Sky reporting that some prisoners let out on the early release scheme have not been given accommodation, so they are looking to commit another crime so they can be locked up again
You couldn't make this up
That's just embarrassing, there just seems to be no joined up thinking anywhere in the government and this isn't me having a go at the current lot, it was the same under the Tories and the same under Labour before that and so on.
That's always been the case - we dump prisoners back on the streets / or relatives who really don't want them and so they end up back on the streets.
I would be curious as to where the issues are occurring as I expect this is a (very) regional issue..
- more than every Labour leader put together since 1997
- despite being in the top 1% of earners
- refuses to stop taking them despite the damage it’s inflicted on Labour
What’s the explanation other than that he’s greedy
This is silly. SKS has not taken £100k worth of freebies because no-one would pay £100k at open market prices for the things he was granted.
The problem is a single person apparently acting as sugar daddy for half the cabinet, not the £ amounts.
Which things have a lower value? Genuine question - my understanding is that the declared value should be the value to purchase.
£20k for somewhere to study.
That was the price of a short term rental of a very large flat in a fashionable part of town.
The actual use it was put to was irrelevant.
If someone gives me a magnum of Perrier Jouet Belle Epoque and I use it to clean my shoes, I would still have to declare the full purchase price.
Your question was which things have a lower value, not which things should have been declared at a lower value. For somewhere to study for GCSE's for a month a normal well off family is not thinking £20k is fair value, maybe £2-4k.
I learned today that over half of the world's semiconductor industry supply of high purity quartz currently comes from N Carolina. Where mining has been stopped by the hurricane. And also that there are plenty of alternate suppliers.
There’s a lot of fear mongering surrounding high purity quartz (“HPQ”) and Spruce Pine, NC following the devastating flooding from Hurricane Helene The area contains the purest form of natural quartz, but the significance of supply disruptions from the mines is exaggerated.. 1/8 https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/1840871017746698617
I fear Kemi will end up being a slightly more competent version of Liz Truss. She's appealing to the exact same demo in the Tory membership with these wild statements. I'm sure there's some businesses that couldn't deal with the minimum wage but the overall good it has done outweighs any downsides.
She needs time to mature if she will mature at all
Jenrick is the best of a bad lot
I think if she matures at all is the issue, I've been watching her career for more than a few years now and she still gets bogged down in absolutes and stupid fights for no reason.
Her statement about the minimum wage is undeniably true, there will have been a few businesses that had a tough time due to the minimum wage over the years, yet it's about 10% of the story for the minimum wage as a whole which means she's either cynically ignoring the 90% in order to win the old fucker Tory members who "never had minimum wage in our day" or she's not able to see that the benefits of the minimum wage on bringing people out of absolute poverty has been a huge success story and worth businesses having to adjust their models.
It's the same as the maternity pay stuff, the birth rate is plunging across Europe and parents need more help and incentives to have kids, making it more expensive or forcing women to choose between having kids or having a career is frankly idiotic.
Twitter’s value now estimated to be down 79% since Musk took over.
It has become unusable for me. I never did use it much but now I can't even look at it unless I give them some personal details. Since I do not wish to, it no longer exists for me.
This has on the whole made a small improvement in the quality of my life.
The date of birth thing? I thought I'd given them my standard fake birth date for organisations with no business knowing it, but I still get asked, so maybe I didn't. But I can simply close the prompt by clicking the cross and it doesn't seem to stop me doing anything.
Still, being off Twitter may still be a net improvement I only really use it for two things, professionally as mainly a broadcast medium (publicising research outputs, calling for participants etc) and following links posted on here (for the latter, the need to be logged in to see any context beyond the immediately linked tweet does bug me).
Come to BlueSky instead. That's increasingly where academic discussion is moving. Although the best place for publicising research outputs I find is probably LinkedIn.
So far I've stuck with Twitter because it would be quite hard work to rebuild such an interesting community - mine has developed since 2008 and has a lot of interesting people in it.
Saying - however subtly - that you are on Bluesky is going to become the marker of the worst type of vain lefty wanker. The social media equivalent of "oh, I only go to Gails, for my bread, lovely sourdough", "or no, actually, I'm a vegan, I can't even LOOK at meat"
Bluesky is full of lefty twats congratulating each other for being on Bluesky
Lefties don't like Gail's. Gail's is for the kind of people who live in Clapham - I've never been inside a Gail's in my life. I only even know about Gail's because class-obsessed PB Tories keep going on about it. And you can add this "Bluesky" thing to the list of things that Lefties are meant to be obsessed with but in reality only know about through rightwingers moaning about them on PB.
Of course and we have the lazy old meme about areas with Gail's voting Liberal Democrat. There's a Gail's in Wanstead - Labour hold the seat, Greens second, Conservatives third.
I've been in just two - the coffee is average, the sausage rolls are very good but very pricey. My London bakery of choice is Wenzel's well, obviously, I'd go to Bageriet or Popham Bakery if I could.
Twitter’s value now estimated to be down 79% since Musk took over.
It has become unusable for me. I never did use it much but now I can't even look at it unless I give them some personal details. Since I do not wish to, it no longer exists for me.
This has on the whole made a small improvement in the quality of my life.
The date of birth thing? I thought I'd given them my standard fake birth date for organisations with no business knowing it, but I still get asked, so maybe I didn't. But I can simply close the prompt by clicking the cross and it doesn't seem to stop me doing anything.
Still, being off Twitter may still be a net improvement I only really use it for two things, professionally as mainly a broadcast medium (publicising research outputs, calling for participants etc) and following links posted on here (for the latter, the need to be logged in to see any context beyond the immediately linked tweet does bug me).
Come to BlueSky instead. That's increasingly where academic discussion is moving. Although the best place for publicising research outputs I find is probably LinkedIn.
So far I've stuck with Twitter because it would be quite hard work to rebuild such an interesting community - mine has developed since 2008 and has a lot of interesting people in it.
Saying - however subtly - that you are on Bluesky is going to become the marker of the worst type of vain lefty wanker. The social media equivalent of "oh, I only go to Gails, for my bread, lovely sourdough", "or no, actually, I'm a vegan, I can't even LOOK at meat"
Bluesky is full of lefty twats congratulating each other for being on Bluesky
Lefties don't like Gail's. Gail's is for the kind of people who live in Clapham - I've never been inside a Gail's in my life. I only even know about Gail's because class-obsessed PB Tories keep going on about it. And you can add this "Bluesky" thing to the list of things that Lefties are meant to be obsessed with but in reality only know about through rightwingers moaning about them on PB.
I never said “lefties go to Gail’s” I said utter wankers drop it into conversion as they think it gives them some bizarre status
However the first person to mention “oh I use Bluesky actually” on this thread appears to be @bondegezou
You should hear what they say about the Knappers' Monthly.
Sky reporting that some prisoners let out on the early release scheme have not been given accommodation, so they are looking to commit another crime so they can be locked up again
You couldn't make this up
No, what you can't make up is a Party which led the Government of this countrty for 14 years and did the sum total of nothing to improve prison capacity or recruit more prison officers leaving the prisons full to bursting when they left office (or, rather, were unceremoniously booted out of office).
I learned today that over half of the world's semiconductor industry supply of high purity quartz currently comes from N Carolina. Where mining has been stopped by the hurricane. And also that there are plenty of alternate suppliers.
There’s a lot of fear mongering surrounding high purity quartz (“HPQ”) and Spruce Pine, NC following the devastating flooding from Hurricane Helene The area contains the purest form of natural quartz, but the significance of supply disruptions from the mines is exaggerated.. 1/8 https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/1840871017746698617
Yes, I read the same but from Ed Conway who has written a book about materials, their use and their supply called material world.
A few years back when Texas had a severe white out in the winter, due to the impact on some of the facilities, the global supply of some polymers including ones we use was severely impacted with force majeure declared and lasting several week.
These extended supply chains with little spare capacity are very very stretched and it only takes one mishap to have a dramatic impact.
Mr. Pioneers, aye. Even if the timing couldn't be altered, they've used that gap to cut planned investment and create an atmosphere of doom and gloom that just makes a bad situation worse, which, as you say, then becomes a legitimate economic line with which to attack Labour.
It's dumb both politically and economically.
I think Nigel Lawson had it spot on when he said in his memoirs that saying how bad the situation is after you've just won an election is damaging because it undermines confidence and it's also pointless because you don't have to face the voters for some years.
Of course it's especially stupid when you've made up transparent lies like saying this is the worst situation for an incoming government since the war, when 2010 was several degrees worse, or that there is a huge hole in the public finances, while there is enough money to waste on pay rises for unreformed public sector unions and pointless and unpopular foreign aid or that things are way worse than you thought, when the figures are public.
And finally it's most staggeringly stupid when you've clearly got no convincing plan to fix anything except the tiniest of tinkering.
2010 wasnt worse for the state of public services, accumulative impact of lack of investment or economic asperations of young people. It is not all about budget finances.
It is if you're Labour, whose only answer for any problem is to waste (or "invest" as Brown called it) other people's money.
Most people who get rich make their money partly through earnings but a very substantial share comes from investments too. It is the same with countries.
What actual completed investments has the state made over the past 30 years though ?
Crossrail & I can't think of much else. Plenty on repairs and maintenance, but actual new completed big projects... ??
Queensferry Crossing & Borders Railway, both opened by QEII so must be REALLY important.
Bathgate electrification through to the Wild West.
Edit: I won't suggest the electrification of the London-Bristol main line as that was so badly screwed up.
Sone big chunks of the A9 have been dualled, tbf. Fochabers bypass. A few new rail stations and realignments in the north (all incredibly ugly). Leven link.
I'd have guessed offshore wind is probably the most significant investment though, enabled by the state. Will reach 20gw in the few years - 30 by 2030.
And that reminds me that some of the delays to the A9 etc were down to the Tories, Slab etc. via the chaos caused by diversion of moneys to the Edinburgh trams - which themselves count as a major investment project, of course. I'd add the Greens to that list but delays to the A9 would be a feature not a bug for them.
For info: Greens still very much trying to kill the A9 and A96 upgrading. John Swinney's gonna have to do a deal with someone to pass his budget. Wonder who?
"The remaining single carriage sections of the A9 should go through a “climate test” before the SNP Government can spend millions on its dualling project, according to Greens co-leader Patrick Harvie.
"The former government minister laid down a marker on further spending ahead of tough financial decisions in First Minister John Swinney’s budget later this year.
"Mr Harvie’s suggestion would lead to further delays to the long-overdue commitment to dual the route all the way between Inverness and Perth.
"It would be similar to the approach to the A96 Aberdeen-Inverness road, which is also long overdue while a report on its future gathers dust in government headquarters."
I am the chosen one For I am of the first ones I know I’m black and beautiful An African freedom fighter My skin is my protection And you my friend, don’t matter Because I am the chosen one For I am of the first ones You created a structure that made you seem great When the simple reality is it is all fake Because I am the chosen one For I am of the first ones
Twitter’s value now estimated to be down 79% since Musk took over.
It has become unusable for me. I never did use it much but now I can't even look at it unless I give them some personal details. Since I do not wish to, it no longer exists for me.
This has on the whole made a small improvement in the quality of my life.
The date of birth thing? I thought I'd given them my standard fake birth date for organisations with no business knowing it, but I still get asked, so maybe I didn't. But I can simply close the prompt by clicking the cross and it doesn't seem to stop me doing anything.
Still, being off Twitter may still be a net improvement I only really use it for two things, professionally as mainly a broadcast medium (publicising research outputs, calling for participants etc) and following links posted on here (for the latter, the need to be logged in to see any context beyond the immediately linked tweet does bug me).
Come to BlueSky instead. That's increasingly where academic discussion is moving. Although the best place for publicising research outputs I find is probably LinkedIn.
So far I've stuck with Twitter because it would be quite hard work to rebuild such an interesting community - mine has developed since 2008 and has a lot of interesting people in it.
Saying - however subtly - that you are on Bluesky is going to become the marker of the worst type of vain lefty wanker. The social media equivalent of "oh, I only go to Gails, for my bread, lovely sourdough", "or no, actually, I'm a vegan, I can't even LOOK at meat"
Bluesky is full of lefty twats congratulating each other for being on Bluesky
Lefties don't like Gail's. Gail's is for the kind of people who live in Clapham - I've never been inside a Gail's in my life. I only even know about Gail's because class-obsessed PB Tories keep going on about it. And you can add this "Bluesky" thing to the list of things that Lefties are meant to be obsessed with but in reality only know about through rightwingers moaning about them on PB.
Of course and we have the lazy old meme about areas with Gail's voting Liberal Democrat. There's a Gail's in Wanstead - Labour hold the seat, Greens second, Conservatives third.
I've been in just two - the coffee is average, the sausage rolls are very good but very pricey. My London bakery of choice is Wenzel's well, obviously, I'd go to Bageriet or Popham Bakery if I could.
How does it compare to "Paul", when I worked in North London I'd regularly pop in and get a sarnie or a cake. Liked it. It was 16 years ago mind.
Twitter’s value now estimated to be down 79% since Musk took over.
It has become unusable for me. I never did use it much but now I can't even look at it unless I give them some personal details. Since I do not wish to, it no longer exists for me.
This has on the whole made a small improvement in the quality of my life.
The date of birth thing? I thought I'd given them my standard fake birth date for organisations with no business knowing it, but I still get asked, so maybe I didn't. But I can simply close the prompt by clicking the cross and it doesn't seem to stop me doing anything.
Still, being off Twitter may still be a net improvement I only really use it for two things, professionally as mainly a broadcast medium (publicising research outputs, calling for participants etc) and following links posted on here (for the latter, the need to be logged in to see any context beyond the immediately linked tweet does bug me).
Come to BlueSky instead. That's increasingly where academic discussion is moving. Although the best place for publicising research outputs I find is probably LinkedIn.
So far I've stuck with Twitter because it would be quite hard work to rebuild such an interesting community - mine has developed since 2008 and has a lot of interesting people in it.
Saying - however subtly - that you are on Bluesky is going to become the marker of the worst type of vain lefty wanker. The social media equivalent of "oh, I only go to Gails, for my bread, lovely sourdough", "or no, actually, I'm a vegan, I can't even LOOK at meat"
Bluesky is full of lefty twats congratulating each other for being on Bluesky
That sounds quite like the early days of twitter - say summer 2007.
If the Tories want me back as a member, they have some work to do.
I'm a big fan of Anne Applebaum but I find it difficult to get audio/visuals about her books. As you know I love lecture format and hate podcasts. So I was pleased to find this lecture by her on her new book "Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-73jkAwyOo .
It's over a hour long but the intro and lecture is the first 33 mins, followed by a Q&A
I am the chosen one For I am of the first ones I know I’m black and beautiful An African freedom fighter My skin is my protection And you my friend, don’t matter Because I am the chosen one For I am of the first ones You created a structure that made you seem great When the simple reality is it is all fake Because I am the chosen one For I am of the first ones
From Seventies Rock Icons. The Dooleys.
Oh we... we are the chosen few You chose me and I chose you We're the chosen few Oh and we... we are the lucky people You got me and I got you We're the chosen few
Well I don't want your money I don't want your love Just give me loving honey Warm me when I'm cold
'Cos we... we are the chosen few You chose me and I chose you We're the chosen few Oh and we... we are the lucky people 'Cos you got me and I got you We're the chosen few... yeah
Don't talk about tomorrow We'll live our lives today As long as we're together You know we'll find a way
'Cos we... we are the chosen few You chose me and I chose you We're the chosen few
I am the chosen one For I am of the first ones I know I’m black and beautiful An African freedom fighter My skin is my protection And you my friend, don’t matter Because I am the chosen one For I am of the first ones You created a structure that made you seem great When the simple reality is it is all fake Because I am the chosen one For I am of the first ones
Interesting video on what's gone wrong for the Conservatives electorally. As with much else it's all the fault of Brexit. That's when they lost the graduates, who are the key demographic in Britain now. Talk in the video about how the Tories can work their way back with an offer to graduates but it feels hypothetical.
Even Corbyn won graduates, they aren't the key swing voters now, the key swing voters now are white lower middle class and skilled working class middle aged voters with a mortgage who voted for Boris in 2019 but for Starmer or Farage this time. Mostly living in the Midlands and North and Essex and Kent.
Graduate swing voters are Remainers primarily in the South who voted for Cameron but LD in July however they are not enough on their own to win a general election
Graduates aren't the key swing voters; they are the most important voting demographic period. The video makes the point that it gets increasingly hard for the Conservatives to win without swinging graduates.
Graduates are large in number and efficiently distributed. This is the killer combo under FPTP.
They are distributed across cities, suburbs, the countryside and increasingly into post industrial northern towns, the so called Red Wall.
Since Brexit they have mostly voted Labour and rarely Conservative. They vote more than non graduates.
Except they aren't, if they were Corbyn would now be PM as most graduates voted for him.
As I said the key swing voters are lower middle class and skilled working class middle aged voters who voted for Boris then Starmer or Farage NOT graduates.
Graduates voted 42% Labour, 18% Conservative, 15% Liberal Democrat, 9% Green and 8% Reform in July. As might be expected, the strongest groups for Labour, the LDs and Greens, the weakest for Conservative and Reform.
Whether that's an example of education or political indoctrination at Universities is a matter for debate of course and I'm sure everyone has a view (or perhaps not).
Cameron won graduates but since they have voted Labour mostly, however Boris won without graduates as did May
According to Yougov Labour was also at >40% with high earners, 50-100k bracket.
Pre tax rises, though Boris did best with average earners not high earners and it is average earners who decide elections.
Only 10% of voters earn more than £50k and the LDs percentage wise get the highest percentage of their voters from high earners now not Labour or the Tories
So according to Yougov, the largest cohort is Labour voting, that LDs get a smaller cohort overall but that it makes up a larger % of their total vote ... shrugs I'm a bit dubious about how accurate the Yougov sub setting is tbh, they're filtering very finely from a relatively small sample. Others might have more knowledgeable insight.
Look at the poshest home counties seats now Esher and Walton, Epsom and Ewell, St Albans, Winchester, Henley, Maidenhead, Tunbridge Wells, Chesham and Amersham etc all now have LD MPs. As do some of the wealthiest parts of London like Wimbledon, Richmond Park and Twickenham
Gails = LD
Even Epping now has LD councillors mostly and a Gail's
Gail's was a complete mystery to me other than seeing it mentioned on here and then I saw my first one on my one and only visit to Epping a month ago and mentioned the conversations we have here to my wife. She was all knowing. Apparently we have one in Guildford (news to me) and her nephew (who has to have everything that is fashionable) is beside himself that one is opening in Henley. My wife thinks they are pretty average.
Mr. Pioneers, aye. Even if the timing couldn't be altered, they've used that gap to cut planned investment and create an atmosphere of doom and gloom that just makes a bad situation worse, which, as you say, then becomes a legitimate economic line with which to attack Labour.
It's dumb both politically and economically.
I think Nigel Lawson had it spot on when he said in his memoirs that saying how bad the situation is after you've just won an election is damaging because it undermines confidence and it's also pointless because you don't have to face the voters for some years.
Of course it's especially stupid when you've made up transparent lies like saying this is the worst situation for an incoming government since the war, when 2010 was several degrees worse, or that there is a huge hole in the public finances, while there is enough money to waste on pay rises for unreformed public sector unions and pointless and unpopular foreign aid or that things are way worse than you thought, when the figures are public.
And finally it's most staggeringly stupid when you've clearly got no convincing plan to fix anything except the tiniest of tinkering.
2010 wasnt worse for the state of public services, accumulative impact of lack of investment or economic asperations of young people. It is not all about budget finances.
It is if you're Labour, whose only answer for any problem is to waste (or "invest" as Brown called it) other people's money.
Most people who get rich make their money partly through earnings but a very substantial share comes from investments too. It is the same with countries.
What actual completed investments has the state made over the past 30 years though ?
Crossrail & I can't think of much else. Plenty on repairs and maintenance, but actual new completed big projects... ??
Queensferry Crossing & Borders Railway, both opened by QEII so must be REALLY important.
Bathgate electrification through to the Wild West.
Edit: I won't suggest the electrification of the London-Bristol main line as that was so badly screwed up.
Sone big chunks of the A9 have been dualled, tbf. Fochabers bypass. A few new rail stations and realignments in the north (all incredibly ugly). Leven link.
I'd have guessed offshore wind is probably the most significant investment though, enabled by the state. Will reach 20gw in the few years - 30 by 2030.
And that reminds me that some of the delays to the A9 etc were down to the Tories, Slab etc. via the chaos caused by diversion of moneys to the Edinburgh trams - which themselves count as a major investment project, of course. I'd add the Greens to that list but delays to the A9 would be a feature not a bug for them.
For info: Greens still very much trying to kill the A9 and A96 upgrading. John Swinney's gonna have to do a deal with someone to pass his budget. Wonder who?
"The remaining single carriage sections of the A9 should go through a “climate test” before the SNP Government can spend millions on its dualling project, according to Greens co-leader Patrick Harvie.
"The former government minister laid down a marker on further spending ahead of tough financial decisions in First Minister John Swinney’s budget later this year.
"Mr Harvie’s suggestion would lead to further delays to the long-overdue commitment to dual the route all the way between Inverness and Perth.
"It would be similar to the approach to the A96 Aberdeen-Inverness road, which is also long overdue while a report on its future gathers dust in government headquarters."
Perhaps he will reverse his cuts to Green travel, if he needs to eat his greens?
I am the chosen one For I am of the first ones I know I’m black and beautiful An African freedom fighter My skin is my protection And you my friend, don’t matter Because I am the chosen one For I am of the first ones You created a structure that made you seem great When the simple reality is it is all fake Because I am the chosen one For I am of the first ones
"The first ones"? She is referring to Out of Africa origins of the human race?
I fear Kemi will end up being a slightly more competent version of Liz Truss. She's appealing to the exact same demo in the Tory membership with these wild statements. I'm sure there's some businesses that couldn't deal with the minimum wage but the overall good it has done outweighs any downsides.
She needs time to mature if she will mature at all
Jenrick is the best of a bad lot
Nope Jenrick is the worst of a bad lot. A dull battleship grey calculating also-ran who will make zero impact on either those who defected to the Faragists, or those who went all LibDemmy.
The case for Kemi is that she is a colourful feisty character who obviously has convictions. Can anyone say that of Jenrick? In particular she has a fighting chance of connecting, or at least being noticed, by those below the age of retirement who, at the moment, would rather go for root-canal work than vote Tory. There would also be the LOLZ of the Tories electing their FOURTH female leader - and a black one at that - while Labour drift on with a quintessential grey-man-in-a-suit. They really don't look like the future belongs to them under Starmer, do they?
That said, there are admittedly downsides with Kemi too. Ahem.
Tories would be better off with Cleverly or Tugendhat but that evidently ain't gonna happen.
Mr. Pioneers, aye. Even if the timing couldn't be altered, they've used that gap to cut planned investment and create an atmosphere of doom and gloom that just makes a bad situation worse, which, as you say, then becomes a legitimate economic line with which to attack Labour.
It's dumb both politically and economically.
I think Nigel Lawson had it spot on when he said in his memoirs that saying how bad the situation is after you've just won an election is damaging because it undermines confidence and it's also pointless because you don't have to face the voters for some years.
Of course it's especially stupid when you've made up transparent lies like saying this is the worst situation for an incoming government since the war, when 2010 was several degrees worse, or that there is a huge hole in the public finances, while there is enough money to waste on pay rises for unreformed public sector unions and pointless and unpopular foreign aid or that things are way worse than you thought, when the figures are public.
And finally it's most staggeringly stupid when you've clearly got no convincing plan to fix anything except the tiniest of tinkering.
2010 wasnt worse for the state of public services, accumulative impact of lack of investment or economic asperations of young people. It is not all about budget finances.
It is if you're Labour, whose only answer for any problem is to waste (or "invest" as Brown called it) other people's money.
Most people who get rich make their money partly through earnings but a very substantial share comes from investments too. It is the same with countries.
One thing I do not understand is why our governments (which can borrow at lower rates than commercial companies) have not insisted on taking large stakes in offshore wind developments. They clearly provide a predictable profit stream, a fair proportion of which goes overseas.
If we are indeed overpaying for renewable electricity, couldn't more of the money at least go back into the exchequer ?
What's the flaw in this reasoning ?
The flaw in the reasoning is that we don't have the capacity to borrow the money and that we structured the deals so that the builders of the wind farms bid on the price at which they electricity was sold - we couldn't have done that if the government was (part) building the farms.
We do though. The market gets spooked when governments borrow for current spending without any consideration for servicing or paying it back; just unjustified assertions as the tax cuts paying for themselves. Genuine investment will be viewed more favourably. Likewise, large but one-off spending will be tolerated by lenders as long as there's a recognition that the largesse will end and normality resume once the emergency is over.
The difficulty here for the jaded observer is that WRT excess borrowing to fund current state expenditure lifestyle the 'emergency' has now lasted without a break since 2008, we plan to reduce debt at a % of GDP by continuing to borrow lots more, and the treasury seems to be planning an even more bogus measure of fiscal probity than the current bogus one so that we can borrow more still, and there is no plan for paying a farthing of it back.
We don't need to pay any of it back. We do, however, need to reduce the debt:GDP ratio over the business cycle, which we're nowhere near at the moment. We were, however, near it between about 2015-20 but the extra debt combined with low growth post-Brexit/Covid has stuffed that.
I learned today that over half of the world's semiconductor industry supply of high purity quartz currently comes from N Carolina. Where mining has been stopped by the hurricane. And also that there are plenty of alternate suppliers.
There’s a lot of fear mongering surrounding high purity quartz (“HPQ”) and Spruce Pine, NC following the devastating flooding from Hurricane Helene The area contains the purest form of natural quartz, but the significance of supply disruptions from the mines is exaggerated.. 1/8 https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/1840871017746698617
Yes, I read the same but from Ed Conway who has written a book about materials, their use and their supply called material world.
A few years back when Texas had a severe white out in the winter, due to the impact on some of the facilities, the global supply of some polymers including ones we use was severely impacted with force majeure declared and lasting several week.
These extended supply chains with little spare capacity are very very stretched and it only takes one mishap to have a dramatic impact.
Except in this case, there seems to be a fairly robust supply of not-quite-as-pure-but-still-acceptable material ?
A lot of it seems simply to be about cost, as this story suggests.
My photo quota today is a Britain First activist called Andrew Edge, suited and booted for a demo in Belfast that apparently drew 23 people (that number could have been ironic, meaning "flop").
Who is the jowly chap in the photo on the wall. I think I recognise it - I was wondering if it was a Monday Club character or someone like John Tyndall. Any ideas?
Hardly a surprise. I have asked multiple times on here what purported qualities I am missing in Badenoch. She seems entirely without appeal – she was ineffective and cowardly as a minister and seems obsessed with trivial culture war nonsense. Nobody was able to articulate what it was about her that commended her to the leadership – and it seems the answer is indeed "sweet FA".
She's appealing to a lot of Conservatives. Otherwise she wouldn't be second favourite to win the leadership election.
As a young man (and I am so much older than I was on Thursday) I remember reading the works of JK Galbraith, specifically "The Affluent Society" and "The New Industrial State". He explained in some detail how states and administrations generally accreted power to themselves and proceeded to make themselves prosperous as they exercised those powers.
I went into Waterstones and "The New Industrial State" is in a bit of a limbo, being neither in print or out of print. Apparently they are thinking about a new edition, and until that's resolved they can't get a copy. As its nominal price in paperback is £44, it's probably for the best. My library does not have a copy
I am the chosen one For I am of the first ones I know I’m black and beautiful An African freedom fighter My skin is my protection And you my friend, don’t matter Because I am the chosen one For I am of the first ones You created a structure that made you seem great When the simple reality is it is all fake Because I am the chosen one For I am of the first ones
"The first ones"? She is referring to Out of Africa origins of the human race?
My photo quota today is a Britain First activist called Andrew Edge, suited and booted for a demo in Belfast that apparently drew 23 people (that number could have been ironic, meaning "flop").
Who is the jowly chap in the photo on the wall. I think I recognise it - I was wondering if it was a Monday Club character or someone like John Tyndall. Any ideas?
Definitely not John Tyndall
Is he drunk, or is that just a poor attempt at an Osborne/Truss power stance ?
I'm on Bluesky because some of the more interesting people I follow on twitter have moved over there.
But much more important are the newsletters I subscribe to, cycling forums, PB, Reddit. The relative value of twitter and equivalents have vastly diminished compared with say 2014 indyref.
My photo quota today is a Britain First activist called Andrew Edge, suited and booted for a demo in Belfast that apparently drew 23 people (that number could have been ironic, meaning "flop").
Who is the jowly chap in the photo on the wall. I think I recognise it - I was wondering if it was a Monday Club character or someone like John Tyndall. Any ideas?
Definitely not John Tyndall
Is he drunk, or is that just a poor attempt at an Osborne/Truss power stance ?
Nobody has mentioned the gun in his hand. A slight oversight I feel.
My photo quota today is a Britain First activist called Andrew Edge, suited and booted for a demo in Belfast that apparently drew 23 people (that number could have been ironic, meaning "flop").
Who is the jowly chap in the photo on the wall. I think I recognise it - I was wondering if it was a Monday Club character or someone like John Tyndall. Any ideas?
Definitely not John Tyndall
Is he drunk, or is that just a poor attempt at an Osborne/Truss power stance ?
Probably having trouble standing without his knuckles dragging on the floor.
I learned today that over half of the world's semiconductor industry supply of high purity quartz currently comes from N Carolina. Where mining has been stopped by the hurricane. And also that there are plenty of alternate suppliers.
There’s a lot of fear mongering surrounding high purity quartz (“HPQ”) and Spruce Pine, NC following the devastating flooding from Hurricane Helene The area contains the purest form of natural quartz, but the significance of supply disruptions from the mines is exaggerated.. 1/8 https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/1840871017746698617
Yes, I read the same but from Ed Conway who has written a book about materials, their use and their supply called material world.
A few years back when Texas had a severe white out in the winter, due to the impact on some of the facilities, the global supply of some polymers including ones we use was severely impacted with force majeure declared and lasting several week.
These extended supply chains with little spare capacity are very very stretched and it only takes one mishap to have a dramatic impact.
Except in this case, there seems to be a fairly robust supply of not-quite-as-pure-but-still-acceptable material ?
A lot of it seems simply to be about cost, as this story suggests.
But western countries are beginning to realise the strategic importance of domestic supply chains
Yes they are, certainly there is a trend towards onshoring in some sectors. Biden was ahead of the curve here. The corporation I work for has mandated us to look at moving whatever we can that is sourced in China to other sources although they are looking at cheaper ones close to home so Eastern Europe or North Africa. Not always easy to do depending on the industries you service and the demands from the customers for re-qualifying alternative sources.
My photo quota today is a Britain First activist called Andrew Edge, suited and booted for a demo in Belfast that apparently drew 23 people (that number could have been ironic, meaning "flop").
Who is the jowly chap in the photo on the wall. I think I recognise it - I was wondering if it was a Monday Club character or someone like John Tyndall. Any ideas?
Definitely not John Tyndall
Is he drunk, or is that just a poor attempt at an Osborne/Truss power stance ?
Probably drunk as well.
It's sort of inverse Rishi trousers - he needs platforms.
I am the chosen one For I am of the first ones I know I’m black and beautiful An African freedom fighter My skin is my protection And you my friend, don’t matter Because I am the chosen one For I am of the first ones You created a structure that made you seem great When the simple reality is it is all fake Because I am the chosen one For I am of the first ones
From Seventies Rock Icons. The Dooleys.
Oh we... we are the chosen few You chose me and I chose you We're the chosen few Oh and we... we are the lucky people You got me and I got you We're the chosen few
Well I don't want your money I don't want your love Just give me loving honey Warm me when I'm cold
'Cos we... we are the chosen few You chose me and I chose you We're the chosen few Oh and we... we are the lucky people 'Cos you got me and I got you We're the chosen few... yeah
Don't talk about tomorrow We'll live our lives today As long as we're together You know we'll find a way
'Cos we... we are the chosen few You chose me and I chose you We're the chosen few
A pedant might quibble at the lines "I don't want your love/just give me loving honey." Still better than Dawn Butler, mind.
My photo quota today is a Britain First activist called Andrew Edge, suited and booted for a demo in Belfast that apparently drew 23 people (that number could have been ironic, meaning "flop").
Who is the jowly chap in the photo on the wall. I think I recognise it - I was wondering if it was a Monday Club character or someone like John Tyndall. Any ideas?
Definitely not John Tyndall
Is he drunk, or is that just a poor attempt at an Osborne/Truss power stance ?
Probably drunk as well.
It's sort of inverse Rishi trousers - he needs platforms.
Mr. Pioneers, aye. Even if the timing couldn't be altered, they've used that gap to cut planned investment and create an atmosphere of doom and gloom that just makes a bad situation worse, which, as you say, then becomes a legitimate economic line with which to attack Labour.
It's dumb both politically and economically.
I think Nigel Lawson had it spot on when he said in his memoirs that saying how bad the situation is after you've just won an election is damaging because it undermines confidence and it's also pointless because you don't have to face the voters for some years.
Of course it's especially stupid when you've made up transparent lies like saying this is the worst situation for an incoming government since the war, when 2010 was several degrees worse, or that there is a huge hole in the public finances, while there is enough money to waste on pay rises for unreformed public sector unions and pointless and unpopular foreign aid or that things are way worse than you thought, when the figures are public.
And finally it's most staggeringly stupid when you've clearly got no convincing plan to fix anything except the tiniest of tinkering.
2010 wasnt worse for the state of public services, accumulative impact of lack of investment or economic asperations of young people. It is not all about budget finances.
It is if you're Labour, whose only answer for any problem is to waste (or "invest" as Brown called it) other people's money.
Most people who get rich make their money partly through earnings but a very substantial share comes from investments too. It is the same with countries.
One thing I do not understand is why our governments (which can borrow at lower rates than commercial companies) have not insisted on taking large stakes in offshore wind developments. They clearly provide a predictable profit stream, a fair proportion of which goes overseas.
If we are indeed overpaying for renewable electricity, couldn't more of the money at least go back into the exchequer ?
What's the flaw in this reasoning ?
AIU it appears to go back to failed investments in industry from the sixties and seventies such that investment has become a bad thing for a couple of generations of politicians.
But government was pretty well guaranteeing a return, by setting a guaranteed price for the electricity.
UK gov makes consistently terrible investment decisions and this doesn't change much by party. I think the main reasons are previous examples of failure and the positive pay offs happen after the politicians are judged.
It is much harder to be criticised for something you never did, than something you championed which ended up over budget or somehow went wrong.
When I was younger and more ignorant, I actually tried selling the DARPA idea to various MPs.
I eventually noticed that, while they claimed to like the idea, they actually wanted to “improve” it by
1) picking the winners 2) throw big money into 1)
As in, the complete reverse of the DARPA idea. Which is small amounts of seed money to a range of ideas in a space, see which ones actually work…
Slightly more to it than that - one program director with almost dictatorial powers, but a limited term of office. And no political decision making, of course.
You can't not have decision-making though. Ultimately, the politicians have to be accountable, which means they have to have some degree of power. In an ideal world, they just pick highly capable people who then run things independently but civil servants and bureaucrats can also suffer from group-think and ignore ideas out of their reference zone. Perhaps a new organisation might not suffer from those problems, if staffed with people from outside that culture but I wouldn't bet on it. To take a practical example, Churchill's direct interventions could be a time-wasting pain in the backside for the military and civil chiefs at times (quite a lot of times) but on the other hand they were also critical in, for example, giving the work at Bletchley Park the priority it needed and deserved.
What's needed is a proactive culture without fear of failure. Neither of these tend to sit very comfortably in the public sector (or, indeed, within the private sector and in particular large, established organisations).
For the DARPA model the politicians set policy goals, and award a tranche of funding - that's it. The reason it works is that they appoint expert program directors on very limited (c. 2 years) terms. During that time they have (in their small sphere) unchecked power to award (relatively small( grants for short term</>, high risk projects.
They get to try ideas without fear of failure (the expectation is that many will fail), and if it works, it's then someone else's to take further.
No empire building.
I don't think that's right - I think DARPA program directors are 3 - 5 years. I think the recipe to success is giving people time (say 4 years) but also then stopping contracts so they know they are moving on by default.
My photo quota today is a Britain First activist called Andrew Edge, suited and booted for a demo in Belfast that apparently drew 23 people (that number could have been ironic, meaning "flop").
Who is the jowly chap in the photo on the wall. I think I recognise it - I was wondering if it was a Monday Club character or someone like John Tyndall. Any ideas?
Definitely not John Tyndall
Is he drunk, or is that just a poor attempt at an Osborne/Truss power stance ?
Nobody has mentioned the gun in his hand. A slight oversight I feel.
I hadn't noticed that; thanks for the observation.
- more than every Labour leader put together since 1997
- despite being in the top 1% of earners
- refuses to stop taking them despite the damage it’s inflicted on Labour
What’s the explanation other than that he’s greedy
This is silly. SKS has not taken £100k worth of freebies because no-one would pay £100k at open market prices for the things he was granted.
The problem is a single person apparently acting as sugar daddy for half the cabinet, not the £ amounts.
Which things have a lower value? Genuine question - my understanding is that the declared value should be the value to purchase.
£20k for somewhere to study.
It wasn't somewhere to study though was it? It was after GCSEs. It was £20k for a swanky central London pad. Which is market value. Arguably SKS wouldn't have paid that out of his own money, but the market would.
Mr. Pioneers, aye. Even if the timing couldn't be altered, they've used that gap to cut planned investment and create an atmosphere of doom and gloom that just makes a bad situation worse, which, as you say, then becomes a legitimate economic line with which to attack Labour.
It's dumb both politically and economically.
I think Nigel Lawson had it spot on when he said in his memoirs that saying how bad the situation is after you've just won an election is damaging because it undermines confidence and it's also pointless because you don't have to face the voters for some years.
Of course it's especially stupid when you've made up transparent lies like saying this is the worst situation for an incoming government since the war, when 2010 was several degrees worse, or that there is a huge hole in the public finances, while there is enough money to waste on pay rises for unreformed public sector unions and pointless and unpopular foreign aid or that things are way worse than you thought, when the figures are public.
And finally it's most staggeringly stupid when you've clearly got no convincing plan to fix anything except the tiniest of tinkering.
2010 wasnt worse for the state of public services, accumulative impact of lack of investment or economic asperations of young people. It is not all about budget finances.
It is if you're Labour, whose only answer for any problem is to waste (or "invest" as Brown called it) other people's money.
Most people who get rich make their money partly through earnings but a very substantial share comes from investments too. It is the same with countries.
One thing I do not understand is why our governments (which can borrow at lower rates than commercial companies) have not insisted on taking large stakes in offshore wind developments. They clearly provide a predictable profit stream, a fair proportion of which goes overseas.
If we are indeed overpaying for renewable electricity, couldn't more of the money at least go back into the exchequer ?
What's the flaw in this reasoning ?
AIU it appears to go back to failed investments in industry from the sixties and seventies such that investment has become a bad thing for a couple of generations of politicians.
But government was pretty well guaranteeing a return, by setting a guaranteed price for the electricity.
UK gov makes consistently terrible investment decisions and this doesn't change much by party. I think the main reasons are previous examples of failure and the positive pay offs happen after the politicians are judged.
It is much harder to be criticised for something you never did, than something you championed which ended up over budget or somehow went wrong.
Had we applied that approach to the water industry, the consumer would probably still have been ripped off, but at least half of the revenue would have stayed in the UK, rather than disappearing overseas. Macquarie made a lot of their money effectively borrowing from themselves to gear up the industry. So they took out dividends in the equity and got paid interest on what was effectively government guaranteed borrowing (at rates more expensive than government could itself have borrowed).
Privatised monopolies don't work in the public interest.
That's a question of regulation. Ofwat has been captured by the water companies.
If you link caps on dividends and executive bonuses and salaries to pollution levels then you'd almost certainly see the latter coming down.
The state, to repeat a point made multiple times already, tends to be dreadful at investment. For boring stuff like water networks, that's less because it makes bad investment choices of X over Y and more because political pressure is to keep bills down, and the easiest way to do that is to cut the investment budget which has little immediate adverse effect. It's no coincidence that both water quality and leak rates under the nationalised water boards were dreadful.
Mr. Pioneers, aye. Even if the timing couldn't be altered, they've used that gap to cut planned investment and create an atmosphere of doom and gloom that just makes a bad situation worse, which, as you say, then becomes a legitimate economic line with which to attack Labour.
It's dumb both politically and economically.
I think Nigel Lawson had it spot on when he said in his memoirs that saying how bad the situation is after you've just won an election is damaging because it undermines confidence and it's also pointless because you don't have to face the voters for some years.
Of course it's especially stupid when you've made up transparent lies like saying this is the worst situation for an incoming government since the war, when 2010 was several degrees worse, or that there is a huge hole in the public finances, while there is enough money to waste on pay rises for unreformed public sector unions and pointless and unpopular foreign aid or that things are way worse than you thought, when the figures are public.
And finally it's most staggeringly stupid when you've clearly got no convincing plan to fix anything except the tiniest of tinkering.
2010 wasnt worse for the state of public services, accumulative impact of lack of investment or economic asperations of young people. It is not all about budget finances.
It is if you're Labour, whose only answer for any problem is to waste (or "invest" as Brown called it) other people's money.
Most people who get rich make their money partly through earnings but a very substantial share comes from investments too. It is the same with countries.
One thing I do not understand is why our governments (which can borrow at lower rates than commercial companies) have not insisted on taking large stakes in offshore wind developments. They clearly provide a predictable profit stream, a fair proportion of which goes overseas.
If we are indeed overpaying for renewable electricity, couldn't more of the money at least go back into the exchequer ?
What's the flaw in this reasoning ?
AIU it appears to go back to failed investments in industry from the sixties and seventies such that investment has become a bad thing for a couple of generations of politicians.
But government was pretty well guaranteeing a return, by setting a guaranteed price for the electricity.
UK gov makes consistently terrible investment decisions and this doesn't change much by party. I think the main reasons are previous examples of failure and the positive pay offs happen after the politicians are judged.
It is much harder to be criticised for something you never did, than something you championed which ended up over budget or somehow went wrong.
When I was younger and more ignorant, I actually tried selling the DARPA idea to various MPs.
I eventually noticed that, while they claimed to like the idea, they actually wanted to “improve” it by
1) picking the winners 2) throw big money into 1)
As in, the complete reverse of the DARPA idea. Which is small amounts of seed money to a range of ideas in a space, see which ones actually work…
Slightly more to it than that - one program director with almost dictatorial powers, but a limited term of office. And no political decision making, of course.
You can't not have decision-making though. Ultimately, the politicians have to be accountable, which means they have to have some degree of power. In an ideal world, they just pick highly capable people who then run things independently but civil servants and bureaucrats can also suffer from group-think and ignore ideas out of their reference zone. Perhaps a new organisation might not suffer from those problems, if staffed with people from outside that culture but I wouldn't bet on it. To take a practical example, Churchill's direct interventions could be a time-wasting pain in the backside for the military and civil chiefs at times (quite a lot of times) but on the other hand they were also critical in, for example, giving the work at Bletchley Park the priority it needed and deserved.
What's needed is a proactive culture without fear of failure. Neither of these tend to sit very comfortably in the public sector (or, indeed, within the private sector and in particular large, established organisations).
For the DARPA model the politicians set policy goals, and award a tranche of funding - that's it. The reason it works is that they appoint expert program directors on very limited (c. 2 years) terms. During that time they have (in their small sphere) unchecked power to award (relatively small( grants for short term</>, high risk projects.
They get to try ideas without fear of failure (the expectation is that many will fail), and if it works, it's then someone else's to take further.
No empire building.
I don't think that's right - I think DARPA program directors are 3 - 5 years. I think the recipe to success is giving people time (say 4 years) but also then stopping contracts so they know they are moving on by default.
You're right, and I have misremembered the term in post. But it doesn't change the principle at all.
Once they're gone, that's it.
https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2022-01-12 ...Every program manager arrives at DARPA with an expiration date on their badges. It’s a short-term deal that constantly brings in new blood and is routinely cited as part of DARPA’s “special sauce.” Those who become PMs know their jobs likely will end three to five years after they start. Yet so many of them say there is no better job and that they wouldn’t have it any other way. Their collective message is that being a DARPA PM can be a dream job for just about any scientist or engineer, whether they are only beginning to rev up their careers; already making a name for their themselves in an academic, start-up, industry, or government setting; or in search of a second-career to apply the experience and wisdom they have accrued over previous decades of work...
Hardly a surprise. I have asked multiple times on here what purported qualities I am missing in Badenoch. She seems entirely without appeal – she was ineffective and cowardly as a minister and seems obsessed with trivial culture war nonsense. Nobody was able to articulate what it was about her that commended her to the leadership – and it seems the answer is indeed "sweet FA".
She's appealing to a lot of Conservatives. Otherwise she wouldn't be second favourite to win the leadership election.
The more they see of her the less she appeals ––– I was right!
Hardly a surprise. I have asked multiple times on here what purported qualities I am missing in Badenoch. She seems entirely without appeal – she was ineffective and cowardly as a minister and seems obsessed with trivial culture war nonsense. Nobody was able to articulate what it was about her that commended her to the leadership – and it seems the answer is indeed "sweet FA".
She's appealing to a lot of Conservatives. Otherwise she wouldn't be second favourite to win the leadership election.
Betfair market appears to be moving rapidly from her to Cleverly, 5.1 Vs 5.6 currently. Which sadly suggests that the market has finally woken up to how the selection process works... should have invested in Cleverly at 12 a day ago
Interesting video on what's gone wrong for the Conservatives electorally. As with much else it's all the fault of Brexit. That's when they lost the graduates, who are the key demographic in Britain now. Talk in the video about how the Tories can work their way back with an offer to graduates but it feels hypothetical.
Even Corbyn won graduates, they aren't the key swing voters now, the key swing voters now are white lower middle class and skilled working class middle aged voters with a mortgage who voted for Boris in 2019 but for Starmer or Farage this time. Mostly living in the Midlands and North and Essex and Kent.
Graduate swing voters are Remainers primarily in the South who voted for Cameron but LD in July however they are not enough on their own to win a general election
Graduates aren't the key swing voters; they are the most important voting demographic period. The video makes the point that it gets increasingly hard for the Conservatives to win without swinging graduates.
Graduates are large in number and efficiently distributed. This is the killer combo under FPTP.
They are distributed across cities, suburbs, the countryside and increasingly into post industrial northern towns, the so called Red Wall.
Since Brexit they have mostly voted Labour and rarely Conservative. They vote more than non graduates.
Except they aren't, if they were Corbyn would now be PM as most graduates voted for him.
As I said the key swing voters are lower middle class and skilled working class middle aged voters who voted for Boris then Starmer or Farage NOT graduates.
Graduates voted 42% Labour, 18% Conservative, 15% Liberal Democrat, 9% Green and 8% Reform in July. As might be expected, the strongest groups for Labour, the LDs and Greens, the weakest for Conservative and Reform.
Whether that's an example of education or political indoctrination at Universities is a matter for debate of course and I'm sure everyone has a view (or perhaps not).
Cameron won graduates but since they have voted Labour mostly, however Boris won without graduates as did May
According to Yougov Labour was also at >40% with high earners, 50-100k bracket.
Pre tax rises, though Boris did best with average earners not high earners and it is average earners who decide elections.
Only 10% of voters earn more than £50k and the LDs percentage wise get the highest percentage of their voters from high earners now not Labour or the Tories
So according to Yougov, the largest cohort is Labour voting, that LDs get a smaller cohort overall but that it makes up a larger % of their total vote ... shrugs I'm a bit dubious about how accurate the Yougov sub setting is tbh, they're filtering very finely from a relatively small sample. Others might have more knowledgeable insight.
Look at the poshest home counties seats now Esher and Walton, Epsom and Ewell, St Albans, Winchester, Henley, Maidenhead, Tunbridge Wells, Chesham and Amersham etc all now have LD MPs. As do some of the wealthiest parts of London like Wimbledon, Richmond Park and Twickenham
Gails = LD
Even Epping now has LD councillors mostly and a Gail's
Gail's was a complete mystery to me other than seeing it mentioned on here and then I saw my first one on my one and only visit to Epping a month ago and mentioned the conversations we have here to my wife. She was all knowing. Apparently we have one in Guildford (news to me) and her nephew (who has to have everything that is fashionable) is beside himself that one is opening in Henley. My wife thinks they are pretty average.
If everything was a quarter the price it would be great. At the prices, meh.
Gail's is reputed to be coming to Sale. I can't see it eating too much into the market share of Gregg's and Pound Bakery.
I asked C0p1l0t about the average majority of different parties' MPs. It is an effing genius. "The average majority for Labour Party MPs can vary significantly across different constituencies. Generally, Labour MPs tend to have smaller majorities in more competitive or marginal seats, while in their strongholds, the majorities can be quite large."
I am surprised (and relieved TBH) that Cleverly is so close to Jenrick in a head-to-head (which it seems is looking more likely as Kemi deflates). Maybe sanity is about to break out?
I fear Kemi will end up being a slightly more competent version of Liz Truss. She's appealing to the exact same demo in the Tory membership with these wild statements. I'm sure there's some businesses that couldn't deal with the minimum wage but the overall good it has done outweighs any downsides.
She needs time to mature if she will mature at all
Jenrick is the best of a bad lot
I think if she matures at all is the issue, I've been watching her career for more than a few years now and she still gets bogged down in absolutes and stupid fights for no reason.
Her statement about the minimum wage is undeniably true, there will have been a few businesses that had a tough time due to the minimum wage over the years, yet it's about 10% of the story for the minimum wage as a whole which means she's either cynically ignoring the 90% in order to win the old fucker Tory members who "never had minimum wage in our day" or she's not able to see that the benefits of the minimum wage on bringing people out of absolute poverty has been a huge success story and worth businesses having to adjust their models.
It's the same as the maternity pay stuff, the birth rate is plunging across Europe and parents need more help and incentives to have kids, making it more expensive or forcing women to choose between having kids or having a career is frankly idiotic.
Do you have MSN? I don't, so couldn't read beyond the headline, which didn't include a quotation. For all I know, what Kemi said is pretty much what you've said, but I assume you have read it and know different, given that you've written two long dramatic posts about what an idiot she is.
In what way - if your business cannot work while paying its staff £11.44 an hour you need to find a better business..
As always, it depends on the level it's set at. Some businesses - some industries - will inevitably become unviable once the minimum wage pushes up beyond a certain level. Care and agriculture are two obvious examples, and ones the country needs as essentials.
Anyway, the question is back-to-front. It's not so much the minimum wage that needs pumping up as living costs that need reducing, with housing foremost.
Interesting video on what's gone wrong for the Conservatives electorally. As with much else it's all the fault of Brexit. That's when they lost the graduates, who are the key demographic in Britain now. Talk in the video about how the Tories can work their way back with an offer to graduates but it feels hypothetical.
Even Corbyn won graduates, they aren't the key swing voters now, the key swing voters now are white lower middle class and skilled working class middle aged voters with a mortgage who voted for Boris in 2019 but for Starmer or Farage this time. Mostly living in the Midlands and North and Essex and Kent.
Graduate swing voters are Remainers primarily in the South who voted for Cameron but LD in July however they are not enough on their own to win a general election
Graduates aren't the key swing voters; they are the most important voting demographic period. The video makes the point that it gets increasingly hard for the Conservatives to win without swinging graduates.
Graduates are large in number and efficiently distributed. This is the killer combo under FPTP.
They are distributed across cities, suburbs, the countryside and increasingly into post industrial northern towns, the so called Red Wall.
Since Brexit they have mostly voted Labour and rarely Conservative. They vote more than non graduates.
Except they aren't, if they were Corbyn would now be PM as most graduates voted for him.
As I said the key swing voters are lower middle class and skilled working class middle aged voters who voted for Boris then Starmer or Farage NOT graduates.
Graduates voted 42% Labour, 18% Conservative, 15% Liberal Democrat, 9% Green and 8% Reform in July. As might be expected, the strongest groups for Labour, the LDs and Greens, the weakest for Conservative and Reform.
Whether that's an example of education or political indoctrination at Universities is a matter for debate of course and I'm sure everyone has a view (or perhaps not).
Cameron won graduates but since they have voted Labour mostly, however Boris won without graduates as did May
According to Yougov Labour was also at >40% with high earners, 50-100k bracket.
Pre tax rises, though Boris did best with average earners not high earners and it is average earners who decide elections.
Only 10% of voters earn more than £50k and the LDs percentage wise get the highest percentage of their voters from high earners now not Labour or the Tories
So according to Yougov, the largest cohort is Labour voting, that LDs get a smaller cohort overall but that it makes up a larger % of their total vote ... shrugs I'm a bit dubious about how accurate the Yougov sub setting is tbh, they're filtering very finely from a relatively small sample. Others might have more knowledgeable insight.
Look at the poshest home counties seats now Esher and Walton, Epsom and Ewell, St Albans, Winchester, Henley, Maidenhead, Tunbridge Wells, Chesham and Amersham etc all now have LD MPs. As do some of the wealthiest parts of London like Wimbledon, Richmond Park and Twickenham
Gails = LD
Even Epping now has LD councillors mostly and a Gail's
Gail's was a complete mystery to me other than seeing it mentioned on here and then I saw my first one on my one and only visit to Epping a month ago and mentioned the conversations we have here to my wife. She was all knowing. Apparently we have one in Guildford (news to me) and her nephew (who has to have everything that is fashionable) is beside himself that one is opening in Henley. My wife thinks they are pretty average.
You’re obviously a cut above even the average LD
Does it? Doesn't it make me a pleb that I'm not in with the latest fashions. And I'm definitely not (in with the latest fashions)
I am surprised (and relieved TBH) that Cleverly is so close to Jenrick in a head-to-head (which it seems is looking more likely as Kemi deflates). Maybe sanity is about to break out?
External polling of Tory members looks like utter guff to me. Cleverly used a highly suspect poll (commissioned by his owm team I seem to recall) about what a whizzbang success he was with members before.
I am surprised (and relieved TBH) that Cleverly is so close to Jenrick in a head-to-head (which it seems is looking more likely as Kemi deflates). Maybe sanity is about to break out?
External polling of Tory members looks like utter guff to me. Cleverly used a highly suspect poll (commissioned by his owm team I seem to recall) about what a whizzbang success he was with members before.
Does it really matter who commissioned if it is a reputable polling company with sound methodology?
In what way - if your business cannot work while paying its staff £11.44 an hour you need to find a better business..
As always, it depends on the level it's set at. Some businesses - some industries - will inevitably become unviable once the minimum wage pushes up beyond a certain level. Care and agriculture are two obvious examples, and ones the country needs as essentials.
Anyway, the question is back-to-front. It's not so much the minimum wage that needs pumping up as living costs that need reducing, with housing foremost.
Care already pays well above £11.44 an hour - offer that and you won't have staff as they move to the next agency / care home.
Agriculture is it's own world and usually has it's own set of imported workers...
I am surprised (and relieved TBH) that Cleverly is so close to Jenrick in a head-to-head (which it seems is looking more likely as Kemi deflates). Maybe sanity is about to break out?
CleverClogs is clearly the best and most sensible choice. He's not particularly rightwing though, which will count against him in the selectorate. The rest of them are various forms of Lord Palmerston's Schleswig–Holstein frame – mad, ignorant or dead.
In what way - if your business cannot work while paying its staff £11.44 an hour you need to find a better business..
At a wild guess, maybe because taxation is at a 70 year high, the regulatory burden is at an all time high, energy costs are 4 times what they are in America, AND the minimum wage keeps on being whacked up by successive Chancellors because it's 'free'. You get laughed at if you want to make something in the UK these days.
For someone whose living depends on the continued largesse of private sector taxpayers, you're do a great line in risible complacency don't you?
Mr. Pioneers, aye. Even if the timing couldn't be altered, they've used that gap to cut planned investment and create an atmosphere of doom and gloom that just makes a bad situation worse, which, as you say, then becomes a legitimate economic line with which to attack Labour.
It's dumb both politically and economically.
I think Nigel Lawson had it spot on when he said in his memoirs that saying how bad the situation is after you've just won an election is damaging because it undermines confidence and it's also pointless because you don't have to face the voters for some years.
Of course it's especially stupid when you've made up transparent lies like saying this is the worst situation for an incoming government since the war, when 2010 was several degrees worse, or that there is a huge hole in the public finances, while there is enough money to waste on pay rises for unreformed public sector unions and pointless and unpopular foreign aid or that things are way worse than you thought, when the figures are public.
And finally it's most staggeringly stupid when you've clearly got no convincing plan to fix anything except the tiniest of tinkering.
2010 wasnt worse for the state of public services, accumulative impact of lack of investment or economic asperations of young people. It is not all about budget finances.
It is if you're Labour, whose only answer for any problem is to waste (or "invest" as Brown called it) other people's money.
Most people who get rich make their money partly through earnings but a very substantial share comes from investments too. It is the same with countries.
One thing I do not understand is why our governments (which can borrow at lower rates than commercial companies) have not insisted on taking large stakes in offshore wind developments. They clearly provide a predictable profit stream, a fair proportion of which goes overseas.
If we are indeed overpaying for renewable electricity, couldn't more of the money at least go back into the exchequer ?
What's the flaw in this reasoning ?
AIU it appears to go back to failed investments in industry from the sixties and seventies such that investment has become a bad thing for a couple of generations of politicians.
But government was pretty well guaranteeing a return, by setting a guaranteed price for the electricity.
UK gov makes consistently terrible investment decisions and this doesn't change much by party. I think the main reasons are previous examples of failure and the positive pay offs happen after the politicians are judged.
It is much harder to be criticised for something you never did, than something you championed which ended up over budget or somehow went wrong.
Had we applied that approach to the water industry, the consumer would probably still have been ripped off, but at least half of the revenue would have stayed in the UK, rather than disappearing overseas. Macquarie made a lot of their money effectively borrowing from themselves to gear up the industry. So they took out dividends in the equity and got paid interest on what was effectively government guaranteed borrowing (at rates more expensive than government could itself have borrowed).
Privatised monopolies don't work in the public interest.
That's a question of regulation. Ofwat has been captured by the water companies.
If you link caps on dividends and executive bonuses and salaries to pollution levels then you'd almost certainly see the latter coming down.
The state, to repeat a point made multiple times already, tends to be dreadful at investment. For boring stuff like water networks, that's less because it makes bad investment choices of X over Y and more because political pressure is to keep bills down, and the easiest way to do that is to cut the investment budget which has little immediate adverse effect. It's no coincidence that both water quality and leak rates under the nationalised water boards were dreadful.
But even if we use the lower figure, the question is still: do you want to give £11.5bn to water company shareholders, so that the state can carry on doing pretty much exactly what the water companies are doing? And the government would have to take on the debt (which it wouldn't necessarily if it let a company fail - although the financial, delivery and political consequences of such a failure could easily be unanticipatedly bad, with things stopping that should not stop).
Anyway, the letter was from civil servants. Whether Reed has actually been captured remains to be seen, IMO, and will turn more on what actions he demands (or doesn't) of water companies and what sanctions and benefits he puts in place to incentivise those changes in outcome.
Umm. Did "hard man of #Brexit" Steve Baker just include "Vote Leave, Take Back Control" in a list of examples of oversimplification that lead to errors?
I think he might have, you know. ~AA #PoliticsLive
In what way - if your business cannot work while paying its staff £11.44 an hour you need to find a better business..
As always, it depends on the level it's set at. Some businesses - some industries - will inevitably become unviable once the minimum wage pushes up beyond a certain level. Care and agriculture are two obvious examples, and ones the country needs as essentials.
Anyway, the question is back-to-front. It's not so much the minimum wage that needs pumping up as living costs that need reducing, with housing foremost.
Care already pays well above £11.44 an hour - offer that and you won't have staff as they move to the next agency / care home.
Agriculture is it's own world and usually has it's own set of imported workers...
Care does offer more. Which is no small part of the crisis in local government finance. Something must give there, somewhere.
Interesting video on what's gone wrong for the Conservatives electorally. As with much else it's all the fault of Brexit. That's when they lost the graduates, who are the key demographic in Britain now. Talk in the video about how the Tories can work their way back with an offer to graduates but it feels hypothetical.
Even Corbyn won graduates, they aren't the key swing voters now, the key swing voters now are white lower middle class and skilled working class middle aged voters with a mortgage who voted for Boris in 2019 but for Starmer or Farage this time. Mostly living in the Midlands and North and Essex and Kent.
Graduate swing voters are Remainers primarily in the South who voted for Cameron but LD in July however they are not enough on their own to win a general election
Graduates aren't the key swing voters; they are the most important voting demographic period. The video makes the point that it gets increasingly hard for the Conservatives to win without swinging graduates.
Graduates are large in number and efficiently distributed. This is the killer combo under FPTP.
They are distributed across cities, suburbs, the countryside and increasingly into post industrial northern towns, the so called Red Wall.
Since Brexit they have mostly voted Labour and rarely Conservative. They vote more than non graduates.
Except they aren't, if they were Corbyn would now be PM as most graduates voted for him.
As I said the key swing voters are lower middle class and skilled working class middle aged voters who voted for Boris then Starmer or Farage NOT graduates.
Graduates voted 42% Labour, 18% Conservative, 15% Liberal Democrat, 9% Green and 8% Reform in July. As might be expected, the strongest groups for Labour, the LDs and Greens, the weakest for Conservative and Reform.
Whether that's an example of education or political indoctrination at Universities is a matter for debate of course and I'm sure everyone has a view (or perhaps not).
Cameron won graduates but since they have voted Labour mostly, however Boris won without graduates as did May
According to Yougov Labour was also at >40% with high earners, 50-100k bracket.
Pre tax rises, though Boris did best with average earners not high earners and it is average earners who decide elections.
Only 10% of voters earn more than £50k and the LDs percentage wise get the highest percentage of their voters from high earners now not Labour or the Tories
So according to Yougov, the largest cohort is Labour voting, that LDs get a smaller cohort overall but that it makes up a larger % of their total vote ... shrugs I'm a bit dubious about how accurate the Yougov sub setting is tbh, they're filtering very finely from a relatively small sample. Others might have more knowledgeable insight.
Look at the poshest home counties seats now Esher and Walton, Epsom and Ewell, St Albans, Winchester, Henley, Maidenhead, Tunbridge Wells, Chesham and Amersham etc all now have LD MPs. As do some of the wealthiest parts of London like Wimbledon, Richmond Park and Twickenham
Gails = LD
Even Epping now has LD councillors mostly and a Gail's
Gail's was a complete mystery to me other than seeing it mentioned on here and then I saw my first one on my one and only visit to Epping a month ago and mentioned the conversations we have here to my wife. She was all knowing. Apparently we have one in Guildford (news to me) and her nephew (who has to have everything that is fashionable) is beside himself that one is opening in Henley. My wife thinks they are pretty average.
If everything was a quarter the price it would be great. At the prices, meh.
Gail's is reputed to be coming to Sale. I can't see it eating too much into the market share of Gregg's and Pound Bakery.
The Gail's in Sale lies mainly on the Pail.
If they moved outside Dublin, then the Gail's in Sale lies mainly on the Pale.
Proponents for the reform argue that it creates a more amicable and less politically divisive electoral process by requiring candidates to reach beyond their party’s activist base in order to garner majority support from the broader public. At the very least, such a system is likely to make it more difficult for cartoonishly partisan actors to survive their primary contests — thus giving general election voters a wider selection of more democratically appealing candidates from which they can choose.
Such arguments, however, haven’t done much to win over the hearts and minds of leaders in either major party. Top Nevada Democrats have voiced their opposition to the proposal, with state Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager (D–Las Vegas) telling The Nevada Independent that it would be a “mistake” to implement such an “unproven and unwieldy experiment” on voters. And the Washoe County GOP has been relentlessly urging its followers on X to reject Question 3 at the ballot box, claiming the process will be “too complicated” for voters to understand.
However, evidence suggests voters aren’t quite as easily befuddled as party loyalists suggest.
In Alaska, for example, 85 percent of voters who used the state’s newly enacted RCV process said the system was easy to understand, and exit polls from other jurisdictions show similar results. From Salt Lake City, Utah, to Arlington, Virginia, the vast majority of voters seem to have no problem with ranking candidates in order of preference.
Of course, that doesn’t mean everyone loves it. There’s currently an effort to repeal RCV in Alaska, and plenty of opponents have raised other concerns about a process that so drastically alters the way elections are conducted...
I asked C0p1l0t about the average majority of different parties' MPs. It is an effing genius. "The average majority for Labour Party MPs can vary significantly across different constituencies. Generally, Labour MPs tend to have smaller majorities in more competitive or marginal seats, while in their strongholds, the majorities can be quite large."
I fear Kemi will end up being a slightly more competent version of Liz Truss. She's appealing to the exact same demo in the Tory membership with these wild statements. I'm sure there's some businesses that couldn't deal with the minimum wage but the overall good it has done outweighs any downsides.
She needs time to mature if she will mature at all
Jenrick is the best of a bad lot
I think if she matures at all is the issue, I've been watching her career for more than a few years now and she still gets bogged down in absolutes and stupid fights for no reason.
Her statement about the minimum wage is undeniably true, there will have been a few businesses that had a tough time due to the minimum wage over the years, yet it's about 10% of the story for the minimum wage as a whole which means she's either cynically ignoring the 90% in order to win the old fucker Tory members who "never had minimum wage in our day" or she's not able to see that the benefits of the minimum wage on bringing people out of absolute poverty has been a huge success story and worth businesses having to adjust their models.
It's the same as the maternity pay stuff, the birth rate is plunging across Europe and parents need more help and incentives to have kids, making it more expensive or forcing women to choose between having kids or having a career is frankly idiotic.
Do you have MSN? I don't, so couldn't read beyond the headline, which didn't include a quotation. For all I know, what Kemi said is pretty much what you've said, but I assume you have read it and know different, given that you've written two long dramatic posts about what an idiot she is.
This is what was quoted in the FT today: Badenoch caused confusion on Sunday, the first day of the conference, by suggesting maternity pay was “excessive”, before insisting that was not her view.
However, she appeared to double down on her initial position yesterday, telling delegates: “There’s a café in my constituency that closed down, and the lady who owned it said, ‘I can’t afford to pay the wages any more. I can’t afford minimum wage. I can’t afford for my staff to go on [paid] maternity [leave]’.”
Badenoch continued: “We are overburdening businesses. We are overburdening them with regulation, with tax. People aren’t starting businesses any more because they’re too scared.”
Pretty standard Tory view really. I don’t agree with it and suspect it doesn’t bear scrutiny.
And whenever politicians quote examples that support their cause I usually suspect a good dollop of make believe. But, who knows - could be true. Although I suspect most businesses would normally gripe about rent and rates (and the decay of the local high street) before getting onto wages / mat leave. But the candidate may have only heard the last bit.
I am surprised (and relieved TBH) that Cleverly is so close to Jenrick in a head-to-head (which it seems is looking more likely as Kemi deflates). Maybe sanity is about to break out?
CleverClogs is clearly the best and most sensible choice. He's not particularly rightwing though, which will count against him in the selectorate. The rest of them are various forms of Lord Palmerston's Schleswig–Holstein frame – mad, ignorant or dead.
He's certainly the most likely to give your walking train crash in pricey spectacles an easy ride. So most sensible from that perspective.
- more than every Labour leader put together since 1997
- despite being in the top 1% of earners
- refuses to stop taking them despite the damage it’s inflicted on Labour
What’s the explanation other than that he’s greedy
This is silly. SKS has not taken £100k worth of freebies because no-one would pay £100k at open market prices for the things he was granted.
The problem is a single person apparently acting as sugar daddy for half the cabinet, not the £ amounts.
Which things have a lower value? Genuine question - my understanding is that the declared value should be the value to purchase.
£20k for somewhere to study.
That was the price of a short term rental of a very large flat in a fashionable part of town.
The actual use it was put to was irrelevant.
If someone gives me a magnum of Perrier Jouet Belle Epoque and I use it to clean my shoes, I would still have to declare the full purchase price.
Your question was which things have a lower value, not which things should have been declared at a lower value. For somewhere to study for GCSE's for a month a normal well off family is not thinking £20k is fair value, maybe £2-4k.
No - my question was based on the “it wasn’t a £100k, because some of the things had lower value”, above
My understanding is that all the things given were (correctly) declared at the equivalent purchase price.
What “normal well off” people might do isn’t relevant.
Proponents for the reform argue that it creates a more amicable and less politically divisive electoral process by requiring candidates to reach beyond their party’s activist base in order to garner majority support from the broader public. At the very least, such a system is likely to make it more difficult for cartoonishly partisan actors to survive their primary contests — thus giving general election voters a wider selection of more democratically appealing candidates from which they can choose.
Such arguments, however, haven’t done much to win over the hearts and minds of leaders in either major party. Top Nevada Democrats have voiced their opposition to the proposal, with state Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager (D–Las Vegas) telling The Nevada Independent that it would be a “mistake” to implement such an “unproven and unwieldy experiment” on voters. And the Washoe County GOP has been relentlessly urging its followers on X to reject Question 3 at the ballot box, claiming the process will be “too complicated” for voters to understand.
However, evidence suggests voters aren’t quite as easily befuddled as party loyalists suggest.
In Alaska, for example, 85 percent of voters who used the state’s newly enacted RCV process said the system was easy to understand, and exit polls from other jurisdictions show similar results. From Salt Lake City, Utah, to Arlington, Virginia, the vast majority of voters seem to have no problem with ranking candidates in order of preference.
Of course, that doesn’t mean everyone loves it. There’s currently an effort to repeal RCV in Alaska, and plenty of opponents have raised other concerns about a process that so drastically alters the way elections are conducted...
See, I’ve got a thread on that and a thread on (Scottish) subsamples lined up for the next few days.
I fear Kemi will end up being a slightly more competent version of Liz Truss. She's appealing to the exact same demo in the Tory membership with these wild statements. I'm sure there's some businesses that couldn't deal with the minimum wage but the overall good it has done outweighs any downsides.
She needs time to mature if she will mature at all
Jenrick is the best of a bad lot
I think if she matures at all is the issue, I've been watching her career for more than a few years now and she still gets bogged down in absolutes and stupid fights for no reason.
Her statement about the minimum wage is undeniably true, there will have been a few businesses that had a tough time due to the minimum wage over the years, yet it's about 10% of the story for the minimum wage as a whole which means she's either cynically ignoring the 90% in order to win the old fucker Tory members who "never had minimum wage in our day" or she's not able to see that the benefits of the minimum wage on bringing people out of absolute poverty has been a huge success story and worth businesses having to adjust their models.
It's the same as the maternity pay stuff, the birth rate is plunging across Europe and parents need more help and incentives to have kids, making it more expensive or forcing women to choose between having kids or having a career is frankly idiotic.
Do you have MSN? I don't, so couldn't read beyond the headline, which didn't include a quotation. For all I know, what Kemi said is pretty much what you've said, but I assume you have read it and know different, given that you've written two long dramatic posts about what an idiot she is.
Proponents for the reform argue that it creates a more amicable and less politically divisive electoral process by requiring candidates to reach beyond their party’s activist base in order to garner majority support from the broader public. At the very least, such a system is likely to make it more difficult for cartoonishly partisan actors to survive their primary contests — thus giving general election voters a wider selection of more democratically appealing candidates from which they can choose.
Such arguments, however, haven’t done much to win over the hearts and minds of leaders in either major party. Top Nevada Democrats have voiced their opposition to the proposal, with state Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager (D–Las Vegas) telling The Nevada Independent that it would be a “mistake” to implement such an “unproven and unwieldy experiment” on voters. And the Washoe County GOP has been relentlessly urging its followers on X to reject Question 3 at the ballot box, claiming the process will be “too complicated” for voters to understand.
However, evidence suggests voters aren’t quite as easily befuddled as party loyalists suggest.
In Alaska, for example, 85 percent of voters who used the state’s newly enacted RCV process said the system was easy to understand, and exit polls from other jurisdictions show similar results. From Salt Lake City, Utah, to Arlington, Virginia, the vast majority of voters seem to have no problem with ranking candidates in order of preference.
Of course, that doesn’t mean everyone loves it. There’s currently an effort to repeal RCV in Alaska, and plenty of opponents have raised other concerns about a process that so drastically alters the way elections are conducted...
See, I’ve got a thread on that and a thread on (Scottish) subsamples lined up for the next few days.
Mr. Pioneers, aye. Even if the timing couldn't be altered, they've used that gap to cut planned investment and create an atmosphere of doom and gloom that just makes a bad situation worse, which, as you say, then becomes a legitimate economic line with which to attack Labour.
It's dumb both politically and economically.
I think Nigel Lawson had it spot on when he said in his memoirs that saying how bad the situation is after you've just won an election is damaging because it undermines confidence and it's also pointless because you don't have to face the voters for some years.
Of course it's especially stupid when you've made up transparent lies like saying this is the worst situation for an incoming government since the war, when 2010 was several degrees worse, or that there is a huge hole in the public finances, while there is enough money to waste on pay rises for unreformed public sector unions and pointless and unpopular foreign aid or that things are way worse than you thought, when the figures are public.
And finally it's most staggeringly stupid when you've clearly got no convincing plan to fix anything except the tiniest of tinkering.
2010 wasnt worse for the state of public services, accumulative impact of lack of investment or economic asperations of young people. It is not all about budget finances.
It is if you're Labour, whose only answer for any problem is to waste (or "invest" as Brown called it) other people's money.
Most people who get rich make their money partly through earnings but a very substantial share comes from investments too. It is the same with countries.
One thing I do not understand is why our governments (which can borrow at lower rates than commercial companies) have not insisted on taking large stakes in offshore wind developments. They clearly provide a predictable profit stream, a fair proportion of which goes overseas.
If we are indeed overpaying for renewable electricity, couldn't more of the money at least go back into the exchequer ?
What's the flaw in this reasoning ?
AIU it appears to go back to failed investments in industry from the sixties and seventies such that investment has become a bad thing for a couple of generations of politicians.
But government was pretty well guaranteeing a return, by setting a guaranteed price for the electricity.
UK gov makes consistently terrible investment decisions and this doesn't change much by party. I think the main reasons are previous examples of failure and the positive pay offs happen after the politicians are judged.
It is much harder to be criticised for something you never did, than something you championed which ended up over budget or somehow went wrong.
Had we applied that approach to the water industry, the consumer would probably still have been ripped off, but at least half of the revenue would have stayed in the UK, rather than disappearing overseas. Macquarie made a lot of their money effectively borrowing from themselves to gear up the industry. So they took out dividends in the equity and got paid interest on what was effectively government guaranteed borrowing (at rates more expensive than government could itself have borrowed).
Privatised monopolies don't work in the public interest.
That's a question of regulation. Ofwat has been captured by the water companies.
If you link caps on dividends and executive bonuses and salaries to pollution levels then you'd almost certainly see the latter coming down.
The state, to repeat a point made multiple times already, tends to be dreadful at investment. For boring stuff like water networks, that's less because it makes bad investment choices of X over Y and more because political pressure is to keep bills down, and the easiest way to do that is to cut the investment budget which has little immediate adverse effect. It's no coincidence that both water quality and leak rates under the nationalised water boards were dreadful.
But even if we use the lower figure, the question is still: do you want to give £11.5bn to water company shareholders, so that the state can carry on doing pretty much exactly what the water companies are doing? And the government would have to take on the debt (which it wouldn't necessarily if it let a company fail - although the financial, delivery and political consequences of such a failure could easily be unanticipatedly bad, with things stopping that should not stop).
Anyway, the letter was from civil servants. Whether Reed has actually been captured remains to be seen, IMO, and will turn more on what actions he demands (or doesn't) of water companies and what sanctions and benefits he puts in place to incentivise those changes in outcome.
Letting the water companies go bust, while protecting the actual suppliers of actual goods and services to the water companies is perfectly possible.
The simplest method is -
1) a water company folds 2) the government guarantees a loan, specifically ring fenced to pay suppliers. 3) the shareholders and and the bond holders get a Richard III style haircut. 4) the water company carries on delivering water, under the administrators. 5) without all the debt, paying back the loan from 2) will be trivial. 6) the government should be able to make a profit on 2)
In what way - if your business cannot work while paying its staff £11.44 an hour you need to find a better business..
As always, it depends on the level it's set at. Some businesses - some industries - will inevitably become unviable once the minimum wage pushes up beyond a certain level. Care and agriculture are two obvious examples, and ones the country needs as essentials.
Anyway, the question is back-to-front. It's not so much the minimum wage that needs pumping up as living costs that need reducing, with housing foremost.
Care already pays well above £11.44 an hour - offer that and you won't have staff as they move to the next agency / care home.
Agriculture is it's own world and usually has it's own set of imported workers...
Care does offer more. Which is no small part of the crisis in local government finance. Something must give there, somewhere.
Well you can't pay workers less (although I've seen the games played to try and do so) so what you are left with is working out how to fund things properly...
Which is going to come down to shifting it away from local authorities or at least off local authority budgets - which sadly I can't see Labour doing but it's essential..
In what way - if your business cannot work while paying its staff £11.44 an hour you need to find a better business..
At a wild guess, maybe because taxation is at a 70 year high, the regulatory burden is at an all time high, energy costs are 4 times what they are in America, AND the minimum wage keeps on being whacked up by successive Chancellors because it's 'free'. You get laughed at if you want to make something in the UK these days.
For someone whose living depends on the continued largesse of private sector taxpayers, you're do a great line in risible complacency don't you?
You clearly haven't got the first clue what I do for a living because it ain't in the public sector. there's probably a 60% chance that work I've done will be used the next time you call you bank up though..
Mr. Pioneers, aye. Even if the timing couldn't be altered, they've used that gap to cut planned investment and create an atmosphere of doom and gloom that just makes a bad situation worse, which, as you say, then becomes a legitimate economic line with which to attack Labour.
It's dumb both politically and economically.
I think Nigel Lawson had it spot on when he said in his memoirs that saying how bad the situation is after you've just won an election is damaging because it undermines confidence and it's also pointless because you don't have to face the voters for some years.
Of course it's especially stupid when you've made up transparent lies like saying this is the worst situation for an incoming government since the war, when 2010 was several degrees worse, or that there is a huge hole in the public finances, while there is enough money to waste on pay rises for unreformed public sector unions and pointless and unpopular foreign aid or that things are way worse than you thought, when the figures are public.
And finally it's most staggeringly stupid when you've clearly got no convincing plan to fix anything except the tiniest of tinkering.
2010 wasnt worse for the state of public services, accumulative impact of lack of investment or economic asperations of young people. It is not all about budget finances.
It is if you're Labour, whose only answer for any problem is to waste (or "invest" as Brown called it) other people's money.
Most people who get rich make their money partly through earnings but a very substantial share comes from investments too. It is the same with countries.
One thing I do not understand is why our governments (which can borrow at lower rates than commercial companies) have not insisted on taking large stakes in offshore wind developments. They clearly provide a predictable profit stream, a fair proportion of which goes overseas.
If we are indeed overpaying for renewable electricity, couldn't more of the money at least go back into the exchequer ?
What's the flaw in this reasoning ?
AIU it appears to go back to failed investments in industry from the sixties and seventies such that investment has become a bad thing for a couple of generations of politicians.
But government was pretty well guaranteeing a return, by setting a guaranteed price for the electricity.
UK gov makes consistently terrible investment decisions and this doesn't change much by party. I think the main reasons are previous examples of failure and the positive pay offs happen after the politicians are judged.
It is much harder to be criticised for something you never did, than something you championed which ended up over budget or somehow went wrong.
Had we applied that approach to the water industry, the consumer would probably still have been ripped off, but at least half of the revenue would have stayed in the UK, rather than disappearing overseas. Macquarie made a lot of their money effectively borrowing from themselves to gear up the industry. So they took out dividends in the equity and got paid interest on what was effectively government guaranteed borrowing (at rates more expensive than government could itself have borrowed).
Privatised monopolies don't work in the public interest.
That's a question of regulation. Ofwat has been captured by the water companies.
If you link caps on dividends and executive bonuses and salaries to pollution levels then you'd almost certainly see the latter coming down.
The state, to repeat a point made multiple times already, tends to be dreadful at investment. For boring stuff like water networks, that's less because it makes bad investment choices of X over Y and more because political pressure is to keep bills down, and the easiest way to do that is to cut the investment budget which has little immediate adverse effect. It's no coincidence that both water quality and leak rates under the nationalised water boards were dreadful.
But even if we use the lower figure, the question is still: do you want to give £11.5bn to water company shareholders, so that the state can carry on doing pretty much exactly what the water companies are doing? And the government would have to take on the debt (which it wouldn't necessarily if it let a company fail - although the financial, delivery and political consequences of such a failure could easily be unanticipatedly bad, with things stopping that should not stop).
Anyway, the letter was from civil servants. Whether Reed has actually been captured remains to be seen, IMO, and will turn more on what actions he demands (or doesn't) of water companies and what sanctions and benefits he puts in place to incentivise those changes in outcome.
Letting the water companies go bust, while protecting the actual suppliers of actual goods and services to the water companies is perfectly possible.
The simplest method is -
1) a water company folds 2) the government guarantees a loan, specifically ring fenced to pay suppliers. 3) the shareholders and and the bond holders get a Richard III style haircut. 4) the water company carries on delivering water, under the administrators. 5) without all the debt, paying back the loan from 2) will be trivial. 6) the government should be able to make a profit on 2)
Thames Water going belly up in December / January (I can't remember the exact current timeframes) is going to be a good test on the competency of this Government because they've had enough lead time to find a solution..
I am surprised (and relieved TBH) that Cleverly is so close to Jenrick in a head-to-head (which it seems is looking more likely as Kemi deflates). Maybe sanity is about to break out?
Cleverly now down to 4/1 with Hills. 10/1 only a few days ago.
"Prisoners on early release 'reoffending to escape homelessness'
Recalled prisoners are the fastest-growing element of the overcrowded prison population, doubling in a decade. One former prisoner has told Sky News that being homeless and suffering a drug relapse after being released early has led to him considering reoffending."
In what way - if your business cannot work while paying its staff £11.44 an hour you need to find a better business..
As always, it depends on the level it's set at. Some businesses - some industries - will inevitably become unviable once the minimum wage pushes up beyond a certain level. Care and agriculture are two obvious examples, and ones the country needs as essentials.
Anyway, the question is back-to-front. It's not so much the minimum wage that needs pumping up as living costs that need reducing, with housing foremost.
Care already pays well above £11.44 an hour - offer that and you won't have staff as they move to the next agency / care home.
Agriculture is it's own world and usually has it's own set of imported workers...
Care does offer more. Which is no small part of the crisis in local government finance. Something must give there, somewhere.
Well you can't pay workers less (although I've seen the games played to try and do so) so what you are left with is working out how to fund things properly...
Which is going to come down to shifting it away from local authorities or at least off local authority budgets - which sadly I can't see Labour doing but it's essential..
Massaging the spreadsheets is a fool's errand. Cost is cost, however it's accounted. And it's a social responsibility, so the state has to pick it up somewhere.
Now, a more integrated NHS and care system might take some of the inefficiencies and unhelpful institutional-border-policing out of the system but at the end of the day, if you keep increasing the minimum wage ahead of general wage rises, low-cost industries will feel the heat hardest and that will impact on production, service and viability where technology can't substitute effectively.
I fully expect if labour do remove the age ranges in the minimum wage so there is just a flat minimum wage this will be counterproductive and will harm, not only the hospitality industry, but also the demographic it is purporting to help.
Why take on a younger, less experienced worked, if you can get someone with experience for the same wage ?
- more than every Labour leader put together since 1997
- despite being in the top 1% of earners
- refuses to stop taking them despite the damage it’s inflicted on Labour
What’s the explanation other than that he’s greedy
This is silly. SKS has not taken £100k worth of freebies because no-one would pay £100k at open market prices for the things he was granted.
The problem is a single person apparently acting as sugar daddy for half the cabinet, not the £ amounts.
Which things have a lower value? Genuine question - my understanding is that the declared value should be the value to purchase.
The value of the actual things in & of themselves is probably (roughly) real.
But the value to SKS is (except the clothes?) considerably less, as equivalent goods can be had for a fraction of the price. The Arsenal box access is worth a season ticket to Arsenal, the use of a property in Westminster is actually worth the cost of an office (or a small flat?) somewhere in central London & so on.
The problem is the access buying: The headline £ value of the donations is an accounting fiction for most of them, since they aren’t available to be rented out in the first place & if they were the sticker price would have sent SKS elsewhere for the same goods.
Same goes for political donations to the Tories - the ease of buying of access to politicians is the problem.
In what way - if your business cannot work while paying its staff £11.44 an hour you need to find a better business..
As always, it depends on the level it's set at. Some businesses - some industries - will inevitably become unviable once the minimum wage pushes up beyond a certain level. Care and agriculture are two obvious examples, and ones the country needs as essentials.
Anyway, the question is back-to-front. It's not so much the minimum wage that needs pumping up as living costs that need reducing, with housing foremost.
Care already pays well above £11.44 an hour - offer that and you won't have staff as they move to the next agency / care home.
Agriculture is it's own world and usually has it's own set of imported workers...
Care does offer more. Which is no small part of the crisis in local government finance. Something must give there, somewhere.
Well you can't pay workers less (although I've seen the games played to try and do so) so what you are left with is working out how to fund things properly...
Which is going to come down to shifting it away from local authorities or at least off local authority budgets - which sadly I can't see Labour doing but it's essential..
Massaging the spreadsheets is a fool's errand. Cost is cost, however it's accounted. And it's a social responsibility, so the state has to pick it up somewhere.
Now, a more integrated NHS and care system might take some of the inefficiencies and unhelpful institutional-border-policing out of the system but at the end of the day, if you keep increasing the minimum wage ahead of general wage rises, low-cost industries will feel the heat hardest and that will impact on production, service and viability where technology can't substitute effectively.
The games I usually see are travel time not being paid but mileage being paid...
My point was more on the impact the cost of social care is having on local government finances especially as unlike the other things councils pay for the actual service provided is hidden from those who don't directly pay for it.
Mr. Pioneers, aye. Even if the timing couldn't be altered, they've used that gap to cut planned investment and create an atmosphere of doom and gloom that just makes a bad situation worse, which, as you say, then becomes a legitimate economic line with which to attack Labour.
It's dumb both politically and economically.
I think Nigel Lawson had it spot on when he said in his memoirs that saying how bad the situation is after you've just won an election is damaging because it undermines confidence and it's also pointless because you don't have to face the voters for some years.
Of course it's especially stupid when you've made up transparent lies like saying this is the worst situation for an incoming government since the war, when 2010 was several degrees worse, or that there is a huge hole in the public finances, while there is enough money to waste on pay rises for unreformed public sector unions and pointless and unpopular foreign aid or that things are way worse than you thought, when the figures are public.
And finally it's most staggeringly stupid when you've clearly got no convincing plan to fix anything except the tiniest of tinkering.
2010 wasnt worse for the state of public services, accumulative impact of lack of investment or economic asperations of young people. It is not all about budget finances.
It is if you're Labour, whose only answer for any problem is to waste (or "invest" as Brown called it) other people's money.
Most people who get rich make their money partly through earnings but a very substantial share comes from investments too. It is the same with countries.
One thing I do not understand is why our governments (which can borrow at lower rates than commercial companies) have not insisted on taking large stakes in offshore wind developments. They clearly provide a predictable profit stream, a fair proportion of which goes overseas.
If we are indeed overpaying for renewable electricity, couldn't more of the money at least go back into the exchequer ?
What's the flaw in this reasoning ?
AIU it appears to go back to failed investments in industry from the sixties and seventies such that investment has become a bad thing for a couple of generations of politicians.
But government was pretty well guaranteeing a return, by setting a guaranteed price for the electricity.
UK gov makes consistently terrible investment decisions and this doesn't change much by party. I think the main reasons are previous examples of failure and the positive pay offs happen after the politicians are judged.
It is much harder to be criticised for something you never did, than something you championed which ended up over budget or somehow went wrong.
Had we applied that approach to the water industry, the consumer would probably still have been ripped off, but at least half of the revenue would have stayed in the UK, rather than disappearing overseas. Macquarie made a lot of their money effectively borrowing from themselves to gear up the industry. So they took out dividends in the equity and got paid interest on what was effectively government guaranteed borrowing (at rates more expensive than government could itself have borrowed).
Privatised monopolies don't work in the public interest.
That's a question of regulation. Ofwat has been captured by the water companies.
If you link caps on dividends and executive bonuses and salaries to pollution levels then you'd almost certainly see the latter coming down.
The state, to repeat a point made multiple times already, tends to be dreadful at investment. For boring stuff like water networks, that's less because it makes bad investment choices of X over Y and more because political pressure is to keep bills down, and the easiest way to do that is to cut the investment budget which has little immediate adverse effect. It's no coincidence that both water quality and leak rates under the nationalised water boards were dreadful.
But even if we use the lower figure, the question is still: do you want to give £11.5bn to water company shareholders, so that the state can carry on doing pretty much exactly what the water companies are doing? And the government would have to take on the debt (which it wouldn't necessarily if it let a company fail - although the financial, delivery and political consequences of such a failure could easily be unanticipatedly bad, with things stopping that should not stop).
Anyway, the letter was from civil servants. Whether Reed has actually been captured remains to be seen, IMO, and will turn more on what actions he demands (or doesn't) of water companies and what sanctions and benefits he puts in place to incentivise those changes in outcome.
Letting the water companies go bust, while protecting the actual suppliers of actual goods and services to the water companies is perfectly possible.
The simplest method is -
1) a water company folds 2) the government guarantees a loan, specifically ring fenced to pay suppliers. 3) the shareholders and and the bond holders get a Richard III style haircut. 4) the water company carries on delivering water, under the administrators. 5) without all the debt, paying back the loan from 2) will be trivial. 6) the government should be able to make a profit on 2)
Thames Water going belly up in December / January (I can't remember the exact current timeframes) is going to be a good test on the competency of this Government because they've had enough lead time to find a solution..
My bet is that they fuck up on 2) and then scramble to deal with suppliers to Thames Water collapsing, due to unpaid bills.
"Prisoners on early release 'reoffending to escape homelessness'
Recalled prisoners are the fastest-growing element of the overcrowded prison population, doubling in a decade. One former prisoner has told Sky News that being homeless and suffering a drug relapse after being released early has led to him considering reoffending."
As I posted earlier that shows that the probation service in the area he's from / been released into isn't working correctly because they've set him (and probably others) up to fail.
Mr. Pioneers, aye. Even if the timing couldn't be altered, they've used that gap to cut planned investment and create an atmosphere of doom and gloom that just makes a bad situation worse, which, as you say, then becomes a legitimate economic line with which to attack Labour.
It's dumb both politically and economically.
I think Nigel Lawson had it spot on when he said in his memoirs that saying how bad the situation is after you've just won an election is damaging because it undermines confidence and it's also pointless because you don't have to face the voters for some years.
Of course it's especially stupid when you've made up transparent lies like saying this is the worst situation for an incoming government since the war, when 2010 was several degrees worse, or that there is a huge hole in the public finances, while there is enough money to waste on pay rises for unreformed public sector unions and pointless and unpopular foreign aid or that things are way worse than you thought, when the figures are public.
And finally it's most staggeringly stupid when you've clearly got no convincing plan to fix anything except the tiniest of tinkering.
2010 wasnt worse for the state of public services, accumulative impact of lack of investment or economic asperations of young people. It is not all about budget finances.
It is if you're Labour, whose only answer for any problem is to waste (or "invest" as Brown called it) other people's money.
Most people who get rich make their money partly through earnings but a very substantial share comes from investments too. It is the same with countries.
One thing I do not understand is why our governments (which can borrow at lower rates than commercial companies) have not insisted on taking large stakes in offshore wind developments. They clearly provide a predictable profit stream, a fair proportion of which goes overseas.
If we are indeed overpaying for renewable electricity, couldn't more of the money at least go back into the exchequer ?
What's the flaw in this reasoning ?
AIU it appears to go back to failed investments in industry from the sixties and seventies such that investment has become a bad thing for a couple of generations of politicians.
But government was pretty well guaranteeing a return, by setting a guaranteed price for the electricity.
UK gov makes consistently terrible investment decisions and this doesn't change much by party. I think the main reasons are previous examples of failure and the positive pay offs happen after the politicians are judged.
It is much harder to be criticised for something you never did, than something you championed which ended up over budget or somehow went wrong.
Had we applied that approach to the water industry, the consumer would probably still have been ripped off, but at least half of the revenue would have stayed in the UK, rather than disappearing overseas. Macquarie made a lot of their money effectively borrowing from themselves to gear up the industry. So they took out dividends in the equity and got paid interest on what was effectively government guaranteed borrowing (at rates more expensive than government could itself have borrowed).
Privatised monopolies don't work in the public interest.
That's a question of regulation. Ofwat has been captured by the water companies.
If you link caps on dividends and executive bonuses and salaries to pollution levels then you'd almost certainly see the latter coming down.
The state, to repeat a point made multiple times already, tends to be dreadful at investment. For boring stuff like water networks, that's less because it makes bad investment choices of X over Y and more because political pressure is to keep bills down, and the easiest way to do that is to cut the investment budget which has little immediate adverse effect. It's no coincidence that both water quality and leak rates under the nationalised water boards were dreadful.
But even if we use the lower figure, the question is still: do you want to give £11.5bn to water company shareholders, so that the state can carry on doing pretty much exactly what the water companies are doing? And the government would have to take on the debt (which it wouldn't necessarily if it let a company fail - although the financial, delivery and political consequences of such a failure could easily be unanticipatedly bad, with things stopping that should not stop).
Anyway, the letter was from civil servants. Whether Reed has actually been captured remains to be seen, IMO, and will turn more on what actions he demands (or doesn't) of water companies and what sanctions and benefits he puts in place to incentivise those changes in outcome.
Letting the water companies go bust, while protecting the actual suppliers of actual goods and services to the water companies is perfectly possible.
The simplest method is -
1) a water company folds 2) the government guarantees a loan, specifically ring fenced to pay suppliers. 3) the shareholders and and the bond holders get a Richard III style haircut. 4) the water company carries on delivering water, under the administrators. 5) without all the debt, paying back the loan from 2) will be trivial. 6) the government should be able to make a profit on 2)
Thames Water going belly up in December / January (I can't remember the exact current timeframes) is going to be a good test on the competency of this Government because they've had enough lead time to find a solution..
My bet is that they fuck up on 2) and then scramble to deal with suppliers to Thames Water collapsing, due to unpaid bills.
So far they haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory have they?
I fully expect if labour do remove the age ranges in the minimum wage so there is just a flat minimum wage this will be counterproductive and will harm, not only the hospitality industry, but also the demographic it is purporting to help.
Why take on a younger, less experienced worked, if you can get someone with experience for the same wage ?
Pinch clamp-flation if the last in and weighted ave prices are anything to go by.
Mr. Pioneers, aye. Even if the timing couldn't be altered, they've used that gap to cut planned investment and create an atmosphere of doom and gloom that just makes a bad situation worse, which, as you say, then becomes a legitimate economic line with which to attack Labour.
It's dumb both politically and economically.
I think Nigel Lawson had it spot on when he said in his memoirs that saying how bad the situation is after you've just won an election is damaging because it undermines confidence and it's also pointless because you don't have to face the voters for some years.
Of course it's especially stupid when you've made up transparent lies like saying this is the worst situation for an incoming government since the war, when 2010 was several degrees worse, or that there is a huge hole in the public finances, while there is enough money to waste on pay rises for unreformed public sector unions and pointless and unpopular foreign aid or that things are way worse than you thought, when the figures are public.
And finally it's most staggeringly stupid when you've clearly got no convincing plan to fix anything except the tiniest of tinkering.
2010 wasnt worse for the state of public services, accumulative impact of lack of investment or economic asperations of young people. It is not all about budget finances.
It is if you're Labour, whose only answer for any problem is to waste (or "invest" as Brown called it) other people's money.
Most people who get rich make their money partly through earnings but a very substantial share comes from investments too. It is the same with countries.
One thing I do not understand is why our governments (which can borrow at lower rates than commercial companies) have not insisted on taking large stakes in offshore wind developments. They clearly provide a predictable profit stream, a fair proportion of which goes overseas.
If we are indeed overpaying for renewable electricity, couldn't more of the money at least go back into the exchequer ?
What's the flaw in this reasoning ?
AIU it appears to go back to failed investments in industry from the sixties and seventies such that investment has become a bad thing for a couple of generations of politicians.
But government was pretty well guaranteeing a return, by setting a guaranteed price for the electricity.
UK gov makes consistently terrible investment decisions and this doesn't change much by party. I think the main reasons are previous examples of failure and the positive pay offs happen after the politicians are judged.
It is much harder to be criticised for something you never did, than something you championed which ended up over budget or somehow went wrong.
Had we applied that approach to the water industry, the consumer would probably still have been ripped off, but at least half of the revenue would have stayed in the UK, rather than disappearing overseas. Macquarie made a lot of their money effectively borrowing from themselves to gear up the industry. So they took out dividends in the equity and got paid interest on what was effectively government guaranteed borrowing (at rates more expensive than government could itself have borrowed).
Privatised monopolies don't work in the public interest.
That's a question of regulation. Ofwat has been captured by the water companies.
If you link caps on dividends and executive bonuses and salaries to pollution levels then you'd almost certainly see the latter coming down.
The state, to repeat a point made multiple times already, tends to be dreadful at investment. For boring stuff like water networks, that's less because it makes bad investment choices of X over Y and more because political pressure is to keep bills down, and the easiest way to do that is to cut the investment budget which has little immediate adverse effect. It's no coincidence that both water quality and leak rates under the nationalised water boards were dreadful.
But even if we use the lower figure, the question is still: do you want to give £11.5bn to water company shareholders, so that the state can carry on doing pretty much exactly what the water companies are doing? And the government would have to take on the debt (which it wouldn't necessarily if it let a company fail - although the financial, delivery and political consequences of such a failure could easily be unanticipatedly bad, with things stopping that should not stop).
Anyway, the letter was from civil servants. Whether Reed has actually been captured remains to be seen, IMO, and will turn more on what actions he demands (or doesn't) of water companies and what sanctions and benefits he puts in place to incentivise those changes in outcome.
Letting the water companies go bust, while protecting the actual suppliers of actual goods and services to the water companies is perfectly possible.
The simplest method is -
1) a water company folds 2) the government guarantees a loan, specifically ring fenced to pay suppliers. 3) the shareholders and and the bond holders get a Richard III style haircut. 4) the water company carries on delivering water, under the administrators. 5) without all the debt, paying back the loan from 2) will be trivial. 6) the government should be able to make a profit on 2)
Thames Water going belly up in December / January (I can't remember the exact current timeframes) is going to be a good test on the competency of this Government because they've had enough lead time to find a solution..
My bet is that they fuck up on 2) and then scramble to deal with suppliers to Thames Water collapsing, due to unpaid bills.
So far they haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory have they?
Unless “glory” is the name of a brand of clothes from a very expensive tailor, no. They haven’t
Mr. Pioneers, aye. Even if the timing couldn't be altered, they've used that gap to cut planned investment and create an atmosphere of doom and gloom that just makes a bad situation worse, which, as you say, then becomes a legitimate economic line with which to attack Labour.
It's dumb both politically and economically.
I think Nigel Lawson had it spot on when he said in his memoirs that saying how bad the situation is after you've just won an election is damaging because it undermines confidence and it's also pointless because you don't have to face the voters for some years.
Of course it's especially stupid when you've made up transparent lies like saying this is the worst situation for an incoming government since the war, when 2010 was several degrees worse, or that there is a huge hole in the public finances, while there is enough money to waste on pay rises for unreformed public sector unions and pointless and unpopular foreign aid or that things are way worse than you thought, when the figures are public.
And finally it's most staggeringly stupid when you've clearly got no convincing plan to fix anything except the tiniest of tinkering.
2010 wasnt worse for the state of public services, accumulative impact of lack of investment or economic asperations of young people. It is not all about budget finances.
It is if you're Labour, whose only answer for any problem is to waste (or "invest" as Brown called it) other people's money.
Most people who get rich make their money partly through earnings but a very substantial share comes from investments too. It is the same with countries.
One thing I do not understand is why our governments (which can borrow at lower rates than commercial companies) have not insisted on taking large stakes in offshore wind developments. They clearly provide a predictable profit stream, a fair proportion of which goes overseas.
If we are indeed overpaying for renewable electricity, couldn't more of the money at least go back into the exchequer ?
What's the flaw in this reasoning ?
AIU it appears to go back to failed investments in industry from the sixties and seventies such that investment has become a bad thing for a couple of generations of politicians.
But government was pretty well guaranteeing a return, by setting a guaranteed price for the electricity.
UK gov makes consistently terrible investment decisions and this doesn't change much by party. I think the main reasons are previous examples of failure and the positive pay offs happen after the politicians are judged.
It is much harder to be criticised for something you never did, than something you championed which ended up over budget or somehow went wrong.
Had we applied that approach to the water industry, the consumer would probably still have been ripped off, but at least half of the revenue would have stayed in the UK, rather than disappearing overseas. Macquarie made a lot of their money effectively borrowing from themselves to gear up the industry. So they took out dividends in the equity and got paid interest on what was effectively government guaranteed borrowing (at rates more expensive than government could itself have borrowed).
Privatised monopolies don't work in the public interest.
That's a question of regulation. Ofwat has been captured by the water companies.
If you link caps on dividends and executive bonuses and salaries to pollution levels then you'd almost certainly see the latter coming down.
The state, to repeat a point made multiple times already, tends to be dreadful at investment. For boring stuff like water networks, that's less because it makes bad investment choices of X over Y and more because political pressure is to keep bills down, and the easiest way to do that is to cut the investment budget which has little immediate adverse effect. It's no coincidence that both water quality and leak rates under the nationalised water boards were dreadful.
But even if we use the lower figure, the question is still: do you want to give £11.5bn to water company shareholders, so that the state can carry on doing pretty much exactly what the water companies are doing? And the government would have to take on the debt (which it wouldn't necessarily if it let a company fail - although the financial, delivery and political consequences of such a failure could easily be unanticipatedly bad, with things stopping that should not stop).
Anyway, the letter was from civil servants. Whether Reed has actually been captured remains to be seen, IMO, and will turn more on what actions he demands (or doesn't) of water companies and what sanctions and benefits he puts in place to incentivise those changes in outcome.
Letting the water companies go bust, while protecting the actual suppliers of actual goods and services to the water companies is perfectly possible.
The simplest method is -
1) a water company folds 2) the government guarantees a loan, specifically ring fenced to pay suppliers. 3) the shareholders and and the bond holders get a Richard III style haircut. 4) the water company carries on delivering water, under the administrators. 5) without all the debt, paying back the loan from 2) will be trivial. 6) the government should be able to make a profit on 2)
In theory that's fine, and fleshes out what I suggested above. But. Lawyers and administrators.
It's easy to write 'shareholders and creditors get x or y pence in the pound'. I'm not sure you can differentiate between categories of creditor? But even if you can, you'd have to expect legal challenges incoming. Personally, I don't see why shareholders from a bust company get anything.
However, more important would be keeping the lights on (or the water running, the sewage flowing and the leaks fixing) during the administration (your point 4), given what would be a snarl-up of liquidity. Who funds what, when, how and with what guarantees. Those are the dirty questions that high-level plans don't address, and where the service delivery would have the potential to become stuck.
Comments
I would be curious as to where the issues are occurring as I expect this is a (very) regional issue..
And also that there are plenty of alternate suppliers.
There’s a lot of fear mongering surrounding high purity quartz (“HPQ”) and Spruce Pine, NC following the devastating flooding from Hurricane Helene
The area contains the purest form of natural quartz, but the significance of supply disruptions from the mines is exaggerated..
1/8
https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/1840871017746698617
Her statement about the minimum wage is undeniably true, there will have been a few businesses that had a tough time due to the minimum wage over the years, yet it's about 10% of the story for the minimum wage as a whole which means she's either cynically ignoring the 90% in order to win the old fucker Tory members who "never had minimum wage in our day" or she's not able to see that the benefits of the minimum wage on bringing people out of absolute poverty has been a huge success story and worth businesses having to adjust their models.
It's the same as the maternity pay stuff, the birth rate is plunging across Europe and parents need more help and incentives to have kids, making it more expensive or forcing women to choose between having kids or having a career is frankly idiotic.
I've been in just two - the coffee is average, the sausage rolls are very good but very pricey. My London bakery of choice is Wenzel's well, obviously, I'd go to Bageriet or Popham Bakery if I could.
A few years back when Texas had a severe white out in the winter, due to the impact on some of the facilities, the global supply of some polymers including ones we use was severely impacted with force majeure declared and lasting several week.
These extended supply chains with little spare capacity are very very stretched and it only takes one mishap to have a dramatic impact.
https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/politics/6591322/a9-dualling-a96-climate-greens/
"The remaining single carriage sections of the A9 should go through a “climate test” before the SNP Government can spend millions on its dualling project, according to Greens co-leader Patrick Harvie.
"The former government minister laid down a marker on further spending ahead of tough financial decisions in First Minister John Swinney’s budget later this year.
"Mr Harvie’s suggestion would lead to further delays to the long-overdue commitment to dual the route all the way between Inverness and Perth.
"It would be similar to the approach to the A96 Aberdeen-Inverness road, which is also long overdue while a report on its future gathers dust in government headquarters."
https://x.com/dawnbutlerbrent/status/1841054298458751060
I am the chosen one
For I am of the first ones
I know I’m black and beautiful
An African freedom fighter
My skin is my protection
And you my friend, don’t matter
Because I am the chosen one
For I am of the first ones
You created a structure that made you seem great
When the simple reality is it is all fake
Because I am the chosen one
For I am of the first ones
If the Tories want me back as a member, they have some work to do.
It's over a hour long but the intro and lecture is the first 33 mins, followed by a Q&A
Oh we... we are the chosen few
You chose me and I chose you
We're the chosen few
Oh and we... we are the lucky people
You got me and I got you
We're the chosen few
Well I don't want your money
I don't want your love
Just give me loving honey
Warm me when I'm cold
'Cos we... we are the chosen few
You chose me and I chose you
We're the chosen few
Oh and we... we are the lucky people
'Cos you got me and I got you
We're the chosen few... yeah
Don't talk about tomorrow
We'll live our lives today
As long as we're together
You know we'll find a way
'Cos we... we are the chosen few
You chose me and I chose you
We're the chosen few
Unfortunately, I conspired to drop half of it on the station platform
The case for Kemi is that she is a colourful feisty character who obviously has convictions. Can anyone say that of Jenrick? In particular she has a fighting chance of connecting, or at least being noticed, by those below the age of retirement who, at the moment, would rather go for root-canal work than vote Tory. There would also be the LOLZ of the Tories electing their FOURTH female leader - and a black one at that - while Labour drift on with a quintessential grey-man-in-a-suit. They really don't look like the future belongs to them under Starmer, do they?
That said, there are admittedly downsides with Kemi too. Ahem.
Tories would be better off with Cleverly or Tugendhat but that evidently ain't gonna happen.
A lot of it seems simply to be about cost, as this story suggests.
Korean chipmakers' reliance on Chinese raw materials deepens
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/tech/2024/10/133_383248.html
But western countries are beginning to realise the strategic importance of domestic supply chains
Question should I go Italian or French for lunch today?
Thankfully I was able to order a paperback copy of "Late Soviet Britain: why materialist utopias fail" by Abby Innes. It's £26.99, but what the hey, let's push the boat out. I'm decadent, me
But much more important are the newsletters I subscribe to, cycling forums, PB, Reddit. The relative value of twitter and equivalents have vastly diminished compared with say 2014 indyref.
It's sort of inverse Rishi trousers - he needs platforms.
Still better than Dawn Butler, mind.
https://www.gaylesbakery.com/menus/
Their Key Lime Pie is evidence that Graham Crackers do indeed have a purpose in life.
But it doesn't change the principle at all.
Once they're gone, that's it.
https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2022-01-12
...Every program manager arrives at DARPA with an expiration date on their badges. It’s a short-term deal that constantly brings in new blood and is routinely cited as part of DARPA’s “special sauce.” Those who become PMs know their jobs likely will end three to five years after they start. Yet so many of them say there is no better job and that they wouldn’t have it any other way. Their collective message is that being a DARPA PM can be a dream job for just about any scientist or engineer, whether they are only beginning to rev up their careers; already making a name for their themselves in an academic, start-up, industry, or government setting; or in search of a second-career to apply the experience and wisdom they have accrued over previous decades of work...
It's the projects are shorter.
whilst the Governors were, er, speaking to the President about provision of whatever aid they need.
Slime ball.
Queues up and down the street for the best pie shop in the world.
Which sadly suggests that the market has finally woken up to how the selection process works... should have invested in Cleverly at 12 a day ago
Whatever next?
It could be a pinned post on every header.
It is an effing genius.
"The average majority for Labour Party MPs can vary significantly across different constituencies. Generally, Labour MPs tend to have smaller majorities in more competitive or marginal seats, while in their strongholds, the majorities can be quite large."
20-29 Sept
Final round scenarios
Jenrick 48 - Badenoch 52
Jenrick 52 - Cleverly 48
Jenrick 58 - Tugendhat 42
Badenoch 54 - Cleverly 46
Badenoch 58 - Tugendhat 42
Cleverly 55 - Tugendhat 45
I am surprised (and relieved TBH) that Cleverly is so close to Jenrick in a head-to-head (which it seems is looking more likely as Kemi deflates). Maybe sanity is about to break out?
Anyway, the question is back-to-front. It's not so much the minimum wage that needs pumping up as living costs that need reducing, with housing foremost.
Put it this way I was in town on Friday, London on Saturday and Stoke on Sunday and all those places had a lot of shops looking for staff..
Agriculture is it's own world and usually has it's own set of imported workers...
For someone whose living depends on the continued largesse of private sector taxpayers, you're do a great line in risible complacency don't you?
Anyway, the letter was from civil servants. Whether Reed has actually been captured remains to be seen, IMO, and will turn more on what actions he demands (or doesn't) of water companies and what sanctions and benefits he puts in place to incentivise those changes in outcome.
I think he might have, you know. ~AA #PoliticsLive
https://x.com/BestForBritain/status/1841087840932807145
If they moved outside Dublin, then the Gail's in Sale lies mainly on the Pale.
It’s nearly unanimous: The political elite don’t like ranked-choice voting
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/opinion-its-nearly-unanimous-the-political-elite-dont-like-ranked-choice-voting
..If passed by voters in November, Question 3 would establish open primaries in Nevada and allow voters to rank their top five candidates in the general election — a massive departure from our current system of closed partisan primaries and the “lesser of two evils” general elections.
Proponents for the reform argue that it creates a more amicable and less politically divisive electoral process by requiring candidates to reach beyond their party’s activist base in order to garner majority support from the broader public. At the very least, such a system is likely to make it more difficult for cartoonishly partisan actors to survive their primary contests — thus giving general election voters a wider selection of more democratically appealing candidates from which they can choose.
Such arguments, however, haven’t done much to win over the hearts and minds of leaders in either major party. Top Nevada Democrats have voiced their opposition to the proposal, with state Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager (D–Las Vegas) telling The Nevada Independent that it would be a “mistake” to implement such an “unproven and unwieldy experiment” on voters. And the Washoe County GOP has been relentlessly urging its followers on X to reject Question 3 at the ballot box, claiming the process will be “too complicated” for voters to understand.
However, evidence suggests voters aren’t quite as easily befuddled as party loyalists suggest.
In Alaska, for example, 85 percent of voters who used the state’s newly enacted RCV process said the system was easy to understand, and exit polls from other jurisdictions show similar results. From Salt Lake City, Utah, to Arlington, Virginia, the vast majority of voters seem to have no problem with ranking candidates in order of preference.
Of course, that doesn’t mean everyone loves it. There’s currently an effort to repeal RCV in Alaska, and plenty of opponents have raised other concerns about a process that so drastically alters the way elections are conducted...
However, she appeared to double down on her initial position yesterday, telling delegates: “There’s a café in my constituency that closed down, and the lady who owned it said, ‘I can’t afford to pay the wages any more. I can’t afford minimum wage. I can’t afford for my staff to go on [paid] maternity [leave]’.”
Badenoch continued: “We are overburdening businesses. We are overburdening them with regulation, with tax. People aren’t starting businesses any more because they’re too scared.”
Pretty standard Tory view really. I don’t agree with it and suspect it doesn’t bear scrutiny.
And whenever politicians quote examples that support their cause I usually suspect a good dollop of make believe. But, who knows - could be true. Although I suspect most businesses would normally gripe about rent and rates (and the decay of the local high street) before getting onto wages / mat leave. But the candidate may have only heard the last bit.
My understanding is that all the things given were (correctly) declared at the equivalent purchase price.
What “normal well off” people might do isn’t relevant.
No, really, I have.
https://archive.ph/ho5kT
(AFAICS the original is from the Telegrunt, as it happens.)
I'm happy.
It's the first day of the month.
More importantly, it's the first day of the month after a dry month.
And I've just had my first glass of wine.
Hic!
The simplest method is -
1) a water company folds
2) the government guarantees a loan, specifically ring fenced to pay suppliers.
3) the shareholders and and the bond holders get a Richard III style haircut.
4) the water company carries on delivering water, under the administrators.
5) without all the debt, paying back the loan from 2) will be trivial.
6) the government should be able to make a profit on 2)
Which is going to come down to shifting it away from local authorities or at least off local authority budgets - which sadly I can't see Labour doing but it's essential..
Recalled prisoners are the fastest-growing element of the overcrowded prison population, doubling in a decade. One former prisoner has told Sky News that being homeless and suffering a drug relapse after being released early has led to him considering reoffending."
https://news.sky.com/story/prisoners-on-early-release-reoffending-to-escape-homelessness-13225597
Now, a more integrated NHS and care system might take some of the inefficiencies and unhelpful institutional-border-policing out of the system but at the end of the day, if you keep increasing the minimum wage ahead of general wage rises, low-cost industries will feel the heat hardest and that will impact on production, service and viability where technology can't substitute effectively.
I fully expect if labour do remove the age ranges in the minimum wage so there is just a flat minimum wage this will be counterproductive and will harm, not only the hospitality industry, but also the demographic it is purporting to help.
Why take on a younger, less experienced worked, if you can get someone with experience for the same wage ?
The question, though, is the harm that it does to business offset by the good it does, at individual, local and societal levels?
All real world policies have downsides.
One in three children around the world are now short-sighted and a child’s ability to see far away objects is worsening, a new study has revealed.
Covid lockdowns have partly been blamed for deteriorating eyesight as children spent more time indoors and on screens."
https://www.itv.com/news/2024-09-25/one-in-three-children-are-short-sighted-how-do-i-protect-my-childs-eye-sight
But the value to SKS is (except the clothes?) considerably less, as equivalent goods can be had for a fraction of the price. The Arsenal box access is worth a season ticket to Arsenal, the use of a property in Westminster is actually worth the cost of an office (or a small flat?) somewhere in central London & so on.
The problem is the access buying: The headline £ value of the donations is an accounting fiction for most of them, since they aren’t available to be rented out in the first place & if they were the sticker price would have sent SKS elsewhere for the same goods.
Same goes for political donations to the Tories - the ease of buying of access to politicians is the problem.
My point was more on the impact the cost of social care is having on local government finances especially as unlike the other things councils pay for the actual service provided is hidden from those who don't directly pay for it.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment/news/brotherhood-of-man-announce-death-of-eurovision-song-contest-winner-martin-lee-aged-77/ar-AA1rwxaJ?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=9457b6f3173f41918481c9c4f50649dc&ei=21
It's easy to write 'shareholders and creditors get x or y pence in the pound'. I'm not sure you can differentiate between categories of creditor? But even if you can, you'd have to expect legal challenges incoming. Personally, I don't see why shareholders from a bust company get anything.
However, more important would be keeping the lights on (or the water running, the sewage flowing and the leaks fixing) during the administration (your point 4), given what would be a snarl-up of liquidity. Who funds what, when, how and with what guarantees. Those are the dirty questions that high-level plans don't address, and where the service delivery would have the potential to become stuck.