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.
Your first argument about spending money on staff. Do you think that in not spending money on staff that we’re not spending money on staff?
We are - on temps and emergency cover. You can’t just cut teacher numbers and keep operating the school. Or medical staff in hospitals. Or courts.
This is the Tory problem. “Just work harder”. You can’t work the remaining people hard enough to cope with the staff already cut. It’s impossible and they break. So you need even more emergency spending to deal with the damage.
Are you comprehending yet? There is not a “spend no money” option.
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".
Most 3 year degrees are 9 terms of 8-12 weeks so about 72-108 weeks. They could nearly all be done in 2 years full time or 4 years part time.
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.
Its a lot easier to get GCSEs now than it was to get O levels in the 1950s.
Not least because school leaving age was 15 back then.
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.
Agreed, I am concerned by the new governments approach to investment so far. Hopefully the culling of some existing investment is to allow more of whatever their preferred investment is but we shall find out more after the budget.
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.
I’ll try! I’m likely to be standing for Aberdeenshire council in the near future just to add to the fun. So will have to get my head back into politics
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 ?
We should pay market driven rates that allow us to fill key jobs without 100k vacancies or the loss of the best staff. This is capitalism 101, or should be.
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.
The medical schools could quadruple their capacity and still be filled with every applicant getting 4A*. There is a capacity later on though when they start rotating into the NHS, the places arent there without extra cash.
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.
When I was working in IT support in City banks in the late 1990s, it was quite normal for Senior-ish support staff (eg team leader / third line) to be getting 100k or more per annum, contracting.
They would be on £50+ per hour on normal to long working weeks. And plenty of senior staff had been there for 5-10 years.
I recall one contract developer in his 50s, who lived on the river front west of London, explaining how his payment arrangements involved the bank's contract being with his personal service company in Liechtenstein.
There was also quite the cocaine culture, which I expect is perhaps still normalised.
I don't think salaried software developers would be at that level, but package values towards 100k pa would have been normal.
One interesting aspect was that the contracting side worked far more like a trade market than a professional market - it was "what particular skills have you got, that I can use TODAY", not "what are your qualifications", and qualifications - such as they were - were particular skills not degrees and Chartered etc. The flip side of that was that it could be brutal - this was before the time when contractors were turned into proto-employees with holidays and the rest.
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
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 ?
We should pay market driven rates that allow us to fill key jobs without 100k vacancies or the loss of the best staff. This is capitalism 101, or should be.
Given the massive increase in NHS employment in the last few years it seems that there is no difficulty in recruiting for it.
I remember reading here five years ago that there was 100k vacancies in the NHS, well since then NHS employment has increased by over 300k.
Given that the NHS now employs over two million people and is continually recruiting why are you surprised that there are vacancies as its current workforce continually retires, dies and changes jobs ?
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?
“When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.” - Harry Stonecipher, former CEO of Boeing
But it's more complicated than that - and more interesting.
In the Modern. Proper way of managing a company, you try and outsource everything. This traditionally meant that you didn't carry the risk of developing sub assemblies and components - the contractor did. And when you changed a design or stopped making it, they had the obsolete factory.
This ends up with a vast pyramid of contractors, who in turn, subcontract.
In the 1960s, when everything was on paper, this had the advantage that contractors delivered a black box *they designed*. Because keeping the whole design in a single set of drawings and specification would be impossible.
On the political side, this means you can subtly distribute spend to all the parts of the country where the relevant politicians come from. And the subcontractors donating to the politicians looks much better than a zillion dollar cheque from Boeing.
The problem is that each layer in the contracting pyramid needs profit and, more importantly, the communication between the parent company and the contractors can easily become slow and adversarial.
In the case of the door falling off the airliner, Boeing had split off a huge chunk of its aircarft making to form a company called Spirit. Communication between Boeing nd Sprint was poor. When you added in Boeing management misusing the defect repair process to do quality control.....
In the case of Starliner, the thrusters that are failing were outsourced to Aerojet. With a poorly thought out spec. Boeing then started arguing with Aerojet about spec changes - Boeing wanted Aerojet to swallow all the extra costs.
These thrusters were then integrated into poorly designed enclosures (designed by another contractor) - they put too many thrusters and fuel lines next to each other in a box that held the heat in. As the cherry on top, the heating was poorly modelled, without physical testing.
This model of development nearly destroyed the Apollo program - see Apollo 204 (aka Apollo 1). But it continued to be used for big projects and has created a number of epic failures.
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.
Self preservation is key.
After all this time, and not charging at the same time as Murrell, I will be astonished if Sturgeon is charged, or that it will actually get to trial if she is. But then I didnt think he'd get charged either.
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.
DavidL is right about the A96 - I reckon a number of bypasses would do more to boost the Scottish economy than dualling the A9 by allowing better movement of goods between industries in the north and allowing our town centres to become attractive again. The obsession with the A9 has distracted people from thinking about what is the best use of money/borrowing.
The new tram line in Edinburgh is going to cost £2 billion. That is probably clear value-for-money, but just imagine what you could do with £2 billion for cycling and walking infrastructure, or even investment in local bus services elsewhere in Scotland.
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Easily solved.
Get training here then you either have to work here for an agreed length of time or you get charged for the cost of the training.
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Not much about our health service does. It seems to be bloated, expensive, badly run, with poor outcomes, yet beloved and sacrosanct even as apparently everyone in it is poorly treated or paid (one or the other, or both).
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Easily solved.
Get training here then you either have to work here for an agreed length of time or you get charged for the cost of the training.
Err, students in England and Wales already get charged for the training. That's why some of them have over £100,000 in debt.
Of course, if you move to Australia permanently those debts get wiped after 25/30 years and you don't have to pay a penny. Nice one.
That's what's so scary about how he behaves, in that he probably is stone cold sober.
There's countless rumours he's hopped up on various pills, which would make sense given his insistent belief Biden was hopped up on various pills, but it's probably nothing.
But it's more complicated than that - and more interesting.
In the Modern. Proper way of managing a company, you try and outsource everything. This traditionally meant that you didn't carry the risk of developing sub assemblies and components - the contractor did. And when you changed a design or stopped making it, they had the obsolete factory.
This ends up with a vast pyramid of contractors, who in turn, subcontract.
In the 1960s, when everything was on paper, this had the advantage that contractors delivered a black box *they designed*. Because keeping the whole design in a single set of drawings and specification would be impossible.
On the political side, this means you can subtly distribute spend to all the parts of the country where the relevant politicians come from. And the subcontractors donating to the politicians looks much better than a zillion dollar cheque from Boeing.
The problem is that each layer in the contracting pyramid needs profit and, more importantly, the communication between the parent company and the contractors can easily become slow and adversarial.
In the case of the door falling off the airliner, Boeing had split off a huge chunk of its aircarft making to form a company called Spirit. Communication between Boeing nd Sprint was poor. When you added in Boeing management misusing the defect repair process to do quality control.....
In the case of Starliner, the thrusters that are failing were outsourced to Aerojet. With a poorly thought out spec. Boeing then started arguing with Aerojet about spec changes - Boeing wanted Aerojet to swallow all the extra costs.
These thrusters were then integrated into poorly designed enclosures (designed by another contractor) - they put too many thrusters and fuel lines next to each other in a box that held the heat in. As the cherry on top, the heating was poorly modelled, without physical testing.
This model of development nearly destroyed the Apollo program - see Apollo 204 (aka Apollo 1). But it continued to be used for big projects and has created a number of epic failures.
This internal Boeing technical report from 2001 on the benefits & costs of outsourcing looks ever more prescient: “OUT-SOURCED PROFITS – THE CORNERSTONE OF SUCCESSFUL SUBCONTRACTING by Dr. L. J. HART-SMITH“ https://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2014130646.pdf
Boeing management clearly decided to take this report & do everything it said not to.
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Easily solved.
Get training here then you either have to work here for an agreed length of time or you get charged for the cost of the training.
Err, students in England and Wales already get charged for the training. That's why some of them have over £100,000 in debt.
Of course, if you move to Australia permanently those debts get wiped after 25/30 years and you don't have to pay a penny. Nice one.
So change the training contract - move to Australia and get a £100k+ bill, payable immediately.
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 ?
We should pay market driven rates that allow us to fill key jobs without 100k vacancies or the loss of the best staff. This is capitalism 101, or should be.
Given the massive increase in NHS employment in the last few years it seems that there is no difficulty in recruiting for it.
I remember reading here five years ago that there was 100k vacancies in the NHS, well since then NHS employment has increased by over 300k.
Given that the NHS now employs over two million people and is continually recruiting why are you surprised that there are vacancies as its current workforce continually retires, dies and changes jobs ?
A big part of the problem is the uniform, bad conditions of employment combined with centrally set pay.
At the moment, doctors have the following options to get better pay and conditions
1) Strike 2) Go fully private (but there is a very limited market) 3) Emigrate - big costs, social and financial. 4) Leave medicine - again, big costs.
What is missing, is what some people in the private sector have. If they are underpaid, relative to others, leave and get another job. If they are badly treated, the same.
If hospitals had to actually compete for staff, then there would be a market. But preventing such a market in staff was specifically designed out of the system we have.
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Easily solved.
Get training here then you either have to work here for an agreed length of time or you get charged for the cost of the training.
Along those lines is a sensible step, yes. But doesn't mean that having half the public sector on strike saves us money, it just doesn't.
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Not much about our health service does. It seems to be bloated, expensive, badly run, with poor outcomes, yet beloved and sacrosanct even as apparently everyone in it is poorly treated or paid (one or the other, or both).
Not is, but claims to be.
An organisation which is able to increase its workforce so much in a time of full employment is not paying poorly.
Less than what some NHS workers think they deserve maybe, less than what some other countries pay possibly.
But if you want to receive the best international pay rates then you need to produce the best international performance.
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Easily solved.
Get training here then you either have to work here for an agreed length of time or you get charged for the cost of the training.
Err, students in England and Wales already get charged for the training. That's why some of them have over £100,000 in debt.
Of course, if you move to Australia permanently those debts get wiped after 25/30 years and you don't have to pay a penny. Nice one.
So change the training contract - move to Australia and get a £100k+ bill, payable immediately.
A simple suggestion - while working in the NHS, all student/training debt is handled by the NHS. To the member of staff, it is as if it has ceased to exist.
In addition pay it off, on their behalf, over years of service.
So after 7 years (say) - no debt. Back load the wiping out of debt so that most of it goes in the 6th and 7th years of working in the NHS.
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.
Your first argument about spending money on staff. Do you think that in not spending money on staff that we’re not spending money on staff?
We are - on temps and emergency cover. You can’t just cut teacher numbers and keep operating the school. Or medical staff in hospitals. Or courts.
This is the Tory problem. “Just work harder”. You can’t work the remaining people hard enough to cope with the staff already cut. It’s impossible and they break. So you need even more emergency spending to deal with the damage.
Are you comprehending yet? There is not a “spend no money” option.
Our government is not spending nothing and neither did the last government. It is spending nearly £800bn a year, more than £2bn a day. The argument that we just need to spend more to get value for money has been tested to oblivion, not least under Boris and Sunak. It hasn't worked. It never works.
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Easily solved.
Get training here then you either have to work here for an agreed length of time or you get charged for the cost of the training.
Err, students in England and Wales already get charged for the training. That's why some of them have over £100,000 in debt.
Of course, if you move to Australia permanently those debts get wiped after 25/30 years and you don't have to pay a penny. Nice one.
So change the training contract - move to Australia and get a £100k+ bill, payable immediately.
A simple suggestion - while working in the NHS, all student/training debt is handled by the NHS. To the member of staff, it is as if it has ceased to exist.
In addition pay it off, on their behalf, over years of service.
So after 7 years (say) - no debt. Back load the wiping out of debt so that most of it goes in the 6th and 7th years of working in the NHS.
I've proposed something similar to that before. I think it addresses both the lower pay at the start (because they do not start to repay their debt) and staff retention. Whether it stops people heading off to Australia is less certain.
But it's more complicated than that - and more interesting.
In the Modern. Proper way of managing a company, you try and outsource everything. This traditionally meant that you didn't carry the risk of developing sub assemblies and components - the contractor did. And when you changed a design or stopped making it, they had the obsolete factory.
This ends up with a vast pyramid of contractors, who in turn, subcontract.
In the 1960s, when everything was on paper, this had the advantage that contractors delivered a black box *they designed*. Because keeping the whole design in a single set of drawings and specification would be impossible.
On the political side, this means you can subtly distribute spend to all the parts of the country where the relevant politicians come from. And the subcontractors donating to the politicians looks much better than a zillion dollar cheque from Boeing.
The problem is that each layer in the contracting pyramid needs profit and, more importantly, the communication between the parent company and the contractors can easily become slow and adversarial.
In the case of the door falling off the airliner, Boeing had split off a huge chunk of its aircarft making to form a company called Spirit. Communication between Boeing nd Sprint was poor. When you added in Boeing management misusing the defect repair process to do quality control.....
In the case of Starliner, the thrusters that are failing were outsourced to Aerojet. With a poorly thought out spec. Boeing then started arguing with Aerojet about spec changes - Boeing wanted Aerojet to swallow all the extra costs.
These thrusters were then integrated into poorly designed enclosures (designed by another contractor) - they put too many thrusters and fuel lines next to each other in a box that held the heat in. As the cherry on top, the heating was poorly modelled, without physical testing.
This model of development nearly destroyed the Apollo program - see Apollo 204 (aka Apollo 1). But it continued to be used for big projects and has created a number of epic failures.
This internal Boeing technical report from 2001 on the benefits & costs of outsourcing looks ever more prescient: “OUT-SOURCED PROFITS – THE CORNERSTONE OF SUCCESSFUL SUBCONTRACTING by Dr. L. J. HART-SMITH“ https://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2014130646.pdf
Boeing management clearly decided to take this report & do everything it said not to.
Yes.
The alternative is to recognise that technology has change since 1960. Instead of a subcontracting the design of subassemblies, with computer aided design, you can have a single design. The new tools even automatically test the whole design for failures in simulation and for constraints on ease of manufacturing. Tooling has changed - multi axis CNC machines can carve a design on the computer. And then do something completely different the next minute. The same with 3D printers. So instead of specialised sub assembly production lines, you can have generalist "make anything" setups. To a degree. So the "risk" of having the manufacturing in-house goes away, mostly.
All of this means that bringing the manufacturing back into the parent company makes sense - you can control the design, not give layers of profit to hundreds of other companies and communication between people working on the system is vastly improved.
The problem is political and social. The politicians see a demand to give money to monolithic companies that then spend it how they want. Rather than in a delicate dance of whose-constituecy-gets-what. Old school generalist managers don't have the skills to manage anything other than money (and that poorly).
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?
“When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.” - Harry Stonecipher, former CEO of Boeing
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.
DavidL is right about the A96 - I reckon a number of bypasses would do more to boost the Scottish economy than dualling the A9 by allowing better movement of goods between industries in the north and allowing our town centres to become attractive again. The obsession with the A9 has distracted people from thinking about what is the best use of money/borrowing.
The new tram line in Edinburgh is going to cost £2 billion. That is probably clear value-for-money, but just imagine what you could do with £2 billion for cycling and walking infrastructure, or even investment in local bus services elsewhere in Scotland.
I'm not sure if the Edinburgh Tram is a good example - how much better could that have been done?
I think it would be quite interesting to see how Scotland tackles such a scheme now, given that they now have a committed active travel % of overall transport budget (if it survives).
I'd invest 0.2% of the money in a dashcam upload portal.
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Easily solved.
Get training here then you either have to work here for an agreed length of time or you get charged for the cost of the training.
Err, students in England and Wales already get charged for the training. That's why some of them have over £100,000 in debt.
Of course, if you move to Australia permanently those debts get wiped after 25/30 years and you don't have to pay a penny. Nice one.
So change the training contract - move to Australia and get a £100k+ bill, payable immediately.
A simple suggestion - while working in the NHS, all student/training debt is handled by the NHS. To the member of staff, it is as if it has ceased to exist.
In addition pay it off, on their behalf, over years of service.
So after 7 years (say) - no debt. Back load the wiping out of debt so that most of it goes in the 6th and 7th years of working in the NHS.
Year 1 1% Year 2 2% Year 3 4% Year 4 8% Year 5 16% Year 6 32% Year 7 37%
Or on a longer, slower write off:
Year 1 1% Year 2 1% Year 3 2% Year 4 3% Year 5 5% Year 6 8% Year 7 13% Year 8 21% Year 9 34% Year 10 12%
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.
DavidL is right about the A96 - I reckon a number of bypasses would do more to boost the Scottish economy than dualling the A9 by allowing better movement of goods between industries in the north and allowing our town centres to become attractive again. The obsession with the A9 has distracted people from thinking about what is the best use of money/borrowing.
The new tram line in Edinburgh is going to cost £2 billion. That is probably clear value-for-money, but just imagine what you could do with £2 billion for cycling and walking infrastructure, or even investment in local bus services elsewhere in Scotland.
I'm not sure if the Edinburgh Tram is a good example - how much better could that have been done?
I think it would be quite interesting to see how Scotland tackles such a scheme now, given that they now have a committed active travel % of overall transport budget (if it survives).
I'd invest 0.2% of the money in a dashcam upload portal.
Edinburgh Tram was an extended festival of rolling, asinine, incompetence shot through with not-invented-here syndrome. How much better could that have been done?
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Easily solved.
Get training here then you either have to work here for an agreed length of time or you get charged for the cost of the training.
Err, students in England and Wales already get charged for the training. That's why some of them have over £100,000 in debt.
Of course, if you move to Australia permanently those debts get wiped after 25/30 years and you don't have to pay a penny. Nice one.
So change the training contract - move to Australia and get a £100k+ bill, payable immediately.
A simple suggestion - while working in the NHS, all student/training debt is handled by the NHS. To the member of staff, it is as if it has ceased to exist.
In addition pay it off, on their behalf, over years of service.
So after 7 years (say) - no debt. Back load the wiping out of debt so that most of it goes in the 6th and 7th years of working in the NHS.
I've proposed something similar to that before. I think it addresses both the lower pay at the start (because they do not start to repay their debt) and staff retention. Whether it stops people heading off to Australia is less certain.
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Easily solved.
Get training here then you either have to work here for an agreed length of time or you get charged for the cost of the training.
Err, students in England and Wales already get charged for the training. That's why some of them have over £100,000 in debt.
Of course, if you move to Australia permanently those debts get wiped after 25/30 years and you don't have to pay a penny. Nice one.
So change the training contract - move to Australia and get a £100k+ bill, payable immediately.
A simple suggestion - while working in the NHS, all student/training debt is handled by the NHS. To the member of staff, it is as if it has ceased to exist.
In addition pay it off, on their behalf, over years of service.
So after 7 years (say) - no debt. Back load the wiping out of debt so that most of it goes in the 6th and 7th years of working in the NHS.
I've proposed something similar to that before. I think it addresses both the lower pay at the start (because they do not start to repay their debt) and staff retention. Whether it stops people heading off to Australia is less certain.
No reason why an 'Australia' term cannot be in the contract.
With say 25% of the training cost being charged if the doctor works for more than say five years in other countries - I don't think its a bad thing if workers get a different experience by working elsewhere for a time.
Just looking at Short money - the Lib Dems will get about £2.5m about double their previous allocation and Reform will get about £1m.
We'll be carpeted in yellow diamonds and knee-deep in bar charts come the next election.
I'll be quite interested to see what happens in Ashfield.
Someone will need to do the political trench warfare against Reform, and it is unlikely to be the Ashfield Independents imo.
But will Sir Ed Davey's best pratting-about-in-ponds days be behind him? Don't want a hernia on the campaign trail. Though a photo op in a run down casualty department isn't the worst idea.
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.
Your first argument about spending money on staff. Do you think that in not spending money on staff that we’re not spending money on staff?
We are - on temps and emergency cover. You can’t just cut teacher numbers and keep operating the school. Or medical staff in hospitals. Or courts.
This is the Tory problem. “Just work harder”. You can’t work the remaining people hard enough to cope with the staff already cut. It’s impossible and they break. So you need even more emergency spending to deal with the damage.
Are you comprehending yet? There is not a “spend no money” option.
Our government is not spending nothing and neither did the last government. It is spending nearly £800bn a year, more than £2bn a day. The argument that we just need to spend more to get value for money has been tested to oblivion, not least under Boris and Sunak. It hasn't worked. It never works.
The government is actually spending £1,226bn this year:
£371bn Social protection £251bn Health £131bn Education £109bn Debt interest £71bn Defence £59bn Transport £49bn Industry, agriculture & employment £47bn Public order & safety £45bn Personal social services £40bn Housing & environment £53bn Other
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.
DavidL is right about the A96 - I reckon a number of bypasses would do more to boost the Scottish economy than dualling the A9 by allowing better movement of goods between industries in the north and allowing our town centres to become attractive again. The obsession with the A9 has distracted people from thinking about what is the best use of money/borrowing.
The new tram line in Edinburgh is going to cost £2 billion. That is probably clear value-for-money, but just imagine what you could do with £2 billion for cycling and walking infrastructure, or even investment in local bus services elsewhere in Scotland.
I'm not sure if the Edinburgh Tram is a good example - how much better could that have been done?
I think it would be quite interesting to see how Scotland tackles such a scheme now, given that they now have a committed active travel % of overall transport budget (if it survives).
I'd invest 0.2% of the money in a dashcam upload portal.
IIRC there is a company investigating applying Self-Propelled Modular Transporter (SPMT) tech to multi unit "bendy buses".
That is, by using computer controlled steering on each unit, a "road-train" can be created that can corner etc, despite the length. It runs on a "virtual track", a predesigned route
The idea is that you get much of benefits of trams, without the tracks or overhead wires.
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.
DavidL is right about the A96 - I reckon a number of bypasses would do more to boost the Scottish economy than dualling the A9 by allowing better movement of goods between industries in the north and allowing our town centres to become attractive again. The obsession with the A9 has distracted people from thinking about what is the best use of money/borrowing.
The new tram line in Edinburgh is going to cost £2 billion. That is probably clear value-for-money, but just imagine what you could do with £2 billion for cycling and walking infrastructure, or even investment in local bus services elsewhere in Scotland.
I'm not sure if the Edinburgh Tram is a good example - how much better could that have been done?
I think it would be quite interesting to see how Scotland tackles such a scheme now, given that they now have a committed active travel % of overall transport budget (if it survives).
I'd invest 0.2% of the money in a dashcam upload portal.
Edinburgh Tram was an extended festival of rolling, asinine, incompetence shot through with not-invented-here syndrome. How much better could that have been done?
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.
DavidL is right about the A96 - I reckon a number of bypasses would do more to boost the Scottish economy than dualling the A9 by allowing better movement of goods between industries in the north and allowing our town centres to become attractive again. The obsession with the A9 has distracted people from thinking about what is the best use of money/borrowing.
The new tram line in Edinburgh is going to cost £2 billion. That is probably clear value-for-money, but just imagine what you could do with £2 billion for cycling and walking infrastructure, or even investment in local bus services elsewhere in Scotland.
I'm not sure if the Edinburgh Tram is a good example - how much better could that have been done?
I think it would be quite interesting to see how Scotland tackles such a scheme now, given that they now have a committed active travel % of overall transport budget (if it survives).
I'd invest 0.2% of the money in a dashcam upload portal.
IIRC there is a company investigating applying Self-Propelled Modular Transporter (SPMT) tech to multi unit "bendy buses".
That is, by using computer controlled steering on each unit, a "road-train" can be created that can corner etc, despite the length. It runs on a "virtual track", a predesigned route
The idea is that you get much of benefits of trams, without the tracks or overhead wires.
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Easily solved.
Get training here then you either have to work here for an agreed length of time or you get charged for the cost of the training.
Err, students in England and Wales already get charged for the training. That's why some of them have over £100,000 in debt.
Of course, if you move to Australia permanently those debts get wiped after 25/30 years and you don't have to pay a penny. Nice one.
So change the training contract - move to Australia and get a £100k+ bill, payable immediately.
A simple suggestion - while working in the NHS, all student/training debt is handled by the NHS. To the member of staff, it is as if it has ceased to exist.
In addition pay it off, on their behalf, over years of service.
So after 7 years (say) - no debt. Back load the wiping out of debt so that most of it goes in the 6th and 7th years of working in the NHS.
Year 1 1% Year 2 2% Year 3 4% Year 4 8% Year 5 16% Year 6 32% Year 7 37%
Or on a longer, slower write off:
Year 1 1% Year 2 1% Year 3 2% Year 4 3% Year 5 5% Year 6 8% Year 7 13% Year 8 21% Year 9 34% Year 10 12%
Lots of ways it could be done, if they want to.
I'm not convinced by that for 2 reasons - one is that it is short-term, the other is that it is purely financial.
Medics become progressively more valuable over time, and to create a fully developed consultant is a matter of 20-25 years not 5-10. So I think we need to be looking at careers-for-life, not at "stay here for X years and you can leave at no cost".
Something multi-dimensional is required, considered over perhaps 30 or even 40 years.
Just looking at Short money - the Lib Dems will get about £2.5m about double their previous allocation and Reform will get about £1m.
LibDems 72 seats Reform 5 seats
But like Hillary Clinton, Reform won the popular vote and lost in FPTP's electoral college.
More apt comparison maybe Canada in 2021 and 2019 where the Conservatives (a party formed by the merger of the Canadian Reform and Tory parties in 2003 after they couldn't beat the Liberals on votes or seats alone) also won most votes but Liberals won most seats
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Less so after the massive Labour government payrise for junior NHS doctors, most of the extra money in Australia or Canada is due to their being more highly paid private medicine posts
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Easily solved.
Get training here then you either have to work here for an agreed length of time or you get charged for the cost of the training.
Err, students in England and Wales already get charged for the training. That's why some of them have over £100,000 in debt.
Of course, if you move to Australia permanently those debts get wiped after 25/30 years and you don't have to pay a penny. Nice one.
So change the training contract - move to Australia and get a £100k+ bill, payable immediately.
A simple suggestion - while working in the NHS, all student/training debt is handled by the NHS. To the member of staff, it is as if it has ceased to exist.
In addition pay it off, on their behalf, over years of service.
So after 7 years (say) - no debt. Back load the wiping out of debt so that most of it goes in the 6th and 7th years of working in the NHS.
Year 1 1% Year 2 2% Year 3 4% Year 4 8% Year 5 16% Year 6 32% Year 7 37%
Or on a longer, slower write off:
Year 1 1% Year 2 1% Year 3 2% Year 4 3% Year 5 5% Year 6 8% Year 7 13% Year 8 21% Year 9 34% Year 10 12%
Lots of ways it could be done, if they want to.
I'm not convinced by that for 2 reasons - one is that it is short-term, the other is that it is purely financial.
Medics become progressively more valuable over time, and to create a fully developed consultant is a matter of 20-25 years not 5-10. So I think we need to be looking at careers-for-life, not at "stay here for X years and you can leave at no cost".
Something multi-dimensional is required, considered over perhaps 30 or even 40 years.
Certainly and likely containing a mixture of carrot and stick.
The problem is that currently all we read and hear is 'pay them more, pay them more, pay them more, pay them more, pay them more'.
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.
Labour have disappeared now thay they are breaking every pledge to Scotland, halfwits like Milliband wrecking energy sector, Starmer a clown giving Murray the money instead of Scottish government , Reeves duffing up pensioners. Anus has totally disappeared. Not take long to remember that no matter how bad SNP are at least some of them had Scotland's intersts at heart unlike labour who only want london and ermine.
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.
they have managed to drag their feet for 3 years , another 3 will be no problem for the Keystone cops.
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Easily solved.
Get training here then you either have to work here for an agreed length of time or you get charged for the cost of the training.
Err, students in England and Wales already get charged for the training. That's why some of them have over £100,000 in debt.
Of course, if you move to Australia permanently those debts get wiped after 25/30 years and you don't have to pay a penny. Nice one.
So change the training contract - move to Australia and get a £100k+ bill, payable immediately.
A simple suggestion - while working in the NHS, all student/training debt is handled by the NHS. To the member of staff, it is as if it has ceased to exist.
In addition pay it off, on their behalf, over years of service.
So after 7 years (say) - no debt. Back load the wiping out of debt so that most of it goes in the 6th and 7th years of working in the NHS.
Year 1 1% Year 2 2% Year 3 4% Year 4 8% Year 5 16% Year 6 32% Year 7 37%
Or on a longer, slower write off:
Year 1 1% Year 2 1% Year 3 2% Year 4 3% Year 5 5% Year 6 8% Year 7 13% Year 8 21% Year 9 34% Year 10 12%
Lots of ways it could be done, if they want to.
I'm not convinced by that for 2 reasons - one is that it is short-term, the other is that it is purely financial.
Medics become progressively more valuable over time, and to create a fully developed consultant is a matter of 20-25 years not 5-10. So I think we need to be looking at careers-for-life, not at "stay here for X years and you can leave at no cost".
Something multi-dimensional is required, considered over perhaps 30 or even 40 years.
The following has been observed -
1) If you get someone to stay in a job for 7+ years at the seat of career, that they continue in that (or very similar) job. In that country. 2) This happens with a high degree of certainty.
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Easily solved.
Get training here then you either have to work here for an agreed length of time or you get charged for the cost of the training.
Err, students in England and Wales already get charged for the training. That's why some of them have over £100,000 in debt.
Of course, if you move to Australia permanently those debts get wiped after 25/30 years and you don't have to pay a penny. Nice one.
So change the training contract - move to Australia and get a £100k+ bill, payable immediately.
How the fuck would you enforce that? They don't have 100k for a start. Also, just go bankrupt, see ya!
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".
You only really need a degree to be a barrister, academic, teach A Level or IB in secondary schools, be a doctor or surgeon or be a RC priest or Anglican Vicar or Bishop or a senior civil service mandarin (though the latter mainly due to Oxbridge filter). Every other professional or skilled job can be done via professional exams or apprenticeships and learning on the job and largely was 100 years ago when less than 5% went to and graduated from a university and even some PMs like Disraeli, Callaghan, Major and Churchill and Macdonald and Lloyd George often never went to university (indeed Lloyd George was a solicitor but never got a degree)
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.
Far too much ballast in the public sector , inefficient money pit. They need to get some real managers in and get productivity up. Any penny of a pay rise should be linked to productivity and have to pay for itself.
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Easily solved.
Get training here then you either have to work here for an agreed length of time or you get charged for the cost of the training.
Err, students in England and Wales already get charged for the training. That's why some of them have over £100,000 in debt.
Of course, if you move to Australia permanently those debts get wiped after 25/30 years and you don't have to pay a penny. Nice one.
So change the training contract - move to Australia and get a £100k+ bill, payable immediately.
How the fuck would you enforce that? They don't have 100k for a start. Also, just go bankrupt, see ya!
In the USA (under Clinton, IIRC) they amended bankruptcy law to exclude student debt. So go bankrupt - you still owe your student loans.
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.
DavidL is right about the A96 - I reckon a number of bypasses would do more to boost the Scottish economy than dualling the A9 by allowing better movement of goods between industries in the north and allowing our town centres to become attractive again. The obsession with the A9 has distracted people from thinking about what is the best use of money/borrowing.
The new tram line in Edinburgh is going to cost £2 billion. That is probably clear value-for-money, but just imagine what you could do with £2 billion for cycling and walking infrastructure, or even investment in local bus services elsewhere in Scotland.
I'm not sure if the Edinburgh Tram is a good example - how much better could that have been done?
I think it would be quite interesting to see how Scotland tackles such a scheme now, given that they now have a committed active travel % of overall transport budget (if it survives).
I'd invest 0.2% of the money in a dashcam upload portal.
Edinburgh Tram was an extended festival of rolling, asinine, incompetence shot through with not-invented-here syndrome. How much better could that have been done?
Sorry, I'm talking about a new new line running from the Royal Infirmary to Granton.
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Easily solved.
Get training here then you either have to work here for an agreed length of time or you get charged for the cost of the training.
Err, students in England and Wales already get charged for the training. That's why some of them have over £100,000 in debt.
Of course, if you move to Australia permanently those debts get wiped after 25/30 years and you don't have to pay a penny. Nice one.
So change the training contract - move to Australia and get a £100k+ bill, payable immediately.
How the fuck would you enforce that? They don't have 100k for a start. Also, just go bankrupt, see ya!
They can get their new employer to pay for it.
Or perhaps that would reduce the demand we're told they are in from other countries.
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.
DavidL is right about the A96 - I reckon a number of bypasses would do more to boost the Scottish economy than dualling the A9 by allowing better movement of goods between industries in the north and allowing our town centres to become attractive again. The obsession with the A9 has distracted people from thinking about what is the best use of money/borrowing.
The new tram line in Edinburgh is going to cost £2 billion. That is probably clear value-for-money, but just imagine what you could do with £2 billion for cycling and walking infrastructure, or even investment in local bus services elsewhere in Scotland.
I'm not sure if the Edinburgh Tram is a good example - how much better could that have been done?
I think it would be quite interesting to see how Scotland tackles such a scheme now, given that they now have a committed active travel % of overall transport budget (if it survives).
I'd invest 0.2% of the money in a dashcam upload portal.
Edinburgh Tram was an extended festival of rolling, asinine, incompetence shot through with not-invented-here syndrome. How much better could that have been done?
Sorry, I'm talking about a new new line running from the Royal Infirmary to Granton.
The problem is the past. "Edinburgh Trams Project" as a brand, has much of the popularity of a naked Boris Johnson in your living room. It appeals to very limited demographic.
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Easily solved.
Get training here then you either have to work here for an agreed length of time or you get charged for the cost of the training.
Err, students in England and Wales already get charged for the training. That's why some of them have over £100,000 in debt.
Of course, if you move to Australia permanently those debts get wiped after 25/30 years and you don't have to pay a penny. Nice one.
So change the training contract - move to Australia and get a £100k+ bill, payable immediately.
A simple suggestion - while working in the NHS, all student/training debt is handled by the NHS. To the member of staff, it is as if it has ceased to exist.
In addition pay it off, on their behalf, over years of service.
So after 7 years (say) - no debt. Back load the wiping out of debt so that most of it goes in the 6th and 7th years of working in the NHS.
Year 1 1% Year 2 2% Year 3 4% Year 4 8% Year 5 16% Year 6 32% Year 7 37%
Or on a longer, slower write off:
Year 1 1% Year 2 1% Year 3 2% Year 4 3% Year 5 5% Year 6 8% Year 7 13% Year 8 21% Year 9 34% Year 10 12%
Lots of ways it could be done, if they want to.
I'm not convinced by that for 2 reasons - one is that it is short-term, the other is that it is purely financial.
Medics become progressively more valuable over time, and to create a fully developed consultant is a matter of 20-25 years not 5-10. So I think we need to be looking at careers-for-life, not at "stay here for X years and you can leave at no cost".
Something multi-dimensional is required, considered over perhaps 30 or even 40 years.
The following has been observed -
1) If you get someone to stay in a job for 7+ years at the seat of career, that they continue in that (or very similar) job. In that country. 2) This happens with a high degree of certainty.
Does that apply to the particular case of NHS Doctors?
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.
DavidL is right about the A96 - I reckon a number of bypasses would do more to boost the Scottish economy than dualling the A9 by allowing better movement of goods between industries in the north and allowing our town centres to become attractive again. The obsession with the A9 has distracted people from thinking about what is the best use of money/borrowing.
The new tram line in Edinburgh is going to cost £2 billion. That is probably clear value-for-money, but just imagine what you could do with £2 billion for cycling and walking infrastructure, or even investment in local bus services elsewhere in Scotland.
I'm not sure if the Edinburgh Tram is a good example - how much better could that have been done?
I think it would be quite interesting to see how Scotland tackles such a scheme now, given that they now have a committed active travel % of overall transport budget (if it survives).
I'd invest 0.2% of the money in a dashcam upload portal.
Edinburgh Tram was an extended festival of rolling, asinine, incompetence shot through with not-invented-here syndrome. How much better could that have been done?
Sorry, I'm talking about a new new line running from the Royal Infirmary to Granton.
Do we have evidence that that will be better run, and especially that it will be carefully considered in relation to all transport modes, and that such careful consideration will reach the actual project?
(I'll give you that the Edinburgh Labour vs SNP Government push-me-pull-you political punchbag war may no longer apply.)
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.
DavidL is right about the A96 - I reckon a number of bypasses would do more to boost the Scottish economy than dualling the A9 by allowing better movement of goods between industries in the north and allowing our town centres to become attractive again. The obsession with the A9 has distracted people from thinking about what is the best use of money/borrowing.
The new tram line in Edinburgh is going to cost £2 billion. That is probably clear value-for-money, but just imagine what you could do with £2 billion for cycling and walking infrastructure, or even investment in local bus services elsewhere in Scotland.
I'm not sure if the Edinburgh Tram is a good example - how much better could that have been done?
I think it would be quite interesting to see how Scotland tackles such a scheme now, given that they now have a committed active travel % of overall transport budget (if it survives).
I'd invest 0.2% of the money in a dashcam upload portal.
Edinburgh Tram was an extended festival of rolling, asinine, incompetence shot through with not-invented-here syndrome. How much better could that have been done?
Sorry, I'm talking about a new new line running from the Royal Infirmary to Granton.
The problem is the past. "Edinburgh Trams Project" as a brand, has much of the popularity of a naked Boris Johnson in your living room. It appeals to very limited demographic.
I don't think that's true at all actually. The process of putting them in - yes.
But they now have the distinct advantage of having a decent route down to Leith, the most densely populated area anywhere in Scotland, and are completely jam packed. It is impossible to deny the latent demand for them.
And that's with just one line. If you could also use them to get to the university, hospital, Portobello, Gorgie, the Southside...
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.
Far too much ballast in the public sector , inefficient money pit. They need to get some real managers in and get productivity up. Any penny of a pay rise should be linked to productivity and have to pay for itself.
Thing is, Malc, you're basically right, but do what you say and you'll be back, next election cycle (or sooner?) with;
"Get rid of all these stupid managers sitting on their arses, we need to fire them all and employ x number of new nurses (or insert front-line public sector role, according to context)."
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.
DavidL is right about the A96 - I reckon a number of bypasses would do more to boost the Scottish economy than dualling the A9 by allowing better movement of goods between industries in the north and allowing our town centres to become attractive again. The obsession with the A9 has distracted people from thinking about what is the best use of money/borrowing.
The new tram line in Edinburgh is going to cost £2 billion. That is probably clear value-for-money, but just imagine what you could do with £2 billion for cycling and walking infrastructure, or even investment in local bus services elsewhere in Scotland.
I'm not sure if the Edinburgh Tram is a good example - how much better could that have been done?
I think it would be quite interesting to see how Scotland tackles such a scheme now, given that they now have a committed active travel % of overall transport budget (if it survives).
I'd invest 0.2% of the money in a dashcam upload portal.
Edinburgh Tram was an extended festival of rolling, asinine, incompetence shot through with not-invented-here syndrome. How much better could that have been done?
Sorry, I'm talking about a new new line running from the Royal Infirmary to Granton.
Do we have evidence that that will be better run, and especially that it will be carefully considered in relation to all transport modes, and that such careful consideration will reach the actual project?
(I'll give you that the Edinburgh Labour vs SNP Government push-me-pull-you political punchbag war may no longer apply.)
Well no. But there is no denying that the latest line to Leith/Newhaven is massively popular.
What I'm asking is if the new proposed line really is the best use of £2 billion. Lothian Buses is recording 110 million passengers a year - why don't we use that £2 billion for a similar service in Dundee, Glasgow, Aberdeen?
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".
You only really need a degree to be a barrister, academic, teach A Level or IB in secondary schools, be a doctor or surgeon or be a RC priest or Anglican Vicar or Bishop or a senior civil service mandarin (though the latter mainly due to Oxbridge filter). Every other professional or skilled job can be done via professional exams or apprenticeships and learning on the job and largely was 100 years ago when less than 5% went to and graduated from a university and even some PMs like Disraeli, Callaghan, Major and Churchill and Macdonald and Lloyd George often never went to university (indeed Lloyd George was a solicitor but never got a degree)
Even Jesus Christ, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and the late Queen never got a degree
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.
DavidL is right about the A96 - I reckon a number of bypasses would do more to boost the Scottish economy than dualling the A9 by allowing better movement of goods between industries in the north and allowing our town centres to become attractive again. The obsession with the A9 has distracted people from thinking about what is the best use of money/borrowing.
The new tram line in Edinburgh is going to cost £2 billion. That is probably clear value-for-money, but just imagine what you could do with £2 billion for cycling and walking infrastructure, or even investment in local bus services elsewhere in Scotland.
I'm not sure if the Edinburgh Tram is a good example - how much better could that have been done?
I think it would be quite interesting to see how Scotland tackles such a scheme now, given that they now have a committed active travel % of overall transport budget (if it survives).
I'd invest 0.2% of the money in a dashcam upload portal.
Edinburgh Tram was an extended festival of rolling, asinine, incompetence shot through with not-invented-here syndrome. How much better could that have been done?
Sorry, I'm talking about a new new line running from the Royal Infirmary to Granton.
The problem is the past. "Edinburgh Trams Project" as a brand, has much of the popularity of a naked Boris Johnson in your living room. It appeals to very limited demographic.
I don't think that's true at all actually. The process of putting them in - yes.
But they now have the distinct advantage of having a decent route down to Leith, the most densely populated area anywhere in Scotland, and are completely jam packed. It is impossible to deny the latent demand for them.
And that's with just one line. If you could also use them to get to the university, hospital, Portobello, Gorgie, the Southside...
I'm not talking of Trams Projects in the sense of wheely things on rails. People quite obviously like those.
"Edinburgh Trams Project" has become a toxic byword. Not for the wheely things on the rails, but the utter fuckup that, almost accidentally and incidentally, delivered the said wheely things.
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Easily solved.
Get training here then you either have to work here for an agreed length of time or you get charged for the cost of the training.
Err, students in England and Wales already get charged for the training. That's why some of them have over £100,000 in debt.
Of course, if you move to Australia permanently those debts get wiped after 25/30 years and you don't have to pay a penny. Nice one.
So change the training contract - move to Australia and get a £100k+ bill, payable immediately.
A simple suggestion - while working in the NHS, all student/training debt is handled by the NHS. To the member of staff, it is as if it has ceased to exist.
In addition pay it off, on their behalf, over years of service.
So after 7 years (say) - no debt. Back load the wiping out of debt so that most of it goes in the 6th and 7th years of working in the NHS.
Year 1 1% Year 2 2% Year 3 4% Year 4 8% Year 5 16% Year 6 32% Year 7 37%
Or on a longer, slower write off:
Year 1 1% Year 2 1% Year 3 2% Year 4 3% Year 5 5% Year 6 8% Year 7 13% Year 8 21% Year 9 34% Year 10 12%
Lots of ways it could be done, if they want to.
I'm not convinced by that for 2 reasons - one is that it is short-term, the other is that it is purely financial.
Medics become progressively more valuable over time, and to create a fully developed consultant is a matter of 20-25 years not 5-10. So I think we need to be looking at careers-for-life, not at "stay here for X years and you can leave at no cost".
Something multi-dimensional is required, considered over perhaps 30 or even 40 years.
The following has been observed -
1) If you get someone to stay in a job for 7+ years at the seat of career, that they continue in that (or very similar) job. In that country. 2) This happens with a high degree of certainty.
Does that apply to the particular case of NHS Doctors?
If you start the clock at leaving university... Seven years later, you will have done foundation and specialist training (or be pretty close to completing that). You will be thirty years old. If not attached and settled and sprogging, again probably pretty close.
I'm which case, going abroad or restarting in another field becomes a lot less attractive.
One other thought. If you are going to put golden handcuffs on people in order for them to train as doctors, a certain amount of gold will be needed. Other careers are available to eighteen year olds.
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.
DavidL is right about the A96 - I reckon a number of bypasses would do more to boost the Scottish economy than dualling the A9 by allowing better movement of goods between industries in the north and allowing our town centres to become attractive again. The obsession with the A9 has distracted people from thinking about what is the best use of money/borrowing.
The new tram line in Edinburgh is going to cost £2 billion. That is probably clear value-for-money, but just imagine what you could do with £2 billion for cycling and walking infrastructure, or even investment in local bus services elsewhere in Scotland.
I'm not sure if the Edinburgh Tram is a good example - how much better could that have been done?
I think it would be quite interesting to see how Scotland tackles such a scheme now, given that they now have a committed active travel % of overall transport budget (if it survives).
I'd invest 0.2% of the money in a dashcam upload portal.
Edinburgh Tram was an extended festival of rolling, asinine, incompetence shot through with not-invented-here syndrome. How much better could that have been done?
Sorry, I'm talking about a new new line running from the Royal Infirmary to Granton.
The problem is the past. "Edinburgh Trams Project" as a brand, has much of the popularity of a naked Boris Johnson in your living room. It appeals to very limited demographic.
I don't think that's true at all actually. The process of putting them in - yes.
But they now have the distinct advantage of having a decent route down to Leith, the most densely populated area anywhere in Scotland, and are completely jam packed. It is impossible to deny the latent demand for them.
And that's with just one line. If you could also use them to get to the university, hospital, Portobello, Gorgie, the Southside...
Quite agree. The trams were a wholly Unionist disaster in terms of their initial planning and implementation, and the excessively high, near-heavy rail, standards, and notably with the Topries to be blamed along the Greens, LDs, and Labour.
There was also a huge amount of ifnrastructure to be located and renewed, which would have to be done anyway sooner or later.
However, now they exist and are running ...
More than one uni and more than one campus (Old College, George Square and Kings' Buildings for just one alone).
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".
You only really need a degree to be a barrister, academic, teach A Level or IB in secondary schools, be a doctor or surgeon or be a RC priest or Anglican Vicar or Bishop or a senior civil service mandarin (though the latter mainly due to Oxbridge filter). Every other professional or skilled job can be done via professional exams or apprenticeships and learning on the job and largely was 100 years ago when less than 5% went to and graduated from a university and even some PMs like Disraeli, Callaghan, Major and Churchill and Macdonald and Lloyd George often never went to university (indeed Lloyd George was a solicitor but never got a degree)
Even Jesus Christ and the late Queen never got a degree
So if your daddy is powerful it all works out?
(I do agree it's ridiculous how having a degree is deemed necessary in many instances though)
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.
DavidL is right about the A96 - I reckon a number of bypasses would do more to boost the Scottish economy than dualling the A9 by allowing better movement of goods between industries in the north and allowing our town centres to become attractive again. The obsession with the A9 has distracted people from thinking about what is the best use of money/borrowing.
The new tram line in Edinburgh is going to cost £2 billion. That is probably clear value-for-money, but just imagine what you could do with £2 billion for cycling and walking infrastructure, or even investment in local bus services elsewhere in Scotland.
I'm not sure if the Edinburgh Tram is a good example - how much better could that have been done?
I think it would be quite interesting to see how Scotland tackles such a scheme now, given that they now have a committed active travel % of overall transport budget (if it survives).
I'd invest 0.2% of the money in a dashcam upload portal.
Edinburgh Tram was an extended festival of rolling, asinine, incompetence shot through with not-invented-here syndrome. How much better could that have been done?
Sorry, I'm talking about a new new line running from the Royal Infirmary to Granton.
Do we have evidence that that will be better run, and especially that it will be carefully considered in relation to all transport modes, and that such careful consideration will reach the actual project?
(I'll give you that the Edinburgh Labour vs SNP Government push-me-pull-you political punchbag war may no longer apply.)
Been needed for a very long time. Would connect with a great deal of Edinburgh and allow an eventual loop along the seafront. Given the current usage of the original track, the original calculations seem way out if done on the same algorithm.
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".
You only really need a degree to be a barrister, academic, teach A Level or IB in secondary schools, be a doctor or surgeon or be a RC priest or Anglican Vicar or Bishop or a senior civil service mandarin (though the latter mainly due to Oxbridge filter). Every other professional or skilled job can be done via professional exams or apprenticeships and learning on the job and largely was 100 years ago when less than 5% went to and graduated from a university and even some PMs like Disraeli, Callaghan, Major and Churchill and Macdonald and Lloyd George often never went to university (indeed Lloyd George was a solicitor but never got a degree)
Even Jesus Christ and the late Queen never got a degree
So if your daddy is powerful it all works out?
(I do agree it's ridiculous how having a degree is deemed necessary in many instances though)
Jesus was a trained carpenter, he would be classified skilled working class by the ONS. He was a preacher and prophet and Messiah but not even a Parish priest let alone a Bishop, he just founded the Church
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".
You only really need a degree to be a barrister, academic, teach A Level or IB in secondary schools, be a doctor or surgeon or be a RC priest or Anglican Vicar or Bishop or a senior civil service mandarin (though the latter mainly due to Oxbridge filter). Every other professional or skilled job can be done via professional exams or apprenticeships and learning on the job and largely was 100 years ago when less than 5% went to and graduated from a university and even some PMs like Disraeli, Callaghan, Major and Churchill and Macdonald and Lloyd George often never went to university (indeed Lloyd George was a solicitor but never got a degree)
Even Jesus Christ and the late Queen never got a degree
So if your daddy is powerful it all works out?
(I do agree it's ridiculous how having a degree is deemed necessary in many instances though)
Jesus was a trained carpenter, he would be classified skilled working class by the ONS, he was a preacher and prophet and Messiah but not even a Parish priest let alone a Bishop, he just founded the Church
That's true, he did at least learn his craft long before he embarked on all that preaching business at the end.
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".
You only really need a degree to be a barrister, academic, teach A Level or IB in secondary schools, be a doctor or surgeon or be a RC priest or Anglican Vicar or Bishop or a senior civil service mandarin (though the latter mainly due to Oxbridge filter). Every other professional or skilled job can be done via professional exams or apprenticeships and learning on the job and largely was 100 years ago when less than 5% went to and graduated from a university and even some PMs like Disraeli, Callaghan, Major and Churchill and Macdonald and Lloyd George often never went to university (indeed Lloyd George was a solicitor but never got a degree)
Even Jesus Christ and the late Queen never got a degree
So if your daddy is powerful it all works out?
(I do agree it's ridiculous how having a degree is deemed necessary in many instances though)
Jesus was a trained carpenter, he would be classified skilled working class by the ONS. He was a preacher and prophet and Messiah but not even a Parish priest let alone a Bishop, he just founded the Church
Though the data gathering system of the time was notoriously inefficient, so who knows whether the OIS (Office of Imperial Statistics) would have been able to record anything.
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".
You only really need a degree to be a barrister, academic, teach A Level or IB in secondary schools, be a doctor or surgeon or be a RC priest or Anglican Vicar or Bishop or a senior civil service mandarin (though the latter mainly due to Oxbridge filter). Every other professional or skilled job can be done via professional exams or apprenticeships and learning on the job and largely was 100 years ago when less than 5% went to and graduated from a university and even some PMs like Disraeli, Callaghan, Major and Churchill and Macdonald and Lloyd George often never went to university (indeed Lloyd George was a solicitor but never got a degree)
Even Jesus Christ and the late Queen never got a degree
So if your daddy is powerful it all works out?
(I do agree it's ridiculous how having a degree is deemed necessary in many instances though)
Jesus was a trained carpenter, he would be classified skilled working class by the ONS, he was a preacher and prophet and Messiah but not even a Parish priest let alone a Bishop, he just founded the Church
That's true, he did at least learn his craft long before he embarked on all that preaching business at the end.
Indeed, he had a practical job, it was the Pharisees who had all the legal knowledge and Torah and book learning
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".
You only really need a degree to be a barrister, academic, teach A Level or IB in secondary schools, be a doctor or surgeon or be a RC priest or Anglican Vicar or Bishop or a senior civil service mandarin (though the latter mainly due to Oxbridge filter). Every other professional or skilled job can be done via professional exams or apprenticeships and learning on the job and largely was 100 years ago when less than 5% went to and graduated from a university and even some PMs like Disraeli, Callaghan, Major and Churchill and Macdonald and Lloyd George often never went to university (indeed Lloyd George was a solicitor but never got a degree)
Even Jesus Christ and the late Queen never got a degree
So if your daddy is powerful it all works out?
(I do agree it's ridiculous how having a degree is deemed necessary in many instances though)
Jesus was a trained carpenter, he would be classified skilled working class by the ONS, he was a preacher and prophet and Messiah but not even a Parish priest let alone a Bishop, he just founded the Church
That's true, he did at least learn his craft long before he embarked on all that preaching business at the end.
Nowadays, it's called Non Stipendiary Ministry/Ministry in Secular Employment.
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".
You only really need a degree to be a barrister, academic, teach A Level or IB in secondary schools, be a doctor or surgeon or be a RC priest or Anglican Vicar or Bishop or a senior civil service mandarin (though the latter mainly due to Oxbridge filter). Every other professional or skilled job can be done via professional exams or apprenticeships and learning on the job and largely was 100 years ago when less than 5% went to and graduated from a university and even some PMs like Disraeli, Callaghan, Major and Churchill and Macdonald and Lloyd George often never went to university (indeed Lloyd George was a solicitor but never got a degree)
Even Jesus Christ and the late Queen never got a degree
So if your daddy is powerful it all works out?
(I do agree it's ridiculous how having a degree is deemed necessary in many instances though)
Jesus was a trained carpenter, he would be classified skilled working class by the ONS. He was a preacher and prophet and Messiah but not even a Parish priest let alone a Bishop, he just founded the Church
Though the data gathering system of the time was notoriously inefficient, so who knows whether the OIS (Office of Imperial Statistics) would have been able to record anything.
Heck, supposedly they ran a census by making people return to their hometown, forcing huge sections of the population to disrupt their lives and also making such a census pointless.
(I'm aware the accuracy of that claim is, shockingly, disputed)
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.
Your first argument about spending money on staff. Do you think that in not spending money on staff that we’re not spending money on staff?
We are - on temps and emergency cover. You can’t just cut teacher numbers and keep operating the school. Or medical staff in hospitals. Or courts.
This is the Tory problem. “Just work harder”. You can’t work the remaining people hard enough to cope with the staff already cut. It’s impossible and they break. So you need even more emergency spending to deal with the damage.
Are you comprehending yet? There is not a “spend no money” option.
Our government is not spending nothing and neither did the last government. It is spending nearly £800bn a year, more than £2bn a day. The argument that we just need to spend more to get value for money has been tested to oblivion, not least under Boris and Sunak. It hasn't worked. It never works.
What is better value for money? Employ the number of teachers the school needs to function optimally and deliver excellent education? Or cut that budget by 30% and then spend a further 50% on supply staff and crisis management?
You’re right - we’re spending a vast amount of money. On the wrong things. To save money long term we need to spend a little more now - to hire the staff needed - which then allows you to not need to spend the money on crisis management.
It’s just basic adding. That you Tories no longer understand or explains an awful lot about why you got hammered and now and listing after Robert Jenrick as leader.
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Easily solved.
Get training here then you either have to work here for an agreed length of time or you get charged for the cost of the training.
The problem is one of enforcement: how do you get £100,000 back from someone who has left the country? And, unfortunately, it's not like the Australians have any incentive to be helpful. They are, after all, following a policy of not paying for medical training.
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".
You only really need a degree to be a barrister, academic, teach A Level or IB in secondary schools, be a doctor or surgeon or be a RC priest or Anglican Vicar or Bishop or a senior civil service mandarin (though the latter mainly due to Oxbridge filter). Every other professional or skilled job can be done via professional exams or apprenticeships and learning on the job and largely was 100 years ago when less than 5% went to and graduated from a university and even some PMs like Disraeli, Callaghan, Major and Churchill and Macdonald and Lloyd George often never went to university (indeed Lloyd George was a solicitor but never got a degree)
Even Jesus Christ and the late Queen never got a degree
So if your daddy is powerful it all works out?
(I do agree it's ridiculous how having a degree is deemed necessary in many instances though)
Jesus was a trained carpenter, he would be classified skilled working class by the ONS. He was a preacher and prophet and Messiah but not even a Parish priest let alone a Bishop, he just founded the Church
Though the data gathering system of the time was notoriously inefficient, so who knows whether the OIS (Office of Imperial Statistics) would have been able to record anything.
Heck, supposedly they ran a census by making people return to their hometown, forcing huge sections of the population to disrupt their lives and also making such a census pointless.
(I'm aware the accuracy of that claim is, shockingly, disputed)
Heck, they didn't even have the data to efficiently murder a two year old potential king.
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.
This. It was one of his most toxic legacies.
Analysis of economic benefits of genuine government investment is vertsinly less than ideal, but it’s not in the same league.
One of those two things can be improved; the other idea just needs eliminating.
"Kirstie Allsopp last night spoke of her outrage after she was quizzed by social services for allowing her 15-year-old son to go Interrailing across Europe.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal how, in an extraordinary intervention, a social worker contacted the TV presenter to inform her that a file had been opened after child protection concerns were raised over her youngest child, Oscar.
To the 52-year-old's fury, the social worker demanded to know what 'safeguards' had been put in place when she allowed Oscar to travel for three weeks on the continent alongside a 16-year-old friend. "
Just looking at Short money - the Lib Dems will get about £2.5m about double their previous allocation and Reform will get about £1m.
We'll be carpeted in yellow diamonds and knee-deep in bar charts come the next election.
I'll be quite interested to see what happens in Ashfield.
Someone will need to do the political trench warfare against Reform, and it is unlikely to be the Ashfield Independents imo.
But will Sir Ed Davey's best pratting-about-in-ponds days be behind him? Don't want a hernia on the campaign trail. Though a photo op in a run down casualty department isn't the worst idea.
They all like photo-ops at our local hospital, as it is the best rated in the East Midlands region, as it happens .
On photo-ops, there's a video out there somewhere of Jason Zadrozny on our local pond in a dinghy explaining how proud he is of the duck-island he is responsible for installing, which is floating next to him .
I don't know about Lib Dems - it's possible that some Ashfield Independents could go back to them if it splits or disintegrates after Zadrozny's trial at Northampton Crown Court in 2025. I can't call it. Z is a good political operator, but his feet may have sunk too far into the mud.
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.
Your first argument about spending money on staff. Do you think that in not spending money on staff that we’re not spending money on staff?
We are - on temps and emergency cover. You can’t just cut teacher numbers and keep operating the school. Or medical staff in hospitals. Or courts.
This is the Tory problem. “Just work harder”. You can’t work the remaining people hard enough to cope with the staff already cut. It’s impossible and they break. So you need even more emergency spending to deal with the damage.
Are you comprehending yet? There is not a “spend no money” option.
Our government is not spending nothing and neither did the last government. It is spending nearly £800bn a year, more than £2bn a day. The argument that we just need to spend more to get value for money has been tested to oblivion, not least under Boris and Sunak. It hasn't worked. It never works.
What is better value for money? Employ the number of teachers the school needs to function optimally and deliver excellent education? Or cut that budget by 30% and then spend a further 50% on supply staff and crisis management?
You’re right - we’re spending a vast amount of money. On the wrong things. To save money long term we need to spend a little more now - to hire the staff needed - which then allows you to not need to spend the money on crisis management.
It’s just basic adding. That you Tories no longer understand or explains an awful lot about why you got hammered and now and listing after Robert Jenrick as leader.
Education and health are devolved.
Are you suggesting that SNP Scotland and Labour Wales also managed to spend at this optimally inefficient level as well as Conservative England ?
The UK has had an effectively 14 year experiment of different parties running public services in its different parts.
Are there any significant differences in the quality and quantity of output of those services ?
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.
Far too much ballast in the public sector , inefficient money pit. They need to get some real managers in and get productivity up. Any penny of a pay rise should be linked to productivity and have to pay for itself.
Thing is, Malc, you're basically right, but do what you say and you'll be back, next election cycle (or sooner?) with;
"Get rid of all these stupid managers sitting on their arses, we need to fire them all and employ x number of new nurses (or insert front-line public sector role, according to context)."
See the problem?
Malcolm is something of an enigma. He is a natural Tebbitt Tory who also happens to be a Scottish Nationalist, and his political hero is a former firebrand Trot. Make of that what you will.
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.
But we need 2x the number of medical staff that the universities are providing. And they get training here and then go to Australia and Canada as we offer good training but poor early career wages. It really doesn't make any sense.
Not much about our health service does. It seems to be bloated, expensive, badly run, with poor outcomes, yet beloved and sacrosanct even as apparently everyone in it is poorly treated or paid (one or the other, or both).
Another problem is that the NHS hugely centralised and politicised, to an extent unimaginable in comparable countries, if not quite as much as it used to be. Its spending is controlled by the Treasury and it is subject to government policy. This increases bureaucracy and stifles initiative and responsiveness to local conditions, and then we wonder why we're usually at the bottom of surveys on healthcare outcomes despite spending the OECD average as a % of GDP. The unpleasant fool Bevan, who established the NHS, famously said that the sound of a dropped bedpan in Tredegar should reverberate around the Palace of Westminster - one of the stupidest comments ever made in British politics. Of course you can't run a huge industry in such a Stalinist way, nor do other civilised countries try to.
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.
Your first argument about spending money on staff. Do you think that in not spending money on staff that we’re not spending money on staff?
We are - on temps and emergency cover. You can’t just cut teacher numbers and keep operating the school. Or medical staff in hospitals. Or courts.
This is the Tory problem. “Just work harder”. You can’t work the remaining people hard enough to cope with the staff already cut. It’s impossible and they break. So you need even more emergency spending to deal with the damage.
Are you comprehending yet? There is not a “spend no money” option.
Our government is not spending nothing and neither did the last government. It is spending nearly £800bn a year, more than £2bn a day. The argument that we just need to spend more to get value for money has been tested to oblivion, not least under Boris and Sunak. It hasn't worked. It never works.
What is better value for money? Employ the number of teachers the school needs to function optimally and deliver excellent education? Or cut that budget by 30% and then spend a further 50% on supply staff and crisis management?
You’re right - we’re spending a vast amount of money. On the wrong things. To save money long term we need to spend a little more now - to hire the staff needed - which then allows you to not need to spend the money on crisis management.
It’s just basic adding. That you Tories no longer understand or explains an awful lot about why you got hammered and now and listing after Robert Jenrick as leader.
And it's worse than that.
When the crisis comes along, the standard response is to grab cash from the capital budget to provide revenue to get over this week's problem. Which is rational in the short term, but calamitous if you do it year after year.
Because the ways to improve productivity are either to shout at people to WORK HARDER, or spend money to provide them with tools to do their jobs better. And even the people doing the shouting now have sore throats, because there's been no investment in voice amplification equipment.
But it's more complicated than that - and more interesting.
In the Modern. Proper way of managing a company, you try and outsource everything. This traditionally meant that you didn't carry the risk of developing sub assemblies and components - the contractor did. And when you changed a design or stopped making it, they had the obsolete factory.
This ends up with a vast pyramid of contractors, who in turn, subcontract.
In the 1960s, when everything was on paper, this had the advantage that contractors delivered a black box *they designed*. Because keeping the whole design in a single set of drawings and specification would be impossible.
On the political side, this means you can subtly distribute spend to all the parts of the country where the relevant politicians come from. And the subcontractors donating to the politicians looks much better than a zillion dollar cheque from Boeing.
The problem is that each layer in the contracting pyramid needs profit and, more importantly, the communication between the parent company and the contractors can easily become slow and adversarial.
In the case of the door falling off the airliner, Boeing had split off a huge chunk of its aircarft making to form a company called Spirit. Communication between Boeing nd Sprint was poor. When you added in Boeing management misusing the defect repair process to do quality control.....
In the case of Starliner, the thrusters that are failing were outsourced to Aerojet. With a poorly thought out spec. Boeing then started arguing with Aerojet about spec changes - Boeing wanted Aerojet to swallow all the extra costs.
These thrusters were then integrated into poorly designed enclosures (designed by another contractor) - they put too many thrusters and fuel lines next to each other in a box that held the heat in. As the cherry on top, the heating was poorly modelled, without physical testing.
This model of development nearly destroyed the Apollo program - see Apollo 204 (aka Apollo 1). But it continued to be used for big projects and has created a number of epic failures.
The skill lies presumably in knowing what, and what not to outsource. And how to control the risks. ‘Not invented here’ syndrome can also be toxic to successful businesses.
And after all, startups like SpaceX or Anduril probably couldn’t get started without outsourcing.
"Kirstie Allsopp last night spoke of her outrage after she was quizzed by social services for allowing her 15-year-old son to go Interrailing across Europe.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal how, in an extraordinary intervention, a social worker contacted the TV presenter to inform her that a file had been opened after child protection concerns were raised over her youngest child, Oscar.
To the 52-year-old's fury, the social worker demanded to know what 'safeguards' had been put in place when she allowed Oscar to travel for three weeks on the continent alongside a 16-year-old friend. "
I have some experience of this as my wife was a foster carer, and by default and required training so was I. The lad was 15, it's slam-dunk textbook "neglect". If it was some single mother from a sink estate the boy would now be in foster care.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Everyone is jumping to conclusions without much in the way of facts.
Thread with a different perspective. "The detention and search warrant was issued because Durov did not cooperate with French security forces and did not properly moderate Telegram, which makes him an accomplice in crimes such as drug trafficking, terrorism, money laundering, child abuse, etc".. https://x.com/YaroslavAzhnyuk/status/1827534637511430402
"Kirstie Allsopp last night spoke of her outrage after she was quizzed by social services for allowing her 15-year-old son to go Interrailing across Europe.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal how, in an extraordinary intervention, a social worker contacted the TV presenter to inform her that a file had been opened after child protection concerns were raised over her youngest child, Oscar.
To the 52-year-old's fury, the social worker demanded to know what 'safeguards' had been put in place when she allowed Oscar to travel for three weeks on the continent alongside a 16-year-old friend. "
I have some experience of this as my wife was a foster carer, and by default and required training so was I. The lad was 15, it's slam-dunk textbook "neglect". If it was some single mother from a sink estate the boy would now be in foster care.
So is 15 years 51 weeks 'slam dunk textbook neglect' but 16 years 0 weeks okay ?
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".
You only really need a degree to be a barrister, academic, teach A Level or IB in secondary schools, be a doctor or surgeon or be a RC priest or Anglican Vicar or Bishop or a senior civil service mandarin (though the latter mainly due to Oxbridge filter). Every other professional or skilled job can be done via professional exams or apprenticeships and learning on the job and largely was 100 years ago when less than 5% went to and graduated from a university and even some PMs like Disraeli, Callaghan, Major and Churchill and Macdonald and Lloyd George often never went to university (indeed Lloyd George was a solicitor but never got a degree)
Even Jesus Christ and the late Queen never got a degree
So if your daddy is powerful it all works out?
(I do agree it's ridiculous how having a degree is deemed necessary in many instances though)
Jesus was a trained carpenter, he would be classified skilled working class by the ONS, he was a preacher and prophet and Messiah but not even a Parish priest let alone a Bishop, he just founded the Church
That's true, he did at least learn his craft long before he embarked on all that preaching business at the end.
Indeed, he had a practical job, it was the Pharisees who had all the legal knowledge and Torah and book learning
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".
You only really need a degree to be a barrister, academic, teach A Level or IB in secondary schools, be a doctor or surgeon or be a RC priest or Anglican Vicar or Bishop or a senior civil service mandarin (though the latter mainly due to Oxbridge filter). Every other professional or skilled job can be done via professional exams or apprenticeships and learning on the job and largely was 100 years ago when less than 5% went to and graduated from a university and even some PMs like Disraeli, Callaghan, Major and Churchill and Macdonald and Lloyd George often never went to university (indeed Lloyd George was a solicitor but never got a degree)
Even Jesus Christ and the late Queen never got a degree
So if your daddy is powerful it all works out?
(I do agree it's ridiculous how having a degree is deemed necessary in many instances though)
Jesus was a trained carpenter, he would be classified skilled working class by the ONS, he was a preacher and prophet and Messiah but not even a Parish priest let alone a Bishop, he just founded the Church
That's true, he did at least learn his craft long before he embarked on all that preaching business at the end.
Nowadays, it's called Non Stipendiary Ministry/Ministry in Secular Employment.
That's an interesting thought, but I reckon it would be Rabbi. And they have afaik never had to be paid. Is it not in the OT that 10 individuals are required * ?
* Which is one way of thinking about the principle of a tithe .. how 10 can pay for a Rabbi.
Thoughts and solidarity with our @Reuters colleagues today.
A member of a Reuters news team was missing and two others were injured and hospitalized after a Russian missile attack on their hotel in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk. https://x.com/ChristopherJM/status/1827671099577905390
"Kirstie Allsopp last night spoke of her outrage after she was quizzed by social services for allowing her 15-year-old son to go Interrailing across Europe.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal how, in an extraordinary intervention, a social worker contacted the TV presenter to inform her that a file had been opened after child protection concerns were raised over her youngest child, Oscar.
To the 52-year-old's fury, the social worker demanded to know what 'safeguards' had been put in place when she allowed Oscar to travel for three weeks on the continent alongside a 16-year-old friend. "
I have some experience of this as my wife was a foster carer, and by default and required training so was I. The lad was 15, it's slam-dunk textbook "neglect". If it was some single mother from a sink estate the boy would now be in foster care.
They're not that quick to put people into foster care generally, being both disproportionate as a response to such a first offense and given limited fostering resources. You must have an abundance of carers in your area.
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.
Your first argument about spending money on staff. Do you think that in not spending money on staff that we’re not spending money on staff?
We are - on temps and emergency cover. You can’t just cut teacher numbers and keep operating the school. Or medical staff in hospitals. Or courts.
This is the Tory problem. “Just work harder”. You can’t work the remaining people hard enough to cope with the staff already cut. It’s impossible and they break. So you need even more emergency spending to deal with the damage.
Are you comprehending yet? There is not a “spend no money” option.
Our government is not spending nothing and neither did the last government. It is spending nearly £800bn a year, more than £2bn a day. The argument that we just need to spend more to get value for money has been tested to oblivion, not least under Boris and Sunak. It hasn't worked. It never works.
What is better value for money? Employ the number of teachers the school needs to function optimally and deliver excellent education? Or cut that budget by 30% and then spend a further 50% on supply staff and crisis management?
You’re right - we’re spending a vast amount of money. On the wrong things. To save money long term we need to spend a little more now - to hire the staff needed - which then allows you to not need to spend the money on crisis management.
It’s just basic adding. That you Tories no longer understand or explains an awful lot about why you got hammered and now and listing after Robert Jenrick as leader.
And it's worse than that.
When the crisis comes along, the standard response is to grab cash from the capital budget to provide revenue to get over this week's problem. Which is rational in the short term, but calamitous if you do it year after year.
Because the ways to improve productivity are either to shout at people to WORK HARDER, or spend money to provide them with tools to do their jobs better. And even the people doing the shouting now have sore throats, because there's been no investment in voice amplification equipment.
Its not just management who will reduce capital investment to pay for current costs.
Workers will happily do so as well if it means higher pay than otherwise.
Comments
We are - on temps and emergency cover. You can’t just cut teacher numbers and keep operating the school. Or medical staff in hospitals. Or courts.
This is the Tory problem. “Just work harder”. You can’t work the remaining people hard enough to cope with the staff already cut. It’s impossible and they break. So you need even more emergency spending to deal with the damage.
Are you comprehending yet? There is not a “spend no money” option.
Not least because school leaving age was 15 back then.
They would be on £50+ per hour on normal to long working weeks. And plenty of senior staff had been there for 5-10 years.
I recall one contract developer in his 50s, who lived on the river front west of London, explaining how his payment arrangements involved the bank's contract being with his personal service company in Liechtenstein.
There was also quite the cocaine culture, which I expect is perhaps still normalised.
I don't think salaried software developers would be at that level, but package values towards 100k pa would have been normal.
One interesting aspect was that the contracting side worked far more like a trade market than a professional market - it was "what particular skills have you got, that I can use TODAY", not "what are your qualifications", and qualifications - such as they were - were particular skills not degrees and Chartered etc. The flip side of that was that it could be brutal - this was before the time when contractors were turned into proto-employees with holidays and the rest.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/publicsectorpersonnel/timeseries/c9lg/pse
I remember reading here five years ago that there was 100k vacancies in the NHS, well since then NHS employment has increased by over 300k.
Given that the NHS now employs over two million people and is continually recruiting why are you surprised that there are vacancies as its current workforce continually retires, dies and changes jobs ?
But it's more complicated than that - and more interesting.
In the Modern. Proper way of managing a company, you try and outsource everything. This traditionally meant that you didn't carry the risk of developing sub assemblies and components - the contractor did. And when you changed a design or stopped making it, they had the obsolete factory.
This ends up with a vast pyramid of contractors, who in turn, subcontract.
In the 1960s, when everything was on paper, this had the advantage that contractors delivered a black box *they designed*. Because keeping the whole design in a single set of drawings and specification would be impossible.
On the political side, this means you can subtly distribute spend to all the parts of the country where the relevant politicians come from. And the subcontractors donating to the politicians looks much better than a zillion dollar cheque from Boeing.
The problem is that each layer in the contracting pyramid needs profit and, more importantly, the communication between the parent company and the contractors can easily become slow and adversarial.
In the case of the door falling off the airliner, Boeing had split off a huge chunk of its aircarft making to form a company called Spirit. Communication between Boeing nd Sprint was poor. When you added in Boeing management misusing the defect repair process to do quality control.....
In the case of Starliner, the thrusters that are failing were outsourced to Aerojet. With a poorly thought out spec. Boeing then started arguing with Aerojet about spec changes - Boeing wanted Aerojet to swallow all the extra costs.
These thrusters were then integrated into poorly designed enclosures (designed by another contractor) - they put too many thrusters and fuel lines next to each other in a box that held the heat in. As the cherry on top, the heating was poorly modelled, without physical testing.
This model of development nearly destroyed the Apollo program - see Apollo 204 (aka Apollo 1). But it continued to be used for big projects and has created a number of epic failures.
After all this time, and not charging at the same time as Murrell, I will be astonished if Sturgeon is charged, or that it will actually get to trial if she is. But then I didnt think he'd get charged either.
The new tram line in Edinburgh is going to cost £2 billion. That is probably clear value-for-money, but just imagine what you could do with £2 billion for cycling and walking infrastructure, or even investment in local bus services elsewhere in Scotland.
Get training here then you either have to work here for an agreed length of time or you get charged for the cost of the training.
Of course, if you move to Australia permanently those debts get wiped after 25/30 years and you don't have to pay a penny. Nice one.
There's countless rumours he's hopped up on various pills, which would make sense given his insistent belief Biden was hopped up on various pills, but it's probably nothing.
Boeing management clearly decided to take this report & do everything it said not to.
At the moment, doctors have the following options to get better pay and conditions
1) Strike
2) Go fully private (but there is a very limited market)
3) Emigrate - big costs, social and financial.
4) Leave medicine - again, big costs.
What is missing, is what some people in the private sector have. If they are underpaid, relative to others, leave and get another job. If they are badly treated, the same.
If hospitals had to actually compete for staff, then there would be a market. But preventing such a market in staff was specifically designed out of the system we have.
An organisation which is able to increase its workforce so much in a time of full employment is not paying poorly.
Less than what some NHS workers think they deserve maybe, less than what some other countries pay possibly.
But if you want to receive the best international pay rates then you need to produce the best international performance.
In addition pay it off, on their behalf, over years of service.
So after 7 years (say) - no debt. Back load the wiping out of debt so that most of it goes in the 6th and 7th years of working in the NHS.
The alternative is to recognise that technology has change since 1960. Instead of a subcontracting the design of subassemblies, with computer aided design, you can have a single design. The new tools even automatically test the whole design for failures in simulation and for constraints on ease of manufacturing. Tooling has changed - multi axis CNC machines can carve a design on the computer. And then do something completely different the next minute. The same with 3D printers. So instead of specialised sub assembly production lines, you can have generalist "make anything" setups. To a degree. So the "risk" of having the manufacturing in-house goes away, mostly.
All of this means that bringing the manufacturing back into the parent company makes sense - you can control the design, not give layers of profit to hundreds of other companies and communication between people working on the system is vastly improved.
The problem is political and social. The politicians see a demand to give money to monolithic companies that then spend it how they want. Rather than in a delicate dance of whose-constituecy-gets-what. Old school generalist managers don't have the skills to manage anything other than money (and that poorly).
Reform 5 seats
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13761131/boeing-777-test-fleet-grounded-engine-defect.html
I think it would be quite interesting to see how Scotland tackles such a scheme now, given that they now have a committed active travel % of overall transport budget (if it survives).
I'd invest 0.2% of the money in a dashcam upload portal.
Year 2 2%
Year 3 4%
Year 4 8%
Year 5 16%
Year 6 32%
Year 7 37%
Or on a longer, slower write off:
Year 1 1%
Year 2 1%
Year 3 2%
Year 4 3%
Year 5 5%
Year 6 8%
Year 7 13%
Year 8 21%
Year 9 34%
Year 10 12%
Lots of ways it could be done, if they want to.
Someone will need to do the political trench warfare against Reform, and it is unlikely to be the Ashfield Independents imo.
With say 25% of the training cost being charged if the doctor works for more than say five years in other countries - I don't think its a bad thing if workers get a different experience by working elsewhere for a time.
£371bn Social protection
£251bn Health
£131bn Education
£109bn Debt interest
£71bn Defence
£59bn Transport
£49bn Industry, agriculture & employment
£47bn Public order & safety
£45bn Personal social services
£40bn Housing & environment
£53bn Other
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45814459
That is, by using computer controlled steering on each unit, a "road-train" can be created that can corner etc, despite the length. It runs on a "virtual track", a predesigned route
The idea is that you get much of benefits of trams, without the tracks or overhead wires.
Medics become progressively more valuable over time, and to create a fully developed consultant is a matter of 20-25 years not 5-10. So I think we need to be looking at careers-for-life, not at "stay here for X years and you can leave at no cost".
Something multi-dimensional is required, considered over perhaps 30 or even 40 years.
The problem is that currently all we read and hear is 'pay them more, pay them more, pay them more, pay them more, pay them more'.
1) If you get someone to stay in a job for 7+ years at the seat of career, that they continue in that (or very similar) job. In that country.
2) This happens with a high degree of certainty.
https://www.railmagazine.com/news/network/2024/02/14/consultation-on-a-second-tram-route-for-edinburgh
Or perhaps that would reduce the demand we're told they are in from other countries.
(I'll give you that the Edinburgh Labour vs SNP Government push-me-pull-you political punchbag war may no longer apply.)
But they now have the distinct advantage of having a decent route down to Leith, the most densely populated area anywhere in Scotland, and are completely jam packed. It is impossible to deny the latent demand for them.
And that's with just one line. If you could also use them to get to the university, hospital, Portobello, Gorgie, the Southside...
"Get rid of all these stupid managers sitting on their arses, we need to fire them all and employ x number of new nurses (or insert front-line public sector role, according to context)."
See the problem?
What I'm asking is if the new proposed line really is the best use of £2 billion. Lothian Buses is recording 110 million passengers a year - why don't we use that £2 billion for a similar service in Dundee, Glasgow, Aberdeen?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cl4y82em7e6o
"Edinburgh Trams Project" has become a toxic byword. Not for the wheely things on the rails, but the utter fuckup that, almost accidentally and incidentally, delivered the said wheely things.
I'm which case, going abroad or restarting in another field becomes a lot less attractive.
One other thought. If you are going to put golden handcuffs on people in order for them to train as doctors, a certain amount of gold will be needed. Other careers are available to eighteen year olds.
There was also a huge amount of ifnrastructure to be located and renewed, which would have to be done anyway sooner or later.
However, now they exist and are running ...
More than one uni and more than one campus (Old College, George Square and Kings' Buildings for just one alone).
(I do agree it's ridiculous how having a degree is deemed necessary in many instances though)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg2kz9kn93o
(I'm aware the accuracy of that claim is, shockingly, disputed)
You’re right - we’re spending a vast amount of money. On the wrong things. To save money long term we need to spend a little more now - to hire the staff needed - which then allows you to not need to spend the money on crisis management.
It’s just basic adding. That you Tories no longer understand or explains an awful lot about why you got hammered and now and listing after Robert Jenrick as leader.
It was one of his most toxic legacies.
Analysis of economic benefits of genuine government investment is vertsinly less than ideal, but it’s not in the same league.
One of those two things can be improved; the other idea just needs eliminating.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13776757/After-TV-presenter-sparked-debate-revealing-15-year-old-went-travelling-abroad-friend-Kirstie-Allsopps-fury-social-services-probe-sons-interrail-trip.html
"Kirstie Allsopp last night spoke of her outrage after she was quizzed by social services for allowing her 15-year-old son to go Interrailing across Europe.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal how, in an extraordinary intervention, a social worker contacted the TV presenter to inform her that a file had been opened after child protection concerns were raised over her youngest child, Oscar.
To the 52-year-old's fury, the social worker demanded to know what 'safeguards' had been put in place when she allowed Oscar to travel for three weeks on the continent alongside a 16-year-old friend. "
On photo-ops, there's a video out there somewhere of Jason Zadrozny on our local pond in a dinghy explaining how proud he is of the duck-island he is responsible for installing, which is floating next to him
I don't know about Lib Dems - it's possible that some Ashfield Independents could go back to them if it splits or disintegrates after Zadrozny's trial at Northampton Crown Court in 2025. I can't call it. Z is a good political operator, but his feet may have sunk too far into the mud.
Are you suggesting that SNP Scotland and Labour Wales also managed to spend at this optimally inefficient level as well as Conservative England ?
The UK has had an effectively 14 year experiment of different parties running public services in its different parts.
Are there any significant differences in the quality and quantity of output of those services ?
When the crisis comes along, the standard response is to grab cash from the capital budget to provide revenue to get over this week's problem. Which is rational in the short term, but calamitous if you do it year after year.
Because the ways to improve productivity are either to shout at people to WORK HARDER, or spend money to provide them with tools to do their jobs better. And even the people doing the shouting now have sore throats, because there's been no investment in voice amplification equipment.
And after all, startups like SpaceX or Anduril probably couldn’t get started without outsourcing.
Everyone is jumping to conclusions without much in the way of facts.
Thread with a different perspective.
"The detention and search warrant was issued because Durov did not cooperate with French security forces and did not properly moderate Telegram, which makes him an accomplice in crimes such as drug trafficking, terrorism, money laundering, child abuse, etc"..
https://x.com/YaroslavAzhnyuk/status/1827534637511430402
Time will tell which is closer to the truth.
How hard are the dividing lines drawn ?
* Which is one way of thinking about the principle of a tithe .. how 10 can pay for a Rabbi.
A member of a Reuters news team was missing and two others were injured and hospitalized after a Russian missile attack on their hotel in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk.
https://x.com/ChristopherJM/status/1827671099577905390
Workers will happily do so as well if it means higher pay than otherwise.