, promoted particularly strongly by BBC Scotland, that people had to vote Labour in Scotland to defeat the Tories. It still only led to Labour 35% SNP 30% of the vote.

    Sarwar knows that under PR he will be hard pushed to end up with more seats than the SNP for Holyrood 2026. He expects to be reliant on the Tories, which is why he has been trialling Labour & Tory alliances taking power in multiple councils where the SNP is the largest party to see the reaction. Negative reaction has been minimal, so game on for Sarwar.

    The problems that the SNP face include: electoral weariness after 19 years, shortage of funds, the police potentially still dragging out their investigations, perceived failures in government. Their biggest problem remains the ludicrous bias in the media, especially BBC Scotland News, which would not survive any genuine examination of its supposed impartiality.

    In their favour will be comparisons with Labour run Wales, which has been badly run by Labour throughout the century. I expect this to result in a strong swing to Plaid Cymru for Senedd 2026.
    The chances of Labour being as popular in 2026 as at the GE are low, especially given their unpromising start. Significant underlying support for independence is likely to inflate the SNP vote relative to the GE.

    So, the SNP have indeed not gone away, and are the likeliest to have the largest number of seats after 2026. Who will be the First Minister is not so clear.

    The SNP won't be in government after the coming election. Services are in too big a mess and their focus is too far away from the issues that matter.

    For all that they want it to be about Independence, and for all that they can parrot a list of Great Things they have done (all of which were a decade ago), the basic questions people ask are why is everything being cut, why are services so bad, why haven't you done any of the infrastructure projects you promised, why is my town so run down.

    The answer to any of those isn't "vote SNP". They will get an absolute kicking. The polls lag - the fear of being seen to be against the SNP and thus "against Scotland" is real. But they go there in the end in the general - that finalish poll showing the SNP crushed to 10 seats was widely derided and yet was pretty accurate.
  • HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    Per my comment last night, I am far from convinced that people want Starmer to be telling them everything is terrible. They can see the state the country is in. They need a bit of reassurance that Labour will put it on the right trajectory.

    Even at the very nadir of Thatcher’s popularity in the 1979-1983 parliament, she was always very careful to sell the ‘why’ and to talk about what she saw as the good times ahead.

    The doom and gloom from Labour is not the “national renewal” message they campaigned on. They did not fight an election, as the Tories did in 2010, to get a mandate for unpopular (even if necessary) tax and spend decisions. They said very little, and got a huge majority out of it but now the chips are down I still think they will regret not saying enough of this at the time of the campaign.
    The counterpoint is that the country has been in a fool's paradise situation for years, and Starmer was up against a party that was happy to pretend that paradise could continue.

    And the election is water under the bridge. If a government with a huge majority and plenty of time can't tell hard truths, who can?

    What matters is how it all looks in 2028/9. And if the Conservatives mess up their leadership selection (by picking a leader who, in your guts/you know she's nuts), you can make that 2033/4.
    The premise is wrong. The finances of the country were difficult and have been since COVID but a re-elected Conservative government would have run on much as it has since 2015 making very modest improvements as and when it can. There wasn't a lot of resiliance when COVID came along or when opportunistically Putin invaded the Ukraine.

    Can Starmer walk the tightrope and keep things running with very little growth. Before the election I thought he probably would. I thought he would make "tough" decisions such as telling the doctors and train drivers to F Off. Maybe after this initital spree he will.

    His lack of generosity financially is understandable. His lack of generosity of spirit is more of a surprise. If the Guardian article is a fair sample of his intended big speech then he ought to rewrite it from scratch. Those who fail to give respect to those who oppose them gain little respect for themselves. How different from say Alistair Darling.
  • DopermeanDopermean Posts: 542

    Central heating switched on alert (by my partner not me I hasten to add).

    Of some relevance to the header, I told her it would be fine as I'd read Anas's lips about there being no austerity under Labour and Sir Keir had promised power bills being reduced by 'up to £300'.

    THINGS WILL GET WORSE feels like Davos-speak to me. It's 'the new normal'. The unwritten part is it's going to get worse and it's 'the new normal' because of deliberate policy. Truss was the last PM who said 'Britain's best days lie ahead' and we all know what happened to her.
    Yep she self-destructed in record time through unprecedented incompetence.

    Though to be fair despite all the warnings, she did hugely outperform expectations, I was counting on a year or so of her just being really useless.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,545
    Dopermean said:

    Central heating switched on alert (by my partner not me I hasten to add).

    Of some relevance to the header, I told her it would be fine as I'd read Anas's lips about there being no austerity under Labour and Sir Keir had promised power bills being reduced by 'up to £300'.

    THINGS WILL GET WORSE feels like Davos-speak to me. It's 'the new normal'. The unwritten part is it's going to get worse and it's 'the new normal' because of deliberate policy. Truss was the last PM who said 'Britain's best days lie ahead' and we all know what happened to her.
    Yep she self-destructed in record time through unprecedented incompetence.

    Though to be fair despite all the warnings, she did hugely outperform expectations, I was counting on a year or so of her just being really useless.
    Yawn.
  • JPJ2JPJ2 Posts: 380
    Rochdale Pioneers. Your analysis smacks of wishful thinking, but I always love unionist complacency.

    A critical feature is that this is a PR not FPTP election. The SNP may get, as you put it, "an absolute kicking" but that still has the strong potential to leave them as the largest party, though possibly not in power. If that happened, it would be the first time that the largest party at Holyrood would not be in power, but I do not rule that out.

    I don't see much more downside in SNP support, and negligible further upside in Labour support since the GE.
  • FF43FF43 Posts: 17,209
    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    The difference between "things WILL GET worse" and "things ARE worse" is the difference between failure and success for Starmer.

    I think he's unlikely to do worse than his predecessors and now opposition but he's the one in power and perception is everything here.
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 28,056

    Pagan2 said:

    FPT

    ohnotnow said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Cicero said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Badenoch can't do it.

    Can't do what? Make the odd witty comment at PMQs that the small percentage who really pay attention to politics might appreciate? Devise policies that will never be implemented? Watch helplessly as an overwhelming majority means that the government can do whatever it likes however irrational or self harming and all your work and smart comments are to no avail?

    Worrying about who the next Tory leader is shows that you haven't come to terms with what happened last month. They are irrelevant and will be for 10 years now. That is the price of complete failure.
    Nonsense. Snap out of it man, and grow up.

    You're facing a socialist government, and it's time to rally around and challenge it.
    Good grief Casino, how old are you?

    This is nothing like a socialist government. The only time this country has got close to a socialist government was 1945-1950 and even that was fairly mild.

    Starmer's is likely to be very much like Blair2, possibly a bit better, possibly not. But in any event, it will be a shedload better than the mismanagement we have had for the past 14 years.
    At the moment Starmer's government is far more like Brown2 than Blair2
    Starmer is a disaster.
    That comment may become true, but to state it as fact five weeks after the election is just ridiculous.
    There's plenty of evidence already that he's an absolute disaster.
    Wait until they do over the pensions in the Autumn Budget...

    And that will bite hard on not just current pensioners.
    When they repeatedly said they specifically won't raise the rate of income tax, NI or VAT it was clear to anyone who can actually listen that they were going to increase other taxes. Some reform is long overdue in pensions, lets see what they do.

    Personally I find it ludicrous that the government foregoes tax to allow people to build up multi million pound retirement pots, plus £20k per year ISAs. Subsidising savings up to around 500k per person makes a lot of sense, but beyond that it is just giving back tax to the wealthy and hiding that we are doing it by making the system very complex.
    The 'pension reform' you crave will apply to people currently in work, who will not be able to save as efficiently as existing retirees were encouraged to. They will be the losers. I genuinely want the Zedders to enjoy the same benefits as me but they seem determined to throw them away in an envious fit of pique.
    Give over.

    Our generation has had the rug pulled away every step of the way. Free university got replaced with tuition fees as it was supposedly "unaffordable" to continue with free university with so many more going than in the past.

    Well there's so many more pensioners than in the past so in the exact same way it is completely unaffordable to keep paying triple locked pensions.

    Getting pensions on an affordable footing is better to ensuring they're still there in the future than burning down the house now by pissing away every penny available then finding there's no money left.
    Empty rhetoric.
    Not remotely empty.

    Give me one good reason that free tuition
    was taken away because there were more people and it was no longer affordable that doesn't equally apply to pensioners benefits.

    There's no money left, getting spending on a sustainable footing is the best way to ensure the spending can be available in the future too.
    Because impoverished pensioners will require additional other services.

    Government should actually look at what it does in a critical light and determine if it is value added. For example it’s not clear to me that all the current students benefit from their university courses and not clear that society benefits from funding them.

    But we have this mindset that more people having tertiary education is a good thing in and of itself . That’s just not true. More people having -*value added* tertiary education is a good thing
    I told my son uni was a bad idea when he asked...he went...he got an msc and then said he never wants to work in a lab ever again and says he wished he had taken my advice and learned a trade....I didn't advise him out of snobbery....just knew he would be happier using his hands and make a lot more money that he would with his degree
    I’m not sure that either of you are quite right.

    Unfortunately many employers use tertiary education as a screening device for “graduate level” jobs (even though the jobs may not require graduate skills). So having an MSc gives your son options that he didn’t have before even if he doesn’t want to work in a lab.

    But equally there are people who are not suited for an academic path - for whom a trade would be better. There is certainly useful training that can be done - improving the NVQ model perhaps - but not necessarily 3 years and £40k of student debt…
    Having had 65+ MSc's apply for a junior PHP developer role this week - none of whom I could distinguish from another - they might as well have spent 1/4 the money getting through an undistinguished bootcamp programme.

    If anything, I'm giving a +1 to people who paid their way through a bootcamp to get out of whatever hellhole job they were in before.
    Think about this for a minute......you even put "graduate level" jobs in quotes. Should we be alright with the only way to get what are jobs that often could be done by a school leaver with A levels behind a barrier that puts someone 40k or more in debt so they can earn not much more than minimum wage?
    University exams should be made open, so anyone can pay a reasonable fee and take them. Where they get the knowledge and at what cost then becomes up to them, I suspect within a decade most would get it online at a fraction of the cost, often alongside full time work. .
    Which is how many professional level qualifications have always been obtained.
    Including medicine. Until around the early to mid-20th Century, most doctors did not have degrees. They'd do what amounted to an apprenticeship in medical schools and then do exams set by various professional bodies. If you look at a medical degree today, after the first year or two, it still looks suspiciously like an apprenticeship.
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 28,056
    Bidders line up for Brookfield’s £1.2bn sale of PD Ports
    Peel Ports and Macquarie said to be among interested parties as Canadian owner prepares for auction of Teesside-based operator with 1,400 staff across 11 UK locations

    https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/companies/article/bidders-line-up-for-brookfields-12bn-sale-of-pd-ports-jxt6jm3zd (£££)

    British infrastructure that had previously been sold to foreigners is now up for sale again, possibly to Macquarie of water scandal fame.
  • FF43FF43 Posts: 17,209
    edited August 25

    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    Per my comment last night, I am far from convinced that people want Starmer to be telling them everything is terrible. They can see the state the country is in. They need a bit of reassurance that Labour will put it on the right trajectory.

    Even at the very nadir of Thatcher’s popularity in the 1979-1983 parliament, she was always very careful to sell the ‘why’ and to talk about what she saw as the good times ahead.

    The doom and gloom from Labour is not the “national renewal” message they campaigned on. They did not fight an election, as the Tories did in 2010, to get a mandate for unpopular (even if necessary) tax and spend decisions. They said very little, and got a huge majority out of it but now the chips are down I still think they will regret not saying enough of this at the time of the campaign.
    The counterpoint is that the country has been in a fool's paradise situation for years, and Starmer was up against a party that was happy to pretend that paradise could continue.

    And the election is water under the bridge. If a government with a huge majority and plenty of time can't tell hard truths, who can?

    What matters is how it all looks in 2028/9. And if the Conservatives mess up their leadership selection (by picking a leader who, in your guts/you know she's nuts), you can make that 2033/4.
    The premise is wrong. The finances of the country were difficult and have been since COVID but a re-elected Conservative government would have run on much as it has since 2015 making very modest improvements as and when it can. There wasn't a lot of resiliance when COVID came along or when opportunistically Putin invaded the Ukraine.

    Can Starmer walk the tightrope and keep things running with very little growth. Before the election I thought he probably would. I thought he would make "tough" decisions such as telling the doctors and train drivers to F Off. Maybe after this initital spree he will.

    His lack of generosity financially is understandable. His lack of generosity of spirit is more of a surprise. If the Guardian article is a fair sample of his intended big speech then he ought to rewrite it from scratch. Those who fail to give respect to those who oppose them gain little respect for themselves. How different from say Alistair Darling.
    I wouldn't necessarily say Starmer is taking tough decisions, but at least he's taking decisions, unlike the previous government of drift. Public sector pay agreements in line with national averages is a decision Sunak should have taken literally years ago, instead of letting this and other problems pile up.
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 33,525

    Pagan2 said:

    FPT

    ohnotnow said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Cicero said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Badenoch can't do it.

    Can't do what? Make the odd witty comment at PMQs that the small percentage who really pay attention to politics might appreciate? Devise policies that will never be implemented? Watch helplessly as an overwhelming majority means that the government can do whatever it likes however irrational or self harming and all your work and smart comments are to no avail?

    Worrying about who the next Tory leader is shows that you haven't come to terms with what happened last month. They are irrelevant and will be for 10 years now. That is the price of complete failure.
    Nonsense. Snap out of it man, and grow up.

    You're facing a socialist government, and it's time to rally around and challenge it.
    Good grief Casino, how old are you?

    This is nothing like a socialist government. The only time this country has got close to a socialist government was 1945-1950 and even that was fairly mild.

    Starmer's is likely to be very much like Blair2, possibly a bit better, possibly not. But in any event, it will be a shedload better than the mismanagement we have had for the past 14 years.
    At the moment Starmer's government is far more like Brown2 than Blair2
    Starmer is a disaster.
    That comment may become true, but to state it as fact five weeks after the election is just ridiculous.
    There's plenty of evidence already that he's an absolute disaster.
    Wait until they do over the pensions in the Autumn Budget...

    And that will bite hard on not just current pensioners.
    When they repeatedly said they specifically won't raise the rate of income tax, NI or VAT it was clear to anyone who can actually listen that they were going to increase other taxes. Some reform is long overdue in pensions, lets see what they do.

    Personally I find it ludicrous that the government foregoes tax to allow people to build up multi million pound retirement pots, plus £20k per year ISAs. Subsidising savings up to around 500k per person makes a lot of sense, but beyond that it is just giving back tax to the wealthy and hiding that we are doing it by making the system very complex.
    The 'pension reform' you crave will apply to people currently in work, who will not be able to save as efficiently as existing retirees were encouraged to. They will be the losers. I genuinely want the Zedders to enjoy the same benefits as me but they seem determined to throw them away in an envious fit of pique.
    Give over.

    Our generation has had the rug pulled away every step of the way. Free university got replaced with tuition fees as it was supposedly "unaffordable" to continue with free university with so many more going than in the past.

    Well there's so many more pensioners than in the past so in the exact same way it is completely unaffordable to keep paying triple locked pensions.

    Getting pensions on an affordable footing is better to ensuring they're still there in the future than burning down the house now by pissing away every penny available then finding there's no money left.
    Empty rhetoric.
    Not remotely empty.

    Give me one good reason that free tuition
    was taken away because there were more people and it was no longer affordable that doesn't equally apply to pensioners benefits.

    There's no money left, getting spending on a sustainable footing is the best way to ensure the spending can be available in the future too.
    Because impoverished pensioners will require additional other services.

    Government should actually look at what it does in a critical light and determine if it is value added. For example it’s not clear to me that all the current students benefit from their university courses and not clear that society benefits from funding them.

    But we have this mindset that more people having tertiary education is a good thing in and of itself . That’s just not true. More people having -*value added* tertiary education is a good thing
    I told my son uni was a bad idea when he asked...he went...he got an msc and then said he never wants to work in a lab ever again and says he wished he had taken my advice and learned a trade....I didn't advise him out of snobbery....just knew he would be happier using his hands and make a lot more money that he would with his degree
    I’m not sure that either of you are quite right.

    Unfortunately many employers use tertiary education as a screening device for “graduate level” jobs (even though the jobs may not require graduate skills). So having an MSc gives your son options that he didn’t have before even if he doesn’t want to work in a lab.

    But equally there are people who are not suited for an academic path - for whom a trade would be better. There is certainly useful training that can be done - improving the NVQ model perhaps - but not necessarily 3 years and £40k of student debt…
    Having had 65+ MSc's apply for a junior PHP developer role this week - none of whom I could distinguish from another - they might as well have spent 1/4 the money getting through an undistinguished bootcamp programme.

    If anything, I'm giving a +1 to people who paid their way through a bootcamp to get out of whatever hellhole job they were in before.
    Think about this for a minute......you even put "graduate level" jobs in quotes. Should we be alright with the only way to get what are jobs that often could be done by a school leaver with A levels behind a barrier that puts someone 40k or more in debt so they can earn not much more than minimum wage?
    University exams should be made open, so anyone can pay a reasonable fee and take them. Where they get the knowledge and at what cost then becomes up to them, I suspect within a decade most would get it online at a fraction of the cost, often alongside full time work. .
    Which is how many professional level qualifications have always been obtained.
    Including medicine. Until around the early to mid-20th Century, most doctors did not have degrees. They'd do what amounted to an apprenticeship in medical schools and then do exams set by various professional bodies. If you look at a medical degree today, after the first year or two, it still looks suspiciously like an apprenticeship.
    My great (something) grandfather did that. Apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary (in SW Wales) he completed his apprenticeship and became registered. He actually took the final exams a bit later, and then, having apparently met and married a lady with money, he took and passed the St Andrews medical degree exams so that he was MB.BS.
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 28,056
    Priti tote bags, Kemi sweatshirts and Jenrick mugs: Tory candidates to roll out the merch in bid to be new leader
    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/aug/25/priti-tote-bags-kemi-sweatshirts-and-jenrick-mugs-tory-candidates-roll-out-the-merch-in-bid-to-be-new-leader

    Leadership candidates should sell avatars, which Tories could use to show whom they support when posting on PB.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 8,775
    JPJ2 said:

    Rochdale Pioneers. Your analysis smacks of wishful thinking, but I always love unionist complacency.

    A critical feature is that this is a PR not FPTP election. The SNP may get, as you put it, "an absolute kicking" but that still has the strong potential to leave them as the largest party, though possibly not in power. If that happened, it would be the first time that the largest party at Holyrood would not be in power, but I do not rule that out.

    I don't see much more downside in SNP support, and negligible further upside in Labour support since the GE.

    I would tend to agree, the SNP vote feels resilient in the face of some colourful scandals and decades in power. However, predicting the whims of Scottish voters is always difficult, and the Greens could pick up a lot of the Indy support in what are now becoming Labour/unionist cities. Gaza might complement that swing a little.

    Scotland also has a much more pronounced urban/rural split than England. In rural areas, you could have more interesting 3-way battles between the Tories, Lib Dems and SNP.
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 33,525

    FF43 said:

    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    Per my comment last night, I am far from convinced that people want Starmer to be telling them everything is terrible. They can see the state the country is in. They need a bit of reassurance that Labour will put it on the right trajectory.

    Even at the very nadir of Thatcher’s popularity in the 1979-1983 parliament, she was always very careful to sell the ‘why’ and to talk about what she saw as the good times ahead.

    The doom and gloom from Labour is not the “national renewal” message they campaigned on. They did not fight an election, as the Tories did in 2010, to get a mandate for unpopular (even if necessary) tax and spend decisions. They said very little, and got a huge majority out of it but now the chips are down I still think they will regret not saying enough of this at the time of the campaign.
    The counterpoint is that the country has been in a fool's paradise situation for years, and Starmer was up against a party that was happy to pretend that paradise could continue.

    And the election is water under the bridge. If a government with a huge majority and plenty of time can't tell hard truths, who can?

    What matters is how it all looks in 2028/9. And if the Conservatives mess up their leadership selection (by picking a leader who, in your guts/you know she's nuts), you can make that 2033/4.
    The premise is wrong. The finances of the country were difficult and have been since COVID but a re-elected Conservative government would have run on much as it has since 2015 making very modest improvements as and when it can. There wasn't a lot of resiliance when COVID came along or when opportunistically Putin invaded the Ukraine.

    Can Starmer walk the tightrope and keep things running with very little growth. Before the election I thought he probably would. I thought he would make "tough" decisions such as telling the doctors and train drivers to F Off. Maybe after this initital spree he will.

    His lack of generosity financially is understandable. His lack of generosity of spirit is more of a surprise. If the Guardian article is a fair sample of his intended big speech then he ought to rewrite it from scratch. Those who fail to give respect to those who oppose them gain little respect for themselves. How different from say Alistair Darling.
    I wouldn't necessarily say Starmer is taking tough decisions, but at least he's taking decisions, unlike the previous government of drift. Public sector pay agreements in line with national averages is a decision Sunak should have taken literally years ago, instead of letting this and other problems pile up.
    This is a fair assessment, Theresa May was notorious for just not making decisions, and then pushed into outcomes she wouldnt have chosen if an earlier decision had been made.

    The last person in government to make proper decisions was Osborne. All he was able to completely undone by big spending Boris and Truss. The narrative of Truss as a cutter is odd since her fuel support levy was the biggest market interference since the 70s fuel crisis.
    Osborne had, of course, at least in 2010-15 the support of a substantial majority, due to the coalition and in particular that of Danny Alexander.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,411

    All work and no play makes Ian a dull boy:

    Big client offices likely to be repopulated the week after next. A busy program of activities coming up driving activities for 3 of their businesses. The bit where client business A says one specific project can't be done in less than 6 months and business B insists we do it in 6 weeks will be fun. My project work liaising between them for the needs of business C does get bemusing at times. As does the time difference now having to work with people based in Mexico and Abu Dhabi at the opposite ends of the time spectrum.

    My YouTube channel is getting stepped up from 4 videos a month to 6. A stack of rushes to edit for various pieces, a few boxes now delivered containing items to install / shoot review videos / upload. All get me income via referral programs. A Big Push through the autumn to drive towards 10k subscribers and my £1k a month revenue target.

    Our new toys business goes live next weekend. Need to shoot the sponsorship segment for next Friday's Tesla video (as one business is now sponsoring the other) - that video itself needs editing together and will take a while. And tweak the webstore / do some basic SEO tagging etc etc. And social media needs creating as haven't done them yet either

    Wifey's shop still struggling - as are other independent shops in the industry, local Aberdeenshire shops / hospitality in general because the economy is still a mess. Needs some input from me on finance stuff.

    And I assume at some point I get to sleep, see the kids etc. Hence being on PB a lot less these days.

    Can we have a link to your channel?

    The subscribers per revenue number is interesting.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 42,045
    edited August 25
    I'd missed this one, Reform blatting SCons and a new kid on the block, Indy for Scotland Party.

    Ballot Box Scotland
    @BallotBoxScot
    By-Election Result analysis: Armadale and Blackridge
    An unsurprising Labour victory emerges from a very surprising set of figures, including big surges for Reform UK and the Independence for Scotland Party; a real weird one, let me tell you!

    https://x.com/BallotBoxScot/status/1826928287370596357

  • ManOfGwentManOfGwent Posts: 105
    JPJ2 said:

    I suspect that we have already seen peak Labour in Scotland. A chunk of their vote at the GE was based on the fantasy, promoted particularly strongly by BBC Scotland, that people had to vote Labour in Scotland to defeat the Tories. It still only led to Labour 35% SNP 30% of the vote.

    Sarwar knows that under PR he will be hard pushed to end up with more seats than the SNP for Holyrood 2026. He expects to be reliant on the Tories, which is why he has been trialling Labour & Tory alliances taking power in multiple councils where the SNP is the largest party to see the reaction. Negative reaction has been minimal, so game on for Sarwar.

    The problems that the SNP face include: electoral weariness after 19 years, shortage of funds, the police potentially still dragging out their investigations, perceived failures in government. Their biggest problem remains the ludicrous bias in the media, especially BBC Scotland News, which would not survive any genuine examination of its supposed impartiality.

    In their favour will be comparisons with Labour run Wales, which has been badly run by Labour throughout the century. I expect this to result in a strong swing to Plaid Cymru for Senedd 2026.
    The chances of Labour being as popular in 2026 as at the GE are low, especially given their unpromising start. Significant underlying support for independence is likely to inflate the SNP vote relative to the GE.

    So, the SNP have indeed not gone away, and are the likeliest to have the largest number of seats after 2026. Who will be the First Minister is not so clear.

    It is far more likely that we get a swing to Reform in Wales than the nationalists. There really is little difference between Plaid and Welsh Labour. However, there is a completely different voting system for the next Assembly election in Wales, so the certainties Labour have built power upon under FPTP disappear. Sadly despite this, we are just likely to get more of the same, Labour supported by Plaid until the sun envelopes the earth.
  • SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 22,055

    Pagan2 said:

    FPT

    ohnotnow said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Cicero said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Badenoch can't do it.

    Can't do what? Make the odd witty comment at PMQs that the small percentage who really pay attention to politics might appreciate? Devise policies that will never be implemented? Watch helplessly as an overwhelming majority means that the government can do whatever it likes however irrational or self harming and all your work and smart comments are to no avail?

    Worrying about who the next Tory leader is shows that you haven't come to terms with what happened last month. They are irrelevant and will be for 10 years now. That is the price of complete failure.
    Nonsense. Snap out of it man, and grow up.

    You're facing a socialist government, and it's time to rally around and challenge it.
    Good grief Casino, how old are you?

    This is nothing like a socialist government. The only time this country has got close to a socialist government was 1945-1950 and even that was fairly mild.

    Starmer's is likely to be very much like Blair2, possibly a bit better, possibly not. But in any event, it will be a shedload better than the mismanagement we have had for the past 14 years.
    At the moment Starmer's government is far more like Brown2 than Blair2
    Starmer is a disaster.
    That comment may become true, but to state it as fact five weeks after the election is just ridiculous.
    There's plenty of evidence already that he's an absolute disaster.
    Wait until they do over the pensions in the Autumn Budget...

    And that will bite hard on not just current pensioners.
    When they repeatedly said they specifically won't raise the rate of income tax, NI or VAT it was clear to anyone who can actually listen that they were going to increase other taxes. Some reform is long overdue in pensions, lets see what they do.

    Personally I find it ludicrous that the government foregoes tax to allow people to build up multi million pound retirement pots, plus £20k per year ISAs. Subsidising savings up to around 500k per person makes a lot of sense, but beyond that it is just giving back tax to the wealthy and hiding that we are doing it by making the system very complex.
    The 'pension reform' you crave will apply to people currently in work, who will not be able to save as efficiently as existing retirees were encouraged to. They will be the losers. I genuinely want the Zedders to enjoy the same benefits as me but they seem determined to throw them away in an envious fit of pique.
    Give over.

    Our generation has had the rug pulled away every step of the way. Free university got replaced with tuition fees as it was supposedly "unaffordable" to continue with free university with so many more going than in the past.

    Well there's so many more pensioners than in the past so in the exact same way it is completely unaffordable to keep paying triple locked pensions.

    Getting pensions on an affordable footing is better to ensuring they're still there in the future than burning down the house now by pissing away every penny available then finding there's no money left.
    Empty rhetoric.
    Not remotely empty.

    Give me one good reason that free tuition
    was taken away because there were more people and it was no longer affordable that doesn't equally apply to pensioners benefits.

    There's no money left, getting spending on a sustainable footing is the best way to ensure the spending can be available in the future too.
    Because impoverished pensioners will require additional other services.

    Government should actually look at what it does in a critical light and determine if it is value added. For example it’s not clear to me that all the current students benefit from their university courses and not clear that society benefits from funding them.

    But we have this mindset that more people having tertiary education is a good thing in and of itself . That’s just not true. More people having -*value added* tertiary education is a good thing
    I told my son uni was a bad idea when he asked...he went...he got an msc and then said he never wants to work in a lab ever again and says he wished he had taken my advice and learned a trade....I didn't advise him out of snobbery....just knew he would be happier using his hands and make a lot more money that he would with his degree
    I’m not sure that either of you are quite right.

    Unfortunately many employers use tertiary education as a screening device for “graduate level” jobs (even though the jobs may not require graduate skills). So having an MSc gives your son options that he didn’t have before even if he doesn’t want to work in a lab.

    But equally there are people who are not suited for an academic path - for whom a trade would be better. There is certainly useful training that can be done - improving the NVQ model perhaps - but not necessarily 3 years and £40k of student debt…
    Having had 65+ MSc's apply for a junior PHP developer role this week - none of whom I could distinguish from another - they might as well have spent 1/4 the money getting through an undistinguished bootcamp programme.

    If anything, I'm giving a +1 to people who paid their way through a bootcamp to get out of whatever hellhole job they were in before.
    Think about this for a minute......you even put "graduate level" jobs in quotes. Should we be alright with the only way to get what are jobs that often could be done by a school leaver with A levels behind a barrier that puts someone 40k or more in debt so they can earn not much more than minimum wage?
    Also, is php still a thing? I did a php short course a few years back and used the knowledge gained precisely once to solve a customer's problem.



    If good jobs in banks still existed, that would need a degree, not four O-levels (GCSEs to younger PBers; yes, you could leave school and start a career at 16).
    You can earn 6 figures, writing software in banks.
    You could probably get away with much more than that if you write the right piece of software.
  • Pagan2 said:

    FPT

    ohnotnow said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Cicero said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Badenoch can't do it.

    Can't do what? Make the odd witty comment at PMQs that the small percentage who really pay attention to politics might appreciate? Devise policies that will never be implemented? Watch helplessly as an overwhelming majority means that the government can do whatever it likes however irrational or self harming and all your work and smart comments are to no avail?

    Worrying about who the next Tory leader is shows that you haven't come to terms with what happened last month. They are irrelevant and will be for 10 years now. That is the price of complete failure.
    Nonsense. Snap out of it man, and grow up.

    You're facing a socialist government, and it's time to rally around and challenge it.
    Good grief Casino, how old are you?

    This is nothing like a socialist government. The only time this country has got close to a socialist government was 1945-1950 and even that was fairly mild.

    Starmer's is likely to be very much like Blair2, possibly a bit better, possibly not. But in any event, it will be a shedload better than the mismanagement we have had for the past 14 years.
    At the moment Starmer's government is far more like Brown2 than Blair2
    Starmer is a disaster.
    That comment may become true, but to state it as fact five weeks after the election is just ridiculous.
    There's plenty of evidence already that he's an absolute disaster.
    Wait until they do over the pensions in the Autumn Budget...

    And that will bite hard on not just current pensioners.
    When they repeatedly said they specifically won't raise the rate of income tax, NI or VAT it was clear to anyone who can actually listen that they were going to increase other taxes. Some reform is long overdue in pensions, lets see what they do.

    Personally I find it ludicrous that the government foregoes tax to allow people to build up multi million pound retirement pots, plus £20k per year ISAs. Subsidising savings up to around 500k per person makes a lot of sense, but beyond that it is just giving back tax to the wealthy and hiding that we are doing it by making the system very complex.
    The 'pension reform' you crave will apply to people currently in work, who will not be able to save as efficiently as existing retirees were encouraged to. They will be the losers. I genuinely want the Zedders to enjoy the same benefits as me but they seem determined to throw them away in an envious fit of pique.
    Give over.

    Our generation has had the rug pulled away every step of the way. Free university got replaced with tuition fees as it was supposedly "unaffordable" to continue with free university with so many more going than in the past.

    Well there's so many more pensioners than in the past so in the exact same way it is completely unaffordable to keep paying triple locked pensions.

    Getting pensions on an affordable footing is better to ensuring they're still there in the future than burning down the house now by pissing away every penny available then finding there's no money left.
    Empty rhetoric.
    Not remotely empty.

    Give me one good reason that free tuition
    was taken away because there were more people and it was no longer affordable that doesn't equally apply to pensioners benefits.

    There's no money left, getting spending on a sustainable footing is the best way to ensure the spending can be available in the future too.
    Because impoverished pensioners will require additional other services.

    Government should actually look at what it does in a critical light and determine if it is value added. For example it’s not clear to me that all the current students benefit from their university courses and not clear that society benefits from funding them.

    But we have this mindset that more people having tertiary education is a good thing in and of itself . That’s just not true. More people having -*value added* tertiary education is a good thing
    I told my son uni was a bad idea when he asked...he went...he got an msc and then said he never wants to work in a lab ever again and says he wished he had taken my advice and learned a trade....I didn't advise him out of snobbery....just knew he would be happier using his hands and make a lot more money that he would with his degree
    I’m not sure that either of you are quite right.

    Unfortunately many employers use tertiary education as a screening device for “graduate level” jobs (even though the jobs may not require graduate skills). So having an MSc gives your son options that he didn’t have before even if he doesn’t want to work in a lab.

    But equally there are people who are not suited for an academic path - for whom a trade would be better. There is certainly useful training that can be done - improving the NVQ model perhaps - but not necessarily 3 years and £40k of student debt…
    Having had 65+ MSc's apply for a junior PHP developer role this week - none of whom I could distinguish from another - they might as well have spent 1/4 the money getting through an undistinguished bootcamp programme.

    If anything, I'm giving a +1 to people who paid their way through a bootcamp to get out of whatever hellhole job they were in before.
    Think about this for a minute......you even put "graduate level" jobs in quotes. Should we be alright with the only way to get what are jobs that often could be done by a school leaver with A levels behind a barrier that puts someone 40k or more in debt so they can earn not much more than minimum wage?
    Also, is php still a thing? I did a php short course a few years back and used the knowledge gained precisely once to solve a customer's problem.



    If good jobs in banks still existed, that would need a degree, not four O-levels (GCSEs to younger PBers; yes, you could leave school and start a career at 16).
    Good morning one and all.
    Couple of years ago I ran into one of my old schoolmates; hadn't seen him for best part of 70 years. As one did then he'd left school at 16 with a clutch of decent O levels, including Spanish, which he'd enjoyed, and gone straight into a bank and after a while into the South American branch, where his Spanish was, of course, very useful. He told me he'd had a very fulfilling and enjoyable career, with lots of travelling.
    In today's world unless you are working for your self, you'll not get above NMW without GCSEs.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 8,775

    I'd missed this one, Reform blatting SCons and a new kid on the block, Indy for Scotland Party.

    Ballot Box Scotland
    @BallotBoxScot
    By-Election Result analysis: Armadale and Blackridge
    An unsurprising Labour victory emerges from a very surprising set of figures, including big surges for Reform UK and the Independence for Scotland Party; a real weird one, let me tell you!

    https://x.com/BallotBoxScot/status/1826928287370596357

    Interesting. 38% of people in Scotland voted to leave the EU - it's natural that at least some of them would be attracted to a Reform type party.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 28,449

    Foxy said:

    Weather looking good for scooter weekend on the Isle of Wight.


    Weather might be nice, but the air quality will be shite with all those noxious engines!
    Net zero commitments fail at a stroke, or in this case with just two strokes.
    Right that's it! I'm off like @Leon to debate my own genius in the mirror. Not one of you picked up my world- beating awesome pun!
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,225

    Curious as to when the trials of the SNP elite start. Any ideas?

    Not sure but the police did confirm earlier on this month that Nicola Sturgeon still under investigation by police in party finances row

    https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/nicola-sturgeon-operation-branchform-4742082
    I know financial irregularities can be hard to unpick, but seriously either charge her or drop it already.

    JPJ2 said:

    I suspect that we have already seen peak Labour in Scotland. A chunk of their vote at the GE was based on the fantasy, promoted particularly strongly by BBC Scotland, that people had to vote Labour in Scotland to defeat the Tories. It still only led to Labour 35% SNP 30% of the vote.

    Sarwar knows that under PR he will be hard pushed to end up with more seats than the SNP for Holyrood 2026. He expects to be reliant on the Tories, which is why he has been trialling Labour & Tory alliances taking power in multiple councils where the SNP is the largest party to see the reaction. Negative reaction has been minimal, so game on for Sarwar.

    The problems that the SNP face include: electoral weariness after 19 years, shortage of funds, the police potentially still dragging out their investigations, perceived failures in government. Their biggest problem remains the ludicrous bias in the media, especially BBC Scotland News, which would not survive any genuine examination of its supposed impartiality.

    In their favour will be comparisons with Labour run Wales, which has been badly run by Labour throughout the century. I expect this to result in a strong swing to Plaid Cymru for Senedd 2026.
    The chances of Labour being as popular in 2026 as at the GE are low, especially given their unpromising start. Significant underlying support for independence is likely to inflate the SNP vote relative to the GE.

    So, the SNP have indeed not gone away, and are the likeliest to have the largest number of seats after 2026. Who will be the First Minister is not so clear.

    It is far more likely that we get a swing to Reform in Wales than the nationalists. There really is little difference between Plaid and Welsh Labour. However, there is a completely different voting system for the next Assembly election in Wales, so the certainties Labour have built power upon under FPTP disappear. Sadly despite this, we are just likely to get more of the same, Labour supported by Plaid until the sun envelopes the earth.
    Wales was the last holdout of old UKIP, I'd assume Reform would get at least some attention there.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 50,515

    Pagan2 said:

    FPT

    ohnotnow said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Cicero said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Badenoch can't do it.

    Can't do what? Make the odd witty comment at PMQs that the small percentage who really pay attention to politics might appreciate? Devise policies that will never be implemented? Watch helplessly as an overwhelming majority means that the government can do whatever it likes however irrational or self harming and all your work and smart comments are to no avail?

    Worrying about who the next Tory leader is shows that you haven't come to terms with what happened last month. They are irrelevant and will be for 10 years now. That is the price of complete failure.
    Nonsense. Snap out of it man, and grow up.

    You're facing a socialist government, and it's time to rally around and challenge it.
    Good grief Casino, how old are you?

    This is nothing like a socialist government. The only time this country has got close to a socialist government was 1945-1950 and even that was fairly mild.

    Starmer's is likely to be very much like Blair2, possibly a bit better, possibly not. But in any event, it will be a shedload better than the mismanagement we have had for the past 14 years.
    At the moment Starmer's government is far more like Brown2 than Blair2
    Starmer is a disaster.
    That comment may become true, but to state it as fact five weeks after the election is just ridiculous.
    There's plenty of evidence already that he's an absolute disaster.
    Wait until they do over the pensions in the Autumn Budget...

    And that will bite hard on not just current pensioners.
    When they repeatedly said they specifically won't raise the rate of income tax, NI or VAT it was clear to anyone who can actually listen that they were going to increase other taxes. Some reform is long overdue in pensions, lets see what they do.

    Personally I find it ludicrous that the government foregoes tax to allow people to build up multi million pound retirement pots, plus £20k per year ISAs. Subsidising savings up to around 500k per person makes a lot of sense, but beyond that it is just giving back tax to the wealthy and hiding that we are doing it by making the system very complex.
    The 'pension reform' you crave will apply to people currently in work, who will not be able to save as efficiently as existing retirees were encouraged to. They will be the losers. I genuinely want the Zedders to enjoy the same benefits as me but they seem determined to throw them away in an envious fit of pique.
    Give over.

    Our generation has had the rug pulled away every step of the way. Free university got replaced with tuition fees as it was supposedly "unaffordable" to continue with free university with so many more going than in the past.

    Well there's so many more pensioners than in the past so in the exact same way it is completely unaffordable to keep paying triple locked pensions.

    Getting pensions on an affordable footing is better to ensuring they're still there in the future than burning down the house now by pissing away every penny available then finding there's no money left.
    Empty rhetoric.
    Not remotely empty.

    Give me one good reason that free tuition
    was taken away because there were more people and it was no longer affordable that doesn't equally apply to pensioners benefits.

    There's no money left, getting spending on a sustainable footing is the best way to ensure the spending can be available in the future too.
    Because impoverished pensioners will require additional other services.

    Government should actually look at what it does in a critical light and determine if it is value added. For example it’s not clear to me that all the current students benefit from their university courses and not clear that society benefits from funding them.

    But we have this mindset that more people having tertiary education is a good thing in and of itself . That’s just not true. More people having -*value added* tertiary education is a good thing
    I told my son uni was a bad idea when he asked...he went...he got an msc and then said he never wants to work in a lab ever again and says he wished he had taken my advice and learned a trade....I didn't advise him out of snobbery....just knew he would be happier using his hands and make a lot more money that he would with his degree
    I’m not sure that either of you are quite right.

    Unfortunately many employers use tertiary education as a screening device for “graduate level” jobs (even though the jobs may not require graduate skills). So having an MSc gives your son options that he didn’t have before even if he doesn’t want to work in a lab.

    But equally there are people who are not suited for an academic path - for whom a trade would be better. There is certainly useful training that can be done - improving the NVQ model perhaps - but not necessarily 3 years and £40k of student debt…
    Having had 65+ MSc's apply for a junior PHP developer role this week - none of whom I could distinguish from another - they might as well have spent 1/4 the money getting through an undistinguished bootcamp programme.

    If anything, I'm giving a +1 to people who paid their way through a bootcamp to get out of whatever hellhole job they were in before.
    Think about this for a minute......you even put "graduate level" jobs in quotes. Should we be alright with the only way to get what are jobs that often could be done by a school leaver with A levels behind a barrier that puts someone 40k or more in debt so they can earn not much more than minimum wage?
    Also, is php still a thing? I did a php short course a few years back and used the knowledge gained precisely once to solve a customer's problem.



    If good jobs in banks still existed, that would need a degree, not four O-levels (GCSEs to younger PBers; yes, you could leave school and start a career at 16).
    You can earn 6 figures, writing software in banks.
    You could probably get away with much more than that if you write the right piece of software.
    I do, I do.

    Some years ago, I was working for an alt-bank. They had development teams in Canada, US, London, Eastern Europe and India. As a result of mergers and acquisitions.

    Because they were all working on the same software, it was a perfect opportunity for some analysis. So they ranked locations according to the cost per *feature* successfully delivered.

    London was the cheapest place to develop, by that metric, Eastern Europe was next. India was dead last. By a long way.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,225

    Space comedy

    https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/its-official-nasa-calls-on-crew-dragon-to-rescue-the-starliner-astronauts/

    The inevitable happened - the astronauts are not going home on Boeing Starliner. Instead, they are staying on ISS until Feb and going home on a SpaceX Dragon.

    Huge slap in the face for Boeing.

    How have things gotten so bad for them?
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,411
    edited August 25
    DavidL said:

    DavidL said:

    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    Per my comment last night, I am far from convinced that people want Starmer to be telling them everything is terrible. They can see the state the country is in. They need a bit of reassurance that Labour will put it on the right trajectory.

    Even at the very nadir of Thatcher’s popularity in the 1979-1983 parliament, she was always very careful to sell the ‘why’ and to talk about what she saw as the good times ahead.

    The doom and gloom from Labour is not the “national renewal” message they campaigned on. They did not fight an election, as the Tories did in 2010, to get a mandate for unpopular (even if necessary) tax and spend decisions. They said very little, and got a huge majority out of it but now the chips are down I still think they will regret not saying enough of this at the time of the campaign.
    It suited both of the major parties to ignore or hide the hideous state the government's finances were in. The Tories wanted to claim that they had done well and the future looked bright and Labour wanted to pretend that there was enough money to improve the state of public services if you let them at it.

    The reality is that for every £7 the government spends one is borrowed from our children. If this money was going into infrastructure, schools, hospitals, roads and other capital investments that they would get the benefit of that might be excusable but it is in fact going to paying current expenditure in the main because we think we are entitled to a higher standard of living as a country than we actually earn.

    Rebalancing the public finances now is going to be very nearly as challenging as it was in 2010 but, as others have pointed out, we have been sold a somewhat different fantasy.
    I wouldn't want to be a Labour minister. The mess is almost impossible to navigate. I do have to point out though that the cost of not spending money is usually higher than the cost of doing it properly. As an example - school budgets get cut so staff levels get cut which gives no flex when members of staff are ill which increases the costs and frequency of emergency spending to cover holes with supply teachers. Same in the NHS. Same in council services. Etc. Etc.

    As a nation - and I do squarely blame the Conservative Party for this - we now see all spending as "cost" and not "benefit". "Who will pay" instead of who will benefit. And zero care for the cost of not spending - as if it is a zero sum decision.

    You say that we're borrowing a pound from our children. But what are we leaving our children? Towns in ruin, public services and infrastructure gone, a desperate lack of hope as grinding crushing poverty reduces millions to a life of just about managing. We need to refloat our economy so that towns can actually be viable again, letting businesses flourish and having customers for those businesses actually having spare cash to pay for their goods or services. If everyone is broke we all lose.

    What happened to the Tories? We need the return of capitalism and enterprise, and you lot keep wanting to cut to zero.
    You don't buy the ubiquitous PB narrative that in just 7 weeks Labour have squandered the golden legacy they inherited?
    We need to spend money to save money. We're spending so much dealing with the crises created by cuts, and it is all money wasted. We need more front line staff in front line roles in health, education and council services. That means spending money now to save money later.

    Again, lets do capitalism. I have a food shop with old-fashioned open chillers. A fortune in cash literally evaporating off into the air. I could save an awful lot of money on energy bills by investing in new closed door chillers.

    "Who would pay for that, how much debt are we in" say the Tories of 2024. But go back 20 years and the Tories of 2004 would be "yes, absolutely. Borrow. Invest. Gain a Return on that Investment". Capitalism.

    It is the exact same thing with the country. Borrowing to give people free cash? No. Borrowing to invest to significantly cut operating expenses and expand the economy? Absolutely.

    Seriously, today's remaining Tories need their heads examining.
    Ian, spending money on more staff is not an investment, it is an increase in costs. That increase in cost may be justified if it produces a better service but the evidence for that in the public sector is thin indeed. What seems to happen is that already poor productivity falls further.

    I have no problem with borrowing to genuinely invest, provided that you can be confident that investment is going to produce a return in the future. So, in your neck of the woods, dualling the A96 would be an investment. It would encourage businesses who could be confident of getting their goods to market. It would save lives and it would stop people wasting their potentially productive time in one queue after another.

    I think we need a lot more investment but I am not so sure we can afford to borrow a lot more to pay for it. That is why I think the government should be looking to cut current expenditure and unnecessary benefits for the well off to create the space and cash for that investment. But what did Reeves do? The first thing she did was to cancel a series of investments with growth potential so she could increase public pay.

    As I have said before I do not envy her her task. Growth, inflation, employment were all good to very good when she took over but our public expenditure is at least £100bn out of line with our income. Its a very difficult challenge.
    TBF (slightly) fair to the Tories, iirc Gordon Brown was the man who introduced a routine misleading rhetoric branding revenue expenditure as "investment", during his interminable budget groan-o-logues in New Labour days.

    I'm not getting into returns on investments in even bigger roads than we have already, but I will note that many of them deliver nothing like the promised returns, any many less than the money tipped down the hole, and that investment in getting traffic off roads (ie active travel schemes) often deliver double or treble the returns. :smile:
  • pm215pm215 Posts: 1,138

    Pagan2 said:

    FPT

    ohnotnow said:

    Pagan2 said:

    Cicero said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    Badenoch can't do it.

    Can't do what? Make the odd witty comment at PMQs that the small percentage who really pay attention to politics might appreciate? Devise policies that will never be implemented? Watch helplessly as an overwhelming majority means that the government can do whatever it likes however irrational or self harming and all your work and smart comments are to no avail?

    Worrying about who the next Tory leader is shows that you haven't come to terms with what happened last month. They are irrelevant and will be for 10 years now. That is the price of complete failure.
    Nonsense. Snap out of it man, and grow up.

    You're facing a socialist government, and it's time to rally around and challenge it.
    Good grief Casino, how old are you?

    This is nothing like a socialist government. The only time this country has got close to a socialist government was 1945-1950 and even that was fairly mild.

    Starmer's is likely to be very much like Blair2, possibly a bit better, possibly not. But in any event, it will be a shedload better than the mismanagement we have had for the past 14 years.
    At the moment Starmer's government is far more like Brown2 than Blair2
    Starmer is a disaster.
    That comment may become true, but to state it as fact five weeks after the election is just ridiculous.
    There's plenty of evidence already that he's an absolute disaster.
    Wait until they do over the pensions in the Autumn Budget...

    And that will bite hard on not just current pensioners.
    When they repeatedly said they specifically won't raise the rate of income tax, NI or VAT it was clear to anyone who can actually listen that they were going to increase other taxes. Some reform is long overdue in pensions, lets see what they do.

    Personally I find it ludicrous that the government foregoes tax to allow people to build up multi million pound retirement pots, plus £20k per year ISAs. Subsidising savings up to around 500k per person makes a lot of sense, but beyond that it is just giving back tax to the wealthy and hiding that we are doing it by making the system very complex.
    The 'pension reform' you crave will apply to people currently in work, who will not be able to save as efficiently as existing retirees were encouraged to. They will be the losers. I genuinely want the Zedders to enjoy the same benefits as me but they seem determined to throw them away in an envious fit of pique.
    Give over.

    Our generation has had the rug pulled away every step of the way. Free university got replaced with tuition fees as it was supposedly "unaffordable" to continue with free university with so many more going than in the past.

    Well there's so many more pensioners than in the past so in the exact same way it is completely unaffordable to keep paying triple locked pensions.

    Getting pensions on an affordable footing is better to ensuring they're still there in the future than burning down the house now by pissing away every penny available then finding there's no money left.
    Empty rhetoric.
    Not remotely empty.

    Give me one good reason that free tuition
    was taken away because there were more people and it was no longer affordable that doesn't equally apply to pensioners benefits.

    There's no money left, getting spending on a sustainable footing is the best way to ensure the spending can be available in the future too.
    Because impoverished pensioners will require additional other services.

    Government should actually look at what it does in a critical light and determine if it is value added. For example it’s not clear to me that all the current students benefit from their university courses and not clear that society benefits from funding them.

    But we have this mindset that more people having tertiary education is a good thing in and of itself . That’s just not true. More people having -*value added* tertiary education is a good thing
    I told my son uni was a bad idea when he asked...he went...he got an msc and then said he never wants to work in a lab ever again and says he wished he had taken my advice and learned a trade....I didn't advise him out of snobbery....just knew he would be happier using his hands and make a lot more money that he would with his degree
    I’m not sure that either of you are quite right.

    Unfortunately many employers use tertiary education as a screening device for “graduate level” jobs (even though the jobs may not require graduate skills). So having an MSc gives your son options that he didn’t have before even if he doesn’t want to work in a lab.

    But equally there are people who are not suited for an academic path - for whom a trade would be better. There is certainly useful training that can be done - improving the NVQ model perhaps - but not necessarily 3 years and £40k of student debt…
    Having had 65+ MSc's apply for a junior PHP developer role this week - none of whom I could distinguish from another - they might as well have spent 1/4 the money getting through an undistinguished bootcamp programme.

    If anything, I'm giving a +1 to people who paid their way through a bootcamp to get out of whatever hellhole job they were in before.
    Think about this for a minute......you even put "graduate level" jobs in quotes. Should we be alright with the only way to get what are jobs that often could be done by a school leaver with A levels behind a barrier that puts someone 40k or more in debt so they can earn not much more than minimum wage?
    University exams should be made open, so anyone can pay a reasonable fee and take them. Where they get the knowledge and at what cost then becomes up to them, I suspect within a decade most would get it online at a fraction of the cost, often alongside full time work. .
    Which is how many professional level qualifications have always been obtained.
    Including medicine. Until around the early to mid-20th Century, most doctors did not have degrees. They'd do what amounted to an apprenticeship in medical schools and then do exams set by various professional bodies. If you look at a medical degree today, after the first year or two, it still looks suspiciously like an apprenticeship.
    Mmm, there are probably a lot of jobs where a bit of post A level theoretical study and a big chunk of on the job mentoring would serve people better than three or four years of pure academic study. (I'm thinking in particular of my own field of computer programming where the academic side and the industry side don't match up very well -- a bit of theoretical grounding is helpful but you don't need three years. Indeed I did two years maths and then a year of compsci, and it's hard to say I'd have been any worse at the job if I'd skipped those two years of maths entirely...) But as a society we seem to be stuck in a situation where the degree is almost entirely acting as a "filter out 50% of applicants and be a signal that somebody can spend three years on a task without too much supervision and get it done".
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,327

    All work and no play makes Ian a dull boy:

    Big client offices likely to be repopulated the week after next. A busy program of activities coming up driving activities for 3 of their businesses. The bit where client business A says one specific project can't be done in less than 6 months and business B insists we do it in 6 weeks will be fun. My project work liaising between them for the needs of business C does get bemusing at times. As does the time difference now having to work with people based in Mexico and Abu Dhabi at the opposite ends of the time spectrum.

    My YouTube channel is getting stepped up from 4 videos a month to 6. A stack of rushes to edit for various pieces, a few boxes now delivered containing items to install / shoot review videos / upload. All get me income via referral programs. A Big Push through the autumn to drive towards 10k subscribers and my £1k a month revenue target.

    Our new toys business goes live next weekend. Need to shoot the sponsorship segment for next Friday's Tesla video (as one business is now sponsoring the other) - that video itself needs editing together and will take a while. And tweak the webstore / do some basic SEO tagging etc etc. And social media needs creating as haven't done them yet either

    Wifey's shop still struggling - as are other independent shops in the industry, local Aberdeenshire shops / hospitality in general because the economy is still a mess. Needs some input from me on finance stuff.

    And I assume at some point I get to sleep, see the kids etc. Hence being on PB a lot less these days.

    All very well - and good luck with it all - but let's also every now and again pump out some anti-right-populist brimstone on here. You do that better than most.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 50,515
    kle4 said:

    Curious as to when the trials of the SNP elite start. Any ideas?

    Not sure but the police did confirm earlier on this month that Nicola Sturgeon still under investigation by police in party finances row

    https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/nicola-sturgeon-operation-branchform-4742082
    I know financial irregularities can be hard to unpick, but seriously either charge her or drop it already.
    When the police report, it will either anger the SNP or their opponents. If Sturgeon ends up being prosecuted, the SNP won’t like the tarnish to their brand. If she doesn’t get charged, the opponents of the SNP will scream about it being a fix.

    With such a political hot potato, the obvious thing is to claim it needs a bit more time in the oven. This gives you time to move from the enquiry, retire, get promoted etc etc. Finishing the enquiry just gets you grief.
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 28,913
    JPJ2 said:

    Rochdale Pioneers. Your analysis smacks of wishful thinking, but I always love unionist complacency.

    A critical feature is that this is a PR not FPTP election. The SNP may get, as you put it, "an absolute kicking" but that still has the strong potential to leave them as the largest party, though possibly not in power. If that happened, it would be the first time that the largest party at Holyrood would not be in power, but I do not rule that out.

    I don't see much more downside in SNP support, and negligible further upside in Labour support since the GE.

    Good morning!

    I am not a unionist.

    As for elections, you see that “it’s impossible for any one party to win a majority”? Don’t lecture me about how the electoral system works, it’s a waste of your time.

    The challenge for the SNP will be simple: why will people positively vote for them? The negative vote for them falls apart when the Tories aren’t in government. So they need to show the positive reasons why people need to keep voting for the party dismantling their public services and bringing their communities to rack and ruin and corruptly wasting money whilst achieving nothing.

    Final point. Your “I can’t see much more downside in SNP support” line. It’s hopium. Once people break their link from the party they usually vote for it’s very easy for them to not vote for them. Ask Labour about how that works.
  • Tim_in_RuislipTim_in_Ruislip Posts: 435
    edited August 25

    DavidL said:

    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    Per my comment last night, I am far from convinced that people want Starmer to be telling them everything is terrible. They can see the state the country is in. They need a bit of reassurance that Labour will put it on the right trajectory.

    Even at the very nadir of Thatcher’s popularity in the 1979-1983 parliament, she was always very careful to sell the ‘why’ and to talk about what she saw as the good times ahead.

    The doom and gloom from Labour is not the “national renewal” message they campaigned on. They did not fight an election, as the Tories did in 2010, to get a mandate for unpopular (even if necessary) tax and spend decisions. They said very little, and got a huge majority out of it but now the chips are down I still think they will regret not saying enough of this at the time of the campaign.
    It suited both of the major parties to ignore or hide the hideous state the government's finances were in. The Tories wanted to claim that they had done well and the future looked bright and Labour wanted to pretend that there was enough money to improve the state of public services if you let them at it.

    The reality is that for every £7 the government spends one is borrowed from our children. If this money was going into infrastructure, schools, hospitals, roads and other capital investments that they would get the benefit of that might be excusable but it is in fact going to paying current expenditure in the main because we think we are entitled to a higher standard of living as a country than we actually earn.

    Rebalancing the public finances now is going to be very nearly as challenging as it was in 2010 but, as others have pointed out, we have been sold a somewhat different fantasy.
    I wouldn't want to be a Labour minister. The mess is almost impossible to navigate. I do have to point out though that the cost of not spending money is usually higher than the cost of doing it properly. As an example - school budgets get cut so staff levels get cut which gives no flex when members of staff are ill which increases the costs and frequency of emergency spending to cover holes with supply teachers. Same in the NHS. Same in council services. Etc. Etc.

    As a nation - and I do squarely blame the Conservative Party for this - we now see all spending as "cost" and not "benefit". "Who will pay" instead of who will benefit. And zero care for the cost of not spending - as if it is a zero sum decision.

    You say that we're borrowing a pound from our children. But what are we leaving our children? Towns in ruin, public services and infrastructure gone, a desperate lack of hope as grinding crushing poverty reduces millions to a life of just about managing. We need to refloat our economy so that towns can actually be viable again, letting businesses flourish and having customers for those businesses actually having spare cash to pay for their goods or services. If everyone is broke we all lose.

    What happened to the Tories? We need the return of capitalism and enterprise, and you lot keep wanting to cut to zero.
    You don't buy the ubiquitous PB narrative that in just 7 weeks Labour have squandered the golden legacy they inherited?
    The British public are notably to the left of the PB consensus mid-point.

    If replicated by punters, this could well result in obvious value on the betting markets. I already sense right wing psychology being projected onto labour. Explanations for their motives and obvious misunderstanding of the dynamics at play.

    The tele/speccie output, for example, seems really quite off-base and if they keep going* and take PB/punters with them, I can only see the betting markets becoming more irrational.

    I might take up gambling again if/when the money starts flowing into the "Starmer is toast" markets.

    *Important context: We are in the middle of a conservative leadership contest.
  • pm215pm215 Posts: 1,138

    DavidL said:

    DavidL said:

    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    Per my comment last night, I am far from convinced that people want Starmer to be telling them everything is terrible. They can see the state the country is in. They need a bit of reassurance that Labour will put it on the right trajectory.

    Even at the very nadir of Thatcher’s popularity in the 1979-1983 parliament, she was always very careful to sell the ‘why’ and to talk about what she saw as the good times ahead.

    The doom and gloom from Labour is not the “national renewal” message they campaigned on. They did not fight an election, as the Tories did in 2010, to get a mandate for unpopular (even if necessary) tax and spend decisions. They said very little, and got a huge majority out of it but now the chips are down I still think they will regret not saying enough of this at the time of the campaign.
    It suited both of the major parties to ignore or hide the hideous state the government's finances were in. The Tories wanted to claim that they had done well and the future looked bright and Labour wanted to pretend that there was enough money to improve the state of public services if you let them at it.

    The reality is that for every £7 the government spends one is borrowed from our children. If this money was going into infrastructure, schools, hospitals, roads and other capital investments that they would get the benefit of that might be excusable but it is in fact going to paying current expenditure in the main because we think we are entitled to a higher standard of living as a country than we actually earn.

    Rebalancing the public finances now is going to be very nearly as challenging as it was in 2010 but, as others have pointed out, we have been sold a somewhat different fantasy.
    I wouldn't want to be a Labour minister. The mess is almost impossible to navigate. I do have to point out though that the cost of not spending money is usually higher than the cost of doing it properly. As an example - school budgets get cut so staff levels get cut which gives no flex when members of staff are ill which increases the costs and frequency of emergency spending to cover holes with supply teachers. Same in the NHS. Same in council services. Etc. Etc.

    As a nation - and I do squarely blame the Conservative Party for this - we now see all spending as "cost" and not "benefit". "Who will pay" instead of who will benefit. And zero care for the cost of not spending - as if it is a zero sum decision.

    You say that we're borrowing a pound from our children. But what are we leaving our children? Towns in ruin, public services and infrastructure gone, a desperate lack of hope as grinding crushing poverty reduces millions to a life of just about managing. We need to refloat our economy so that towns can actually be viable again, letting businesses flourish and having customers for those businesses actually having spare cash to pay for their goods or services. If everyone is broke we all lose.

    What happened to the Tories? We need the return of capitalism and enterprise, and you lot keep wanting to cut to zero.
    You don't buy the ubiquitous PB narrative that in just 7 weeks Labour have squandered the golden legacy they inherited?
    We need to spend money to save money. We're spending so much dealing with the crises created by cuts, and it is all money wasted. We need more front line staff in front line roles in health, education and council services. That means spending money now to save money later.

    Again, lets do capitalism. I have a food shop with old-fashioned open chillers. A fortune in cash literally evaporating off into the air. I could save an awful lot of money on energy bills by investing in new closed door chillers.

    "Who would pay for that, how much debt are we in" say the Tories of 2024. But go back 20 years and the Tories of 2004 would be "yes, absolutely. Borrow. Invest. Gain a Return on that Investment". Capitalism.

    It is the exact same thing with the country. Borrowing to give people free cash? No. Borrowing to invest to significantly cut operating expenses and expand the economy? Absolutely.

    Seriously, today's remaining Tories need their heads examining.
    Ian, spending money on more staff is not an investment, it is an increase in costs. That increase in cost may be justified if it produces a better service but the evidence for that in the public sector is thin indeed. What seems to happen is that already poor productivity falls further.

    I have no problem with borrowing to genuinely invest, provided that you can be confident that investment is going to produce a return in the future. So, in your neck of the woods, dualling the A96 would be an investment. It would encourage businesses who could be confident of getting their goods to market. It would save lives and it would stop people wasting their potentially productive time in one queue after another.

    I think we need a lot more investment but I am not so sure we can afford to borrow a lot more to pay for it. That is why I think the government should be looking to cut current expenditure and unnecessary benefits for the well off to create the space and cash for that investment. But what did Reeves do? The first thing she did was to cancel a series of investments with growth potential so she could increase public pay.

    As I have said before I do not envy her her task. Growth, inflation, employment were all good to very good when she took over but our public expenditure is at least £100bn out of line with our income. Its a very difficult challenge.
    We werent saving money by not paying junior doctors an extra £4k per year. When they went on strike we instead paid experienced doctors up to £3k per shift to cover for them! And cancelled many thousands of operations leaving people not working and businesses across the country having to deal with that. It is a false saving that only exists on a spreadsheet, not the real world.
    Right, having half the public sector on strike for years doesn't serve anybody and doesn't save money either. It's the "cancel the investments" side of it that didn't sit well with me.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,930

    DavidL said:

    DavidL said:

    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    Per my comment last night, I am far from convinced that people want Starmer to be telling them everything is terrible. They can see the state the country is in. They need a bit of reassurance that Labour will put it on the right trajectory.

    Even at the very nadir of Thatcher’s popularity in the 1979-1983 parliament, she was always very careful to sell the ‘why’ and to talk about what she saw as the good times ahead.

    The doom and gloom from Labour is not the “national renewal” message they campaigned on. They did not fight an election, as the Tories did in 2010, to get a mandate for unpopular (even if necessary) tax and spend decisions. They said very little, and got a huge majority out of it but now the chips are down I still think they will regret not saying enough of this at the time of the campaign.
    It suited both of the major parties to ignore or hide the hideous state the government's finances were in. The Tories wanted to claim that they had done well and the future looked bright and Labour wanted to pretend that there was enough money to improve the state of public services if you let them at it.

    The reality is that for every £7 the government spends one is borrowed from our children. If this money was going into infrastructure, schools, hospitals, roads and other capital investments that they would get the benefit of that might be excusable but it is in fact going to paying current expenditure in the main because we think we are entitled to a higher standard of living as a country than we actually earn.

    Rebalancing the public finances now is going to be very nearly as challenging as it was in 2010 but, as others have pointed out, we have been sold a somewhat different fantasy.
    I wouldn't want to be a Labour minister. The mess is almost impossible to navigate. I do have to point out though that the cost of not spending money is usually higher than the cost of doing it properly. As an example - school budgets get cut so staff levels get cut which gives no flex when members of staff are ill which increases the costs and frequency of emergency spending to cover holes with supply teachers. Same in the NHS. Same in council services. Etc. Etc.

    As a nation - and I do squarely blame the Conservative Party for this - we now see all spending as "cost" and not "benefit". "Who will pay" instead of who will benefit. And zero care for the cost of not spending - as if it is a zero sum decision.

    You say that we're borrowing a pound from our children. But what are we leaving our children? Towns in ruin, public services and infrastructure gone, a desperate lack of hope as grinding crushing poverty reduces millions to a life of just about managing. We need to refloat our economy so that towns can actually be viable again, letting businesses flourish and having customers for those businesses actually having spare cash to pay for their goods or services. If everyone is broke we all lose.

    What happened to the Tories? We need the return of capitalism and enterprise, and you lot keep wanting to cut to zero.
    You don't buy the ubiquitous PB narrative that in just 7 weeks Labour have squandered the golden legacy they inherited?
    We need to spend money to save money. We're spending so much dealing with the crises created by cuts, and it is all money wasted. We need more front line staff in front line roles in health, education and council services. That means spending money now to save money later.

    Again, lets do capitalism. I have a food shop with old-fashioned open chillers. A fortune in cash literally evaporating off into the air. I could save an awful lot of money on energy bills by investing in new closed door chillers.

    "Who would pay for that, how much debt are we in" say the Tories of 2024. But go back 20 years and the Tories of 2004 would be "yes, absolutely. Borrow. Invest. Gain a Return on that Investment". Capitalism.

    It is the exact same thing with the country. Borrowing to give people free cash? No. Borrowing to invest to significantly cut operating expenses and expand the economy? Absolutely.

    Seriously, today's remaining Tories need their heads examining.
    Ian, spending money on more staff is not an investment, it is an increase in costs. That increase in cost may be justified if it produces a better service but the evidence for that in the public sector is thin indeed. What seems to happen is that already poor productivity falls further.

    I have no problem with borrowing to genuinely invest, provided that you can be confident that investment is going to produce a return in the future. So, in your neck of the woods, dualling the A96 would be an investment. It would encourage businesses who could be confident of getting their goods to market. It would save lives and it would stop people wasting their potentially productive time in one queue after another.

    I think we need a lot more investment but I am not so sure we can afford to borrow a lot more to pay for it. That is why I think the government should be looking to cut current expenditure and unnecessary benefits for the well off to create the space and cash for that investment. But what did Reeves do? The first thing she did was to cancel a series of investments with growth potential so she could increase public pay.

    As I have said before I do not envy her her task. Growth, inflation, employment were all good to very good when she took over but our public expenditure is at least £100bn out of line with our income. Its a very difficult challenge.
    We werent saving money by not paying junior doctors an extra £4k per year. When they went on strike we instead paid experienced doctors up to £3k per shift to cover for them! And cancelled many thousands of operations leaving people not working and businesses across the country having to deal with that. It is a false saving that only exists on a spreadsheet, not the real world.
    Apples and pears. We pay to cover their shifts once or twice. We pay them the additional salary forever. When Universities are struggling to fill their medicine courses we will know we have a problem. Medicine is not as well paid as it was, the junior doctors are right about that, but its still pretty attractive.
  • another_richardanother_richard Posts: 26,656

    DavidL said:

    DavidL said:

    HYUFD said:

    From 'Things can only get better' with Blair in 1997 to, in Starmer's own words. 'Things will get worse' now
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rx0mdgpnno

    Per my comment last night, I am far from convinced that people want Starmer to be telling them everything is terrible. They can see the state the country is in. They need a bit of reassurance that Labour will put it on the right trajectory.

    Even at the very nadir of Thatcher’s popularity in the 1979-1983 parliament, she was always very careful to sell the ‘why’ and to talk about what she saw as the good times ahead.

    The doom and gloom from Labour is not the “national renewal” message they campaigned on. They did not fight an election, as the Tories did in 2010, to get a mandate for unpopular (even if necessary) tax and spend decisions. They said very little, and got a huge majority out of it but now the chips are down I still think they will regret not saying enough of this at the time of the campaign.
    It suited both of the major parties to ignore or hide the hideous state the government's finances were in. The Tories wanted to claim that they had done well and the future looked bright and Labour wanted to pretend that there was enough money to improve the state of public services if you let them at it.

    The reality is that for every £7 the government spends one is borrowed from our children. If this money was going into infrastructure, schools, hospitals, roads and other capital investments that they would get the benefit of that might be excusable but it is in fact going to paying current expenditure in the main because we think we are entitled to a higher standard of living as a country than we actually earn.

    Rebalancing the public finances now is going to be very nearly as challenging as it was in 2010 but, as others have pointed out, we have been sold a somewhat different fantasy.
    I wouldn't want to be a Labour minister. The mess is almost impossible to navigate. I do have to point out though that the cost of not spending money is usually higher than the cost of doing it properly. As an example - school budgets get cut so staff levels get cut which gives no flex when members of staff are ill which increases the costs and frequency of emergency spending to cover holes with supply teachers. Same in the NHS. Same in council services. Etc. Etc.

    As a nation - and I do squarely blame the Conservative Party for this - we now see all spending as "cost" and not "benefit". "Who will pay" instead of who will benefit. And zero care for the cost of not spending - as if it is a zero sum decision.

    You say that we're borrowing a pound from our children. But what are we leaving our children? Towns in ruin, public services and infrastructure gone, a desperate lack of hope as grinding crushing poverty reduces millions to a life of just about managing. We need to refloat our economy so that towns can actually be viable again, letting businesses flourish and having customers for those businesses actually having spare cash to pay for their goods or services. If everyone is broke we all lose.

    What happened to the Tories? We need the return of capitalism and enterprise, and you lot keep wanting to cut to zero.
    You don't buy the ubiquitous PB narrative that in just 7 weeks Labour have squandered the golden legacy they inherited?
    We need to spend money to save money. We're spending so much dealing with the crises created by cuts, and it is all money wasted. We need more front line staff in front line roles in health, education and council services. That means spending money now to save money later.

    Again, lets do capitalism. I have a food shop with old-fashioned open chillers. A fortune in cash literally evaporating off into the air. I could save an awful lot of money on energy bills by investing in new closed door chillers.

    "Who would pay for that, how much debt are we in" say the Tories of 2024. But go back 20 years and the Tories of 2004 would be "yes, absolutely. Borrow. Invest. Gain a Return on that Investment". Capitalism.

    It is the exact same thing with the country. Borrowing to give people free cash? No. Borrowing to invest to significantly cut operating expenses and expand the economy? Absolutely.

    Seriously, today's remaining Tories need their heads examining.
    Ian, spending money on more staff is not an investment, it is an increase in costs. That increase in cost may be justified if it produces a better service but the evidence for that in the public sector is thin indeed. What seems to happen is that already poor productivity falls further.

    I have no problem with borrowing to genuinely invest, provided that you can be confident that investment is going to produce a return in the future. So, in your neck of the woods, dualling the A96 would be an investment. It would encourage businesses who could be confident of getting their goods to market. It would save lives and it would stop people wasting their potentially productive time in one queue after another.

    I think we need a lot more investment but I am not so sure we can afford to borrow a lot more to pay for it. That is why I think the government should be looking to cut current expenditure and unnecessary benefits for the well off to create the space and cash for that investment. But what did Reeves do? The first thing she did was to cancel a series of investments with growth potential so she could increase public pay.

    As I have said before I do not envy her her task. Growth, inflation, employment were all good to very good when she took over but our public expenditure is at least £100bn out of line with our income. Its a very difficult challenge.
    We werent saving money by not paying junior doctors an extra £4k per year. When they went on strike we instead paid experienced doctors up to £3k per shift to cover for them! And cancelled many thousands of operations leaving people not working and businesses across the country having to deal with that. It is a false saving that only exists on a spreadsheet, not the real world.
    And if the junior doctors demand another £4k per year do you pay that as well ?

    How about if other public sector workers demand an extra £4k for themselves ?
This discussion has been closed.