Frankly if a UK business can’t afford to pay people a living wage then I would not be happy supporting them.
Which isn't what you were saying not long ago when you were demanding that employers be able to bring in people on minimum wage into the country to evade pay rises to fill vacancies.
Specifically you said local hospitality couldn't fill vacancies unless people were allowed to migrate on the existing minimum wage rather than put up wages.
When did I say that then?
A while back when London restauranteurs were in the news for not being able to fill vacancies and saying more migrants were needed to fill them.
I said they should just let supply and demand sort the labour market and pay a higher wage. You said they couldn't afford to pay higher wages.
I said if they can't afford higher wages then the least productive firms should go out of business and the more productive ones would gain the customers of the other ones and be able to afford the higher wages. You said you were opposed to the idea of pubs going out of business.
I am opposed to the idea of pubs going out of business. The moves tomorrow are not going to put pubs out of business though.
Anyway, is everything alright on your side? We haven't crossed paths recently and I always used to see you post frequently.
I mean pubs will definitely go out of business in a wage/price spiral. Not enough people on the minimum wage go to pubs so there won't be much additional demand but prices will have to go up to pay for the increased rates. Booze in pubs has got very elastic demand.
Sadly going to the pub is so expensive that I don't go as much as I used to, despite earning significantly more. Corner shop is just so much cheaper.
No that's not true, the demand for pubs at £9 per pint will be noticeably lower than £7 per pint. Pubs are going to close and anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves.
There are other things we should be doing to help the industry rather than keeping wages low.
Indeed.
But it's amusing how some people are perfectly OK with wages going up as long as it's the state determining that everyone's wages go up, with no regards to local market conditions.
While being utterly horrified at supply and demand and local market conditions meaning that wages might locally go up above minimum wage if that is what is required.
The minimum wage should be a floor, not a ceiling, to wages.
Without productivity improvements minimum wage does act as a ceiling as well as a floor.
It does mean that pubs will need to careful manage the hours they open but the biggest issue for most won't be the minimum wage it will be the fact their business rates (which have been discounted since 2021) will be reverting back to their historic levels if the 75% relief that ends in March isn't extended.
In a free market wage rises can lead to productivity rises.
If market conditions demand above minimum wage pay rates to fill vacancies but some firms can't afford the wage rise so go out of business, leading to consolidation of the market and customers from those firms now frequenting the surviving firms, then the surviving firms staff both have higher pay and are more productive (serving more customers per hour).
A rise led by diktat rather than market forces doesn't have the same productivity boost.
I think at current rates it may in fact have the opposite effect as wage growth elsewhere in a business are sacrificed to pay for the minimum wage rises. So what ends up happening is highly productive people either leave or become less motivated/productive to retain people on lower wages. What worries me is that Labour are simultaneously increasing business costs in wages, NI and supposedly NI on pension contributions as well as small business rates relief being on the chopping block. It's going to lead to a lot of upheaval if they do all four of those. Lots won't survive and unemployment will go up, probably by a fair amount.
The advent of the £9 pint won’t help boost the birth rate as we were discussing yesterday. Wrong decision chancellor - get young people drunk in close proximity to each other, and we’ll get more babies.
The advent of the £9 pint won’t help boost the birth rate as we were discussing yesterday. Wrong decision chancellor - get young people drunk in close proximity to each other, and we’ll get more babies.
The advent of the £9 pint won’t help boost the birth rate as we were discussing yesterday. Wrong decision chancellor - get young people drunk in close proximity to each other, and we’ll get more babies.
Or more abortions. Extra costs for the NHS.
Though abortions lower crime rates. Lower costs for the Police and Criminal Justice system (albeit 20 years later).
Sad, Woke, Left-wing shit by juveniles playing at government.
Come along. Would you really want a snap of Nigel Lawson on your wall? I wouldn't even want a snap of Nigella Lawson, and she's considerably easier on the eye than her father.
Er, yes?
He's an icon and one of the most transformative and forward thinking Chancellors of the 20th Century.
Nigella would be in another room - not the office.
No 10 denying prior knowledge of the decision by the CPS to charge the suspect with terrorism
I expect an urgent question to the Home Secretary asking when she knew ricin and the Al Quaeda manual had been discovered in the suspects house
I suspect she found out quite late on. even with high profile cases like this there'd be little to no communication with the home secretary about operational matters.
Seriously? It’s not just this week the rice in the Tupperware and a manual was found is it? These were found hours after the attack.
I’m with Big G on this one. Urgent Ricingate questions for Cooper to answer, what did she know and when.
Do you know when they were found? What's your source?
The manual could have been encrypted and significant time taken to decrypt etc. The ricin would have needed samples taken and testing. We don't know when the first inklings were that maybe it was terror related.
Hmmm. I suspect people whose job is to look for ricin and other such terrorist chemistry sets know pretty much in seconds that they are dealing with an attempt ricin manufacture.
There are many possibilities.
One that amuses me, is that he was trying to make ricin and was doing it incompetently, so it was not fully clear what he was trying to do.
Also: it is widely believed that things like the anarchist's cookbook that are circulated nowadays have been (ahem) altered to make them less dangerous. Or, in some cases, more dangerous to the people trying out the recipes.
The advent of the £9 pint won’t help boost the birth rate as we were discussing yesterday. Wrong decision chancellor - get young people drunk in close proximity to each other, and we’ll get more babies.
Smartphones kill sex, drinking and mental health.
How often do you see kids out on bikes or at skateparks anymore?
The advent of the £9 pint won’t help boost the birth rate as we were discussing yesterday. Wrong decision chancellor - get young people drunk in close proximity to each other, and we’ll get more babies.
Or more abortions. Extra costs for the NHS.
Though abortions lower crime rates. Lower costs for the Police and Criminal Justice system (albeit 20 years later).
Maybe so, but the stated objective was more babies.
Sad, Woke, Left-wing shit by juveniles playing at government.
Come along. Would you really want a snap of Nigel Lawson on your wall? I wouldn't even want a snap of Nigella Lawson, and she's considerably easier on the eye than her father.
Er, yes?
He's an icon and one of the most transformative and forward thinking Chancellors of the 20th Century.
Nigella would be in another room - not the office.
“Prime Minister, why was Taylor Swift given a special police escort?”
Hmmm
Hmmmmm what? What do you think the issue is? Home Secretary and Mayor believe extra protection needed following Austrian terrorist issue. Police disagree. Home Secretary and Mayor get their way, possibly under pressure from Swift's team. Seems normal stuff.
“Prime Minister, why was Taylor Swift given a special police escort?”
Hmmm
Hmmmmm what? What do you think the issue is? Home Secretary and Mayor believe extra protection needed following Austrian terrorist issue. Police disagree. Home Secretary and Mayor get their way, possibly under pressure from Swift's team. Seems normal stuff.
What new conspiracy are you trying to spread now?
How about… you don’t respond to me and I don’t respond to you. Since I can’t figure out how to mute you on here.
Nope. Each time you spout or link to conpiracies I am going to out you. You have a track record of doing so, some of it appalling. When you linked to QAnon here and then later to an appalling racist anti Semite you deserved it and I'm not going to let you off the hook.
Leon has often described this place an online pub. How do I put this. I’d not find you out across the bar for a catch-up? I’d finish my drink and go for a curry? I don’t think you’ve said anything interesting about the world at all ever. It is a drain on life force even reading your angry, sad person antagonism.
This is a betting site. Last night I flagged a growing online story that might be as important/unimportant to driving marginal turnout for the right, as the Puerto Rico story might be for the left.
Because you are an intellectually challenged and needlessly aggressive person, you called me a conspiracy theorist for doing so, rather than thanking me for a tip that might or might not prove important. Joe Rogan himself (as well as Musk) has been explicitly flagging the apparent shadow banning of his interview to his many millions of followers. And the story has caught on like wildfire. But no, you know better.
As I say, consider yourself metaphorically muted from here on in, my life is far too precious to waste any more of it engaging with such a hostile bore. Cheerio.
Sad, Woke, Left-wing shit by juveniles playing at government.
Come along. Would you really want a snap of Nigel Lawson on your wall? I wouldn't even want a snap of Nigella Lawson, and she's considerably easier on the eye than her father.
Er, yes?
He's an icon and one of the most transformative and forward thinking Chancellors of the 20th Century.
Nigella would be in another room - not the office.
I thought he was a good CoE - I'd not go out to bat for him in quite the way you have though. The problem of course is Economics - the endlessly rubbish humanity that portrays itself as a science.
A new pub is opening in my corner of suburban north London. It’s a gastropub with seasonal food and an open kitchen. Good food is the key to success in the pub sector.
Interestingly, it does not accept cash. Which I thought was a clever move: will save a lot of time and risk.
Frankly if a UK business can’t afford to pay people a living wage then I would not be happy supporting them.
Which isn't what you were saying not long ago when you were demanding that employers be able to bring in people on minimum wage into the country to evade pay rises to fill vacancies.
Specifically you said local hospitality couldn't fill vacancies unless people were allowed to migrate on the existing minimum wage rather than put up wages.
When did I say that then?
A while back when London restauranteurs were in the news for not being able to fill vacancies and saying more migrants were needed to fill them.
I said they should just let supply and demand sort the labour market and pay a higher wage. You said they couldn't afford to pay higher wages.
I said if they can't afford higher wages then the least productive firms should go out of business and the more productive ones would gain the customers of the other ones and be able to afford the higher wages. You said you were opposed to the idea of pubs going out of business.
I am opposed to the idea of pubs going out of business. The moves tomorrow are not going to put pubs out of business though.
Anyway, is everything alright on your side? We haven't crossed paths recently and I always used to see you post frequently.
I mean pubs will definitely go out of business in a wage/price spiral. Not enough people on the minimum wage go to pubs so there won't be much additional demand but prices will have to go up to pay for the increased rates. Booze in pubs has got very elastic demand.
Sadly going to the pub is so expensive that I don't go as much as I used to, despite earning significantly more. Corner shop is just so much cheaper.
No that's not true, the demand for pubs at £9 per pint will be noticeably lower than £7 per pint. Pubs are going to close and anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves.
There are other things we should be doing to help the industry rather than keeping wages low.
Indeed.
But it's amusing how some people are perfectly OK with wages going up as long as it's the state determining that everyone's wages go up, with no regards to local market conditions.
While being utterly horrified at supply and demand and local market conditions meaning that wages might locally go up above minimum wage if that is what is required.
The minimum wage should be a floor, not a ceiling, to wages.
Without productivity improvements minimum wage does act as a ceiling as well as a floor.
It does mean that pubs will need to careful manage the hours they open but the biggest issue for most won't be the minimum wage it will be the fact their business rates (which have been discounted since 2021) will be reverting back to their historic levels if the 75% relief that ends in March isn't extended.
In a free market wage rises can lead to productivity rises.
If market conditions demand above minimum wage pay rates to fill vacancies but some firms can't afford the wage rise so go out of business, leading to consolidation of the market and customers from those firms now frequenting the surviving firms, then the surviving firms staff both have higher pay and are more productive (serving more customers per hour).
A rise led by diktat rather than market forces doesn't have the same productivity boost.
I think at current rates it may in fact have the opposite effect as wage growth elsewhere in a business are sacrificed to pay for the minimum wage rises. So what ends up happening is highly productive people either leave or become less motivated/productive to retain people on lower wages. What worries me is that Labour are simultaneously increasing business costs in wages, NI and supposedly NI on pension contributions as well as small business rates relief being on the chopping block. It's going to lead to a lot of upheaval if they do all four of those. Lots won't survive and unemployment will go up, probably by a fair amount.
They're also giving workers new rights, another kick in the balls to business. And Mad Ed is going to increase energy costs yet further.
I honestly think this is the most anti-business, anti-enterprise and anti-aspiration government we've ever had, despite Starmer's gaslighting about growth. And given what the last thirty years have been like, that's quite an achievement.
Sad, Woke, Left-wing shit by juveniles playing at government.
Come along. Would you really want a snap of Nigel Lawson on your wall? I wouldn't even want a snap of Nigella Lawson, and she's considerably easier on the eye than her father.
Er, yes?
He's an icon and one of the most transformative and forward thinking Chancellors of the 20th Century.
Nigella would be in another room - not the office.
“Prime Minister, why was Taylor Swift given a special police escort?”
Hmmm
Hmmmmm what? What do you think the issue is? Home Secretary and Mayor believe extra protection needed following Austrian terrorist issue. Police disagree. Home Secretary and Mayor get their way, possibly under pressure from Swift's team. Seems normal stuff.
“Prime Minister, why was Taylor Swift given a special police escort?”
Hmmm
Hmmmmm what? What do you think the issue is? Home Secretary and Mayor believe extra protection needed following Austrian terrorist issue. Police disagree. Home Secretary and Mayor get their way, possibly under pressure from Swift's team. Seems normal stuff.
What new conspiracy are you trying to spread now?
How about… you don’t respond to me and I don’t respond to you. Since I can’t figure out how to mute you on here.
Nope. Each time you spout or link to conpiracies I am going to out you. You have a track record of doing so, some of it appalling. When you linked to QAnon here and then later to an appalling racist anti Semite you deserved it and I'm not going to let you off the hook.
Leon has often described this place an online pub. How do I put this. I’d not find you out across the bar for a catch-up? I’d finish my drink and go for a curry? I don’t think you’ve said anything interesting about the world at all ever. It is a drain on life force even reading your angry, sad person antagonism.
This is a betting site. Last night I flagged a growing online story that might be as important/unimportant to driving marginal turnout for the right, as the Puerto Rico story might be for the left.
Because you are an intellectually challenged and needlessly aggressive person, you called me a conspiracy theorist for doing so, rather than thanking me for a tip that might or might not prove important. Joe Rogan himself (as well as Musk) has been explicitly flagging the apparent shadow banning of his interview to his many millions of followers. And the story has caught on like wildfire. But no, you know better.
As I say, consider yourself metaphorically muted from here on in, my life is far too precious to waste any more of it engaging with such a hostile bore. Cheerio.
What, Elon Musk thinks it's being shadow banned? Well, then, if an entirely rational, sober person like Musk, who has never shown any inclination towards conspiracy theories, is saying that, it must be true.
The advent of the £9 pint won’t help boost the birth rate as we were discussing yesterday. Wrong decision chancellor - get young people drunk in close proximity to each other, and we’ll get more babies.
Or more abortions. Extra costs for the NHS.
Though abortions lower crime rates. Lower costs for the Police and Criminal Justice system (albeit 20 years later).
Maybe so, but the stated objective was more babies.
Not all pregnancies are aborted though.
More pregnancies combined with more abortions is a win/win. We get more births to loving families who want to bring up their kids, but without the ones who don't.
The pollings all over the place . In Arizona a shock poll by Data Orbital gives Trump an 8 point lead , CNN have Harris in the lead by 1 point .
Earlier Susquehanna give Harris a 5 point lead in Michigan as opposed to Emerson who give Trump a 1 point lead .
And not poll related Trump just called his hate rally a love-fest !
Data Orbital called Arizona pretty well in 2020.
That said, CNN -which was also broadly right in 2020- came out yesterday with a Harris +1 in AZ.
So you pays your money. Right now, the mood music suggests that Trump is ahead in AZ, NV, GA and NC... but that the rust belt is much tighter.
I’m still confident of NC, I think that’s more likely for Harris than Georgia. Nevada looks weird , I think the Indy’s are breaking heavily for Harris . I think Michigan and Pennsylvania are looking good for Harris . Wisconsin I think is going to be incredibly close .
Closer than last time? 0.63% (20k votes). Though I've stll got it in the Harris column.
Whilst I'm leaning Trump, I do gut feeling think Harris will win Pennsylvania, so it all comes down to Michigan for me, as I think Trump edges the rest. So good news there bery welcome.
I'm not sure if it's just where I live and work, but there's still absolutely loads of pubs everywhere.
All my life I've heard they're closing in large numbers. I'm sure it's true, but there's still loads, there were clearly way more than needed, even if trends meant they were more used before.
There is no such thing as “more than needed” when it comes to pubs. I currently only really have three pubs near my house, which isn’t enough for “one pub, one pint” as I was brought up to do.
Frankly if a UK business can’t afford to pay people a living wage then I would not be happy supporting them.
Which isn't what you were saying not long ago when you were demanding that employers be able to bring in people on minimum wage into the country to evade pay rises to fill vacancies.
Specifically you said local hospitality couldn't fill vacancies unless people were allowed to migrate on the existing minimum wage rather than put up wages.
When did I say that then?
A while back when London restauranteurs were in the news for not being able to fill vacancies and saying more migrants were needed to fill them.
I said they should just let supply and demand sort the labour market and pay a higher wage. You said they couldn't afford to pay higher wages.
I said if they can't afford higher wages then the least productive firms should go out of business and the more productive ones would gain the customers of the other ones and be able to afford the higher wages. You said you were opposed to the idea of pubs going out of business.
I am opposed to the idea of pubs going out of business. The moves tomorrow are not going to put pubs out of business though.
Anyway, is everything alright on your side? We haven't crossed paths recently and I always used to see you post frequently.
I mean pubs will definitely go out of business in a wage/price spiral. Not enough people on the minimum wage go to pubs so there won't be much additional demand but prices will have to go up to pay for the increased rates. Booze in pubs has got very elastic demand.
Sadly going to the pub is so expensive that I don't go as much as I used to, despite earning significantly more. Corner shop is just so much cheaper.
No that's not true, the demand for pubs at £9 per pint will be noticeably lower than £7 per pint. Pubs are going to close and anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves.
There are other things we should be doing to help the industry rather than keeping wages low.
Indeed.
But it's amusing how some people are perfectly OK with wages going up as long as it's the state determining that everyone's wages go up, with no regards to local market conditions.
While being utterly horrified at supply and demand and local market conditions meaning that wages might locally go up above minimum wage if that is what is required.
The minimum wage should be a floor, not a ceiling, to wages.
Without productivity improvements minimum wage does act as a ceiling as well as a floor.
It does mean that pubs will need to careful manage the hours they open but the biggest issue for most won't be the minimum wage it will be the fact their business rates (which have been discounted since 2021) will be reverting back to their historic levels if the 75% relief that ends in March isn't extended.
In a free market wage rises can lead to productivity rises.
If market conditions demand above minimum wage pay rates to fill vacancies but some firms can't afford the wage rise so go out of business, leading to consolidation of the market and customers from those firms now frequenting the surviving firms, then the surviving firms staff both have higher pay and are more productive (serving more customers per hour).
A rise led by diktat rather than market forces doesn't have the same productivity boost.
I think at current rates it may in fact have the opposite effect as wage growth elsewhere in a business are sacrificed to pay for the minimum wage rises. So what ends up happening is highly productive people either leave or become less motivated/productive to retain people on lower wages. What worries me is that Labour are simultaneously increasing business costs in wages, NI and supposedly NI on pension contributions as well as small business rates relief being on the chopping block. It's going to lead to a lot of upheaval if they do all four of those. Lots won't survive and unemployment will go up, probably by a fair amount.
They're also giving workers new rights, another kick in the balls to business. And Mad Ed is going to increase energy costs yet further.
I honestly think this is the most anti-business, anti-enterprise and anti-aspiration government we've ever had, despite Starmer's gaslighting about growth. And given what the last thirty years have been like, that's quite an achievement.
The sad thing is I doubt any of the extra taxes we'll be clobbered with in this budget will make anything better; it will just raise costs and prices, misdirect investment, and expand the size and scope of the State. Fruitlessly.
What we won't get is transformative outcomes; what we will get is the bill.
A new pub is opening in my corner of suburban north London. It’s a gastropub with seasonal food and an open kitchen. Good food is the key to success in the pub sector.
Interestingly, it does not accept cash. Which I thought was a clever move: will save a lot of time and risk.
Frankly if a UK business can’t afford to pay people a living wage then I would not be happy supporting them.
Which isn't what you were saying not long ago when you were demanding that employers be able to bring in people on minimum wage into the country to evade pay rises to fill vacancies.
Specifically you said local hospitality couldn't fill vacancies unless people were allowed to migrate on the existing minimum wage rather than put up wages.
When did I say that then?
A while back when London restauranteurs were in the news for not being able to fill vacancies and saying more migrants were needed to fill them.
I said they should just let supply and demand sort the labour market and pay a higher wage. You said they couldn't afford to pay higher wages.
I said if they can't afford higher wages then the least productive firms should go out of business and the more productive ones would gain the customers of the other ones and be able to afford the higher wages. You said you were opposed to the idea of pubs going out of business.
I am opposed to the idea of pubs going out of business. The moves tomorrow are not going to put pubs out of business though.
Anyway, is everything alright on your side? We haven't crossed paths recently and I always used to see you post frequently.
I mean pubs will definitely go out of business in a wage/price spiral. Not enough people on the minimum wage go to pubs so there won't be much additional demand but prices will have to go up to pay for the increased rates. Booze in pubs has got very elastic demand.
Sadly going to the pub is so expensive that I don't go as much as I used to, despite earning significantly more. Corner shop is just so much cheaper.
No that's not true, the demand for pubs at £9 per pint will be noticeably lower than £7 per pint. Pubs are going to close and anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves.
There are other things we should be doing to help the industry rather than keeping wages low.
Indeed.
But it's amusing how some people are perfectly OK with wages going up as long as it's the state determining that everyone's wages go up, with no regards to local market conditions.
While being utterly horrified at supply and demand and local market conditions meaning that wages might locally go up above minimum wage if that is what is required.
The minimum wage should be a floor, not a ceiling, to wages.
Without productivity improvements minimum wage does act as a ceiling as well as a floor.
It does mean that pubs will need to careful manage the hours they open but the biggest issue for most won't be the minimum wage it will be the fact their business rates (which have been discounted since 2021) will be reverting back to their historic levels if the 75% relief that ends in March isn't extended.
In a free market wage rises can lead to productivity rises.
If market conditions demand above minimum wage pay rates to fill vacancies but some firms can't afford the wage rise so go out of business, leading to consolidation of the market and customers from those firms now frequenting the surviving firms, then the surviving firms staff both have higher pay and are more productive (serving more customers per hour).
A rise led by diktat rather than market forces doesn't have the same productivity boost.
I think at current rates it may in fact have the opposite effect as wage growth elsewhere in a business are sacrificed to pay for the minimum wage rises. So what ends up happening is highly productive people either leave or become less motivated/productive to retain people on lower wages. What worries me is that Labour are simultaneously increasing business costs in wages, NI and supposedly NI on pension contributions as well as small business rates relief being on the chopping block. It's going to lead to a lot of upheaval if they do all four of those. Lots won't survive and unemployment will go up, probably by a fair amount.
They're also giving workers new rights, another kick in the balls to business. And Mad Ed is going to increase energy costs yet further.
I honestly think this is the most anti-business, anti-enterprise and anti-aspiration government we've ever had, despite Starmer's gaslighting about growth. And given what the last thirty years have been like, that's quite an achievement.
The sad thing is I doubt any of the extra taxes we'll be clobbered with in this budget will make anything better; it will just raise costs and prices, misdirect investment, and expand the size and scope of the State. Fruitlessly.
What we won't get is transformative outcomes; what we will get is the bill.
No 10 denying prior knowledge of the decision by the CPS to charge the suspect with terrorism
I expect an urgent question to the Home Secretary asking when she knew ricin and the Al Quaeda manual had been discovered in the suspects house
I suspect she found out quite late on. even with high profile cases like this there'd be little to no communication with the home secretary about operational matters.
Seriously? It’s not just this week the rice in the Tupperware and a manual was found is it? These were found hours after the attack.
I’m with Big G on this one. Urgent Ricingate questions for Cooper to answer, what did she know and when.
Do you know when they were found? What's your source?
The manual could have been encrypted and significant time taken to decrypt etc. The ricin would have needed samples taken and testing. We don't know when the first inklings were that maybe it was terror related.
Hmmm. I suspect people whose job is to look for ricin and other such terrorist chemistry sets know pretty much in seconds that they are dealing with an attempt ricin manufacture.
There are many possibilities.
One that amuses me, is that he was trying to make ricin and was doing it incompetently, so it was not fully clear what he was trying to do.
Also: it is widely believed that things like the anarchist's cookbook that are circulated nowadays have been (ahem) altered to make them less dangerous. Or, in some cases, more dangerous to the people trying out the recipes.
I'm certainly not going to start Googling how to make ricin. Especially whilst in the ME! Yes, he may have been a shit chemist. His kitchen might have looked like some horrors seen in student digs. But I still suspect - nothing more, I may be in utter ignorance here - that professional people looking for tell-tale signs would pick those up very quickly.
The advent of the £9 pint won’t help boost the birth rate as we were discussing yesterday. Wrong decision chancellor - get young people drunk in close proximity to each other, and we’ll get more babies.
Smartphones kill sex, drinking and mental health.
How often do you see kids out on bikes or at skateparks anymore?
Joking aside, I do worry that things like dating apps being the main way of meeting people means that it’s much more rare to meet someone totally different to you in the way you could at work or a night out.
Moving this away from dating and sex - I wonder if living life online therefore narrows friendship groups? Cant be great for society, and so we’re back to wanting pubs and other less boozy meeting places.
“Prime Minister, why was Taylor Swift given a special police escort?”
Hmmm
Hmmmmm what? What do you think the issue is? Home Secretary and Mayor believe extra protection needed following Austrian terrorist issue. Police disagree. Home Secretary and Mayor get their way, possibly under pressure from Swift's team. Seems normal stuff.
“Prime Minister, why was Taylor Swift given a special police escort?”
Hmmm
Hmmmmm what? What do you think the issue is? Home Secretary and Mayor believe extra protection needed following Austrian terrorist issue. Police disagree. Home Secretary and Mayor get their way, possibly under pressure from Swift's team. Seems normal stuff.
What new conspiracy are you trying to spread now?
How about… you don’t respond to me and I don’t respond to you. Since I can’t figure out how to mute you on here.
Nope. Each time you spout or link to conpiracies I am going to out you. You have a track record of doing so, some of it appalling. When you linked to QAnon here and then later to an appalling racist anti Semite you deserved it and I'm not going to let you off the hook.
Leon has often described this place an online pub. How do I put this. I’d not find you out across the bar for a catch-up? I’d finish my drink and go for a curry? I don’t think you’ve said anything interesting about the world at all ever. It is a drain on life force even reading your angry, sad person antagonism.
This is a betting site. Last night I flagged a growing online story that might be as important/unimportant to driving marginal turnout for the right, as the Puerto Rico story might be for the left.
Because you are an intellectually challenged and needlessly aggressive person, you called me a conspiracy theorist for doing so, rather than thanking me for a tip that might or might not prove important. Joe Rogan himself (as well as Musk) has been explicitly flagging the apparent shadow banning of his interview to his many millions of followers. And the story has caught on like wildfire. But no, you know better.
As I say, consider yourself metaphorically muted from here on in, my life is far too precious to waste any more of it engaging with such a hostile bore. Cheerio.
What, Elon Musk thinks it's being shadow banned? Well, then, if an entirely rational, sober person like Musk, who has never shown any inclination towards conspiracy theories, is saying that, it must be true.
Whether this was deliberate by someone at YouTube/google, or whether a special interest group had gamed the algorithm’s flagging system, is under hot dispute. But it’s clear that something was up (now been corrected). From a betting perspective, the relevant point is that many voters in marginal states will now be aware of this story and it squarely underlines Republican campaign messaging. Take from that what you will.
Don't worry, the Groucho Club is still only around £6.50.
Start at under 2 quid in Spoon's, in God's country at least
My local village pubs currently charges £3.75 per pint of real ale. I can’t advise on the price of unreal lager. I will update you after the budget if it changes.
Cheapest pint in Spoons is £1.79 (£1.29 with a Camra voucher).
Sad, Woke, Left-wing shit by juveniles playing at government.
Come along. Would you really want a snap of Nigel Lawson on your wall? I wouldn't even want a snap of Nigella Lawson, and she's considerably easier on the eye than her father.
There'd have been a portrait of someone else before Lawson, just that there weren't any whining losers moaning in the paper that he replaced something else. Given Lawson was responsible for a pre-election boom followed by a vicious bust, housing market crash and doubling of interest rates, putting millions in negative equity, he's a pretty shit role model for a CoE, why not someone like Clarke or even Major.
The public either shies away from the transformative (so our politicians do all they can to avoid it), or they want entrirely too much transformation which is unrealistic to achieve. Not sure how we break the cycle.
A new pub is opening in my corner of suburban north London. It’s a gastropub with seasonal food and an open kitchen. Good food is the key to success in the pub sector.
Interestingly, it does not accept cash. Which I thought was a clever move: will save a lot of time and risk.
I think food gets the punters in, and then the margins are on the drinks they? With the really good margins on things like coke and coffee because there’s no tax.
Sad, Woke, Left-wing shit by juveniles playing at government.
Come along. Would you really want a snap of Nigel Lawson on your wall? I wouldn't even want a snap of Nigella Lawson, and she's considerably easier on the eye than her father.
There'd have been a portrait of someone else before Lawson, just that there weren't any whining losers moaning in the paper that he replaced something else. Given Lawson was responsible for a pre-election boom followed by a vicious bust, housing market crash and doubling of interest rates, putting millions in negative equity, he's a pretty shit role model for a CoE, why not someone like Clarke or even Major.
Sad, Woke, Left-wing shit by juveniles playing at government.
Come along. Would you really want a snap of Nigel Lawson on your wall? I wouldn't even want a snap of Nigella Lawson, and she's considerably easier on the eye than her father.
There'd have been a portrait of someone else before Lawson, just that there weren't any whining losers moaning in the paper that he replaced something else. Given Lawson was responsible for a pre-election boom followed by a vicious bust, housing market crash and doubling of interest rates, putting millions in negative equity, he's a pretty shit role model for a CoE, why not someone like Clarke or even Major.
Boom and bust is a good thing. Getting growth and then corrections is better than stagnation.
Housing crashes are a good thing. Means housing becomes more affordable, after the housing crash home ownership rates hit record highs which have not been seen again since.
Seems like an excellent role model for a CoE. Better than someone who'll continue with stagnation and rent seeking.
Don't worry, the Groucho Club is still only around £6.50.
Start at under 2 quid in Spoon's, in God's country at least
My local village pubs currently charges £3.75 per pint of real ale. I can’t advise on the price of unreal lager. I will update you after the budget if it changes.
Cheapest pint in Spoons is £1.79 (£1.29 with a Camra voucher).
Hang on, this is an important fact. Can you still use the new look CAMRA vouchers in spoons? When they rebranded the vouchers I assumed that was because Tim Martin ditched them.
Don't worry, the Groucho Club is still only around £6.50.
Start at under 2 quid in Spoon's, in God's country at least
My local village pubs currently charges £3.75 per pint of real ale. I can’t advise on the price of unreal lager. I will update you after the budget if it changes.
Cheapest pint in Spoons is £1.79 (£1.29 with a Camra voucher).
The likelihood of someone being in CAMRA and also being willing to drink Greene King IPA or Ruddles is pretty low, though.
As a Cambridge pub graffito above the urinals had it: "Piss hard, it's a long way to Bury St Edmunds".
A new pub is opening in my corner of suburban north London. It’s a gastropub with seasonal food and an open kitchen. Good food is the key to success in the pub sector.
Interestingly, it does not accept cash. Which I thought was a clever move: will save a lot of time and risk.
So, you've decided to open a pub?
I would love to in theory. But it’s too much like hard work.
Frankly if a UK business can’t afford to pay people a living wage then I would not be happy supporting them.
Which isn't what you were saying not long ago when you were demanding that employers be able to bring in people on minimum wage into the country to evade pay rises to fill vacancies.
Specifically you said local hospitality couldn't fill vacancies unless people were allowed to migrate on the existing minimum wage rather than put up wages.
When did I say that then?
A while back when London restauranteurs were in the news for not being able to fill vacancies and saying more migrants were needed to fill them.
I said they should just let supply and demand sort the labour market and pay a higher wage. You said they couldn't afford to pay higher wages.
I said if they can't afford higher wages then the least productive firms should go out of business and the more productive ones would gain the customers of the other ones and be able to afford the higher wages. You said you were opposed to the idea of pubs going out of business.
I am opposed to the idea of pubs going out of business. The moves tomorrow are not going to put pubs out of business though.
Anyway, is everything alright on your side? We haven't crossed paths recently and I always used to see you post frequently.
I mean pubs will definitely go out of business in a wage/price spiral. Not enough people on the minimum wage go to pubs so there won't be much additional demand but prices will have to go up to pay for the increased rates. Booze in pubs has got very elastic demand.
Sadly going to the pub is so expensive that I don't go as much as I used to, despite earning significantly more. Corner shop is just so much cheaper.
No that's not true, the demand for pubs at £9 per pint will be noticeably lower than £7 per pint. Pubs are going to close and anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves.
There are other things we should be doing to help the industry rather than keeping wages low.
Indeed.
But it's amusing how some people are perfectly OK with wages going up as long as it's the state determining that everyone's wages go up, with no regards to local market conditions.
While being utterly horrified at supply and demand and local market conditions meaning that wages might locally go up above minimum wage if that is what is required.
The minimum wage should be a floor, not a ceiling, to wages.
Without productivity improvements minimum wage does act as a ceiling as well as a floor.
It does mean that pubs will need to careful manage the hours they open but the biggest issue for most won't be the minimum wage it will be the fact their business rates (which have been discounted since 2021) will be reverting back to their historic levels if the 75% relief that ends in March isn't extended.
In a free market wage rises can lead to productivity rises.
If market conditions demand above minimum wage pay rates to fill vacancies but some firms can't afford the wage rise so go out of business, leading to consolidation of the market and customers from those firms now frequenting the surviving firms, then the surviving firms staff both have higher pay and are more productive (serving more customers per hour).
A rise led by diktat rather than market forces doesn't have the same productivity boost.
I think at current rates it may in fact have the opposite effect as wage growth elsewhere in a business are sacrificed to pay for the minimum wage rises. So what ends up happening is highly productive people either leave or become less motivated/productive to retain people on lower wages. What worries me is that Labour are simultaneously increasing business costs in wages, NI and supposedly NI on pension contributions as well as small business rates relief being on the chopping block. It's going to lead to a lot of upheaval if they do all four of those. Lots won't survive and unemployment will go up, probably by a fair amount.
They're also giving workers new rights, another kick in the balls to business. And Mad Ed is going to increase energy costs yet further.
I honestly think this is the most anti-business, anti-enterprise and anti-aspiration government we've ever had, despite Starmer's gaslighting about growth. And given what the last thirty years have been like, that's quite an achievement.
“Prime Minister, why was Taylor Swift given a special police escort?”
Hmmm
Hmmmmm what? What do you think the issue is? Home Secretary and Mayor believe extra protection needed following Austrian terrorist issue. Police disagree. Home Secretary and Mayor get their way, possibly under pressure from Swift's team. Seems normal stuff.
“Prime Minister, why was Taylor Swift given a special police escort?”
Hmmm
Hmmmmm what? What do you think the issue is? Home Secretary and Mayor believe extra protection needed following Austrian terrorist issue. Police disagree. Home Secretary and Mayor get their way, possibly under pressure from Swift's team. Seems normal stuff.
What new conspiracy are you trying to spread now?
How about… you don’t respond to me and I don’t respond to you. Since I can’t figure out how to mute you on here.
Nope. Each time you spout or link to conpiracies I am going to out you. You have a track record of doing so, some of it appalling. When you linked to QAnon here and then later to an appalling racist anti Semite you deserved it and I'm not going to let you off the hook.
Leon has often described this place an online pub. How do I put this. I’d not find you out across the bar for a catch-up? I’d finish my drink and go for a curry? I don’t think you’ve said anything interesting about the world at all ever. It is a drain on life force even reading your angry, sad person antagonism.
This is a betting site. Last night I flagged a growing online story that might be as important/unimportant to driving marginal turnout for the right, as the Puerto Rico story might be for the left.
Because you are an intellectually challenged and needlessly aggressive person, you called me a conspiracy theorist for doing so, rather than thanking me for a tip that might or might not prove important. Joe Rogan himself (as well as Musk) has been explicitly flagging the apparent shadow banning of his interview to his many millions of followers. And the story has caught on like wildfire. But no, you know better.
As I say, consider yourself metaphorically muted from here on in, my life is far too precious to waste any more of it engaging with such a hostile bore. Cheerio.
What, Elon Musk thinks it's being shadow banned? Well, then, if an entirely rational, sober person like Musk, who has never shown any inclination towards conspiracy theories, is saying that, it must be true.
Whether this was deliberate by someone at YouTube/google, or whether a special interest group had gamed the algorithm’s flagging system, is under hot dispute. But it’s clear that something was up (now been corrected). From a betting perspective, the relevant point is that many voters in marginal states will now be aware of this story and it squarely underlines Republican campaign messaging. Take from that what you will.
From a betting perspective, yes, we should note that voters may be swayed by lies and conspiracy theories. That doesn't mean we should pretend these lies and conspiracy theories are true.
The advent of the £9 pint won’t help boost the birth rate as we were discussing yesterday. Wrong decision chancellor - get young people drunk in close proximity to each other, and we’ll get more babies.
Smartphones kill sex, drinking and mental health.
How often do you see kids out on bikes or at skateparks anymore?
Joking aside, I do worry that things like dating apps being the main way of meeting people means that it’s much more rare to meet someone totally different to you in the way you could at work or a night out.
Moving this away from dating and sex - I wonder if living life online therefore narrows friendship groups? Cant be great for society, and so we’re back to wanting pubs and other less boozy meeting places.
I've never had sex with anyone I've met through a dating app.
The advent of the £9 pint won’t help boost the birth rate as we were discussing yesterday. Wrong decision chancellor - get young people drunk in close proximity to each other, and we’ll get more babies.
Smartphones kill sex, drinking and mental health.
How often do you see kids out on bikes or at skateparks anymore?
Joking aside, I do worry that things like dating apps being the main way of meeting people means that it’s much more rare to meet someone totally different to you in the way you could at work or a night out.
Moving this away from dating and sex - I wonder if living life online therefore narrows friendship groups? Cant be great for society, and so we’re back to wanting pubs and other less boozy meeting places.
I was fairly comfortably anti social even before the advent of everyone having smartphones and the internet, but I feel like there's a lot more like me now, who find it less comfortable than they may pretend.
The advent of the £9 pint won’t help boost the birth rate as we were discussing yesterday. Wrong decision chancellor - get young people drunk in close proximity to each other, and we’ll get more babies.
Sad, Woke, Left-wing shit by juveniles playing at government.
Come along. Would you really want a snap of Nigel Lawson on your wall? I wouldn't even want a snap of Nigella Lawson, and she's considerably easier on the eye than her father.
There'd have been a portrait of someone else before Lawson, just that there weren't any whining losers moaning in the paper that he replaced something else. Given Lawson was responsible for a pre-election boom followed by a vicious bust, housing market crash and doubling of interest rates, putting millions in negative equity, he's a pretty shit role model for a CoE, why not someone like Clarke or even Major.
Portrait talk is among the lowest of political commentary. If nothign else it's just responding to obvious trolling by whoever changes the portraits, so feels like if people do respond they might miss something important, like the distraction part of a magic trick.
So the models project a coin toss with a slight Trump bias, while the betting market make Trump almost twice as likely to win as Harris.
It is a very significant divergence.
Biden traded mostly between 1.1 and 1.2 for a long time after winning the last election. It would be reasonable to expect a similar scenario this time around if Trump loses. Adjusting for that I don't find the price variances between the models and betfair significant.
Don't worry, the Groucho Club is still only around £6.50.
Start at under 2 quid in Spoon's, in God's country at least
My local village pubs currently charges £3.75 per pint of real ale. I can’t advise on the price of unreal lager. I will update you after the budget if it changes.
Cheapest pint in Spoons is £1.79 (£1.29 with a Camra voucher).
Hang on, this is an important fact. Can you still use the new look CAMRA vouchers in spoons? When they rebranded the vouchers I assumed that was because Tim Martin ditched them.
A new pub is opening in my corner of suburban north London. It’s a gastropub with seasonal food and an open kitchen. Good food is the key to success in the pub sector.
Interestingly, it does not accept cash. Which I thought was a clever move: will save a lot of time and risk.
Free entertainment, such as live music or board games, is also a useful pub offering.
Cricket and rugby clubs provide live sport when one of their teams are playing.
Don't worry, the Groucho Club is still only around £6.50.
Start at under 2 quid in Spoon's, in God's country at least
My local village pubs currently charges £3.75 per pint of real ale. I can’t advise on the price of unreal lager. I will update you after the budget if it changes.
Cheapest pint in Spoons is £1.79 (£1.29 with a Camra voucher).
The likelihood of someone being in CAMRA and also being willing to drink Greene King IPA or Ruddles is pretty low, though.
As a Cambridge pub graffito above the urinals had it: "Piss hard, it's a long way to Bury St Edmunds".
“Prime Minister, why was Taylor Swift given a special police escort?”
Hmmm
Hmmmmm what? What do you think the issue is? Home Secretary and Mayor believe extra protection needed following Austrian terrorist issue. Police disagree. Home Secretary and Mayor get their way, possibly under pressure from Swift's team. Seems normal stuff.
“Prime Minister, why was Taylor Swift given a special police escort?”
Hmmm
Hmmmmm what? What do you think the issue is? Home Secretary and Mayor believe extra protection needed following Austrian terrorist issue. Police disagree. Home Secretary and Mayor get their way, possibly under pressure from Swift's team. Seems normal stuff.
What new conspiracy are you trying to spread now?
How about… you don’t respond to me and I don’t respond to you. Since I can’t figure out how to mute you on here.
Nope. Each time you spout or link to conpiracies I am going to out you. You have a track record of doing so, some of it appalling. When you linked to QAnon here and then later to an appalling racist anti Semite you deserved it and I'm not going to let you off the hook.
Leon has often described this place an online pub. How do I put this. I’d not find you out across the bar for a catch-up? I’d finish my drink and go for a curry? I don’t think you’ve said anything interesting about the world at all ever. It is a drain on life force even reading your angry, sad person antagonism.
This is a betting site. Last night I flagged a growing online story that might be as important/unimportant to driving marginal turnout for the right, as the Puerto Rico story might be for the left.
Because you are an intellectually challenged and needlessly aggressive person, you called me a conspiracy theorist for doing so, rather than thanking me for a tip that might or might not prove important. Joe Rogan himself (as well as Musk) has been explicitly flagging the apparent shadow banning of his interview to his many millions of followers. And the story has caught on like wildfire. But no, you know better.
As I say, consider yourself metaphorically muted from here on in, my life is far too precious to waste any more of it engaging with such a hostile bore. Cheerio.
Well seeing as I have never mentioned Rogan on here or responded to you about Rogan ever, you clearly have me mixed up with someone else. Obviously others have responded to you similarly.
I call you a conspiracy theorist because you are. You do it regularly. Your worse two being a link to QAnon stuff sometime ago and more recently a Twitter post whose poster had the most appalling anti Semite stuff on it. Really extreme stuff.
Obviously I hit a nerve by the nature of your reply. I am never angry or aggressive. I make a point of being civil. You, obviously not so, by your reply.
The beneficiaries of the higher minimum wage will be private landlords who can probably whack on another 10% to the rent in areas of limited housing supply, to start to deal with all the new housing regulation in the private rented sector.
So many of our society's problems arise from housing scarcity forcing costs to an absurdly high proportion of people's salaries.
A few ideas:
1. Huge liberalisation in planning approval process. Pre-approve large areas for construction to reduce the scarcity and value of planning permission being granted.
2. Tax breaks to incentivise the building of homes. Aim to bring in new competition to the area.
3. Tax property ownership properly, and potentially land value as well. That means a much higher annual tax as a % property value, combined with scrapping stamp duty that discourages mobility and downsizing.
We can't have a productive economy if so much of our income generated is paid away to rent seekers. People with enough money to be a landlord should be investing in companies, not in homes.
I exclude build to rent in the above categorisation as that's actually helping things.
The only entity that is going to build affordable housing is the state either directly or through housing associations. There could also be a shake-up of property taxes to improve liquidity in the housing market, the disincentives to downsize don't help, unlikely to happen though.
The only reason that houses prices haven't collapsed, long ago, and we haven't got 8 houses each, is the constraints on not building them.
I can buy an acre of land in Marden, in Kent, nice countryside, near a train station to London etc. £2500 an acre. A house round there can go for a million plus. You could put 2 on acre. So why hasn't everyone filled their boots?
Workers rights apparently always hurt businesses. Frankly I don't know where some people would stop.
We were discussing slavery earlier …..
Some people think that we need to import more people to keep wages down.
I say roll to the ultimate conclusion, on that one.
{Scouts locations for a statue down on Bristol docks}
EDIT: Simply raising the minimum wage will have effects. One is that it will increase the value of operating illegally. Given we have no enforcement....
The advent of the £9 pint won’t help boost the birth rate as we were discussing yesterday. Wrong decision chancellor - get young people drunk in close proximity to each other, and we’ll get more babies.
Smartphones kill sex, drinking and mental health.
How often do you see kids out on bikes or at skateparks anymore?
Might be related to how much time you spend out on bikes/at skate parks nowadays
Anecdata, my nephew, who is 12, spends most of his free time either down the skate park with his mates or in the local woods doing jumps on his bike.
No 10 denying prior knowledge of the decision by the CPS to charge the suspect with terrorism
I expect an urgent question to the Home Secretary asking when she knew ricin and the Al Quaeda manual had been discovered in the suspects house
I suspect she found out quite late on. even with high profile cases like this there'd be little to no communication with the home secretary about operational matters.
Seriously? It’s not just this week the rice in the Tupperware and a manual was found is it? These were found hours after the attack.
I’m with Big G on this one. Urgent Ricingate questions for Cooper to answer, what did she know and when.
Do you know when they were found? What's your source?
The manual could have been encrypted and significant time taken to decrypt etc. The ricin would have needed samples taken and testing. We don't know when the first inklings were that maybe it was terror related.
Hmmm. I suspect people whose job is to look for ricin and other such terrorist chemistry sets know pretty much in seconds that they are dealing with an attempt ricin manufacture.
I was being generous. DSTL were all over this and a quick mass spec of the samples would probably have directly rung the the Bat phone to counter terrorism. I don’t doubt it’s been known for a fair amount of time while the CPS mull over the charges.
Workers rights apparently always hurt businesses. Frankly I don't know where some people would stop.
There is a balance though, surely. Should a new employee automatically get full employment rights on day one? E.g. turn up at 9, go home feeling stressed at 10, get signed off by the GP, company pays sick leave? I think we have a pretty good current balance in the U.K., but moving the dial a fraction in either direction is hardly the end of the world.
The teenager accused of the stabbing murders of three young girls in Southport has been charged with producing the poison ricin and possessing a military study of an Al Qaeda training manual.
This isn't going to help all conspiracy theory stuff, as the police were very quick to say not terrorist related and the online stuff which got people out on the streets was all about a cover up of this being a terrorist attack and strange story of the soldier stabbing (which we still don't really know much about).
Wasn't the crux of the 'fake news' story that he was known to the security services?
The crux was that he was an immigrant, which he wasn't, IIRC.
Farage falsely claimed the police were not telling the whole truth around the tragedies in Southport shortly after the stabbings first happened, and suggested the suspect was already known to the security services.
I can understand why the police didn’t want to release this pre whatever that Tommy Robinson march was, but the perception I.e what some groups will do with this won’t help.
So they’ve put “Tommy” in prison, and are now saying that this attack was terrorism after all?
Hope the police and Home Office are braced for the response, let’s all hope and pray it doesn’t get as ugly as it did earlier in the summer.
It's cold and dark now, safe time to admit the hush up.
The weather is set fair for the next week. Plenty of fireworks around too. (Not that I want it to kick off - I don't think it will - but if that was the thinking behind the lies, then the police deserve everything they get)
I find some of the language and sentiments expressed by certain posters on here pretty unpleasant at the moment.
Are you really saying that individual police officers deserve to be attacked with fireworks? Pretty shameful imo.
Nope, I'm saying the powers that be having to ask their officers to deal with shit deserve everything they get. (If I were rank and file, I'd refuse to go out there after this).
That isn't how your previous post reads, to me at least.
"Not that I want it to kick off"
Obviously, police don't have much of choice, so I will retract any suggestion that they deserve it. But this is a cover up. And it is an absolute fucking disgrace.
What specifically had been covered up?
We were told that it was disinformation to link the crime to Islamist terrorism. Now it seems to be the truth.
The disinformation was primarily that he was an illegal/boat person.
Along with an incorrect name too.
Isn’t this just correlation/causation
1. He has mental health problems. 2. He is interest in radical Islamic topics 3. He stabbed some kids
2&3 flow from 1. But that doesn’t mean 3 flows from 2
Wouldn't it when that kind of radical Islamic writing says to treat women as sub-human and infidels as animals and then he went to to stab infidel girls?
Workers rights apparently always hurt businesses. Frankly I don't know where some people would stop.
There is a balance though, surely. Should a new employee automatically get full employment rights on day one? E.g. turn up at 9, go home feeling stressed at 10, get signed off by the GP, company pays sick leave? I think we have a pretty good current balance in the U.K., but moving the dial a fraction in either direction is hardly the end of the world.
I don't think it makes sense that you don't get full rights until after being at a company for two years. That is surely too long.
Frankly if a UK business can’t afford to pay people a living wage then I would not be happy supporting them.
Which isn't what you were saying not long ago when you were demanding that employers be able to bring in people on minimum wage into the country to evade pay rises to fill vacancies.
Specifically you said local hospitality couldn't fill vacancies unless people were allowed to migrate on the existing minimum wage rather than put up wages.
When did I say that then?
A while back when London restauranteurs were in the news for not being able to fill vacancies and saying more migrants were needed to fill them.
I said they should just let supply and demand sort the labour market and pay a higher wage. You said they couldn't afford to pay higher wages.
I said if they can't afford higher wages then the least productive firms should go out of business and the more productive ones would gain the customers of the other ones and be able to afford the higher wages. You said you were opposed to the idea of pubs going out of business.
I am opposed to the idea of pubs going out of business. The moves tomorrow are not going to put pubs out of business though.
Anyway, is everything alright on your side? We haven't crossed paths recently and I always used to see you post frequently.
I mean pubs will definitely go out of business in a wage/price spiral. Not enough people on the minimum wage go to pubs so there won't be much additional demand but prices will have to go up to pay for the increased rates. Booze in pubs has got very elastic demand.
Sadly going to the pub is so expensive that I don't go as much as I used to, despite earning significantly more. Corner shop is just so much cheaper.
No that's not true, the demand for pubs at £9 per pint will be noticeably lower than £7 per pint. Pubs are going to close and anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves.
There are other things we should be doing to help the industry rather than keeping wages low.
Indeed.
But it's amusing how some people are perfectly OK with wages going up as long as it's the state determining that everyone's wages go up, with no regards to local market conditions.
While being utterly horrified at supply and demand and local market conditions meaning that wages might locally go up above minimum wage if that is what is required.
The minimum wage should be a floor, not a ceiling, to wages.
Without productivity improvements minimum wage does act as a ceiling as well as a floor.
It does mean that pubs will need to careful manage the hours they open but the biggest issue for most won't be the minimum wage it will be the fact their business rates (which have been discounted since 2021) will be reverting back to their historic levels if the 75% relief that ends in March isn't extended.
In a free market wage rises can lead to productivity rises.
If market conditions demand above minimum wage pay rates to fill vacancies but some firms can't afford the wage rise so go out of business, leading to consolidation of the market and customers from those firms now frequenting the surviving firms, then the surviving firms staff both have higher pay and are more productive (serving more customers per hour).
A rise led by diktat rather than market forces doesn't have the same productivity boost.
I think at current rates it may in fact have the opposite effect as wage growth elsewhere in a business are sacrificed to pay for the minimum wage rises. So what ends up happening is highly productive people either leave or become less motivated/productive to retain people on lower wages. What worries me is that Labour are simultaneously increasing business costs in wages, NI and supposedly NI on pension contributions as well as small business rates relief being on the chopping block. It's going to lead to a lot of upheaval if they do all four of those. Lots won't survive and unemployment will go up, probably by a fair amount.
Don't worry, the Groucho Club is still only around £6.50.
Start at under 2 quid in Spoon's, in God's country at least
My local village pubs currently charges £3.75 per pint of real ale. I can’t advise on the price of unreal lager. I will update you after the budget if it changes.
Cheapest pint in Spoons is £1.79 (£1.29 with a Camra voucher).
The likelihood of someone being in CAMRA and also being willing to drink Greene King IPA or Ruddles is pretty low, though.
As a Cambridge pub graffito above the urinals had it: "Piss hard, it's a long way to Bury St Edmunds".
the 80/- in Spoons is not a bad pint and plenty nice ales at just over the 2 quid mark
Don't worry, the Groucho Club is still only around £6.50.
Start at under 2 quid in Spoon's, in God's country at least
My local village pubs currently charges £3.75 per pint of real ale. I can’t advise on the price of unreal lager. I will update you after the budget if it changes.
Cheapest pint in Spoons is £1.79 (£1.29 with a Camra voucher).
The likelihood of someone being in CAMRA and also being willing to drink Greene King IPA or Ruddles is pretty low, though.
As a Cambridge pub graffito above the urinals had it: "Piss hard, it's a long way to Bury St Edmunds".
the 80/- in Spoons is not a bad pint and plenty nice ales at just over the 2 quid mark
We don't get the Belhaven 80/- down here. Now, Caledonian 80/-, that is worth drinking. We get Doom Bar at £2.74 (or £1.99 on Mondays) though, which is decent.
Comments
He's an icon and one of the most transformative and forward thinking Chancellors of the 20th Century.
Nigella would be in another room - not the office.
One that amuses me, is that he was trying to make ricin and was doing it incompetently, so it was not fully clear what he was trying to do.
Also: it is widely believed that things like the anarchist's cookbook that are circulated nowadays have been (ahem) altered to make them less dangerous. Or, in some cases, more dangerous to the people trying out the recipes.
How often do you see kids out on bikes or at skateparks anymore?
This is a betting site. Last night I flagged a growing online story that might be as important/unimportant to driving marginal turnout for the right, as the Puerto Rico story might be for the left.
Because you are an intellectually challenged and needlessly aggressive person, you called me a conspiracy theorist for doing so, rather than thanking me for a tip that might or might not prove important. Joe Rogan himself (as well as Musk) has been explicitly flagging the apparent shadow banning of his interview to his many millions of followers. And the story has caught on like wildfire. But no, you know better.
As I say, consider yourself metaphorically muted from here on in, my life is far too precious to waste any more of it engaging with such a hostile bore. Cheerio.
Interestingly, it does not accept cash. Which I thought was a clever move: will save a lot of time and risk.
I honestly think this is the most anti-business, anti-enterprise and anti-aspiration government we've ever had, despite Starmer's gaslighting about growth. And given what the last thirty years have been like, that's quite an achievement.
More pregnancies combined with more abortions is a win/win. We get more births to loving families who want to bring up their kids, but without the ones who don't.
Whilst I'm leaning Trump, I do gut feeling think Harris will win Pennsylvania, so it all comes down to Michigan for me, as I think Trump edges the rest. So good news there bery welcome.
What we won't get is transformative outcomes; what we will get is the bill.
Moving this away from dating and sex - I wonder if living life online therefore narrows friendship groups? Cant be great for society, and so we’re back to wanting pubs and other less boozy meeting places.
Cheapest pint in Spoons is £1.79 (£1.29 with a Camra voucher).
Given Lawson was responsible for a pre-election boom followed by a vicious bust, housing market crash and doubling of interest rates, putting millions in negative equity, he's a pretty shit role model for a CoE, why not someone like Clarke or even Major.
But they are also destroying their vodka-making capacity in the process. Can Putin survive sober Russians?
Housing crashes are a good thing. Means housing becomes more affordable, after the housing crash home ownership rates hit record highs which have not been seen again since.
Seems like an excellent role model for a CoE. Better than someone who'll continue with stagnation and rent seeking.
As a Cambridge pub graffito above the urinals had it: "Piss hard, it's a long way to Bury St Edmunds".
Well, I've never used a dating app.
Or I'm just fooling myself anyway.
If you want wages to go up, why tax employers who pay higher wages while leaving unearned incomes untaxed?
NEW THREAD
Cricket and rugby clubs provide live sport when one of their teams are playing.
I call you a conspiracy theorist because you are. You do it regularly. Your worse two being a link to QAnon stuff sometime ago and more recently a Twitter post whose poster had the most appalling anti Semite stuff on it. Really extreme stuff.
Obviously I hit a nerve by the nature of your reply. I am never angry or aggressive. I make a point of being civil. You, obviously not so, by your reply.
I can buy an acre of land in Marden, in Kent, nice countryside, near a train station to London etc. £2500 an acre. A house round there can go for a million plus. You could put 2 on acre. So why hasn't everyone filled their boots?
I say roll to the ultimate conclusion, on that one.
{Scouts locations for a statue down on Bristol docks}
EDIT: Simply raising the minimum wage will have effects. One is that it will increase the value of operating illegally. Given we have no enforcement....
Anecdata, my nephew, who is 12, spends most of his free time either down the skate park with his mates or in the local woods doing jumps on his bike.
Agree about smartphones though!
I think we have a pretty good current balance in the U.K., but moving the dial a fraction in either direction is hardly the end of the world.