The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
Yes, they will be forced to sell up and pocket their million+ quid. My heart bleeds.
What a stupid fucking response. The whole point being we want farms to continue as viable businesses. We need farms and farmers. Unless of course you are one of those fuckwits who think the food in supermarkets is miraculously created out of thin air.
Of course it isn't created out of thin air, there's a whole global supply chain.
We should get our food from whomever is best placed to supply it. If British farmers, then great. If French, Spanish, Argentinian, American, Australian or anywhere else then great too.
Given higher import costs of food from Europe given Brexit and the Ukraine war not a good idea and meat from the Americas and Australia is often heavily chemical filled and less good quality than ours
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the quality of Australian meat.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
The irony is that her optician said she will need it but best to go on the 18 month waiting list now so that she will have it before it becomes a necessity
He also added in England it takes 6 weeks waiting but not sure how true that is
It is true. ISTCs do the majority of NHS cataract surgery in England now, with waits typically of a few weeks.
What's an ISTC?
Independent Sector Treatment Centre
They do things where it makes sense to do them on mass (Cataracts / Hip operations) or manage MRI systems.
NHS needs to do loads more of this for routine operations.
Expensive capital equipment such as MRI scanners should be working 24/7, with people offered the option of turning up in the middle of the night tomorrow rather than waiting weeks or months.
Streeting plans further expansion, but it is pretty much limited to quick turnaround surgery in fit patients.
Getting a quick MRI is no benefit if it's a 6 month wait to see a rheumatologist to discuss the findings. There are bottlenecks in the system to address, but it does tend to just shift the queue elsewhere.
I disagree. Last summer my mother went into Kings Mill for pancreatitis. They worked out pretty quickly that it wasn't any of the really bad causes but for obvious reasons wanted to know what was causing it. They had to keep her in for a couple of days uintil the blood markers showed the epiosode was over but wanted to have an MRI to check for gall stones as the Ultrasound had not been clear. They would not send her home because it would have taken weeks to get her the MRi if she was out of hospital.
So she waited in hospital, taking up a bed that others could have been using (and which was certainly needed) for an additional 4 days until they could get her the MRI. And she was not the only one. All because they had only one team capable of running the MRI who were already working a 14 hour days and a 7 day week.
That’s nuts, what do a couple of MRI operators cost, compared to the cost of keeping beds occupied for days because people are waiting for scans?
Yep. And there is another MRI scanner at Newark which doesn't get used that often as they don't have the staff for it.
Totally bonkers, you spend £1m on a scanner but don’t spend the money to train people to use it?
Where I work, expensive capital equipment comes with a training programme.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Though I thought this interesting:
"“Farmers,” Clarkson said on the X social network, “I know that you have been shafted today. But please don’t despair. Just look after yourselves for five short years and this shower will be gone.”
Yet Clarkson himself – or rather the prospective beneficiaries of his estate – may be among those “shafted”. Clarkson has previously said that he bought his 126-hectare (312-acre), £4.25m farm, Diddly Squat, in order to avoid inheritance tax on his estate. In a 2021 interview with The Times Clarkson said that avoiding inheritance tax was “the critical thing” in his decision to buy the farm."
And later in the same article:
"only 44% of the individuals who gained agricultural relief had received any trading income from agriculture at any point in the five years prior to death. It is “not the classic working farmers” who will bear the brunt of the changes, he argued. The change could help cool the rural property market because fewer people will buy a field as inheritance tax dodges"
So clearly this is a relief that has become a tax dodge for non-farmers. Whether this is the best solution to address the issue, I don't know.
I guess if you wanted to provide more relief for family farms that had been in the family for generations, you could provide £1m of relief per generation the farm has been in the family, perhaps capped at five generations.
The other thing is that, if the change does reduce the use of agricultural land as an IHT dodge, and reduces agricultural land prices, then the value of farms will fall and fewer will be above the £1m threshold than at present.
Lower land prices is good for genuine farmers looking to expand their farm.
That's a good point. Mr Clarkson seems to think that the cap will either be raised/abolished when (if) labour are voted out. I'm not sure it will be that simple.
The key to getting land prices down will be to put off "investment" companies who don't farm it themselves. The growth in solar farms, to take one example may keep prices high, we will see.
If you are a farmer with little or no borrowing, a land price crash is your friend
Seems like only five minutes since farmers were complaining they couldn't afford to buy land as the price was being pumped up by City-types trying to avoid IHT.
Not just city types; a lot of 'our' land has been acquired by foreigners - an inevitable consequence of a perpetual balance of payments deficit. There are nations, not universally regarded as fascist dictatorships, who restrict foreign ownership of land because it's regarded as too important to buy and sell like bags of flour. But we, of course, are forever open for business. I have no qualms about foreign billionaires owning skyscrapers in the London docks but I'm less keen on them hoovering up the better half of Worcestershire just because it's there.
You should have a look at the Highlands. So many of the shooting estates in foreign ownership. But, as you say, this is the price we pay for buying more than we make.
An American plutocrat once advised investors to "keep buying land until you reach the sea because they're not making it any more".
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
That average is the mean average distorted by very large holdings.
The median average is much lower.
According to DEFRA 59% of English farms have less than 50 hectares.
50 hectares is still 125ish acres. So still well over £1 million in land value alone without everything else.
There is a huge variety in farms and associated land value, from your massive arable farm in East Anglia to your small hill farm in Wales. It needs a deep analysis rather than broadbrush averages to determine if the policy is a mistake.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
The irony is that her optician said she will need it but best to go on the 18 month waiting list now so that she will have it before it becomes a necessity
He also added in England it takes 6 weeks waiting but not sure how true that is
It is true. ISTCs do the majority of NHS cataract surgery in England now, with waits typically of a few weeks.
What's an ISTC?
Independent Sector Treatment Centre
They do things where it makes sense to do them on mass (Cataracts / Hip operations) or manage MRI systems.
NHS needs to do loads more of this for routine operations.
Expensive capital equipment such as MRI scanners should be working 24/7, with people offered the option of turning up in the middle of the night tomorrow rather than waiting weeks or months.
Streeting plans further expansion, but it is pretty much limited to quick turnaround surgery in fit patients.
Getting a quick MRI is no benefit if it's a 6 month wait to see a rheumatologist to discuss the findings. There are bottlenecks in the system to address, but it does tend to just shift the queue elsewhere.
I disagree. Last summer my mother went into Kings Mill for pancreatitis. They worked out pretty quickly that it wasn't any of the really bad causes but for obvious reasons wanted to know what was causing it. They had to keep her in for a couple of days uintil the blood markers showed the epiosode was over but wanted to have an MRI to check for gall stones as the Ultrasound had not been clear. They would not send her home because it would have taken weeks to get her the MRi if she was out of hospital.
So she waited in hospital, taking up a bed that others could have been using (and which was certainly needed) for an additional 4 days until they could get her the MRI. And she was not the only one. All because they had only one team capable of running the MRI who were already working a 14 hour days and a 7 day week.
That’s nuts, what do a couple of MRI operators cost, compared to the cost of keeping beds occupied for days because people are waiting for scans?
Yep. And there is another MRI scanner at Newark which doesn't get used that often as they don't have the staff for it.
Nearly every time I've had an MRI scan it's been private.
They are always in throughput mode - they run from early morning (before work) till 8-9pm.
Other testing is also an issue - when my father was in hospital, they seemed to have a backlog on basic bloodwork. I'm not talking cultures etc. I'm talking about "What is his potassium level?". Doctors would come round and go "We need to see that before we can make a decision" then leave again.....
At one point, my brother and I were discussing finding a private laboratory and hiring someone to take blood samples and test them...
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
Yes, they will be forced to sell up and pocket their million+ quid. My heart bleeds.
What a stupid fucking response. The whole point being we want farms to continue as viable businesses. We need farms and farmers. Unless of course you are one of those fuckwits who think the food in supermarkets is miraculously created out of thin air.
Do you think the farmland is just going to vanish into thin air after it is sold? Of course not. It will still be farmed by somebody, and very likely in a more productive fashion.
In the area where I grew up, on the edge of the city, the big local landowner has grown incredibly rich by selling chunks of his land for development. He spends his time down the local pub or jetting around the world. His son has spent his whole life racing and crashing cars. AKAIK, he has never done a day's work in his life, with his lifestyle funded by dad's cash and a bumper inheritance of farmland to look forward to. Meanwhile, most of the land is barely used, with just the odd field let out for grazing now and then. Why bother, when its value just keeps going up and junior will inherit the lot?
I have got extended family in farming, all farming relatively small farms. Some arable, some mixed arable and livestock. One of the things that connects them is a love of the land. Much has been in their families for generations, and they care for it.
And hence we get onto this: "It will still be farmed by somebody, and very likely in a more productive fashion."
Yes. It will be bought by larger farms, in many cases massive agribusinesses that will not care for the land; only what the land produces. Worse, many of these are far more adept at avoiding tax than those small farmers.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
The irony is that her optician said she will need it but best to go on the 18 month waiting list now so that she will have it before it becomes a necessity
He also added in England it takes 6 weeks waiting but not sure how true that is
It is true. ISTCs do the majority of NHS cataract surgery in England now, with waits typically of a few weeks.
What's an ISTC?
Independent Sector Treatment Centre
They do things where it makes sense to do them on mass (Cataracts / Hip operations) or manage MRI systems.
NHS needs to do loads more of this for routine operations.
Expensive capital equipment such as MRI scanners should be working 24/7, with people offered the option of turning up in the middle of the night tomorrow rather than waiting weeks or months.
Streeting plans further expansion, but it is pretty much limited to quick turnaround surgery in fit patients.
Getting a quick MRI is no benefit if it's a 6 month wait to see a rheumatologist to discuss the findings. There are bottlenecks in the system to address, but it does tend to just shift the queue elsewhere.
I disagree. Last summer my mother went into Kings Mill for pancreatitis. They worked out pretty quickly that it wasn't any of the really bad causes but for obvious reasons wanted to know what was causing it. They had to keep her in for a couple of days uintil the blood markers showed the epiosode was over but wanted to have an MRI to check for gall stones as the Ultrasound had not been clear. They would not send her home because it would have taken weeks to get her the MRi if she was out of hospital.
So she waited in hospital, taking up a bed that others could have been using (and which was certainly needed) for an additional 4 days until they could get her the MRI. And she was not the only one. All because they had only one team capable of running the MRI who were already working a 14 hour days and a 7 day week.
Sure, more capacity is needed, but it needs radiographers and radiologists too.
If the Radiologists and Radiographers in King's Mill decide to work in a new MRI ISTC then the service in King's Mill for inpatients with pancreatis will get worse rather than better. And where else will the ISTC recruit apart from the NHS?
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
That average is the mean average distorted by very large holdings.
The median average is much lower.
According to DEFRA 59% of English farms have less than 50 hectares.
50 hectares is still 125ish acres. So still well over £1 million in land value alone without everything else.
Going on the absolute upper limit of that range, most won't be at the upper limit.
And based on an average price that may be distorted by the same thing (I'm not sure on that) if it's a mean average then farmland with housing premiums on it that get sold will massively be distorting the average since housing adds 00s to the price of land given our completely broken planning system.
Or we could look at the real data that actually gets recorded rather than multiplying mean averages together to pretend that's an average. As Neidle did.
I nearly bought a farmhouse in Marden, Kent. 35 acres of agricultural land was separate. The farmhouse was way more expensive than the rest of the land.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Though I thought this interesting:
"“Farmers,” Clarkson said on the X social network, “I know that you have been shafted today. But please don’t despair. Just look after yourselves for five short years and this shower will be gone.”
Yet Clarkson himself – or rather the prospective beneficiaries of his estate – may be among those “shafted”. Clarkson has previously said that he bought his 126-hectare (312-acre), £4.25m farm, Diddly Squat, in order to avoid inheritance tax on his estate. In a 2021 interview with The Times Clarkson said that avoiding inheritance tax was “the critical thing” in his decision to buy the farm."
And later in the same article:
"only 44% of the individuals who gained agricultural relief had received any trading income from agriculture at any point in the five years prior to death. It is “not the classic working farmers” who will bear the brunt of the changes, he argued. The change could help cool the rural property market because fewer people will buy a field as inheritance tax dodges"
So clearly this is a relief that has become a tax dodge for non-farmers. Whether this is the best solution to address the issue, I don't know.
I guess if you wanted to provide more relief for family farms that had been in the family for generations, you could provide £1m of relief per generation the farm has been in the family, perhaps capped at five generations.
The other thing is that, if the change does reduce the use of agricultural land as an IHT dodge, and reduces agricultural land prices, then the value of farms will fall and fewer will be above the £1m threshold than at present.
Lower land prices is good for genuine farmers looking to expand their farm.
That's a good point. Mr Clarkson seems to think that the cap will either be raised/abolished when (if) labour are voted out. I'm not sure it will be that simple.
The key to getting land prices down will be to put off "investment" companies who don't farm it themselves. The growth in solar farms, to take one example may keep prices high, we will see.
If you are a farmer with little or no borrowing, a land price crash is your friend
Seems like only five minutes since farmers were complaining they couldn't afford to buy land as the price was being pumped up by City-types trying to avoid IHT.
Not just city types; a lot of 'our' land has been acquired by foreigners - an inevitable consequence of a perpetual balance of payments deficit. There are nations, not universally regarded as fascist dictatorships, who restrict foreign ownership of land because it's regarded as too important to buy and sell like bags of flour. But we, of course, are forever open for business. I have no qualms about foreign billionaires owning skyscrapers in the London docks but I'm less keen on them hoovering up the better half of Worcestershire just because it's there.
You should have a look at the Highlands. So many of the shooting estates in foreign ownership. But, as you say, this is the price we pay for buying more than we make.
An American plutocrat once advised investors to "keep buying land until you reach the sea because they're not making it any more".
Though how close land is to the sea seriously affects its value, giving another famous plutocrat the idea of moving the sea.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
Yes, they will be forced to sell up and pocket their million+ quid. My heart bleeds.
The Labour mentality in one, class envy and class war above everything else. Including the national interest
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
That average is the mean average distorted by very large holdings.
The median average is much lower.
According to DEFRA 59% of English farms have less than 50 hectares.
50 hectares is still 125ish acres. So still well over £1 million in land value alone without everything else.
Going on the absolute upper limit of that range, most won't be at the upper limit.
And based on an average price that may be distorted by the same thing (I'm not sure on that) if it's a mean average then farmland with housing premiums on it that get sold will massively be distorting the average since housing adds 00s to the price of land given our completely broken planning system.
Or we could look at the real data that actually gets recorded rather than multiplying mean averages together to pretend that's an average. As Neidle did.
I nearly bought a farmhouse in Marden, Kent. 35 acres of agricultural land was separate. The farmhouse was way more expensive than the rest of the land.
OT on looking up my shiny new pills on Youtube in order to check pronunciation, I saw this diagram and immediately thought oh, that's glucose on the bottom left.
London University will be pleased to know its efforts to teach me about hexose sugars and their configurations many decades ago were not completely wasted. All altruists gladly make gum in gallon tanks.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Though I thought this interesting:
"“Farmers,” Clarkson said on the X social network, “I know that you have been shafted today. But please don’t despair. Just look after yourselves for five short years and this shower will be gone.”
Yet Clarkson himself – or rather the prospective beneficiaries of his estate – may be among those “shafted”. Clarkson has previously said that he bought his 126-hectare (312-acre), £4.25m farm, Diddly Squat, in order to avoid inheritance tax on his estate. In a 2021 interview with The Times Clarkson said that avoiding inheritance tax was “the critical thing” in his decision to buy the farm."
And later in the same article:
"only 44% of the individuals who gained agricultural relief had received any trading income from agriculture at any point in the five years prior to death. It is “not the classic working farmers” who will bear the brunt of the changes, he argued. The change could help cool the rural property market because fewer people will buy a field as inheritance tax dodges"
So clearly this is a relief that has become a tax dodge for non-farmers. Whether this is the best solution to address the issue, I don't know.
I guess if you wanted to provide more relief for family farms that had been in the family for generations, you could provide £1m of relief per generation the farm has been in the family, perhaps capped at five generations.
The other thing is that, if the change does reduce the use of agricultural land as an IHT dodge, and reduces agricultural land prices, then the value of farms will fall and fewer will be above the £1m threshold than at present.
Lower land prices is good for genuine farmers looking to expand their farm.
That's a good point. Mr Clarkson seems to think that the cap will either be raised/abolished when (if) labour are voted out. I'm not sure it will be that simple.
The key to getting land prices down will be to put off "investment" companies who don't farm it themselves. The growth in solar farms, to take one example may keep prices high, we will see.
If you are a farmer with little or no borrowing, a land price crash is your friend
Seems like only five minutes since farmers were complaining they couldn't afford to buy land as the price was being pumped up by City-types trying to avoid IHT.
Not just city types; a lot of 'our' land has been acquired by foreigners - an inevitable consequence of a perpetual balance of payments deficit. There are nations, not universally regarded as fascist dictatorships, who restrict foreign ownership of land because it's regarded as too important to buy and sell like bags of flour. But we, of course, are forever open for business. I have no qualms about foreign billionaires owning skyscrapers in the London docks but I'm less keen on them hoovering up the better half of Worcestershire just because it's there.
You should have a look at the Highlands. So many of the shooting estates in foreign ownership. But, as you say, this is the price we pay for buying more than we make.
An American plutocrat once advised investors to "keep buying land until you reach the sea because they're not making it any more".
Though how close land is to the sea seriously affects its value, giving another famous plutocrat the idea of moving the sea.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
The irony is that her optician said she will need it but best to go on the 18 month waiting list now so that she will have it before it becomes a necessity
He also added in England it takes 6 weeks waiting but not sure how true that is
It is true. ISTCs do the majority of NHS cataract surgery in England now, with waits typically of a few weeks.
What's an ISTC?
Independent Sector Treatment Centre
They do things where it makes sense to do them on mass (Cataracts / Hip operations) or manage MRI systems.
NHS needs to do loads more of this for routine operations.
Expensive capital equipment such as MRI scanners should be working 24/7, with people offered the option of turning up in the middle of the night tomorrow rather than waiting weeks or months.
Streeting plans further expansion, but it is pretty much limited to quick turnaround surgery in fit patients.
Getting a quick MRI is no benefit if it's a 6 month wait to see a rheumatologist to discuss the findings. There are bottlenecks in the system to address, but it does tend to just shift the queue elsewhere.
I disagree. Last summer my mother went into Kings Mill for pancreatitis. They worked out pretty quickly that it wasn't any of the really bad causes but for obvious reasons wanted to know what was causing it. They had to keep her in for a couple of days uintil the blood markers showed the epiosode was over but wanted to have an MRI to check for gall stones as the Ultrasound had not been clear. They would not send her home because it would have taken weeks to get her the MRi if she was out of hospital.
So she waited in hospital, taking up a bed that others could have been using (and which was certainly needed) for an additional 4 days until they could get her the MRI. And she was not the only one. All because they had only one team capable of running the MRI who were already working a 14 hour days and a 7 day week.
Sure, more capacity is needed, but it needs radiographers and radiologists too.
If the Radiologists and Radiographers in King's Mill decide to work in a new MRI ISTC then the service in King's Mill for inpatients with pancreatis will get worse rather than better. And where else will the ISTC recruit apart from the NHS?
The problem there is the artificial constraints on the supply of Radiologists and Radiographers. We need to create more of them.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
That average is the mean average distorted by very large holdings.
The median average is much lower.
According to DEFRA 59% of English farms have less than 50 hectares.
50 hectares is still 125ish acres. So still well over £1 million in land value alone without everything else.
Going on the absolute upper limit of that range, most won't be at the upper limit.
And based on an average price that may be distorted by the same thing (I'm not sure on that) if it's a mean average then farmland with housing premiums on it that get sold will massively be distorting the average since housing adds 00s to the price of land given our completely broken planning system.
Or we could look at the real data that actually gets recorded rather than multiplying mean averages together to pretend that's an average. As Neidle did.
It is nowhere near the upper limit of the range. Arable land sales vary from between £6,500 an acre for poor value land to £17k an acre for high quality. Housing sale land has no impact on those values as it is calculated separately and not included in the figures. Neidle is talking out of his arse.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
The irony is that her optician said she will need it but best to go on the 18 month waiting list now so that she will have it before it becomes a necessity
He also added in England it takes 6 weeks waiting but not sure how true that is
It is true. ISTCs do the majority of NHS cataract surgery in England now, with waits typically of a few weeks.
What's an ISTC?
Independent Sector Treatment Centre
They do things where it makes sense to do them on mass (Cataracts / Hip operations) or manage MRI systems.
NHS needs to do loads more of this for routine operations.
Expensive capital equipment such as MRI scanners should be working 24/7, with people offered the option of turning up in the middle of the night tomorrow rather than waiting weeks or months.
Streeting plans further expansion, but it is pretty much limited to quick turnaround surgery in fit patients.
Getting a quick MRI is no benefit if it's a 6 month wait to see a rheumatologist to discuss the findings. There are bottlenecks in the system to address, but it does tend to just shift the queue elsewhere.
I disagree. Last summer my mother went into Kings Mill for pancreatitis. They worked out pretty quickly that it wasn't any of the really bad causes but for obvious reasons wanted to know what was causing it. They had to keep her in for a couple of days uintil the blood markers showed the epiosode was over but wanted to have an MRI to check for gall stones as the Ultrasound had not been clear. They would not send her home because it would have taken weeks to get her the MRi if she was out of hospital.
So she waited in hospital, taking up a bed that others could have been using (and which was certainly needed) for an additional 4 days until they could get her the MRI. And she was not the only one. All because they had only one team capable of running the MRI who were already working a 14 hour days and a 7 day week.
That’s nuts, what do a couple of MRI operators cost, compared to the cost of keeping beds occupied for days because people are waiting for scans?
Yep. And there is another MRI scanner at Newark which doesn't get used that often as they don't have the staff for it.
Nearly every time I've had an MRI scan it's been private.
They are always in throughput mode - they run from early morning (before work) till 8-9pm.
Other testing is also an issue - when my father was in hospital, they seemed to have a backlog on basic bloodwork. I'm not talking cultures etc. I'm talking about "What is his potassium level?". Doctors would come round and go "We need to see that before we can make a decision" then leave again.....
At one point, my brother and I were discussing finding a private laboratory and hiring someone to take blood samples and test them...
Since Kings Mill has been mentioned, that's more or less how they run there - I have had scans at 8pm on a Friday evening there, and clinics on Saturdays or Sundays.
Kings Mill are interesting, as the the Trust is highly rated - the last time I looked they were the top rated hospital trust in the East Midlands.
If Richard can highlight those shortcomings he does, it identifies that much optimisation is likely possible everywhere.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
Yes, they will be forced to sell up and pocket their million+ quid. My heart bleeds.
What a stupid fucking response. The whole point being we want farms to continue as viable businesses. We need farms and farmers. Unless of course you are one of those fuckwits who think the food in supermarkets is miraculously created out of thin air.
Do you think the farmland is just going to vanish into thin air after it is sold? Of course not. It will still be farmed by somebody, and very likely in a more productive fashion.
In the area where I grew up, on the edge of the city, the big local landowner has grown incredibly rich by selling chunks of his land for development. He spends his time down the local pub or jetting around the world. His son has spent his whole life racing and crashing cars. AKAIK, he has never done a day's work in his life, with his lifestyle funded by dad's cash and a bumper inheritance of farmland to look forward to. Meanwhile, most of the land is barely used, with just the odd field let out for grazing now and then. Why bother, when its value just keeps going up and junior will inherit the lot?
I have got extended family in farming, all farming relatively small farms. Some arable, some mixed arable and livestock. One of the things that connects them is a love of the land. Much has been in their families for generations, and they care for it.
And hence we get onto this: "It will still be farmed by somebody, and very likely in a more productive fashion."
Yes. It will be bought by larger farms, in many cases massive agribusinesses that will not care for the land; only what the land produces. Worse, many of these are far more adept at avoiding tax than those small farmers.
It amuses me how some people seem to insist that we should have British food, but not care about what the British farms are producing.
If the businesses care about what their land produces as you claim, then that's more British made food.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
Yes, they will be forced to sell up and pocket their million+ quid. My heart bleeds.
The Labour mentality in one, class envy and class war above everything else. Including the national interest
I'd have a bit more respect for the class envy stuff if it wasn't for the fact that so many of the wealthy Labour types seem particularly un-socialist when it comes to either their property values or using every trick in the book to get their kids into the outstanding state primary schools.
The budget does seem to be unravelling, if not as swiftly as Truss'. But, increased long-term interest rates will be another burden to bear.
Still, I think that the voters need a good dose of socialism, from time to time, to remind them that it is not benevolent.
Once in a while you need someone to increase taxes so the next Tory Government can cut them without regard to the consequences of not raising enough tax revenue to keep public services running.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
Yes, they will be forced to sell up and pocket their million+ quid. My heart bleeds.
What a stupid fucking response. The whole point being we want farms to continue as viable businesses. We need farms and farmers. Unless of course you are one of those fuckwits who think the food in supermarkets is miraculously created out of thin air.
Do you think the farmland is just going to vanish into thin air after it is sold? Of course not. It will still be farmed by somebody, and very likely in a more productive fashion.
In the area where I grew up, on the edge of the city, the big local landowner has grown incredibly rich by selling chunks of his land for development. He spends his time down the local pub or jetting around the world. His son has spent his whole life racing and crashing cars. AKAIK, he has never done a day's work in his life, with his lifestyle funded by dad's cash and a bumper inheritance of farmland to look forward to. Meanwhile, most of the land is barely used, with just the odd field let out for grazing now and then. Why bother, when its value just keeps going up and junior will inherit the lot?
I have got extended family in farming, all farming relatively small farms. Some arable, some mixed arable and livestock. One of the things that connects them is a love of the land. Much has been in their families for generations, and they care for it.
And hence we get onto this: "It will still be farmed by somebody, and very likely in a more productive fashion."
Yes. It will be bought by larger farms, in many cases massive agribusinesses that will not care for the land; only what the land produces. Worse, many of these are far more adept at avoiding tax than those small farmers.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
Yes, they will be forced to sell up and pocket their million+ quid. My heart bleeds.
What a stupid fucking response. The whole point being we want farms to continue as viable businesses. We need farms and farmers. Unless of course you are one of those fuckwits who think the food in supermarkets is miraculously created out of thin air.
Do you think the farmland is just going to vanish into thin air after it is sold? Of course not. It will still be farmed by somebody, and very likely in a more productive fashion.
In the area where I grew up, on the edge of the city, the big local landowner has grown incredibly rich by selling chunks of his land for development. He spends his time down the local pub or jetting around the world. His son has spent his whole life racing and crashing cars. AKAIK, he has never done a day's work in his life, with his lifestyle funded by dad's cash and a bumper inheritance of farmland to look forward to. Meanwhile, most of the land is barely used, with just the odd field let out for grazing now and then. Why bother, when its value just keeps going up and junior will inherit the lot?
I have got extended family in farming, all farming relatively small farms. Some arable, some mixed arable and livestock. One of the things that connects them is a love of the land. Much has been in their families for generations, and they care for it.
And hence we get onto this: "It will still be farmed by somebody, and very likely in a more productive fashion."
Yes. It will be bought by larger farms, in many cases massive agribusinesses that will not care for the land; only what the land produces. Worse, many of these are far more adept at avoiding tax than those small farmers.
It amuses me how some people seem to insist that we should have British food, but not care about what the British farms are producing.
If the businesses care about what their land produces as you claim, then that's more British made food.
Also known as productivity.
What the land produces, but not the land itself. I.e. the environment.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
The irony is that her optician said she will need it but best to go on the 18 month waiting list now so that she will have it before it becomes a necessity
He also added in England it takes 6 weeks waiting but not sure how true that is
It is true. ISTCs do the majority of NHS cataract surgery in England now, with waits typically of a few weeks.
What's an ISTC?
Independent Sector Treatment Centre
They do things where it makes sense to do them on mass (Cataracts / Hip operations) or manage MRI systems.
NHS needs to do loads more of this for routine operations.
Expensive capital equipment such as MRI scanners should be working 24/7, with people offered the option of turning up in the middle of the night tomorrow rather than waiting weeks or months.
Streeting plans further expansion, but it is pretty much limited to quick turnaround surgery in fit patients.
Getting a quick MRI is no benefit if it's a 6 month wait to see a rheumatologist to discuss the findings. There are bottlenecks in the system to address, but it does tend to just shift the queue elsewhere.
I disagree. Last summer my mother went into Kings Mill for pancreatitis. They worked out pretty quickly that it wasn't any of the really bad causes but for obvious reasons wanted to know what was causing it. They had to keep her in for a couple of days uintil the blood markers showed the epiosode was over but wanted to have an MRI to check for gall stones as the Ultrasound had not been clear. They would not send her home because it would have taken weeks to get her the MRi if she was out of hospital.
So she waited in hospital, taking up a bed that others could have been using (and which was certainly needed) for an additional 4 days until they could get her the MRI. And she was not the only one. All because they had only one team capable of running the MRI who were already working a 14 hour days and a 7 day week.
That’s nuts, what do a couple of MRI operators cost, compared to the cost of keeping beds occupied for days because people are waiting for scans?
Yep. And there is another MRI scanner at Newark which doesn't get used that often as they don't have the staff for it.
Nearly every time I've had an MRI scan it's been private.
They are always in throughput mode - they run from early morning (before work) till 8-9pm.
Other testing is also an issue - when my father was in hospital, they seemed to have a backlog on basic bloodwork. I'm not talking cultures etc. I'm talking about "What is his potassium level?". Doctors would come round and go "We need to see that before we can make a decision" then leave again.....
At one point, my brother and I were discussing finding a private laboratory and hiring someone to take blood samples and test them...
In the US, that hotbed of medical fuckwittery, you can get a full blood panel for $200. Because insurance companies know that it’s actually advantageous to test people who think they’re well, rather than let them get sick.
The Republican lead in Nevada is now up to 47,300, but will fall later today, as some postal ballots come in. Ralston reckons that by Sunday, we should have a fair idea who has won the State.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
Yes, they will be forced to sell up and pocket their million+ quid. My heart bleeds.
What a stupid fucking response. The whole point being we want farms to continue as viable businesses. We need farms and farmers. Unless of course you are one of those fuckwits who think the food in supermarkets is miraculously created out of thin air.
Do you think the farmland is just going to vanish into thin air after it is sold? Of course not. It will still be farmed by somebody, and very likely in a more productive fashion.
In the area where I grew up, on the edge of the city, the big local landowner has grown incredibly rich by selling chunks of his land for development. He spends his time down the local pub or jetting around the world. His son has spent his whole life racing and crashing cars. AKAIK, he has never done a day's work in his life, with his lifestyle funded by dad's cash and a bumper inheritance of farmland to look forward to. Meanwhile, most of the land is barely used, with just the odd field let out for grazing now and then. Why bother, when its value just keeps going up and junior will inherit the lot?
I have got extended family in farming, all farming relatively small farms. Some arable, some mixed arable and livestock. One of the things that connects them is a love of the land. Much has been in their families for generations, and they care for it.
And hence we get onto this: "It will still be farmed by somebody, and very likely in a more productive fashion."
Yes. It will be bought by larger farms, in many cases massive agribusinesses that will not care for the land; only what the land produces. Worse, many of these are far more adept at avoiding tax than those small farmers.
It amuses me how some people seem to insist that we should have British food, but not care about what the British farms are producing.
If the businesses care about what their land produces as you claim, then that's more British made food.
Also known as productivity.
What the land produces, but not the land itself. I.e. the environment.
So are we interested in food security or not?
If you don't then let's get Australian or American beef or whatever else and then let our environment here be whatever suits us best.
And what suits us best is less farmland and more housing.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
Yes, they will be forced to sell up and pocket their million+ quid. My heart bleeds.
The Labour mentality in one, class envy and class war above everything else. Including the national interest
I'd have a bit more respect for the class envy stuff if it wasn't for the fact that so many of the wealthy Labour types seem particularly un-socialist when it comes to either their property values or using every trick in the book to get their kids into the outstanding state primary schools.
When I lived in Hampstead, a number would boast of the their egalitarianism in sending their children to the local state school.
The story that you had to own millions in property to go there was not true. The live in servants of the really rich would send their children to the school as well.
OT on looking up my shiny new pills on Youtube in order to check pronunciation, I saw this diagram and immediately thought oh, that's glucose on the bottom left.
London University will be pleased to know its efforts to teach me about hexose sugars and their configurations many decades ago were not completely wasted. All altruists gladly make gum in gallon tanks.
Turns out it is a hard g in the drug's name.
Is the structure correct? Odd to have a carbon-carbon from the sugar to the other side of the molecule? What is the drug?
Mr. Malmesbury, the corporate continuity is why Egyptian Pharaohs ended up almost as a junior partner to the priesthood, and why the Church was able to advance in power as the Carolingians sliced up their own empire with their daft inheritance laws.
And, as you say, it's why a family of farmers is significantly disadvantaged versus a big business when it comes to Labour's inheritance tax hammer.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
The irony is that her optician said she will need it but best to go on the 18 month waiting list now so that she will have it before it becomes a necessity
He also added in England it takes 6 weeks waiting but not sure how true that is
It is true. ISTCs do the majority of NHS cataract surgery in England now, with waits typically of a few weeks.
What's an ISTC?
Independent Sector Treatment Centre
They do things where it makes sense to do them on mass (Cataracts / Hip operations) or manage MRI systems.
NHS needs to do loads more of this for routine operations.
Expensive capital equipment such as MRI scanners should be working 24/7, with people offered the option of turning up in the middle of the night tomorrow rather than waiting weeks or months.
Streeting plans further expansion, but it is pretty much limited to quick turnaround surgery in fit patients.
Getting a quick MRI is no benefit if it's a 6 month wait to see a rheumatologist to discuss the findings. There are bottlenecks in the system to address, but it does tend to just shift the queue elsewhere.
I disagree. Last summer my mother went into Kings Mill for pancreatitis. They worked out pretty quickly that it wasn't any of the really bad causes but for obvious reasons wanted to know what was causing it. They had to keep her in for a couple of days uintil the blood markers showed the epiosode was over but wanted to have an MRI to check for gall stones as the Ultrasound had not been clear. They would not send her home because it would have taken weeks to get her the MRi if she was out of hospital.
So she waited in hospital, taking up a bed that others could have been using (and which was certainly needed) for an additional 4 days until they could get her the MRI. And she was not the only one. All because they had only one team capable of running the MRI who were already working a 14 hour days and a 7 day week.
That’s nuts, what do a couple of MRI operators cost, compared to the cost of keeping beds occupied for days because people are waiting for scans?
Yep. And there is another MRI scanner at Newark which doesn't get used that often as they don't have the staff for it.
Nearly every time I've had an MRI scan it's been private.
They are always in throughput mode - they run from early morning (before work) till 8-9pm.
Other testing is also an issue - when my father was in hospital, they seemed to have a backlog on basic bloodwork. I'm not talking cultures etc. I'm talking about "What is his potassium level?". Doctors would come round and go "We need to see that before we can make a decision" then leave again.....
At one point, my brother and I were discussing finding a private laboratory and hiring someone to take blood samples and test them...
This is where we need Theranos and there has been some progress in finding non-fraudulent versions. The trouble with blood tests is the doctor orders half a dozen or so, the phlebotomist draws blood and the lab carries out those tests. Then the doctor looks at the results and decides it would be nice to know a couple more levels, so rinse and repeat. What we need is a machine that runs every conceivable blood test against a single sample to save hours and often days or weeks of toing and froing.
OT on looking up my shiny new pills on Youtube in order to check pronunciation, I saw this diagram and immediately thought oh, that's glucose on the bottom left.
London University will be pleased to know its efforts to teach me about hexose sugars and their configurations many decades ago were not completely wasted. All altruists gladly make gum in gallon tanks.
Turns out it is a hard g in the drug's name.
Is the structure correct? Odd to have a carbon-carbon from the sugar to the other side of the molecule? What is the drug?
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
The irony is that her optician said she will need it but best to go on the 18 month waiting list now so that she will have it before it becomes a necessity
He also added in England it takes 6 weeks waiting but not sure how true that is
It is true. ISTCs do the majority of NHS cataract surgery in England now, with waits typically of a few weeks.
What's an ISTC?
Independent Sector Treatment Centre
They do things where it makes sense to do them on mass (Cataracts / Hip operations) or manage MRI systems.
NHS needs to do loads more of this for routine operations.
Expensive capital equipment such as MRI scanners should be working 24/7, with people offered the option of turning up in the middle of the night tomorrow rather than waiting weeks or months.
Streeting plans further expansion, but it is pretty much limited to quick turnaround surgery in fit patients.
Getting a quick MRI is no benefit if it's a 6 month wait to see a rheumatologist to discuss the findings. There are bottlenecks in the system to address, but it does tend to just shift the queue elsewhere.
I disagree. Last summer my mother went into Kings Mill for pancreatitis. They worked out pretty quickly that it wasn't any of the really bad causes but for obvious reasons wanted to know what was causing it. They had to keep her in for a couple of days uintil the blood markers showed the epiosode was over but wanted to have an MRI to check for gall stones as the Ultrasound had not been clear. They would not send her home because it would have taken weeks to get her the MRi if she was out of hospital.
So she waited in hospital, taking up a bed that others could have been using (and which was certainly needed) for an additional 4 days until they could get her the MRI. And she was not the only one. All because they had only one team capable of running the MRI who were already working a 14 hour days and a 7 day week.
A useful mnemonic for the causes of pancreatitis is I GET SMASHED. The second "S" is for scorpions. I can't remember the rest! Nasty disease. I'm glad your mum recovered quickly.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Though I thought this interesting:
"“Farmers,” Clarkson said on the X social network, “I know that you have been shafted today. But please don’t despair. Just look after yourselves for five short years and this shower will be gone.”
Yet Clarkson himself – or rather the prospective beneficiaries of his estate – may be among those “shafted”. Clarkson has previously said that he bought his 126-hectare (312-acre), £4.25m farm, Diddly Squat, in order to avoid inheritance tax on his estate. In a 2021 interview with The Times Clarkson said that avoiding inheritance tax was “the critical thing” in his decision to buy the farm."
And later in the same article:
"only 44% of the individuals who gained agricultural relief had received any trading income from agriculture at any point in the five years prior to death. It is “not the classic working farmers” who will bear the brunt of the changes, he argued. The change could help cool the rural property market because fewer people will buy a field as inheritance tax dodges"
So clearly this is a relief that has become a tax dodge for non-farmers. Whether this is the best solution to address the issue, I don't know.
I guess if you wanted to provide more relief for family farms that had been in the family for generations, you could provide £1m of relief per generation the farm has been in the family, perhaps capped at five generations.
The other thing is that, if the change does reduce the use of agricultural land as an IHT dodge, and reduces agricultural land prices, then the value of farms will fall and fewer will be above the £1m threshold than at present.
Lower land prices is good for genuine farmers looking to expand their farm.
That's a good point. Mr Clarkson seems to think that the cap will either be raised/abolished when (if) labour are voted out. I'm not sure it will be that simple.
The key to getting land prices down will be to put off "investment" companies who don't farm it themselves. The growth in solar farms, to take one example may keep prices high, we will see.
If you are a farmer with little or no borrowing, a land price crash is your friend
Seems like only five minutes since farmers were complaining they couldn't afford to buy land as the price was being pumped up by City-types trying to avoid IHT.
Not just city types; a lot of 'our' land has been acquired by foreigners - an inevitable consequence of a perpetual balance of payments deficit. There are nations, not universally regarded as fascist dictatorships, who restrict foreign ownership of land because it's regarded as too important to buy and sell like bags of flour. But we, of course, are forever open for business. I have no qualms about foreign billionaires owning skyscrapers in the London docks but I'm less keen on them hoovering up the better half of Worcestershire just because it's there.
You should have a look at the Highlands. So many of the shooting estates in foreign ownership. But, as you say, this is the price we pay for buying more than we make.
An American plutocrat once advised investors to "keep buying land until you reach the sea because they're not making it any more".
Though how close land is to the sea seriously affects its value, giving another famous plutocrat the idea of moving the sea.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
Yes, they will be forced to sell up and pocket their million+ quid. My heart bleeds.
What a stupid fucking response. The whole point being we want farms to continue as viable businesses. We need farms and farmers. Unless of course you are one of those fuckwits who think the food in supermarkets is miraculously created out of thin air.
Do you think the farmland is just going to vanish into thin air after it is sold? Of course not. It will still be farmed by somebody, and very likely in a more productive fashion.
In the area where I grew up, on the edge of the city, the big local landowner has grown incredibly rich by selling chunks of his land for development. He spends his time down the local pub or jetting around the world. His son has spent his whole life racing and crashing cars. AKAIK, he has never done a day's work in his life, with his lifestyle funded by dad's cash and a bumper inheritance of farmland to look forward to. Meanwhile, most of the land is barely used, with just the odd field let out for grazing now and then. Why bother, when its value just keeps going up and junior will inherit the lot?
I have got extended family in farming, all farming relatively small farms. Some arable, some mixed arable and livestock. One of the things that connects them is a love of the land. Much has been in their families for generations, and they care for it.
And hence we get onto this: "It will still be farmed by somebody, and very likely in a more productive fashion."
Yes. It will be bought by larger farms, in many cases massive agribusinesses that will not care for the land; only what the land produces. Worse, many of these are far more adept at avoiding tax than those small farmers.
It amuses me how some people seem to insist that we should have British food, but not care about what the British farms are producing.
If the businesses care about what their land produces as you claim, then that's more British made food.
Also known as productivity.
What the land produces, but not the land itself. I.e. the environment.
So are we interested in food security or not?
If you don't then let's get Australian or American beef or whatever else and then let our environment here be whatever suits us best.
And what suits us best is less farmland and more housing.
If we do, then productivity matters.
Both productivity and the environment matter.
As we've seen many times in the past, going for productivity at the cost of the environment soon sees productivity fall or cease.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
The irony is that her optician said she will need it but best to go on the 18 month waiting list now so that she will have it before it becomes a necessity
He also added in England it takes 6 weeks waiting but not sure how true that is
It is true. ISTCs do the majority of NHS cataract surgery in England now, with waits typically of a few weeks.
What's an ISTC?
Independent Sector Treatment Centre
They do things where it makes sense to do them on mass (Cataracts / Hip operations) or manage MRI systems.
NHS needs to do loads more of this for routine operations.
Expensive capital equipment such as MRI scanners should be working 24/7, with people offered the option of turning up in the middle of the night tomorrow rather than waiting weeks or months.
Streeting plans further expansion, but it is pretty much limited to quick turnaround surgery in fit patients.
Getting a quick MRI is no benefit if it's a 6 month wait to see a rheumatologist to discuss the findings. There are bottlenecks in the system to address, but it does tend to just shift the queue elsewhere.
I disagree. Last summer my mother went into Kings Mill for pancreatitis. They worked out pretty quickly that it wasn't any of the really bad causes but for obvious reasons wanted to know what was causing it. They had to keep her in for a couple of days uintil the blood markers showed the epiosode was over but wanted to have an MRI to check for gall stones as the Ultrasound had not been clear. They would not send her home because it would have taken weeks to get her the MRi if she was out of hospital.
So she waited in hospital, taking up a bed that others could have been using (and which was certainly needed) for an additional 4 days until they could get her the MRI. And she was not the only one. All because they had only one team capable of running the MRI who were already working a 14 hour days and a 7 day week.
That’s nuts, what do a couple of MRI operators cost, compared to the cost of keeping beds occupied for days because people are waiting for scans?
Yep. And there is another MRI scanner at Newark which doesn't get used that often as they don't have the staff for it.
Nearly every time I've had an MRI scan it's been private.
They are always in throughput mode - they run from early morning (before work) till 8-9pm.
Other testing is also an issue - when my father was in hospital, they seemed to have a backlog on basic bloodwork. I'm not talking cultures etc. I'm talking about "What is his potassium level?". Doctors would come round and go "We need to see that before we can make a decision" then leave again.....
At one point, my brother and I were discussing finding a private laboratory and hiring someone to take blood samples and test them...
This is where we need Theranos and there has been some progress in finding non-fraudulent versions. The trouble with blood tests is the doctor orders half a dozen or so, the phlebotomist draws blood and the lab carries out those tests. Then the doctor looks at the results and decides it would be nice to know a couple more levels, so rinse and repeat. What we need is a machine that runs every conceivable blood test against a single sample to save hours and often days or weeks of toing and froing.
It will also be good when hospitals and GPs exchange data so each can see the results of the tests done by the other, rather than just that tests were done…
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
Yes, they will be forced to sell up and pocket their million+ quid. My heart bleeds.
What a stupid fucking response. The whole point being we want farms to continue as viable businesses. We need farms and farmers. Unless of course you are one of those fuckwits who think the food in supermarkets is miraculously created out of thin air.
Do you think the farmland is just going to vanish into thin air after it is sold? Of course not. It will still be farmed by somebody, and very likely in a more productive fashion.
In the area where I grew up, on the edge of the city, the big local landowner has grown incredibly rich by selling chunks of his land for development. He spends his time down the local pub or jetting around the world. His son has spent his whole life racing and crashing cars. AKAIK, he has never done a day's work in his life, with his lifestyle funded by dad's cash and a bumper inheritance of farmland to look forward to. Meanwhile, most of the land is barely used, with just the odd field let out for grazing now and then. Why bother, when its value just keeps going up and junior will inherit the lot?
I have got extended family in farming, all farming relatively small farms. Some arable, some mixed arable and livestock. One of the things that connects them is a love of the land. Much has been in their families for generations, and they care for it.
And hence we get onto this: "It will still be farmed by somebody, and very likely in a more productive fashion."
Yes. It will be bought by larger farms, in many cases massive agribusinesses that will not care for the land; only what the land produces. Worse, many of these are far more adept at avoiding tax than those small farmers.
It amuses me how some people seem to insist that we should have British food, but not care about what the British farms are producing.
If the businesses care about what their land produces as you claim, then that's more British made food.
Also known as productivity.
Indeed, and they'll probably do a better job of looking after the land, too. In my experience, also coming from a farming family, the focus of most of the landowners in my area is very much on the bottom line. They aren't terribly dewy-eyed about the land; indeed many are happy to bend or break environmental laws if it suits them to do so. Big corporations are less likely to be able to get away with that kind of thing.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
That average is the mean average distorted by very large holdings.
The median average is much lower.
According to DEFRA 59% of English farms have less than 50 hectares.
50 hectares is just over 120 acres, so assuming £10k per acre that means 59% are less than £1.2M: most more than £1M could still be correct, particularly when buildings etc are taken into account.
There's a fair chance a lot of those smaller holdings don't have a owner who is a full time farmer. 50 hectares is not a large farm by economy of scale, I'd expect many of those to be either leased out, farmed part time, or a smaller scale enterprise like growing a specific fruit or veg. It's very difficult now to make a profit and maintain a full time job on a farm of 120 acres.
In Scotland, there are over 20,000 crofts in the Highlands and Islands alone. Most of these will be under 10 hectares (25 acres), averaging 5 hectares in size. Clearly the new IHT rules will affect very few of these, though I do wonder if they count towards the Chancellors statement that three quarters of farmers won't be affected. A lot of businesses will be caught out by this, but there is time to get advice and shift ownership before 2026
As the polling I posted earlier shows women also have a women problem.
Do you personally hope that the United States elects a woman President of the United States in your lifetime?
No
Male 23% Female 22%
As with all these questions it depends how the interviewee interprets them. Although the question is quite clear, how many of them thought 'Kamala Harris' as they heard the question and if they are Trump supporters a net 22 - 23% is not really that high.
So for a percentage it may not have been an objection to a woman but an objection to a Democrat woman and I know that wasn't the question.
Also, you might get "No" replies from people who are genuinely indifferent to the gender of the President (which is basically my view). People who actually object to a woman President whose policies they agree with are I suspect pretty rare.
Or, much more accurately, "Why are men, whether of the Left or Right or everything in between, such a problem for women, in every country in the world?"
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
The irony is that her optician said she will need it but best to go on the 18 month waiting list now so that she will have it before it becomes a necessity
He also added in England it takes 6 weeks waiting but not sure how true that is
It is true. ISTCs do the majority of NHS cataract surgery in England now, with waits typically of a few weeks.
What's an ISTC?
Independent Sector Treatment Centre
They do things where it makes sense to do them on mass (Cataracts / Hip operations) or manage MRI systems.
NHS needs to do loads more of this for routine operations.
Expensive capital equipment such as MRI scanners should be working 24/7, with people offered the option of turning up in the middle of the night tomorrow rather than waiting weeks or months.
Streeting plans further expansion, but it is pretty much limited to quick turnaround surgery in fit patients.
Getting a quick MRI is no benefit if it's a 6 month wait to see a rheumatologist to discuss the findings. There are bottlenecks in the system to address, but it does tend to just shift the queue elsewhere.
I disagree. Last summer my mother went into Kings Mill for pancreatitis. They worked out pretty quickly that it wasn't any of the really bad causes but for obvious reasons wanted to know what was causing it. They had to keep her in for a couple of days uintil the blood markers showed the epiosode was over but wanted to have an MRI to check for gall stones as the Ultrasound had not been clear. They would not send her home because it would have taken weeks to get her the MRi if she was out of hospital.
So she waited in hospital, taking up a bed that others could have been using (and which was certainly needed) for an additional 4 days until they could get her the MRI. And she was not the only one. All because they had only one team capable of running the MRI who were already working a 14 hour days and a 7 day week.
That’s nuts, what do a couple of MRI operators cost, compared to the cost of keeping beds occupied for days because people are waiting for scans?
Yep. And there is another MRI scanner at Newark which doesn't get used that often as they don't have the staff for it.
Nearly every time I've had an MRI scan it's been private.
They are always in throughput mode - they run from early morning (before work) till 8-9pm.
Other testing is also an issue - when my father was in hospital, they seemed to have a backlog on basic bloodwork. I'm not talking cultures etc. I'm talking about "What is his potassium level?". Doctors would come round and go "We need to see that before we can make a decision" then leave again.....
At one point, my brother and I were discussing finding a private laboratory and hiring someone to take blood samples and test them...
This is where we need Theranos and there has been some progress in finding non-fraudulent versions. The trouble with blood tests is the doctor orders half a dozen or so, the phlebotomist draws blood and the lab carries out those tests. Then the doctor looks at the results and decides it would be nice to know a couple more levels, so rinse and repeat. What we need is a machine that runs every conceivable blood test against a single sample to save hours and often days or weeks of toing and froing.
It will also be good when hospitals and GPs exchange data so each can see the results of the tests done by the other, rather than just that tests were done…
As discussed previously, the NHS IT team needs to define a data framework to which a whole bunch of private companies can then sell off-the-shelf solutions.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
A farmer isn’t necessarily an expert on tax policy
The issue on tax is how people will behave. Townies have no idea of how people in the country think.
Farmers aren't the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, I mean they thought Brexit would be a good idea despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Lola farmer would beat you hands down in a negotiation.
Yet the majority voted Brexit.
You reap what you sow.
You'd think they'd learnt that growing up on a farm.
You reap what you sow.
I have a sneaking admiration for farmers having lived on Alf Sherrin (Ned's brother's) during my school years in Somerset.
He was up at 5 every morning and was called out at night more often than your family doctor but this IHT thing is a load of nonsense.
When the original Sherrin died Alf went into farming and Ned into showbiz and I believe there were two sisters as well.
So even if the government hadn't taken a cut the value of the farm would have had to be divided into 4 or at least money found to pay off the other three.
This idea of family farms passing from father to son is an anachronism. Farm land is being divided and sold off all the time. If the farmers are lucky with planning permission.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
Yes, they will be forced to sell up and pocket their million+ quid. My heart bleeds.
What a stupid fucking response. The whole point being we want farms to continue as viable businesses. We need farms and farmers. Unless of course you are one of those fuckwits who think the food in supermarkets is miraculously created out of thin air.
Of course it isn't created out of thin air, there's a whole global supply chain.
We should get our food from whomever is best placed to supply it. If British farmers, then great. If French, Spanish, Argentinian, American, Australian or anywhere else then great too.
Would it be a wise strategy for Ukraine to have depended for its supplies of food and other essentials on Russia?
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
The irony is that her optician said she will need it but best to go on the 18 month waiting list now so that she will have it before it becomes a necessity
He also added in England it takes 6 weeks waiting but not sure how true that is
It is true. ISTCs do the majority of NHS cataract surgery in England now, with waits typically of a few weeks.
What's an ISTC?
Independent Sector Treatment Centre
They do things where it makes sense to do them on mass (Cataracts / Hip operations) or manage MRI systems.
NHS needs to do loads more of this for routine operations.
Expensive capital equipment such as MRI scanners should be working 24/7, with people offered the option of turning up in the middle of the night tomorrow rather than waiting weeks or months.
Streeting plans further expansion, but it is pretty much limited to quick turnaround surgery in fit patients.
Getting a quick MRI is no benefit if it's a 6 month wait to see a rheumatologist to discuss the findings. There are bottlenecks in the system to address, but it does tend to just shift the queue elsewhere.
I disagree. Last summer my mother went into Kings Mill for pancreatitis. They worked out pretty quickly that it wasn't any of the really bad causes but for obvious reasons wanted to know what was causing it. They had to keep her in for a couple of days uintil the blood markers showed the epiosode was over but wanted to have an MRI to check for gall stones as the Ultrasound had not been clear. They would not send her home because it would have taken weeks to get her the MRi if she was out of hospital.
So she waited in hospital, taking up a bed that others could have been using (and which was certainly needed) for an additional 4 days until they could get her the MRI. And she was not the only one. All because they had only one team capable of running the MRI who were already working a 14 hour days and a 7 day week.
That’s nuts, what do a couple of MRI operators cost, compared to the cost of keeping beds occupied for days because people are waiting for scans?
Yep. And there is another MRI scanner at Newark which doesn't get used that often as they don't have the staff for it.
Totally bonkers, you spend £1m on a scanner but don’t spend the money to train people to use it?
Where I work, expensive capital equipment comes with a training programme.
It's not a lack of training. It's a lack of filled posts.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
The irony is that her optician said she will need it but best to go on the 18 month waiting list now so that she will have it before it becomes a necessity
He also added in England it takes 6 weeks waiting but not sure how true that is
It is true. ISTCs do the majority of NHS cataract surgery in England now, with waits typically of a few weeks.
What's an ISTC?
Independent Sector Treatment Centre
They do things where it makes sense to do them on mass (Cataracts / Hip operations) or manage MRI systems.
NHS needs to do loads more of this for routine operations.
Expensive capital equipment such as MRI scanners should be working 24/7, with people offered the option of turning up in the middle of the night tomorrow rather than waiting weeks or months.
Streeting plans further expansion, but it is pretty much limited to quick turnaround surgery in fit patients.
Getting a quick MRI is no benefit if it's a 6 month wait to see a rheumatologist to discuss the findings. There are bottlenecks in the system to address, but it does tend to just shift the queue elsewhere.
I disagree. Last summer my mother went into Kings Mill for pancreatitis. They worked out pretty quickly that it wasn't any of the really bad causes but for obvious reasons wanted to know what was causing it. They had to keep her in for a couple of days uintil the blood markers showed the epiosode was over but wanted to have an MRI to check for gall stones as the Ultrasound had not been clear. They would not send her home because it would have taken weeks to get her the MRi if she was out of hospital.
So she waited in hospital, taking up a bed that others could have been using (and which was certainly needed) for an additional 4 days until they could get her the MRI. And she was not the only one. All because they had only one team capable of running the MRI who were already working a 14 hour days and a 7 day week.
That’s nuts, what do a couple of MRI operators cost, compared to the cost of keeping beds occupied for days because people are waiting for scans?
Yep. And there is another MRI scanner at Newark which doesn't get used that often as they don't have the staff for it.
Nearly every time I've had an MRI scan it's been private.
They are always in throughput mode - they run from early morning (before work) till 8-9pm.
Other testing is also an issue - when my father was in hospital, they seemed to have a backlog on basic bloodwork. I'm not talking cultures etc. I'm talking about "What is his potassium level?". Doctors would come round and go "We need to see that before we can make a decision" then leave again.....
At one point, my brother and I were discussing finding a private laboratory and hiring someone to take blood samples and test them...
This is where we need Theranos and there has been some progress in finding non-fraudulent versions. The trouble with blood tests is the doctor orders half a dozen or so, the phlebotomist draws blood and the lab carries out those tests. Then the doctor looks at the results and decides it would be nice to know a couple more levels, so rinse and repeat. What we need is a machine that runs every conceivable blood test against a single sample to save hours and often days or weeks of toing and froing.
May a plague of boil infest Elizabeth Holmes until the end of days.
A side effect of her shit was damaging a very valid investment area - automated testing.
There are a number of highly automated testing systems, in existence, right now. Indeed, Thermos was using existing machines from real manufacturers, behind the scenes, to fake their results.
The bullshit came from the claim that they could run sagans of tests from a pin prick of blood. Which is impossible, with current or near term technology.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
Yes, they will be forced to sell up and pocket their million+ quid. My heart bleeds.
The Labour mentality in one, class envy and class war above everything else. Including the national interest
In what way is it in the national interest for good farmland to be treated as a store of value rather than being actively farmed?
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
The irony is that her optician said she will need it but best to go on the 18 month waiting list now so that she will have it before it becomes a necessity
He also added in England it takes 6 weeks waiting but not sure how true that is
It is true. ISTCs do the majority of NHS cataract surgery in England now, with waits typically of a few weeks.
What's an ISTC?
Independent Sector Treatment Centre
They do things where it makes sense to do them on mass (Cataracts / Hip operations) or manage MRI systems.
NHS needs to do loads more of this for routine operations.
Expensive capital equipment such as MRI scanners should be working 24/7, with people offered the option of turning up in the middle of the night tomorrow rather than waiting weeks or months.
Streeting plans further expansion, but it is pretty much limited to quick turnaround surgery in fit patients.
Getting a quick MRI is no benefit if it's a 6 month wait to see a rheumatologist to discuss the findings. There are bottlenecks in the system to address, but it does tend to just shift the queue elsewhere.
I disagree. Last summer my mother went into Kings Mill for pancreatitis. They worked out pretty quickly that it wasn't any of the really bad causes but for obvious reasons wanted to know what was causing it. They had to keep her in for a couple of days uintil the blood markers showed the epiosode was over but wanted to have an MRI to check for gall stones as the Ultrasound had not been clear. They would not send her home because it would have taken weeks to get her the MRi if she was out of hospital.
So she waited in hospital, taking up a bed that others could have been using (and which was certainly needed) for an additional 4 days until they could get her the MRI. And she was not the only one. All because they had only one team capable of running the MRI who were already working a 14 hour days and a 7 day week.
That’s nuts, what do a couple of MRI operators cost, compared to the cost of keeping beds occupied for days because people are waiting for scans?
Quote a lot. Radiologists and Radiographers are not cheap or easy to find.
You also make a mistake. While keeping a patient in a bed who is otherwise able to be discharged is inefficient and unproductive, it is not expensive being only bed and board. If you discharge them and use the bed for say a bowel resection then the cost per day is a lot higher.
Sweating the assets and staff more efficiently may well increase costs and expenditure in the short term, by doing extra work.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
The irony is that her optician said she will need it but best to go on the 18 month waiting list now so that she will have it before it becomes a necessity
He also added in England it takes 6 weeks waiting but not sure how true that is
It is true. ISTCs do the majority of NHS cataract surgery in England now, with waits typically of a few weeks.
What's an ISTC?
Independent Sector Treatment Centre
They do things where it makes sense to do them on mass (Cataracts / Hip operations) or manage MRI systems.
NHS needs to do loads more of this for routine operations.
Expensive capital equipment such as MRI scanners should be working 24/7, with people offered the option of turning up in the middle of the night tomorrow rather than waiting weeks or months.
Streeting plans further expansion, but it is pretty much limited to quick turnaround surgery in fit patients.
Getting a quick MRI is no benefit if it's a 6 month wait to see a rheumatologist to discuss the findings. There are bottlenecks in the system to address, but it does tend to just shift the queue elsewhere.
I disagree. Last summer my mother went into Kings Mill for pancreatitis. They worked out pretty quickly that it wasn't any of the really bad causes but for obvious reasons wanted to know what was causing it. They had to keep her in for a couple of days uintil the blood markers showed the epiosode was over but wanted to have an MRI to check for gall stones as the Ultrasound had not been clear. They would not send her home because it would have taken weeks to get her the MRi if she was out of hospital.
So she waited in hospital, taking up a bed that others could have been using (and which was certainly needed) for an additional 4 days until they could get her the MRI. And she was not the only one. All because they had only one team capable of running the MRI who were already working a 14 hour days and a 7 day week.
That’s nuts, what do a couple of MRI operators cost, compared to the cost of keeping beds occupied for days because people are waiting for scans?
Yep. And there is another MRI scanner at Newark which doesn't get used that often as they don't have the staff for it.
Nearly every time I've had an MRI scan it's been private.
They are always in throughput mode - they run from early morning (before work) till 8-9pm.
Other testing is also an issue - when my father was in hospital, they seemed to have a backlog on basic bloodwork. I'm not talking cultures etc. I'm talking about "What is his potassium level?". Doctors would come round and go "We need to see that before we can make a decision" then leave again.....
At one point, my brother and I were discussing finding a private laboratory and hiring someone to take blood samples and test them...
This is where we need Theranos and there has been some progress in finding non-fraudulent versions. The trouble with blood tests is the doctor orders half a dozen or so, the phlebotomist draws blood and the lab carries out those tests. Then the doctor looks at the results and decides it would be nice to know a couple more levels, so rinse and repeat. What we need is a machine that runs every conceivable blood test against a single sample to save hours and often days or weeks of toing and froing.
It will also be good when hospitals and GPs exchange data so each can see the results of the tests done by the other, rather than just that tests were done…
As discussed previously, the NHS IT team needs to define a data framework to which a whole bunch of private companies can then sell off-the-shelf solutions.
Unifying the coding systems would be a good start, never mind the data fields/structures.
Primary care diagnoses: Read/CTV3 or - now - SNOMED-CT Secondary care diagnoses: ICD10
Prescriptions/devices: BNF or sometimes Read or dm+d
Operations: OPCS-4 in secondary care. Not sure how primary care records them if they want to add them to the primary care record
Interesting insight into legal shenanigans / balances around who gets to vote in the USA.
1600 voters taken off the roles in Virginia after a records comparison, including 42 who were US Citizens and entitled to vote. Local Court says can't do that - let it be caught by the checks deeper in the system rather than accept the downside of excluding some. SCOTUS rules let it stand.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
The irony is that her optician said she will need it but best to go on the 18 month waiting list now so that she will have it before it becomes a necessity
He also added in England it takes 6 weeks waiting but not sure how true that is
It is true. ISTCs do the majority of NHS cataract surgery in England now, with waits typically of a few weeks.
What's an ISTC?
Independent Sector Treatment Centre
They do things where it makes sense to do them on mass (Cataracts / Hip operations) or manage MRI systems.
NHS needs to do loads more of this for routine operations.
Expensive capital equipment such as MRI scanners should be working 24/7, with people offered the option of turning up in the middle of the night tomorrow rather than waiting weeks or months.
Streeting plans further expansion, but it is pretty much limited to quick turnaround surgery in fit patients.
Getting a quick MRI is no benefit if it's a 6 month wait to see a rheumatologist to discuss the findings. There are bottlenecks in the system to address, but it does tend to just shift the queue elsewhere.
I disagree. Last summer my mother went into Kings Mill for pancreatitis. They worked out pretty quickly that it wasn't any of the really bad causes but for obvious reasons wanted to know what was causing it. They had to keep her in for a couple of days uintil the blood markers showed the epiosode was over but wanted to have an MRI to check for gall stones as the Ultrasound had not been clear. They would not send her home because it would have taken weeks to get her the MRi if she was out of hospital.
So she waited in hospital, taking up a bed that others could have been using (and which was certainly needed) for an additional 4 days until they could get her the MRI. And she was not the only one. All because they had only one team capable of running the MRI who were already working a 14 hour days and a 7 day week.
That’s nuts, what do a couple of MRI operators cost, compared to the cost of keeping beds occupied for days because people are waiting for scans?
Yep. And there is another MRI scanner at Newark which doesn't get used that often as they don't have the staff for it.
Nearly every time I've had an MRI scan it's been private.
They are always in throughput mode - they run from early morning (before work) till 8-9pm.
Other testing is also an issue - when my father was in hospital, they seemed to have a backlog on basic bloodwork. I'm not talking cultures etc. I'm talking about "What is his potassium level?". Doctors would come round and go "We need to see that before we can make a decision" then leave again.....
At one point, my brother and I were discussing finding a private laboratory and hiring someone to take blood samples and test them...
This is where we need Theranos and there has been some progress in finding non-fraudulent versions. The trouble with blood tests is the doctor orders half a dozen or so, the phlebotomist draws blood and the lab carries out those tests. Then the doctor looks at the results and decides it would be nice to know a couple more levels, so rinse and repeat. What we need is a machine that runs every conceivable blood test against a single sample to save hours and often days or weeks of toing and froing.
May a plague of boil infest Elizabeth Holmes until the end of days.
A side effect of her shit was damaging a very valid investment area - automated testing.
There are a number of highly automated testing systems, in existence, right now. Indeed, Thermos was using existing machines from real manufacturers, behind the scenes, to fake their results.
The bullshit came from the claim that they could run sagans of tests from a pin prick of blood. Which is impossible, with current or near term technology.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
The irony is that her optician said she will need it but best to go on the 18 month waiting list now so that she will have it before it becomes a necessity
He also added in England it takes 6 weeks waiting but not sure how true that is
It is true. ISTCs do the majority of NHS cataract surgery in England now, with waits typically of a few weeks.
What's an ISTC?
Independent Sector Treatment Centre
They do things where it makes sense to do them on mass (Cataracts / Hip operations) or manage MRI systems.
NHS needs to do loads more of this for routine operations.
Expensive capital equipment such as MRI scanners should be working 24/7, with people offered the option of turning up in the middle of the night tomorrow rather than waiting weeks or months.
Streeting plans further expansion, but it is pretty much limited to quick turnaround surgery in fit patients.
Getting a quick MRI is no benefit if it's a 6 month wait to see a rheumatologist to discuss the findings. There are bottlenecks in the system to address, but it does tend to just shift the queue elsewhere.
I disagree. Last summer my mother went into Kings Mill for pancreatitis. They worked out pretty quickly that it wasn't any of the really bad causes but for obvious reasons wanted to know what was causing it. They had to keep her in for a couple of days uintil the blood markers showed the epiosode was over but wanted to have an MRI to check for gall stones as the Ultrasound had not been clear. They would not send her home because it would have taken weeks to get her the MRi if she was out of hospital.
So she waited in hospital, taking up a bed that others could have been using (and which was certainly needed) for an additional 4 days until they could get her the MRI. And she was not the only one. All because they had only one team capable of running the MRI who were already working a 14 hour days and a 7 day week.
That’s nuts, what do a couple of MRI operators cost, compared to the cost of keeping beds occupied for days because people are waiting for scans?
Yep. And there is another MRI scanner at Newark which doesn't get used that often as they don't have the staff for it.
Nearly every time I've had an MRI scan it's been private.
They are always in throughput mode - they run from early morning (before work) till 8-9pm.
Other testing is also an issue - when my father was in hospital, they seemed to have a backlog on basic bloodwork. I'm not talking cultures etc. I'm talking about "What is his potassium level?". Doctors would come round and go "We need to see that before we can make a decision" then leave again.....
At one point, my brother and I were discussing finding a private laboratory and hiring someone to take blood samples and test them...
This is where we need Theranos and there has been some progress in finding non-fraudulent versions. The trouble with blood tests is the doctor orders half a dozen or so, the phlebotomist draws blood and the lab carries out those tests. Then the doctor looks at the results and decides it would be nice to know a couple more levels, so rinse and repeat. What we need is a machine that runs every conceivable blood test against a single sample to save hours and often days or weeks of toing and froing.
May a plague of boil infest Elizabeth Holmes until the end of days.
A side effect of her shit was damaging a very valid investment area - automated testing.
There are a number of highly automated testing systems, in existence, right now. Indeed, Thermos was using existing machines from real manufacturers, behind the scenes, to fake their results.
The bullshit came from the claim that they could run sagans of tests from a pin prick of blood. Which is impossible, with current or near term technology.
Libel case from well known manufacturer of insulated drinks containers incoming?
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
That average is the mean average distorted by very large holdings.
The median average is much lower.
According to DEFRA 59% of English farms have less than 50 hectares.
50 hectares is still 125ish acres. So still well over £1 million in land value alone without everything else.
There is a huge variety in farms and associated land value, from your massive arable farm in East Anglia to your small hill farm in Wales. It needs a deep analysis rather than broadbrush averages to determine if the policy is a mistake.
Indeed.
And no mention that of the Total farmable area in England almost 1/2 of it is farmed on a whole or part tenant basis.
And no mention that a lot of the increase in farm values is as a result of inheritance tax dodges by wealthy people with no prior experience of farming at all.
I do a huge amount of walking - I'm always amazed by how infrequently you bump into a farmer or worker.
It's also noticable you many fewer cows you see out in pasture these days. I assume they are all in massive sheds for most of the year - which saddens me.
As the polling I posted earlier shows women also have a women problem.
Do you personally hope that the United States elects a woman President of the United States in your lifetime?
No
Male 23% Female 22%
As with all these questions it depends how the interviewee interprets them. Although the question is quite clear, how many of them thought 'Kama la Harris' as they heard the question and if they are Trump supporters a net 22 - 23% is not really that high.
So for a percentage it may not have been an objection to a woman but an objection to a Democrat woman and I know that wasn't the question.
Also, you might get "No" replies from people who are genuinely indifferent to the gender of the President (which is basically my view). People who actually object to a woman President whose policies they agree with are I suspect pretty rare.
Agree also. I used to do the YouGov polls. I stopped doing them when:
a) Some were ambiguous or badly worded. So an accurate reply would have given the wrong impression eg as for you in the above poll b) Some (eg shopping habits) were long and my answer to every question was 'None of the above' which translated to 'I didn't give a damn and had never heard of many of the products or shops in the list' c) Some actually missed out the box I needed to tick so really I couldn't move on.
Or, much more accurately, "Why are men, whether of the Left or Right or everything in between, such a problem for women, in every country in the world?"
But you might rather hope that problem would be less in the USA than, say, Afghanistan...
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
Yes, they will be forced to sell up and pocket their million+ quid. My heart bleeds.
The Labour mentality in one, class envy and class war above everything else. Including the national interest
In what way is it in the national interest for good farmland to be treated as a store of value rather than being actively farmed?
The reality appears to be that farms had become IHT avoidance tokens for multi-millionaires, that was Clarkson's initial motivation for buying his farm. Removing that tax-exempt status will make farmland cheaper and give it back to people interested in it for farming not tax avoidance. Unintended negative consequence removed.
There’s been quite a lot on Twitter (yes, I know, I know) about Trump-leaning Puerto Ricans flipping to Harris. It is possible that it might be a real movement I guess.
I'm glad I don't have to write an endorsement piece, because I really wouldn't know how to go about it. Ever since 2015, when Trump descended the escalator, I have had the same feeling, which I've never quite seen articulated, so I will briefly try:
It's basically this: Trump is so obviously, manifestly repugnant -- his words, his gestures, his behavior, his history -- that it strikes me like a tsunami. It's a kind of total, perfect, seamless repugnance that I've never witnessed before in my life. Which means ...
... pointing out some particular piece of the repugnance & arguing against it feels ... surreal, I guess. "He has regularly sexually assaulted women, almost certainly raped a few, and ... I think that's bad."
Yeah. I mean, I think rape is bad. But here's the thing ...
... if you think rape is bad, you will already oppose Trump. If you don't, what could I possibly say to reach you? I don't understand your moral universe, your basic precepts. We are different in a way so fundamental that I literally don't know how to speak to you.
It's the same with all of it. I could point to some obvious bit of repugnance -- "I think it's bad to cheat every small business you interact with." -- but ... it's obvious. You've surely see it yourself. And it doesn't matter to you. So how is me pointing it out going to help?
You see what I'm getting at? I feel like there's nothing I can say about Trump that isn't obvious, that isn't well-understood public knowledge. If you still support him at this point, you clearly don't *care* about tall that stuff. And if you don't care about all that stuff ...
... then ... what do you care about? How does your brain operate? What does morality mean to you? What language could possibly reach you? What could cause you to care? I genuinely don't know. It's like when you're trying to speak w/ someone who doesn't speak your language ...
... and you respond by just repeating yourself, louder. "HE'S A CAREER CRIMINAL WITH 34 FELONY CONVICTIONS." It's pointless. They *heard* you. They just don't understand, don't care. You're assuming they share the premise "criminal rapists are bad," but they don't.
And so, if you're that far apart -- if you do not share basic, fundamental moral precepts, if you live in different moral universes -- how can you communicate? Literally, what do you say?
...
Anyway. I just wanted to get that feeling down. Maybe some of you feel it too.
In the meantime, my grand manifesto against electing Trump amounts to this:
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
The irony is that her optician said she will need it but best to go on the 18 month waiting list now so that she will have it before it becomes a necessity
He also added in England it takes 6 weeks waiting but not sure how true that is
It is true. ISTCs do the majority of NHS cataract surgery in England now, with waits typically of a few weeks.
What's an ISTC?
Independent Sector Treatment Centre
They do things where it makes sense to do them on mass (Cataracts / Hip operations) or manage MRI systems.
NHS needs to do loads more of this for routine operations.
Expensive capital equipment such as MRI scanners should be working 24/7, with people offered the option of turning up in the middle of the night tomorrow rather than waiting weeks or months.
Streeting plans further expansion, but it is pretty much limited to quick turnaround surgery in fit patients.
Getting a quick MRI is no benefit if it's a 6 month wait to see a rheumatologist to discuss the findings. There are bottlenecks in the system to address, but it does tend to just shift the queue elsewhere.
I disagree. Last summer my mother went into Kings Mill for pancreatitis. They worked out pretty quickly that it wasn't any of the really bad causes but for obvious reasons wanted to know what was causing it. They had to keep her in for a couple of days uintil the blood markers showed the epiosode was over but wanted to have an MRI to check for gall stones as the Ultrasound had not been clear. They would not send her home because it would have taken weeks to get her the MRi if she was out of hospital.
So she waited in hospital, taking up a bed that others could have been using (and which was certainly needed) for an additional 4 days until they could get her the MRI. And she was not the only one. All because they had only one team capable of running the MRI who were already working a 14 hour days and a 7 day week.
That’s nuts, what do a couple of MRI operators cost, compared to the cost of keeping beds occupied for days because people are waiting for scans?
Quote a lot. Radiologists and Radiographers are not cheap or easy to find.
You also make a mistake. While keeping a patient in a bed who is otherwise able to be discharged is inefficient and unproductive, it is not expensive being only bed and board. If you discharge them and use the bed for say a bowel resection then the cost per day is a lot higher.
Sweating the assets and staff more efficiently may well increase costs and expenditure in the short term, by doing extra work.
Surely discharging patients earlier would benefit the NHS in general?
What you are missing is the opportunity cost of having the next patient in the bed. Someone keeping a bed occupied is denying the next patient that bed.
There’s many radiologists and radiographers in my part of the world, so why not hire some of them?
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
That average is the mean average distorted by very large holdings.
The median average is much lower.
According to DEFRA 59% of English farms have less than 50 hectares.
50 hectares is just over 120 acres, so assuming £10k per acre that means 59% are less than £1.2M: most more than £1M could still be correct, particularly when buildings etc are taken into account.
£10k an acre is at the cheap end. Round here, the "good stuff" is more like £12-15k/acre, and we're only silage/cattle country. Top rate arable will be more again. I nearly bought a house last year with 16 acres of virtually useless moorland (might have a sustained a small flock of sheep) and that was valued at £4-5k/acre.
"Delinquent elites are in an open crusade against democracy"
Discuss
The way the Lisbon Treaty was handled would be a good example...
I was thinking more of things like Peter Thiel writing "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible"
Perhaps he should go and live in North Korea and see what the alternative is like?
Funnily enough though he still lives in America, a country which, with all its faults, is still mostly free AND reasonably democratic.
Is universal suffrage essential for freedom and democracy? Do we look back on the time of Gladstone and Disraeli as an era of tyranny because the vote was restricted?
How about South Africa?
A restricted franchise is a long way from Apartheid.
So you would be OK restricting the franchise on racial lines?
Why are you talking about race? We restrict the franchise based on age today. Maybe if you also had an educational requirement, for example, it would provide an additional incentive for people to pass their exams, and it would also raise the standard of political discouse because politicians would know they had to appeal to the more discerning section of the population.
We have universal adult sufferage of citizens.
You asked whether it was necessary for good government.
Presumably you are planning on restricting based on some factor: sex, education, wealth, race, etc?
Personally, my view is that yes it is needed for good government. Because otherwise you are literally creating second class citizens of one group or another.
Do you agree with denying the vote to long-term residents?
I agree with the universal adult suffrage of citizens.
I don't think that's a particularly controversial point of view. (Especially as - if you are a long-term resident of the UK - then there are plenty of paths to citizenship.)
It’s not universal because we famously deny it to prisoners.
If there were an education requirement then there would also be plenty of paths to qualifying. It could be something as simple as a civics exam, analogous to the test people have to pass to become citizens.
We also famously deny prisoners other rights normal citizens have, like the right to leave the prison.
So what’s the argument against having to pass a simple civics test to get on the electoral roll. We don’t let people drive cars without passing a test. Isn’t it madness to take less care over who can decide the fate of the nation?
No it isn't. Seriously. The point of an election is to ensure that the Government has the consent of the people and the losers concede defeat for a term.
The vote is not a benefit to be granted, it is a right that cannot be removed without due process. The Government does not select the voters, the voters select the government.
This is why I think prisoners should have the vote.
Not sure why governments have been so implacably against this: it's plainly arguable.
Giving the worst type of prisoner the vote (think mass murderers) is political suicide.
Drawing the line as to what prisoners can and cannot have the vote is too difficult.
So giving it to none is the easiest option.
I don't agree with the restriction on principle, but at 0.2% of adult population it's hardly gerrymandering. Let's not conflate it with anti-democratic attempts to limit the franchise to the right sort of voters.
Going the other way - I don’t see the reason that some chose it as a hill to die on from the other side.
Society takes away many rights from the imprisoned. On of the aspects of imprisonment is about withdrawing the right to participate in society for a period.
The US has over three million prisoners, and the proportion of the population incarcerated rises above 10% for younger black men. And it’s an industry, producing almost all military and first responder uniforms, most numberplates, and even about 25% of US office furniture, all for ‘wages’ of a few cents an hour..
The apportionment of electoral votes to states was by population. They had to work out how to take slaves into account. 1 slave =3/5ths of 1 free person.
The BBC radio five live morning phone in is about this today.
"GPs and care homes demand exemption from NI raid NHS and public sector will not have to pay the rise in employers’ National Insurance contributions which increases to 15 per cent from April"
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
Yes, they will be forced to sell up and pocket their million+ quid. My heart bleeds.
What a stupid fucking response. The whole point being we want farms to continue as viable businesses. We need farms and farmers. Unless of course you are one of those fuckwits who think the food in supermarkets is miraculously created out of thin air.
Of course it isn't created out of thin air, there's a whole global supply chain.
We should get our food from whomever is best placed to supply it. If British farmers, then great. If French, Spanish, Argentinian, American, Australian or anywhere else then great too.
Would it be a wise strategy for Ukraine to have depended for its supplies of food and other essentials on Russia?
No it would be wise to rely on the entire planet and not rely upon a single point of failure.
Hence if you get localised flooding in Spain, or in the UK one year, having a diversified supply chain makes you more secure even locally not less.
On a security perspective it is far more concerning where we get our silicon chips from than our potato chips.
I'm glad I don't have to write an endorsement piece, because I really wouldn't know how to go about it. Ever since 2015, when Trump descended the escalator, I have had the same feeling, which I've never quite seen articulated, so I will briefly try:
It's basically this: Trump is so obviously, manifestly repugnant -- his words, his gestures, his behavior, his history -- that it strikes me like a tsunami. It's a kind of total, perfect, seamless repugnance that I've never witnessed before in my life. Which means ...
... pointing out some particular piece of the repugnance & arguing against it feels ... surreal, I guess. "He has regularly sexually assaulted women, almost certainly raped a few, and ... I think that's bad."
Yeah. I mean, I think rape is bad. But here's the thing ...
... if you think rape is bad, you will already oppose Trump. If you don't, what could I possibly say to reach you? I don't understand your moral universe, your basic precepts. We are different in a way so fundamental that I literally don't know how to speak to you.
It's the same with all of it. I could point to some obvious bit of repugnance -- "I think it's bad to cheat every small business you interact with." -- but ... it's obvious. You've surely see it yourself. And it doesn't matter to you. So how is me pointing it out going to help?
You see what I'm getting at? I feel like there's nothing I can say about Trump that isn't obvious, that isn't well-understood public knowledge. If you still support him at this point, you clearly don't *care* about tall that stuff. And if you don't care about all that stuff ...
... then ... what do you care about? How does your brain operate? What does morality mean to you? What language could possibly reach you? What could cause you to care? I genuinely don't know. It's like when you're trying to speak w/ someone who doesn't speak your language ...
... and you respond by just repeating yourself, louder. "HE'S A CAREER CRIMINAL WITH 34 FELONY CONVICTIONS." It's pointless. They *heard* you. They just don't understand, don't care. You're assuming they share the premise "criminal rapists are bad," but they don't.
And so, if you're that far apart -- if you do not share basic, fundamental moral precepts, if you live in different moral universes -- how can you communicate? Literally, what do you say?
...
Anyway. I just wanted to get that feeling down. Maybe some of you feel it too.
In the meantime, my grand manifesto against electing Trump amounts to this:
This is a good diagnostic test for Trump Derangement Syndrome. If you respond to anybody who supports him with this kind of sheer disbelief and incomprehension, then you have it.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Really? My wife was diagnosed with cataracts by the optician a couple of weeks ago, on the Monday. She was phoned by the clinic on Wednesday and booked in for assessment on Thursday. The only reason she didn't have an operation within a week is because she was already booked to go on holiday. Operation (first eye) week after next, so 23 days from diagnosis to operation.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
The irony is that her optician said she will need it but best to go on the 18 month waiting list now so that she will have it before it becomes a necessity
He also added in England it takes 6 weeks waiting but not sure how true that is
It is true. ISTCs do the majority of NHS cataract surgery in England now, with waits typically of a few weeks.
What's an ISTC?
Independent Sector Treatment Centre
They do things where it makes sense to do them on mass (Cataracts / Hip operations) or manage MRI systems.
NHS needs to do loads more of this for routine operations.
Expensive capital equipment such as MRI scanners should be working 24/7, with people offered the option of turning up in the middle of the night tomorrow rather than waiting weeks or months.
Streeting plans further expansion, but it is pretty much limited to quick turnaround surgery in fit patients.
Getting a quick MRI is no benefit if it's a 6 month wait to see a rheumatologist to discuss the findings. There are bottlenecks in the system to address, but it does tend to just shift the queue elsewhere.
I disagree. Last summer my mother went into Kings Mill for pancreatitis. They worked out pretty quickly that it wasn't any of the really bad causes but for obvious reasons wanted to know what was causing it. They had to keep her in for a couple of days uintil the blood markers showed the epiosode was over but wanted to have an MRI to check for gall stones as the Ultrasound had not been clear. They would not send her home because it would have taken weeks to get her the MRi if she was out of hospital.
So she waited in hospital, taking up a bed that others could have been using (and which was certainly needed) for an additional 4 days until they could get her the MRI. And she was not the only one. All because they had only one team capable of running the MRI who were already working a 14 hour days and a 7 day week.
That’s nuts, what do a couple of MRI operators cost, compared to the cost of keeping beds occupied for days because people are waiting for scans?
Quote a lot. Radiologists and Radiographers are not cheap or easy to find.
You also make a mistake. While keeping a patient in a bed who is otherwise able to be discharged is inefficient and unproductive, it is not expensive being only bed and board. If you discharge them and use the bed for say a bowel resection then the cost per day is a lot higher.
Sweating the assets and staff more efficiently may well increase costs and expenditure in the short term, by doing extra work.
Surely discharging patients earlier would benefit the NHS in general?
What you are missing is the opportunity cost of having the next patient in the bed. Someone keeping a bed occupied is denying the next patient that bed.
There’s many radiologists and radiographers in my part of the world, so why not hire some of them?
It costs money to hire people and hospitals have budgets?
There's an interesting angle to the GOP and women.
Take Musk. He has said statements like: a billion people should be living in the USA. Immigration (of the wrong people) is bad. Our birth rate is too low!
There is only one way to reconcile these statements: that he wants the birth rate in the USA to increase massively, and that can only be done by a diminution of women's rights. We are already seeing this with the GOP's attempts (sadly, some successful) to reduce access to abortions and contraception.
Too many people in the GOP see women as only baby-making machines.
(narrator: Musk has fathered all but one of his children by artificial insemination or surrogacy)
It's amazing how farmers have suddenly become the British Right's greatest friends. When Brexit and Liz Truss were selling them out we were piously told that they deserved no special treatment and had to make sacrifices for the greater good.
There are few who don't remember the farmer's voting in a block for Brexit. I well remember a Welsh farmer on Countryfile complaining about how Brexit had killed his business and Adam Henson asking him how he voted 'I voted for Brexit but no one told me it would end like this'
I'm glad I don't have to write an endorsement piece, because I really wouldn't know how to go about it. Ever since 2015, when Trump descended the escalator, I have had the same feeling, which I've never quite seen articulated, so I will briefly try:
It's basically this: Trump is so obviously, manifestly repugnant -- his words, his gestures, his behavior, his history -- that it strikes me like a tsunami. It's a kind of total, perfect, seamless repugnance that I've never witnessed before in my life. Which means ...
... pointing out some particular piece of the repugnance & arguing against it feels ... surreal, I guess. "He has regularly sexually assaulted women, almost certainly raped a few, and ... I think that's bad."
Yeah. I mean, I think rape is bad. But here's the thing ...
... if you think rape is bad, you will already oppose Trump. If you don't, what could I possibly say to reach you? I don't understand your moral universe, your basic precepts. We are different in a way so fundamental that I literally don't know how to speak to you.
It's the same with all of it. I could point to some obvious bit of repugnance -- "I think it's bad to cheat every small business you interact with." -- but ... it's obvious. You've surely see it yourself. And it doesn't matter to you. So how is me pointing it out going to help?
You see what I'm getting at? I feel like there's nothing I can say about Trump that isn't obvious, that isn't well-understood public knowledge. If you still support him at this point, you clearly don't *care* about tall that stuff. And if you don't care about all that stuff ...
... then ... what do you care about? How does your brain operate? What does morality mean to you? What language could possibly reach you? What could cause you to care? I genuinely don't know. It's like when you're trying to speak w/ someone who doesn't speak your language ...
... and you respond by just repeating yourself, louder. "HE'S A CAREER CRIMINAL WITH 34 FELONY CONVICTIONS." It's pointless. They *heard* you. They just don't understand, don't care. You're assuming they share the premise "criminal rapists are bad," but they don't.
And so, if you're that far apart -- if you do not share basic, fundamental moral precepts, if you live in different moral universes -- how can you communicate? Literally, what do you say?
...
Anyway. I just wanted to get that feeling down. Maybe some of you feel it too.
In the meantime, my grand manifesto against electing Trump amounts to this:
This talk of farmers. The simple point is that Starmer and Steve Reed lied to them, to get elected in various rural seats. An immediate loss of trust like this will not be forgotten and they will pay for it.
I'm glad I don't have to write an endorsement piece, because I really wouldn't know how to go about it. Ever since 2015, when Trump descended the escalator, I have had the same feeling, which I've never quite seen articulated, so I will briefly try:
It's basically this: Trump is so obviously, manifestly repugnant -- his words, his gestures, his behavior, his history -- that it strikes me like a tsunami. It's a kind of total, perfect, seamless repugnance that I've never witnessed before in my life. Which means ...
... pointing out some particular piece of the repugnance & arguing against it feels ... surreal, I guess. "He has regularly sexually assaulted women, almost certainly raped a few, and ... I think that's bad."
Yeah. I mean, I think rape is bad. But here's the thing ...
... if you think rape is bad, you will already oppose Trump. If you don't, what could I possibly say to reach you? I don't understand your moral universe, your basic precepts. We are different in a way so fundamental that I literally don't know how to speak to you.
It's the same with all of it. I could point to some obvious bit of repugnance -- "I think it's bad to cheat every small business you interact with." -- but ... it's obvious. You've surely see it yourself. And it doesn't matter to you. So how is me pointing it out going to help?
You see what I'm getting at? I feel like there's nothing I can say about Trump that isn't obvious, that isn't well-understood public knowledge. If you still support him at this point, you clearly don't *care* about tall that stuff. And if you don't care about all that stuff ...
... then ... what do you care about? How does your brain operate? What does morality mean to you? What language could possibly reach you? What could cause you to care? I genuinely don't know. It's like when you're trying to speak w/ someone who doesn't speak your language ...
... and you respond by just repeating yourself, louder. "HE'S A CAREER CRIMINAL WITH 34 FELONY CONVICTIONS." It's pointless. They *heard* you. They just don't understand, don't care. You're assuming they share the premise "criminal rapists are bad," but they don't.
And so, if you're that far apart -- if you do not share basic, fundamental moral precepts, if you live in different moral universes -- how can you communicate? Literally, what do you say?
...
Anyway. I just wanted to get that feeling down. Maybe some of you feel it too.
In the meantime, my grand manifesto against electing Trump amounts to this:
This is a good diagnostic test for Trump Derangement Syndrome. If you respond to anybody who supports him with this kind of sheer disbelief and incomprehension, then you have it.
On the other hand Trump Derangement Syndrome is being deranged enough to look at the long, long list of reasons why Trump is unfit to be in charge of anything or anyone, and saying, 'Yes, I'll vote for that.'
I'm glad I don't have to write an endorsement piece, because I really wouldn't know how to go about it. Ever since 2015, when Trump descended the escalator, I have had the same feeling, which I've never quite seen articulated, so I will briefly try:
It's basically this: Trump is so obviously, manifestly repugnant -- his words, his gestures, his behavior, his history -- that it strikes me like a tsunami. It's a kind of total, perfect, seamless repugnance that I've never witnessed before in my life. Which means ...
... pointing out some particular piece of the repugnance & arguing against it feels ... surreal, I guess. "He has regularly sexually assaulted women, almost certainly raped a few, and ... I think that's bad."
Yeah. I mean, I think rape is bad. But here's the thing ...
... if you think rape is bad, you will already oppose Trump. If you don't, what could I possibly say to reach you? I don't understand your moral universe, your basic precepts. We are different in a way so fundamental that I literally don't know how to speak to you.
It's the same with all of it. I could point to some obvious bit of repugnance -- "I think it's bad to cheat every small business you interact with." -- but ... it's obvious. You've surely see it yourself. And it doesn't matter to you. So how is me pointing it out going to help?
You see what I'm getting at? I feel like there's nothing I can say about Trump that isn't obvious, that isn't well-understood public knowledge. If you still support him at this point, you clearly don't *care* about tall that stuff. And if you don't care about all that stuff ...
... then ... what do you care about? How does your brain operate? What does morality mean to you? What language could possibly reach you? What could cause you to care? I genuinely don't know. It's like when you're trying to speak w/ someone who doesn't speak your language ...
... and you respond by just repeating yourself, louder. "HE'S A CAREER CRIMINAL WITH 34 FELONY CONVICTIONS." It's pointless. They *heard* you. They just don't understand, don't care. You're assuming they share the premise "criminal rapists are bad," but they don't.
And so, if you're that far apart -- if you do not share basic, fundamental moral precepts, if you live in different moral universes -- how can you communicate? Literally, what do you say?
...
Anyway. I just wanted to get that feeling down. Maybe some of you feel it too.
In the meantime, my grand manifesto against electing Trump amounts to this:
This is a good diagnostic test for Trump Derangement Syndrome. If you respond to anybody who supports him with this kind of sheer disbelief and incomprehension, then you have it.
The other kind of Trump Derangement Syndrome, characterising any critcism of Trump however justified as TDS.
I'm glad I don't have to write an endorsement piece, because I really wouldn't know how to go about it. Ever since 2015, when Trump descended the escalator, I have had the same feeling, which I've never quite seen articulated, so I will briefly try:
It's basically this: Trump is so obviously, manifestly repugnant -- his words, his gestures, his behavior, his history -- that it strikes me like a tsunami. It's a kind of total, perfect, seamless repugnance that I've never witnessed before in my life. Which means ...
... pointing out some particular piece of the repugnance & arguing against it feels ... surreal, I guess. "He has regularly sexually assaulted women, almost certainly raped a few, and ... I think that's bad."
Yeah. I mean, I think rape is bad. But here's the thing ...
... if you think rape is bad, you will already oppose Trump. If you don't, what could I possibly say to reach you? I don't understand your moral universe, your basic precepts. We are different in a way so fundamental that I literally don't know how to speak to you.
It's the same with all of it. I could point to some obvious bit of repugnance -- "I think it's bad to cheat every small business you interact with." -- but ... it's obvious. You've surely see it yourself. And it doesn't matter to you. So how is me pointing it out going to help?
You see what I'm getting at? I feel like there's nothing I can say about Trump that isn't obvious, that isn't well-understood public knowledge. If you still support him at this point, you clearly don't *care* about tall that stuff. And if you don't care about all that stuff ...
... then ... what do you care about? How does your brain operate? What does morality mean to you? What language could possibly reach you? What could cause you to care? I genuinely don't know. It's like when you're trying to speak w/ someone who doesn't speak your language ...
... and you respond by just repeating yourself, louder. "HE'S A CAREER CRIMINAL WITH 34 FELONY CONVICTIONS." It's pointless. They *heard* you. They just don't understand, don't care. You're assuming they share the premise "criminal rapists are bad," but they don't.
And so, if you're that far apart -- if you do not share basic, fundamental moral precepts, if you live in different moral universes -- how can you communicate? Literally, what do you say?
...
Anyway. I just wanted to get that feeling down. Maybe some of you feel it too.
In the meantime, my grand manifesto against electing Trump amounts to this:
This is a good diagnostic test for Trump Derangement Syndrome. If you respond to anybody who supports him with this kind of sheer disbelief and incomprehension, then you have it.
There is strong evidence you have a severe dose of Trump Derangement Syndrome, William.
I'm glad I don't have to write an endorsement piece, because I really wouldn't know how to go about it. Ever since 2015, when Trump descended the escalator, I have had the same feeling, which I've never quite seen articulated, so I will briefly try:
It's basically this: Trump is so obviously, manifestly repugnant -- his words, his gestures, his behavior, his history -- that it strikes me like a tsunami. It's a kind of total, perfect, seamless repugnance that I've never witnessed before in my life. Which means ...
... pointing out some particular piece of the repugnance & arguing against it feels ... surreal, I guess. "He has regularly sexually assaulted women, almost certainly raped a few, and ... I think that's bad."
Yeah. I mean, I think rape is bad. But here's the thing ...
... if you think rape is bad, you will already oppose Trump. If you don't, what could I possibly say to reach you? I don't understand your moral universe, your basic precepts. We are different in a way so fundamental that I literally don't know how to speak to you.
It's the same with all of it. I could point to some obvious bit of repugnance -- "I think it's bad to cheat every small business you interact with." -- but ... it's obvious. You've surely see it yourself. And it doesn't matter to you. So how is me pointing it out going to help?
You see what I'm getting at? I feel like there's nothing I can say about Trump that isn't obvious, that isn't well-understood public knowledge. If you still support him at this point, you clearly don't *care* about tall that stuff. And if you don't care about all that stuff ...
... then ... what do you care about? How does your brain operate? What does morality mean to you? What language could possibly reach you? What could cause you to care? I genuinely don't know. It's like when you're trying to speak w/ someone who doesn't speak your language ...
... and you respond by just repeating yourself, louder. "HE'S A CAREER CRIMINAL WITH 34 FELONY CONVICTIONS." It's pointless. They *heard* you. They just don't understand, don't care. You're assuming they share the premise "criminal rapists are bad," but they don't.
And so, if you're that far apart -- if you do not share basic, fundamental moral precepts, if you live in different moral universes -- how can you communicate? Literally, what do you say?
...
Anyway. I just wanted to get that feeling down. Maybe some of you feel it too.
In the meantime, my grand manifesto against electing Trump amounts to this:
This talk of farmers. The simple point is that Starmer and Steve Reed lied to them, to get elected in various rural seats. An immediate loss of trust like this will not be forgotten and they will pay for it.
I must have forgotten the line in the manifesto that said they won't raise tax on farmers?
A simple way to define the election: Harris's DNC want to protect people's rights. The right to choose, the right to privacy, the right to exist Trump's RNC want to remove people's rights. What they think is what all Americans should think, and if they don't they must be commie or psychotic.
The Trump offer truly is the Leopards' Eating Faces Party. They want to impose restrictions on what you do in your own home with your own body, but no no, they're actually only going to do that to the Bad People.
We will see how this plays out. I still think a Harris win, sadly followed by increasing protests, with a serious risk of those becoming violent & armed.
Trump: "I will protect women, whether they like it or not."
I have made the comparison to the fictional Gilead for ages. Trump and the GOP seem determined to create parts of it for real.
And not just women. The long list of enemies and illegals he will lock up / deport. The Puerto Rico “joke” in itself isn’t a big deal, but seems to have woken up voters of that heritage - and the wider Latino voter block - that Trump wants them out of the country. And not just the illegals. He will make you illegal.
I'm glad I don't have to write an endorsement piece, because I really wouldn't know how to go about it. Ever since 2015, when Trump descended the escalator, I have had the same feeling, which I've never quite seen articulated, so I will briefly try:
It's basically this: Trump is so obviously, manifestly repugnant -- his words, his gestures, his behavior, his history -- that it strikes me like a tsunami. It's a kind of total, perfect, seamless repugnance that I've never witnessed before in my life. Which means ...
... pointing out some particular piece of the repugnance & arguing against it feels ... surreal, I guess. "He has regularly sexually assaulted women, almost certainly raped a few, and ... I think that's bad."
Yeah. I mean, I think rape is bad. But here's the thing ...
... if you think rape is bad, you will already oppose Trump. If you don't, what could I possibly say to reach you? I don't understand your moral universe, your basic precepts. We are different in a way so fundamental that I literally don't know how to speak to you.
It's the same with all of it. I could point to some obvious bit of repugnance -- "I think it's bad to cheat every small business you interact with." -- but ... it's obvious. You've surely see it yourself. And it doesn't matter to you. So how is me pointing it out going to help?
You see what I'm getting at? I feel like there's nothing I can say about Trump that isn't obvious, that isn't well-understood public knowledge. If you still support him at this point, you clearly don't *care* about tall that stuff. And if you don't care about all that stuff ...
... then ... what do you care about? How does your brain operate? What does morality mean to you? What language could possibly reach you? What could cause you to care? I genuinely don't know. It's like when you're trying to speak w/ someone who doesn't speak your language ...
... and you respond by just repeating yourself, louder. "HE'S A CAREER CRIMINAL WITH 34 FELONY CONVICTIONS." It's pointless. They *heard* you. They just don't understand, don't care. You're assuming they share the premise "criminal rapists are bad," but they don't.
And so, if you're that far apart -- if you do not share basic, fundamental moral precepts, if you live in different moral universes -- how can you communicate? Literally, what do you say?
...
Anyway. I just wanted to get that feeling down. Maybe some of you feel it too.
In the meantime, my grand manifesto against electing Trump amounts to this:
This is a good diagnostic test for Trump Derangement Syndrome. If you respond to anybody who supports him with this kind of sheer disbelief and incomprehension, then you have it.
If you respond to supporting Trump with this kind of disbelief and incomprehension it means you still have some integrity and morality.
I'm glad I don't have to write an endorsement piece, because I really wouldn't know how to go about it. Ever since 2015, when Trump descended the escalator, I have had the same feeling, which I've never quite seen articulated, so I will briefly try:
It's basically this: Trump is so obviously, manifestly repugnant -- his words, his gestures, his behavior, his history -- that it strikes me like a tsunami. It's a kind of total, perfect, seamless repugnance that I've never witnessed before in my life. Which means ...
... pointing out some particular piece of the repugnance & arguing against it feels ... surreal, I guess. "He has regularly sexually assaulted women, almost certainly raped a few, and ... I think that's bad."
Yeah. I mean, I think rape is bad. But here's the thing ...
... if you think rape is bad, you will already oppose Trump. If you don't, what could I possibly say to reach you? I don't understand your moral universe, your basic precepts. We are different in a way so fundamental that I literally don't know how to speak to you.
It's the same with all of it. I could point to some obvious bit of repugnance -- "I think it's bad to cheat every small business you interact with." -- but ... it's obvious. You've surely see it yourself. And it doesn't matter to you. So how is me pointing it out going to help?
You see what I'm getting at? I feel like there's nothing I can say about Trump that isn't obvious, that isn't well-understood public knowledge. If you still support him at this point, you clearly don't *care* about tall that stuff. And if you don't care about all that stuff ...
... then ... what do you care about? How does your brain operate? What does morality mean to you? What language could possibly reach you? What could cause you to care? I genuinely don't know. It's like when you're trying to speak w/ someone who doesn't speak your language ...
... and you respond by just repeating yourself, louder. "HE'S A CAREER CRIMINAL WITH 34 FELONY CONVICTIONS." It's pointless. They *heard* you. They just don't understand, don't care. You're assuming they share the premise "criminal rapists are bad," but they don't.
And so, if you're that far apart -- if you do not share basic, fundamental moral precepts, if you live in different moral universes -- how can you communicate? Literally, what do you say?
...
Anyway. I just wanted to get that feeling down. Maybe some of you feel it too.
In the meantime, my grand manifesto against electing Trump amounts to this:
I'm glad I don't have to write an endorsement piece, because I really wouldn't know how to go about it. Ever since 2015, when Trump descended the escalator, I have had the same feeling, which I've never quite seen articulated, so I will briefly try:
It's basically this: Trump is so obviously, manifestly repugnant -- his words, his gestures, his behavior, his history -- that it strikes me like a tsunami. It's a kind of total, perfect, seamless repugnance that I've never witnessed before in my life. Which means ...
... pointing out some particular piece of the repugnance & arguing against it feels ... surreal, I guess. "He has regularly sexually assaulted women, almost certainly raped a few, and ... I think that's bad."
Yeah. I mean, I think rape is bad. But here's the thing ...
... if you think rape is bad, you will already oppose Trump. If you don't, what could I possibly say to reach you? I don't understand your moral universe, your basic precepts. We are different in a way so fundamental that I literally don't know how to speak to you.
It's the same with all of it. I could point to some obvious bit of repugnance -- "I think it's bad to cheat every small business you interact with." -- but ... it's obvious. You've surely see it yourself. And it doesn't matter to you. So how is me pointing it out going to help?
You see what I'm getting at? I feel like there's nothing I can say about Trump that isn't obvious, that isn't well-understood public knowledge. If you still support him at this point, you clearly don't *care* about tall that stuff. And if you don't care about all that stuff ...
... then ... what do you care about? How does your brain operate? What does morality mean to you? What language could possibly reach you? What could cause you to care? I genuinely don't know. It's like when you're trying to speak w/ someone who doesn't speak your language ...
... and you respond by just repeating yourself, louder. "HE'S A CAREER CRIMINAL WITH 34 FELONY CONVICTIONS." It's pointless. They *heard* you. They just don't understand, don't care. You're assuming they share the premise "criminal rapists are bad," but they don't.
And so, if you're that far apart -- if you do not share basic, fundamental moral precepts, if you live in different moral universes -- how can you communicate? Literally, what do you say?
...
Anyway. I just wanted to get that feeling down. Maybe some of you feel it too.
In the meantime, my grand manifesto against electing Trump amounts to this:
A simple way to define the election: Harris's DNC want to protect people's rights. The right to choose, the right to privacy, the right to exist Trump's RNC want to remove people's rights. What they think is what all Americans should think, and if they don't they must be commie or psychotic.
The Trump offer truly is the Leopards' Eating Faces Party. They want to impose restrictions on what you do in your own home with your own body, but no no, they're actually only going to do that to the Bad People.
We will see how this plays out. I still think a Harris win, sadly followed by increasing protests, with a serious risk of those becoming violent & armed.
Trump: "I will protect women, whether they like it or not."
I have made the comparison to the fictional Gilead for ages. Trump and the GOP seem determined to create parts of it for real.
And not just women. The long list of enemies and illegals he will lock up / deport. The Puerto Rico “joke” in itself isn’t a big deal, but seems to have woken up voters of that heritage - and the wider Latino voter block - that Trump wants them out of the country. And not just the illegals. He will make you illegal.
What? A comedian made a joke at a rally. It’s a massive leap from that to Trump wants to deport anyone who’s in the county legally.
Meanwhile, Biden called Trump supporters garbage and they all turned up to hallowe’en parties dressed in bin bags.
Exactly. The joke wasn't the start of "I'm going to deport 10m people", it was a joke built on that.
I do worry about Sandpit and others. Who sit there watching Trump say x and immediately say "Trump did not say x"
We had that bit on CNN with Tapper and Vance. Tapper says "Trump said x". Vance gets outraged. "Trump didn't say that how dare you say it, fake news, where's the quote". Tapper then reads the quote verbatim. "Nope" says Vance, he didn't say that.
What has happened to intelligent people to generate this perception filter where they disown the evidence of their eyes and ears and their own sanity and logic and experience? Its very 1984.
The public sector is not all roses. For example, young doctors have to pay for their own exams to progress and are not exactly offered much support to progress. That would be unheard of in the professional private sector. Other examples are teachers buying food and stationary for their classes and being unable to expense.
You ever in your life seen a poor doctor, among the highest paid and safest job in the country with very generous pensions. My heart bleeds for them.
This talk of farmers. The simple point is that Starmer and Steve Reed lied to them, to get elected in various rural seats. An immediate loss of trust like this will not be forgotten and they will pay for it.
I must have forgotten the line in the manifesto that said they won't raise tax on farmers?
Where would you raise the money from instead?
Are farmers not working people? The ones I know seem to work harder than most.
And I would raise the money by not spending it - public sector needs the fat trimming, not plumping up further.
And I would engage in massive deregulation, that's the only thing which will fix the real underlying problem of no growth - because we're strangling growth at birth with regulatory costs, and that's why the economy has stopped growing.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
The irony is that her optician said she will need it but best to go on the 18 month waiting list now so that she will have it before it becomes a necessity
He also added in England it takes 6 weeks waiting but not sure how true that is
It is true. ISTCs do the majority of NHS cataract surgery in England now, with waits typically of a few weeks.
What's an ISTC?
Independent Sector Treatment Centre
They do things where it makes sense to do them on mass (Cataracts / Hip operations) or manage MRI systems.
NHS needs to do loads more of this for routine operations.
Expensive capital equipment such as MRI scanners should be working 24/7, with people offered the option of turning up in the middle of the night tomorrow rather than waiting weeks or months.
Streeting plans further expansion, but it is pretty much limited to quick turnaround surgery in fit patients.
Getting a quick MRI is no benefit if it's a 6 month wait to see a rheumatologist to discuss the findings. There are bottlenecks in the system to address, but it does tend to just shift the queue elsewhere.
I disagree. Last summer my mother went into Kings Mill for pancreatitis. They worked out pretty quickly that it wasn't any of the really bad causes but for obvious reasons wanted to know what was causing it. They had to keep her in for a couple of days uintil the blood markers showed the epiosode was over but wanted to have an MRI to check for gall stones as the Ultrasound had not been clear. They would not send her home because it would have taken weeks to get her the MRi if she was out of hospital.
So she waited in hospital, taking up a bed that others could have been using (and which was certainly needed) for an additional 4 days until they could get her the MRI. And she was not the only one. All because they had only one team capable of running the MRI who were already working a 14 hour days and a 7 day week.
That’s nuts, what do a couple of MRI operators cost, compared to the cost of keeping beds occupied for days because people are waiting for scans?
Yep. And there is another MRI scanner at Newark which doesn't get used that often as they don't have the staff for it.
Nearly every time I've had an MRI scan it's been private.
They are always in throughput mode - they run from early morning (before work) till 8-9pm.
Other testing is also an issue - when my father was in hospital, they seemed to have a backlog on basic bloodwork. I'm not talking cultures etc. I'm talking about "What is his potassium level?". Doctors would come round and go "We need to see that before we can make a decision" then leave again.....
At one point, my brother and I were discussing finding a private laboratory and hiring someone to take blood samples and test them...
That's one area where medtech might come to the rescue. Despite the Theranos debacle, lab on a chip stuff for simple blood tests isn't very far off.
This talk of farmers. The simple point is that Starmer and Steve Reed lied to them, to get elected in various rural seats. An immediate loss of trust like this will not be forgotten and they will pay for it.
I must have forgotten the line in the manifesto that said they won't raise tax on farmers?
Where would you raise the money from instead?
Are farmers not working people? The ones I know seem to work harder than most.
And I would raise the money by not spending it - public sector needs the fat trimming, not plumping up further.
And I would engage in massive deregulation, that's the only thing which will fix the real underlying problem of no growth - because we're strangling growth at birth with regulatory costs, and that's why the economy has stopped growing.
Anyone inheriting farmland didn't work for it, no. If they did, they should have paid income tax when they earned it.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Productivity has gone backwards start there.
Countless thousands of extra staff and vast reduction in service, something far wrong.
What has happened to intelligent people to generate this perception filter where they disown the evidence of their eyes and ears and their own sanity and logic and experience? Its very 1984.
JD Vance's defining political trait is quickly becoming his ability to listen carefully as someone describes an objectively disturbing thing and then say "I don't see the problem you're talking about"
"Gaslighting" is overused but there's just no other word for what he's doing
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
The irony is that her optician said she will need it but best to go on the 18 month waiting list now so that she will have it before it becomes a necessity
He also added in England it takes 6 weeks waiting but not sure how true that is
It is true. ISTCs do the majority of NHS cataract surgery in England now, with waits typically of a few weeks.
What's an ISTC?
Independent Sector Treatment Centre
They do things where it makes sense to do them on mass (Cataracts / Hip operations) or manage MRI systems.
NHS needs to do loads more of this for routine operations.
Expensive capital equipment such as MRI scanners should be working 24/7, with people offered the option of turning up in the middle of the night tomorrow rather than waiting weeks or months.
Streeting plans further expansion, but it is pretty much limited to quick turnaround surgery in fit patients.
Getting a quick MRI is no benefit if it's a 6 month wait to see a rheumatologist to discuss the findings. There are bottlenecks in the system to address, but it does tend to just shift the queue elsewhere.
I disagree. Last summer my mother went into Kings Mill for pancreatitis. They worked out pretty quickly that it wasn't any of the really bad causes but for obvious reasons wanted to know what was causing it. They had to keep her in for a couple of days uintil the blood markers showed the epiosode was over but wanted to have an MRI to check for gall stones as the Ultrasound had not been clear. They would not send her home because it would have taken weeks to get her the MRi if she was out of hospital.
So she waited in hospital, taking up a bed that others could have been using (and which was certainly needed) for an additional 4 days until they could get her the MRI. And she was not the only one. All because they had only one team capable of running the MRI who were already working a 14 hour days and a 7 day week.
That’s nuts, what do a couple of MRI operators cost, compared to the cost of keeping beds occupied for days because people are waiting for scans?
Yep. And there is another MRI scanner at Newark which doesn't get used that often as they don't have the staff for it.
Nearly every time I've had an MRI scan it's been private.
They are always in throughput mode - they run from early morning (before work) till 8-9pm.
Other testing is also an issue - when my father was in hospital, they seemed to have a backlog on basic bloodwork. I'm not talking cultures etc. I'm talking about "What is his potassium level?". Doctors would come round and go "We need to see that before we can make a decision" then leave again.....
At one point, my brother and I were discussing finding a private laboratory and hiring someone to take blood samples and test them...
This is where we need Theranos and there has been some progress in finding non-fraudulent versions. The trouble with blood tests is the doctor orders half a dozen or so, the phlebotomist draws blood and the lab carries out those tests. Then the doctor looks at the results and decides it would be nice to know a couple more levels, so rinse and repeat. What we need is a machine that runs every conceivable blood test against a single sample to save hours and often days or weeks of toing and froing.
It will also be good when hospitals and GPs exchange data so each can see the results of the tests done by the other, rather than just that tests were done…
I have online access to all blood, pathology and radiology investigations done both in hospital or GP in Leicester. It is occasionally an issue if I am referred a patient from Kettering or Peterborough. This has been possible for well over a decade.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
I genuinly don't understand what Dan Neidle is saying.
The average farm in the UK is 85 hectares - 210 acres. Agricultural land averages around £10K an acre. That is £2.1 million in lland value alone. Before you take into account a few hundred thousand on equipment, buildings, livestock etc.
Most family farms wuld be caught by a £1 million cap. They are asset rich and cash poor because that is the nature of the business. It is a fecking ridiculous idea.
That average is the mean average distorted by very large holdings.
The median average is much lower.
According to DEFRA 59% of English farms have less than 50 hectares.
50 hectares is still 125ish acres. So still well over £1 million in land value alone without everything else.
There is a huge variety in farms and associated land value, from your massive arable farm in East Anglia to your small hill farm in Wales. It needs a deep analysis rather than broadbrush averages to determine if the policy is a mistake.
Indeed.
And no mention that of the Total farmable area in England almost 1/2 of it is farmed on a whole or part tenant basis.
And no mention that a lot of the increase in farm values is as a result of inheritance tax dodges by wealthy people with no prior experience of farming at all.
I do a huge amount of walking - I'm always amazed by how infrequently you bump into a farmer or worker.
It's also noticable you many fewer cows you see out in pasture these days. I assume they are all in massive sheds for most of the year - which saddens me.
Here in Arden you're more likely to find ponies or alpacas than cattle. If they contribute to our food security I'd rather not know.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment. Growth in this context just means you don’t want to pay more tax.
That might be a fair argument, if the budget contained genuine growth measures. And I'd fully support that.
It doesn't, unfortunately.
That’s your opinion. In my view investment in education healthcare and infrastructure is a driver for growth.
I have lived long enough now to know that tax cuts don’t drive jobs and “growth” but rather the windfall just gets pocketed as profits.
It's amazing how farmers have suddenly become the British Right's greatest friends. When Brexit and Liz Truss were selling them out we were piously told that they deserved no special treatment and had to make sacrifices for the greater good.
Maybe one day you and the other holdouts will stop living in 2016.
This talk of farmers. The simple point is that Starmer and Steve Reed lied to them, to get elected in various rural seats. An immediate loss of trust like this will not be forgotten and they will pay for it.
I must have forgotten the line in the manifesto that said they won't raise tax on farmers?
Where would you raise the money from instead?
Are farmers not working people? The ones I know seem to work harder than most.
And I would raise the money by not spending it - public sector needs the fat trimming, not plumping up further.
And I would engage in massive deregulation, that's the only thing which will fix the real underlying problem of no growth - because we're strangling growth at birth with regulatory costs, and that's why the economy has stopped growing.
Where is the fat in the public sector?
I ask this because it's 95% of the time the fat people see is services they don't need themselves...
Just on tests: I was talking to a friend of mine a month or two ago and she told me about a friend of hers who was pregnant. She was 'at risk' of having a certain condition but knew she didn't because she'd been tested. A doctor insisted on another blood test. Shortly thereafter, a midwife insisted on the same test again. The internal communication was horrendous.
The mess with farmers and IHT is going to be one to watch. On one hand you have tax expert Dan Neidle saying 'what's the fuss?', very few farms will be included if you look at the tax stats, and then the farmers themselves saying it is a friggin' disaster.
Telegraph has as ever gone totally toton on this this morning.
Yet the main example quoted is a farmer who farms the land still owned by his very aging father. They don't seem to have thought through inheritance and now they do.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls seems to have weighed in and warned that the politics of this are looking bad for Reeves.
U turn coming????
Who to believe on tax... A tax expert or someone who makes TV shows?
Who to believe a farmer or a town dweller ?
If the farmer knows about farming and the townie knows about tax, then the townie.
Expertise beats location.
Nonsense, the question on raising tax is how people will behave. You change the tax regime and people will act differently and often in ways that cant be predicted.
My SME manufacturing co estimates the NI raid will cost us £200k next year. As a result we wont be raising salaries as much and will probably look at a couple of layoffs.
Growrth ? Not on Labours agenda,
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we have a massive budget deficit and a dire need for infrastructure investment.
Yes, which is why we should cut current spending and divert funds to infrastructure. Reform taxes alone and we'll not kill off growth.
The magical “cut spending” and “growth” which means fuck all without detailing what you’d cut and who and what the effects would be - exactly what you’re complaining about now in fact.
You talk about magical NHS and public sector efficiency gains but why can’t your SME make similar gains?
Our SME does it every year. It' why our VAPE is on the up. It will probably take us a couple of years to claw this back. The NHS will simply swallow the money as it productivity falls over the next 5 years.
Or NHS outcomes might improve, GP service might be better, new hospitals and facilities might be built, including in rural areas. Who knows?
The triumph of hope over experience. Good luck with hat,
The demands on the NHS have grown massively.
To suggest outcomes haven't improved seems particularly peverse.
In the early 1990's women with early breast cancer had a 15% chance of dying within 5 years.
Now ? Its about 5%
Cataract operations were once an in patient operation with a couple of nights stay. Its now done in about 12 minutes and you are back home straight away. Quality is better, its safer and there are less complications. The age of people having the operations has dropped, and there are at least 5 times the number of operations per year.
Life expectancy of men has increased by about 7 years since 40 years ago. Many cancers are a function of age. Prostate being a prime example.
We have worse outcomes than many comparable countries, but then we spend less.
Good morning
My wife needs a double cataract operation and has just been put on Wales NHS 18 month waiting list
Seriously go private for that if you can. It makes a massive difference to quality of life, my mother-in-law did the same and she was overjoyed that she had better vision in her last years.
Agree, you can guarantee that 18 months will stretch so if at all possible raise the cash and get done privately.
Comments
But let the consumer choose.
Where I work, expensive capital equipment comes with a training programme.
They are always in throughput mode - they run from early morning (before work) till 8-9pm.
Other testing is also an issue - when my father was in hospital, they seemed to have a backlog on basic bloodwork. I'm not talking cultures etc. I'm talking about "What is his potassium level?". Doctors would come round and go "We need to see that before we can make a decision" then leave again.....
At one point, my brother and I were discussing finding a private laboratory and hiring someone to take blood samples and test them...
And hence we get onto this:
"It will still be farmed by somebody, and very likely in a more productive fashion."
Yes. It will be bought by larger farms, in many cases massive agribusinesses that will not care for the land; only what the land produces. Worse, many of these are far more adept at avoiding tax than those small farmers.
If the Radiologists and Radiographers in King's Mill decide to work in a new MRI ISTC then the service in King's Mill for inpatients with pancreatis will get worse rather than better. And where else will the ISTC recruit apart from the NHS?
Still, I think that the voters need a good dose of socialism, from time to time, to remind them that it is not benevolent.
https://youtu.be/ACiK6YKmIgI?feature=shared
London University will be pleased to know its efforts to teach me about hexose sugars and their configurations many decades ago were not completely wasted. All altruists gladly make gum in gallon tanks.
Turns out it is a hard g in the drug's name.
Did you know that the embankments on the Thames, in London, were mostly real estate deals?
Kings Mill are interesting, as the the Trust is highly rated - the last time I looked they were the top rated hospital trust in the East Midlands.
If Richard can highlight those shortcomings he does, it identifies that much optimisation is likely possible everywhere.
If the businesses care about what their land produces as you claim, then that's more British made food.
Also known as productivity.
If you don't then let's get Australian or American beef or whatever else and then let our environment here be whatever suits us best.
And what suits us best is less farmland and more housing.
If we do, then productivity matters.
The story that you had to own millions in property to go there was not true. The live in servants of the really rich would send their children to the school as well.
And, as you say, it's why a family of farmers is significantly disadvantaged versus a big business when it comes to Labour's inheritance tax hammer.
https://www.royalpalaces.com/palaces/somerset-house/
As we've seen many times in the past, going for productivity at the cost of the environment soon sees productivity fall or cease.
In Scotland, there are over 20,000 crofts in the Highlands and Islands alone. Most of these will be under 10 hectares (25 acres), averaging 5 hectares in size. Clearly the new IHT rules will affect very few of these, though I do wonder if they count towards the Chancellors statement that three quarters of farmers won't be affected. A lot of businesses will be caught out by this, but there is time to get advice and shift ownership before 2026
He was up at 5 every morning and was called out at night more often than your family doctor but this IHT thing is a load of nonsense.
When the original Sherrin died Alf went into farming and Ned into showbiz and I believe there were two sisters as well.
So even if the government hadn't taken a cut the value of the farm would have had to be divided into 4 or at least money found to pay off the other three.
This idea of family farms passing from father to son is an anachronism. Farm land is being divided and sold off all the time. If the farmers are lucky with planning permission.
A side effect of her shit was damaging a very valid investment area - automated testing.
There are a number of highly automated testing systems, in existence, right now. Indeed, Thermos was using existing machines from real manufacturers, behind the scenes, to fake their results.
The bullshit came from the claim that they could run sagans of tests from a pin prick of blood. Which is impossible, with current or near term technology.
You also make a mistake. While keeping a patient in a bed who is otherwise able to be discharged is inefficient and unproductive, it is not expensive being only bed and board. If you discharge them and use the bed for say a bowel resection then the cost per day is a lot higher.
Sweating the assets and staff more efficiently may well increase costs and expenditure in the short term, by doing extra work.
Primary care diagnoses: Read/CTV3 or - now - SNOMED-CT
Secondary care diagnoses: ICD10
Prescriptions/devices: BNF or sometimes Read or dm+d
Operations: OPCS-4 in secondary care. Not sure how primary care records them if they want to add them to the primary care record
1600 voters taken off the roles in Virginia after a records comparison, including 42 who were US Citizens and entitled to vote. Local Court says can't do that - let it be caught by the checks deeper in the system rather than accept the downside of excluding some. SCOTUS rules let it stand.
Somewhat nerdy - ideal for PB. 10 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEAyYs-S_Xc
It’s not like property which would generally be easier to sell .
And no mention that of the Total farmable area in England almost 1/2 of it is farmed on a whole or part tenant basis.
And no mention that a lot of the increase in farm values is as a result of inheritance tax dodges by wealthy people with no prior experience of farming at all.
I do a huge amount of walking - I'm always amazed by how infrequently you bump into a farmer or worker.
It's also noticable you many fewer cows you see out in pasture these days.
I assume they are all in massive sheds for most of the year - which saddens me.
a) Some were ambiguous or badly worded. So an accurate reply would have given the wrong impression eg as for you in the above poll
b) Some (eg shopping habits) were long and my answer to every question was 'None of the above' which translated to 'I didn't give a damn and had never heard of many of the products or shops in the list'
c) Some actually missed out the box I needed to tick so really I couldn't move on.
I left in frustration.
Removing that tax-exempt status will make farmland cheaper and give it back to people interested in it for farming not tax avoidance.
Unintended negative consequence removed.
I'm glad I don't have to write an endorsement piece, because I really wouldn't know how to go about it. Ever since 2015, when Trump descended the escalator, I have had the same feeling, which I've never quite seen articulated, so I will briefly try:
It's basically this: Trump is so obviously, manifestly repugnant -- his words, his gestures, his behavior, his history -- that it strikes me like a tsunami. It's a kind of total, perfect, seamless repugnance that I've never witnessed before in my life. Which means ...
... pointing out some particular piece of the repugnance & arguing against it feels ... surreal, I guess. "He has regularly sexually assaulted women, almost certainly raped a few, and ... I think that's bad."
Yeah. I mean, I think rape is bad. But here's the thing ...
... if you think rape is bad, you will already oppose Trump. If you don't, what could I possibly say to reach you? I don't understand your moral universe, your basic precepts. We are different in a way so fundamental that I literally don't know how to speak to you.
It's the same with all of it. I could point to some obvious bit of repugnance -- "I think it's bad to cheat every small business you interact with." -- but ... it's obvious. You've surely see it yourself. And it doesn't matter to you. So how is me pointing it out going to help?
You see what I'm getting at? I feel like there's nothing I can say about Trump that isn't obvious, that isn't well-understood public knowledge. If you still support him at this point, you clearly don't *care* about tall that stuff. And if you don't care about all that stuff ...
... then ... what do you care about? How does your brain operate? What does morality mean to you? What language could possibly reach you? What could cause you to care? I genuinely don't know. It's like when you're trying to speak w/ someone who doesn't speak your language ...
... and you respond by just repeating yourself, louder. "HE'S A CAREER CRIMINAL WITH 34 FELONY CONVICTIONS." It's pointless. They *heard* you. They just don't understand, don't care. You're assuming they share the premise "criminal rapists are bad," but they don't.
And so, if you're that far apart -- if you do not share basic, fundamental moral precepts, if you live in different moral universes -- how can you communicate? Literally, what do you say?
...
Anyway. I just wanted to get that feeling down. Maybe some of you feel it too.
In the meantime, my grand manifesto against electing Trump amounts to this:
[points at Trump]
https://x.com/drvolts/status/1852035037916455266
What you are missing is the opportunity cost of having the next patient in the bed. Someone keeping a bed occupied is denying the next patient that bed.
There’s many radiologists and radiographers in my part of the world, so why not hire some of them?
I nearly bought a house last year with 16 acres of virtually useless moorland (might have a sustained a small flock of sheep) and that was valued at £4-5k/acre.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_Compromise
Every horror has a bureaucracy.
"GPs and care homes demand exemption from NI raid
NHS and public sector will not have to pay the rise in employers’ National Insurance contributions which increases to 15 per cent from April"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/11/01/national-insurance-rise-gps-care-homes-exemption-reeves/
Hence if you get localised flooding in Spain, or in the UK one year, having a diversified supply chain makes you more secure even locally not less.
On a security perspective it is far more concerning where we get our silicon chips from than our potato chips.
Anyone is free to disagree with it - but at least they've presented some policies and ideas, finally.
There are lots of reasons why this policy is bad, but this isn't one.
(How we laughed!)
When they condescended to present any at all.
Where would you raise the money from instead?
https://x.com/CNviolations/status/1852002645629960480
His voters don't give a shit that he's a horrendous felon that is unfit for office.
They just hate liberals and the modern liberal world more.
I do worry about Sandpit and others. Who sit there watching Trump say x and immediately say "Trump did not say x"
We had that bit on CNN with Tapper and Vance. Tapper says "Trump said x". Vance gets outraged. "Trump didn't say that how dare you say it, fake news, where's the quote". Tapper then reads the quote verbatim. "Nope" says Vance, he didn't say that.
What has happened to intelligent people to generate this perception filter where they disown the evidence of their eyes and ears and their own sanity and logic and experience? Its very 1984.
And I would raise the money by not spending it - public sector needs the fat trimming, not plumping up further.
And I would engage in massive deregulation, that's the only thing which will fix the real underlying problem of no growth - because we're strangling growth at birth with regulatory costs, and that's why the economy has stopped growing.
Despite the Theranos debacle, lab on a chip stuff for simple blood tests isn't very far off.
JD Vance's defining political trait is quickly becoming his ability to listen carefully as someone describes an objectively disturbing thing and then say "I don't see the problem you're talking about"
"Gaslighting" is overused but there's just no other word for what he's doing
https://x.com/whstancil/status/1852291189321433458
The electorate doesnot generally reward politicians who tell it unpleasant truths.
I ask this because it's 95% of the time the fat people see is services they don't need themselves...