TL:DR Women’s sports will become popular, and the competitors paid as much as their male counterparts, once women spend as much time watching and attending sports fixtures as men do.
Yes but this is also why lady tennis players are rolling in it. They sell out Wimbledon just like the men. The job of sports stars is to put bums on seats, and for some reason women do that in tennis but not many other sports.
SKS Fans please explain why SKS Tories are in 3rd place!
This is going to get tiresome (not just from you) if the various factions on here post "X drops to third place!" every time we get a new poll with Ref, Con and Lab tied within MoE and a slightly different random ordering.
Also, I note that the LD lead over Green has GROWN BY 25%!!!!
A drop from a massive lead in 1st to 3rd since GE2024 is more significant.
First time Badenoch scored a clear win at PMQs today, I think.
Why? Badenoch challenged Starmer twice on caps on teacher pay, which have been removed, so Starmer can demonstrate she's wrong on the facts.
Just how I saw it.
I’ve been her critic at PMQs. But on this one she stayed on a topic and Starmer didn’t look ready to discuss the substance and had to fall back on deflection tactics.
I suspect he’d prepared for Southport and wasn’t expecting education policy.
To be fair schools in England are one of the only areas where the Conservatives can point to their record so it should be a relatively comfortable topic for her.My point is, why doesn't Badenoch do her prep? She didn't need to ask two questions about something that doesn't exist. She could have checked first.
Affirmative Action is certainly an industry in the U.S. and operates in a way that most Brits would find unacceptable.
I cannot speak to the specific legal constructs that have supported it over the years, but I presume Trump has chosen to address it at the core, ie the original EO which refers to “affirmative action”.
It happens in the UK too, though in a less full-on way. ISTR a law passed by the Brown government that non-white candidates have to be given priority for employment over white? Certainly in the public sector and public sector-adjacent industries this is the standard approach whether it is directly legislated for or not. And companies have targets to recruit larger percentages of non-white staff at various levels - which has the same effect.
IIRC, no. You have to give a job to the best qualified person in the UK. If two people are equally qualified, you can pick the non-white one, or the woman, etc.
Affirmative Action is certainly an industry in the U.S. and operates in a way that most Brits would find unacceptable.
I cannot speak to the specific legal constructs that have supported it over the years, but I presume Trump has chosen to address it at the core, ie the original EO which refers to “affirmative action”.
It happens in the UK too, though in a less full-on way. ISTR a law passed by the Brown government that non-white candidates have to be given priority for employment over white? Certainly in the public sector and public sector-adjacent industries this is the standard approach whether it is directly legislated for or not. And companies have targets to recruit larger percentages of non-white staff at various levels - which has the same effect.
I don’t think your point about Brown is correct, is it? You often see ads suggesting that “applications from BAME or Global South candidates etc are particularly encouraged”, but so far as I know affirmative action as practiced in the U.S. is actually prohibited under UK law.
Ditto the company targets you mention which may be informal or generic - but not, I think, formalised metrics.
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
TL:DR Women’s sports will become popular, and the competitors paid as much as their male counterparts, once women spend as much time watching and attending sports fixtures as men do.
Yes but this is also why lady tennis players are rolling in it. They sell out Wimbledon just like the men. The job of sports stars is to put bums on seats, and for some reason women do that in tennis but not many other sports.
Indeed so, Burr actually calls out Tennis and UFC in his bit, pointing out that those girls are making serious bank because people actually pay to watch them.
He saves most of his ire for basketball, where the women had been complaining about getting five-figure salaries while the men get telephone numbers, pointing that that most women can’t even name teams and players, who have for decades played in front of almost no-one, and prefer instead to sit at home and watch reality TV, making those people rich instead.
(But he’s a lot funnier and and a lot ruder than my summary!)
TL:DR Women’s sports will become popular, and the competitors paid as much as their male counterparts, once women spend as much time watching and attending sports fixtures as men do.
Yes but this is also why lady tennis players are rolling in it. They sell out Wimbledon just like the men. The job of sports stars is to put bums on seats, and for some reason women do that in tennis but not many other sports.
The womens’ game is more interesting than the men’s’ because there are fewer aces, and longer rallies.
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
Likewise FIX THE FUCKING INLAND REVENUE
I am still waiting for a document - a document which will release many thousands in foreign earnings, to me - which I requested over a year ago. Unbelievable. I have rung them half a dozen times and always been told “OMG we’re so sorry I have your papers right here this will be fixed NOW”
It is never fixed. FIX HMRC!!!
Whoever is in charge of the Passport Office, put that person in charge of HMRC. In fact, put them in charge of EVERYTHING
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
I assume @Andy_JS has misunderstood and I hope that is the case for you two as well, but one can't tell, especially with someone who referred to Kemi as a coconut. Maybe you would like to comment, but the original executive order banned discrimination. It was NOT positive discrimination.
Trump's cancelling of an EO that has stood for 60 years means people can now discriminate against blacks, jews etc in employment. The only affirmative action was that they did not discriminate. They did not have to treat minorities favourable, just not treat them unfavourably.
And you object to that? Really?
I haven't read it all so am happy to be proved wrong.
This is complete drivel. You read it wrong
See my prior comment
Speaking seriously, I think the "affirmative action" mentioned in Johnson's EO 11246 (which prohibits race discrimination) is not the same as "affirmative action" in the 2020s (which enables it if deemed beneficial). This I assume causes all the confusion. Or have I misread it?
The legal underpinnings of what became 'woke' all date back to the original 60s legislation and Trump is serious about rolling it back.
The big one is disparate impact which treats unequal outcomes as evidence of discrimination and in effect makes meritocracy illegal in many cases.
Here's an example of disparate impact in action, with the Biden DOJ suing South Bend (of Pete Buttigieg fame) for using 'a written examination that discriminates against Black applicants and a physical fitness test that discriminates against female applicants'.
No I believe you, it's just that I don't think EO 11246 is an example of it. If I was getting rid of affirmative action (or taking disparate impact into account), then I wouldn't have started with EO 11246. Doing so comprehensively throws the baby out with the bathwater.
LBJ’s “affirmative action” order is the foundation stone on which the entire edifice of woke/DEI is built. It’s the beginning and kernel of the idea that you CAN discriminate by race and gender - against whites and men, but more recently East Asians in education etc - if it is perceived to achieve a greater societal good
Now, you may think it’s appalling that Trump Is reversing and demolishing all of this. The Diversity agenda, the Woke-Industrial Complex. But America is - just about - still a democracy and Trump was explicitly promising to do all this, if elected. He was elected
What he has NOT done is “suddenly made it legal to have racist hiring policies”, or “brought back Jim Crow laws” or any of that hysterical nonsense
So are you saying that it was wrong for industries historically dominated by men to consciously hire more women? Because that is the same thing.
If they weren't qualified or the best person for the role, then yes. People should be judged by the content of their character, not their race, sex etc...
Without that affirmative action historically you wouldn’t see half as many women doctors, lawyers, or engineers because they would still be closed shops. I am not talking about in America either, I am talking about in this country.
Why is meritocratic hiring insufficient?
Because it doesn't happen. If people were purely hired on merit, that would be great. However, what we frequently see is that hiring practices continue to be biased against traditional groups (women, ethnic minorities, disabled, etc.), even after equal pay legislation is introduced. For decades. Which harms individuals, society and the economy.
So, what do you do about that? How do you achieve truly meritocratic hiring? Ideas welcome.
One approach is to have HR staff looking out for sources of bias and trying to do something about them. Trump has gotten rid of such posts in the government. Another approach, a more contentious one, is affirmative action.
If people were hired on merit in the UK, we would live in a far better country than we do. But how do you legislate to prevent the mediocre products of our public schools hiring other mediocre products of our public schools?
When do you think our society reached its peak in the level of meritocracy (assuming the answer isn't the present day)? Maybe the period just after the war?
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
Likewise FIX THE FUCKING INLAND REVENUE
I am still waiting for a document - a document which will release many thousands in foreign earnings, to me - which I requested over a year ago. Unbelievable. I have rung them half a dozen times and always been told “OMG we’re so sorry I have your papers right here this will be fixed NOW”
It is never fixed. FIX HMRC!!!
Whoever is in charge of the Passport Office, put that person in charge of HMRC. In fact, put them in charge of EVERYTHING
The Probate Registry is now fine for simple applications. Anything out of the ordinary can take over a year to sort out.
First time Badenoch scored a clear win at PMQs today, I think.
Why? Badenoch challenged Starmer twice on caps on teacher pay, which have been removed, so Starmer can demonstrate she's wrong on the facts.
Have they? I thought one of the major purposes of this bill was to prevent academies having freedom to set pay? Either Kemi is right, or they've done a very screeching u-turn in the last couple of days.
Having just listened to it, I thought she had Starmer on the ropes - she'd finally got an issue where he can't robotically squawk "£22bn black hole" or "fixing 14 years of Tory government" which left him floundering round completely ignoring the questions for six answers in a row, because he hadn't got a good answer, and he knew it.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
I assume @Andy_JS has misunderstood and I hope that is the case for you two as well, but one can't tell, especially with someone who referred to Kemi as a coconut. Maybe you would like to comment, but the original executive order banned discrimination. It was NOT positive discrimination.
Trump's cancelling of an EO that has stood for 60 years means people can now discriminate against blacks, jews etc in employment. The only affirmative action was that they did not discriminate. They did not have to treat minorities favourable, just not treat them unfavourably.
And you object to that? Really?
I haven't read it all so am happy to be proved wrong.
This is complete drivel. You read it wrong
See my prior comment
Speaking seriously, I think the "affirmative action" mentioned in Johnson's EO 11246 (which prohibits race discrimination) is not the same as "affirmative action" in the 2020s (which enables it if deemed beneficial). This I assume causes all the confusion. Or have I misread it?
The legal underpinnings of what became 'woke' all date back to the original 60s legislation and Trump is serious about rolling it back.
The big one is disparate impact which treats unequal outcomes as evidence of discrimination and in effect makes meritocracy illegal in many cases.
Here's an example of disparate impact in action, with the Biden DOJ suing South Bend (of Pete Buttigieg fame) for using 'a written examination that discriminates against Black applicants and a physical fitness test that discriminates against female applicants'.
No I believe you, it's just that I don't think EO 11246 is an example of it. If I was getting rid of affirmative action (or taking disparate impact into account), then I wouldn't have started with EO 11246. Doing so comprehensively throws the baby out with the bathwater.
LBJ’s “affirmative action” order is the foundation stone on which the entire edifice of woke/DEI is built. It’s the beginning and kernel of the idea that you CAN discriminate by race and gender - against whites and men, but more recently East Asians in education etc - if it is perceived to achieve a greater societal good
Now, you may think it’s appalling that Trump Is reversing and demolishing all of this. The Diversity agenda, the Woke-Industrial Complex. But America is - just about - still a democracy and Trump was explicitly promising to do all this, if elected. He was elected
What he has NOT done is “suddenly made it legal to have racist hiring policies”, or “brought back Jim Crow laws” or any of that hysterical nonsense
So are you saying that it was wrong for industries historically dominated by men to consciously hire more women? Because that is the same thing.
It's wrong to choose a woman over a more qualified man for the sake of diversity, yes. Just as it would be wrong to hire a man over a more qualified woman to be a primary school teacher.
This is so naive and ignores years of careful dismantling of sexism BECAUSE of affirmative action.
You may not have noticed, but it's currently 2025 not 1970.
Yeah. And there is still work to do. It is naive to think that all these problems and inbuild prejudices have disappeared because they haven’t
Sure, but we've reached a point where enough progress has been made that policies that have become counterproductive need to be moved on from.
He has cancelled the most basic rights (not that that will have any impact because of later ones), but not the ones that have gone too far. That seems like an odd thing to do doesn't it.
Yesterday you got yourself in a tangle over climate change and the wording of who has a cervix, both of which were dancing on a pin head. Why don't you just come out with it and say you don't believe in climate change and all this woke nonsense and employers should be able to discriminate as they like.
No, he hasn’t. Non-discrimination is enshrined in other acts of congress, which are not repealed by the executive order.
Agree and I said that in that post (first line in brackets). So why do it then?
Because, as has now beem explained to you by several people; using quite short words, that LBJ EO is the foundation stone of the Woke/Diversity industry. And if you want to roll it all away, you need to get rid of that - which kicked it all off
The many many laws which prohibit racial and sexiual discrimination in hiring etc etc etc all remain firmly in place
Absolute crap. Firstly one person said it not many and it is nonsense. You don't get rid of something very sensible because you don't like something else that came later and then keep the duff stuff. I mean what nutty nonsense is that. Keep the good stuff and get rid of the bad stuff.
You know jolly well that is not Trump's aim. He is just throwing a bone to the idiots that follow him like you who can't think for themselves
I know I chuck around “you’re stupid” comments like the confetti of insults, but the only conclusion I can reach from your comments today, passim, is that you are genuinely too thick to understand all this. I’ve given up trying
Let us talk of happier things, old bean
So you don't have an answer to that then.
We have a whole lot of good stuff and a whole lot of bad stuff. The bad stuff followed the good stuff. So the logical thing to do is get rid of the good stuff and keep the bad stuff. Yes I can see that is logical in an idiots mind.
And the arguments keep changing. Others have said people are still protected by later laws so it is ok. Yet these are the ones you want to get rid of. And when you get rid of them you are going to have to reintroduce a version of LBJ's EO aren't you or are we going back to the bad old days.
Nonsense on stilts.
Lol
Someone actually LIKED your comment. So at least you’re not alone, over there on the bottom left of the bell curve
I’d give you a wave but there’s a big *bell shaped thing* in the way
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
DCs have a much wider legal role than just probate. And there's good sense in having a gatekeeper. For one thing, accurate data. There was an issue about cause of death which had to be double checked with the doctor. Also about how to classify previous employment. But that just took a few moments. In terms of actual bookings, I didn';t have any problems in my part of Scotland - partly because I could go to a different one from my notional place of registration which was much more convenient.
Edit: Also, a DC can be issued only once, which saves confusion ...
And the registrar also triggers the Tell Us Once system which is already in place, to notify doctor, |DSS, etc. etc.
So really I'm not so sure.
The much greater issue is probate registries and the Scottish equivalents - they were getting very slow even before covid, with (in Scotland) instructions for lay users which had not been completely accurate in 2009 and had become less accurate since, needing a check with a lawyer to sort out the technicalities of the form. But I suspect they are trying to discourage lay executors to minimise messups.
Affirmative Action is certainly an industry in the U.S. and operates in a way that most Brits would find unacceptable.
I cannot speak to the specific legal constructs that have supported it over the years, but I presume Trump has chosen to address it at the core, ie the original EO which refers to “affirmative action”.
It happens in the UK too, though in a less full-on way. ISTR a law passed by the Brown government that non-white candidates have to be given priority for employment over white? Certainly in the public sector and public sector-adjacent industries this is the standard approach whether it is directly legislated for or not. And companies have targets to recruit larger percentages of non-white staff at various levels - which has the same effect.
That isn't correct. Positive action is legal, when proportionate, but positive discrimination is illegal:
So as an example several medical schools run access to medicine courses aimed at communities under represented in the medical workforce, but those on these courses have to compete on a level playing field with other applicants. Mostly this is on economic rather than ethnic basis, though there is a degree of overlap. I am masked as to who has been on these courses when interviewing.
Please however feel free to tell Cyclefree she owes her career in law to affirmative action forcing open a door for her rather than her getting on and doing it.
I note December 2024 government borrowing was £7.7bn higher than December 2023.
Hard to lay the blame for that at the door of the Tories.
(Let the attempts commence here!)
Hunt’s NI cuts.
Nah, it's spending rises and debt interest that are the cause. There was enough tax growth elsewhere to cover the cut in NI without spending rises and debt interest increases, both of which are owned by the new government due to their shit policies.
Affirmative Action is certainly an industry in the U.S. and operates in a way that most Brits would find unacceptable.
I cannot speak to the specific legal constructs that have supported it over the years, but I presume Trump has chosen to address it at the core, ie the original EO which refers to “affirmative action”.
It happens in the UK too, though in a less full-on way. ISTR a law passed by the Brown government that non-white candidates have to be given priority for employment over white? Certainly in the public sector and public sector-adjacent industries this is the standard approach whether it is directly legislated for or not. And companies have targets to recruit larger percentages of non-white staff at various levels - which has the same effect.
IIRC, no. You have to give a job to the best qualified person in the UK. If two people are equally qualified, you can pick the non-white one, or the woman, etc.
Where companies have diversity targets it is to check that the process is working overall, e.g. if 10 separate hiring decisions result in 10 white men being appointed, then it suggests that there may be a problem with interviewer bias. It is extremely unlikely that the 10 best candidates are all white men.
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
Likewise FIX THE FUCKING INLAND REVENUE
I am still waiting for a document - a document which will release many thousands in foreign earnings, to me - which I requested over a year ago. Unbelievable. I have rung them half a dozen times and always been told “OMG we’re so sorry I have your papers right here this will be fixed NOW”
It is never fixed. FIX HMRC!!!
Whoever is in charge of the Passport Office, put that person in charge of HMRC. In fact, put them in charge of EVERYTHING
The Probate Registry is now fine for simple applications. Anything out of the ordinary can take over a year to sort out.
Is that a post Covid, maybe-WFH thing?
With HRMC it is definitely a post-Covid WFH thing. I’ve been told that, directly, by HMRC managers
I note that one of The Donald’s many Orders is that everyone in the USG must now go back to work, in work, 5 days a week. Very sensible
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
Likewise FIX THE FUCKING INLAND REVENUE
I am still waiting for a document - a document which will release many thousands in foreign earnings, to me - which I requested over a year ago. Unbelievable. I have rung them half a dozen times and always been told “OMG we’re so sorry I have your papers right here this will be fixed NOW”
It is never fixed. FIX HMRC!!!
Whoever is in charge of the Passport Office, put that person in charge of HMRC. In fact, put them in charge of EVERYTHING
Funnily enough, HMRC makes it incredibly easy to pay your tax! Just did mine. It took five minutes. Who'da thunk it?
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
The driving test situation is nuts, and has a really simple fix of not allowing changes to the driver number after making the booking. Allow date change by all means if the driver can’t make it, but don’t allow name changes otherwise a bunch of middlemen buy up all the spaces like they were Taylor Swift or Oasis tickets.
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
Likewise FIX THE FUCKING INLAND REVENUE
I am still waiting for a document - a document which will release many thousands in foreign earnings, to me - which I requested over a year ago. Unbelievable. I have rung them half a dozen times and always been told “OMG we’re so sorry I have your papers right here this will be fixed NOW”
It is never fixed. FIX HMRC!!!
Whoever is in charge of the Passport Office, put that person in charge of HMRC. In fact, put them in charge of EVERYTHING
The Probate Registry is now fine for simple applications. Anything out of the ordinary can take over a year to sort out.
Is that a post Covid, maybe-WFH thing?
With HRMC it is definitely a post-Covid WFH thing. I’ve been told that, directly, by HMRC managers
I note that one of The Donald’s many Orders is that everyone in the USG must now go back to work, in work, 5 days a week. Very sensible
TL:DR Women’s sports will become popular, and the competitors paid as much as their male counterparts, once women spend as much time watching and attending sports fixtures as men do.
Yes but this is also why lady tennis players are rolling in it. They sell out Wimbledon just like the men. The job of sports stars is to put bums on seats, and for some reason women do that in tennis but not many other sports.
The womens’ game is more interesting than the men’s’ because there are fewer aces, and longer rallies.
Ditto gymnastics. Women’s gym way more popular than men’s
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
Likewise FIX THE FUCKING INLAND REVENUE
I am still waiting for a document - a document which will release many thousands in foreign earnings, to me - which I requested over a year ago. Unbelievable. I have rung them half a dozen times and always been told “OMG we’re so sorry I have your papers right here this will be fixed NOW”
It is never fixed. FIX HMRC!!!
Whoever is in charge of the Passport Office, put that person in charge of HMRC. In fact, put them in charge of EVERYTHING
Funnily enough, HMRC makes it incredibly easy to pay your tax! Just did mine. It took five minutes. Who'da thunk it?
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
Likewise FIX THE FUCKING INLAND REVENUE
I am still waiting for a document - a document which will release many thousands in foreign earnings, to me - which I requested over a year ago. Unbelievable. I have rung them half a dozen times and always been told “OMG we’re so sorry I have your papers right here this will be fixed NOW”
It is never fixed. FIX HMRC!!!
Whoever is in charge of the Passport Office, put that person in charge of HMRC. In fact, put them in charge of EVERYTHING
What if that person attributes some or all of that success to things you consider “woke”?
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
And also: you don't queue at a registrar's. You book an appointment.
If there aren't enough registrars then the soluition is obvious.
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
Likewise FIX THE FUCKING INLAND REVENUE
I am still waiting for a document - a document which will release many thousands in foreign earnings, to me - which I requested over a year ago. Unbelievable. I have rung them half a dozen times and always been told “OMG we’re so sorry I have your papers right here this will be fixed NOW”
It is never fixed. FIX HMRC!!!
Whoever is in charge of the Passport Office, put that person in charge of HMRC. In fact, put them in charge of EVERYTHING
Funnily enough, HMRC makes it incredibly easy to pay your tax! Just did mine. It took five minutes. Who'da thunk it?
I know. Tell me about it. The one mega-efficient aspect is the digitized TAX PAYMENTS
And of course if you are late by an hour then you are fined, no ifs no buts. If they take A WHOLE FUCKING YEAR TO SEND ONE DOCUMENT do I get a rebate? Nah
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
And also: you don't queue at a registrar's. You book an appointment.
If there aren't enough registrars then the soluition is obvious.
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
Likewise FIX THE FUCKING INLAND REVENUE
I am still waiting for a document - a document which will release many thousands in foreign earnings, to me - which I requested over a year ago. Unbelievable. I have rung them half a dozen times and always been told “OMG we’re so sorry I have your papers right here this will be fixed NOW”
It is never fixed. FIX HMRC!!!
Whoever is in charge of the Passport Office, put that person in charge of HMRC. In fact, put them in charge of EVERYTHING
Funnily enough, HMRC makes it incredibly easy to pay your tax! Just did mine. It took five minutes. Who'da thunk it?
I know. Tell me about it. The one mega-efficient aspect is the digitized TAX PAYMENTS
And of course if you are late by an hour then you are fined, no ifs no buts. If they take A WHOLE FUCKING YEAR TO SEND ONE DOCUMENT do I get a rebate? Nah
"The largest police union in the US, which endorsed Donald Trump during his campaign, said Trump’s decision to pardon more than 1,500 people convicted over the January 6 insurrection “sends a dangerous message”, in a statement on Tuesday."
Please however feel free to tell Cyclefree she owes her career in law to affirmative action forcing open a door for her rather than her getting on and doing it.
That is a completely out of order.
You said that without affirmative action, you wouldn’t see half as many women lawyers.
Historically, yes. How do you think culture changes happen?
That takes nothing away from women lawyers at all, or Cyclefree, who I respect immensely and I take it as a direct attack on my character to suggest otherwise.
So do you think that affirmative action was necessary as a temporary measure to deal with historical legacies but should be abolished at some point now that the cultural change has happened?
Remember affirmative action isn’t about picking someone worse for the job, but rather about picking someone to increase diversity whereby suitability is perhaps in the balance. It is also about encouraging people to consider careers or jobs where they might have felt excluded.
Personally I think a team that is 90% women would benefit from having more men. I think that a team that is 90% black would benefit from having more people from other backgrounds. I don’t think “affirmative action” is all or nothing and it works in both cases.
Do PB Tories think that it is bad to encourage more male teachers in primary schools because they are severely underrepresented?
Affirmative action can mean a number of different things. You are describing a UK approach with US terminology. US policy went further than we did in the UK; arguably it needed to given the legacy of Jim Crow.
So what does the US actually need now in terms of affirmitave
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
Likewise FIX THE FUCKING INLAND REVENUE
I am still waiting for a document - a document which will release many thousands in foreign earnings, to me - which I requested over a year ago. Unbelievable. I have rung them half a dozen times and always been told “OMG we’re so sorry I have your papers right here this will be fixed NOW”
It is never fixed. FIX HMRC!!!
Whoever is in charge of the Passport Office, put that person in charge of HMRC. In fact, put them in charge of EVERYTHING
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
And also: you don't queue at a registrar's. You book an appointment.
If there aren't enough registrars then the soluition is obvious.
Legislate for more Black women registrars!
Why not? O|r indeed of any colour or gender. Ours was a very nice and helpful lady btw.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
I assume @Andy_JS has misunderstood and I hope that is the case for you two as well, but one can't tell, especially with someone who referred to Kemi as a coconut. Maybe you would like to comment, but the original executive order banned discrimination. It was NOT positive discrimination.
Trump's cancelling of an EO that has stood for 60 years means people can now discriminate against blacks, jews etc in employment. The only affirmative action was that they did not discriminate. They did not have to treat minorities favourable, just not treat them unfavourably.
And you object to that? Really?
I haven't read it all so am happy to be proved wrong.
This is complete drivel. You read it wrong
See my prior comment
Speaking seriously, I think the "affirmative action" mentioned in Johnson's EO 11246 (which prohibits race discrimination) is not the same as "affirmative action" in the 2020s (which enables it if deemed beneficial). This I assume causes all the confusion. Or have I misread it?
The legal underpinnings of what became 'woke' all date back to the original 60s legislation and Trump is serious about rolling it back.
The big one is disparate impact which treats unequal outcomes as evidence of discrimination and in effect makes meritocracy illegal in many cases.
Here's an example of disparate impact in action, with the Biden DOJ suing South Bend (of Pete Buttigieg fame) for using 'a written examination that discriminates against Black applicants and a physical fitness test that discriminates against female applicants'.
No I believe you, it's just that I don't think EO 11246 is an example of it. If I was getting rid of affirmative action (or taking disparate impact into account), then I wouldn't have started with EO 11246. Doing so comprehensively throws the baby out with the bathwater.
LBJ’s “affirmative action” order is the foundation stone on which the entire edifice of woke/DEI is built. It’s the beginning and kernel of the idea that you CAN discriminate by race and gender - against whites and men, but more recently East Asians in education etc - if it is perceived to achieve a greater societal good
Now, you may think it’s appalling that Trump Is reversing and demolishing all of this. The Diversity agenda, the Woke-Industrial Complex. But America is - just about - still a democracy and Trump was explicitly promising to do all this, if elected. He was elected
What he has NOT done is “suddenly made it legal to have racist hiring policies”, or “brought back Jim Crow laws” or any of that hysterical nonsense
So are you saying that it was wrong for industries historically dominated by men to consciously hire more women? Because that is the same thing.
It's wrong to choose a woman over a more qualified man for the sake of diversity, yes. Just as it would be wrong to hire a man over a more qualified woman to be a primary school teacher.
This is so naive and ignores years of careful dismantling of sexism BECAUSE of affirmative action.
You may not have noticed, but it's currently 2025 not 1970.
Yeah. And there is still work to do. It is naive to think that all these problems and inbuild prejudices have disappeared because they haven’t
Sure, but we've reached a point where enough progress has been made that policies that have become counterproductive need to be moved on from.
He has cancelled the most basic rights (not that that will have any impact because of later ones), but not the ones that have gone too far. That seems like an odd thing to do doesn't it.
Yesterday you got yourself in a tangle over climate change and the wording of who has a cervix, both of which were dancing on a pin head. Why don't you just come out with it and say you don't believe in climate change and all this woke nonsense and employers should be able to discriminate as they like.
Please however feel free to tell Cyclefree she owes her career in law to affirmative action forcing open a door for her rather than her getting on and doing it.
That is a completely out of order.
You said that without affirmative action, you wouldn’t see half as many women lawyers.
Historically, yes. How do you think culture changes happen?
That takes nothing away from women lawyers at all, or Cyclefree, who I respect immensely and I take it as a direct attack on my character to suggest otherwise.
So do you think that affirmative action was necessary as a temporary measure to deal with historical legacies but should be abolished at some point now that the cultural change has happened?
Remember affirmative action isn’t about picking someone worse for the job, but rather about picking someone to increase diversity whereby suitability is perhaps in the balance. It is also about encouraging people to consider careers or jobs where they might have felt excluded.
Personally I think a team that is 90% women would benefit from having more men. I think that a team that is 90% black would benefit from having more people from other backgrounds. I don’t think “affirmative action” is all or nothing and it works in both cases.
Do PB Tories think that it is bad to encourage more male teachers in primary schools because they are severely underrepresented?
SKS Fans please explain why SKS Tories are in 3rd place!
This is going to get tiresome (not just from you) if the various factions on here post "X drops to third place!" every time we get a new poll with Ref, Con and Lab tied within MoE and a slightly different random ordering.
Also, I note that the LD lead over Green has GROWN BY 25%!!!!
A drop from a massive lead in 1st to 3rd since GE2024 is more significant.
The ~9pp drop (~1/4 of 2024 GE votes) is certainly notable. But it's a drop from 1st with a clear lead to joint first - for the present, at least! I'd focus on the haemorrhaging of (polled) support if I was you. Cons have stood still and Reform have, apparently, surged.
(All with normal health warnings on polls, particularly this far from a GE. if you compare to pre-election polls then it's worse for Labour and a little bit less of a surge for Reform, but some of that may be house adjustments post-election.)
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
If you look at the numbers, the driving test backlog is gradually resolving itself - in that waiting times have been consistently falling. eg
the average waiting time for a driving test down from 20.6 weeks at their peak in August 2023, to 15.1 weeks at the end of January 2024. This chart shows the waiting time over the last few months by the different zones.
First time Badenoch scored a clear win at PMQs today, I think.
Why? Badenoch challenged Starmer twice on caps on teacher pay, which have been removed, so Starmer can demonstrate she's wrong on the facts.
Have they? I thought one of the major purposes of this bill was to prevent academies having freedom to set pay? Either Kemi is right, or they've done a very screeching u-turn in the last couple of days.
Having just listened to it, I thought she had Starmer on the ropes - she'd finally got an issue where he can't robotically squawk "£22bn black hole" or "fixing 14 years of Tory government" which left him floundering round completely ignoring the questions for six answers in a row, because he hadn't got a good answer, and he knew it.
The Government put in an amendment stating this, so it could be counted as screeching u-turn if so minded, but in that case Badenoch's point would be "you made screeching u-turn", which she didn't actually notice.
I think another problem is the lack of specifics in Badenoch's attack beyond the pay cap that isn't. The specific complaints about the Schools Bill raised by the people she referenced are the removal of forced academisation for failing schools and the requirement for academies to follow the national curriculum. These criticisms might or might not have put Starmer on the ropes, but as she didn't ask them, they didn't.
Overall a draw I would say. Badenoch can claim the Conservative record on schools and Starmer make a point about children's welfare.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
I assume @Andy_JS has misunderstood and I hope that is the case for you two as well, but one can't tell, especially with someone who referred to Kemi as a coconut. Maybe you would like to comment, but the original executive order banned discrimination. It was NOT positive discrimination.
Trump's cancelling of an EO that has stood for 60 years means people can now discriminate against blacks, jews etc in employment. The only affirmative action was that they did not discriminate. They did not have to treat minorities favourable, just not treat them unfavourably.
And you object to that? Really?
I haven't read it all so am happy to be proved wrong.
This is complete drivel. You read it wrong
See my prior comment
Speaking seriously, I think the "affirmative action" mentioned in Johnson's EO 11246 (which prohibits race discrimination) is not the same as "affirmative action" in the 2020s (which enables it if deemed beneficial). This I assume causes all the confusion. Or have I misread it?
The legal underpinnings of what became 'woke' all date back to the original 60s legislation and Trump is serious about rolling it back.
The big one is disparate impact which treats unequal outcomes as evidence of discrimination and in effect makes meritocracy illegal in many cases.
Here's an example of disparate impact in action, with the Biden DOJ suing South Bend (of Pete Buttigieg fame) for using 'a written examination that discriminates against Black applicants and a physical fitness test that discriminates against female applicants'.
No I believe you, it's just that I don't think EO 11246 is an example of it. If I was getting rid of affirmative action (or taking disparate impact into account), then I wouldn't have started with EO 11246. Doing so comprehensively throws the baby out with the bathwater.
LBJ’s “affirmative action” order is the foundation stone on which the entire edifice of woke/DEI is built. It’s the beginning and kernel of the idea that you CAN discriminate by race and gender - against whites and men, but more recently East Asians in education etc - if it is perceived to achieve a greater societal good
Now, you may think it’s appalling that Trump Is reversing and demolishing all of this. The Diversity agenda, the Woke-Industrial Complex. But America is - just about - still a democracy and Trump was explicitly promising to do all this, if elected. He was elected
What he has NOT done is “suddenly made it legal to have racist hiring policies”, or “brought back Jim Crow laws” or any of that hysterical nonsense
So are you saying that it was wrong for industries historically dominated by men to consciously hire more women? Because that is the same thing.
It's wrong to choose a woman over a more qualified man for the sake of diversity, yes. Just as it would be wrong to hire a man over a more qualified woman to be a primary school teacher.
This is so naive and ignores years of careful dismantling of sexism BECAUSE of affirmative action.
You may not have noticed, but it's currently 2025 not 1970.
Yeah. And there is still work to do. It is naive to think that all these problems and inbuild prejudices have disappeared because they haven’t
Sure, but we've reached a point where enough progress has been made that policies that have become counterproductive need to be moved on from.
He has cancelled the most basic rights (not that that will have any impact because of later ones), but not the ones that have gone too far. That seems like an odd thing to do doesn't it.
Yesterday you got yourself in a tangle over climate change and the wording of who has a cervix, both of which were dancing on a pin head. Why don't you just come out with it and say you don't believe in climate change and all this woke nonsense and employers should be able to discriminate as they like.
No, he hasn’t. Non-discrimination is enshrined in other acts of congress, which are not repealed by the executive order.
Agree and I said that in that post (first line in brackets). So why do it then?
Because, as has now beem explained to you by several people; using quite short words, that LBJ EO is the foundation stone of the Woke/Diversity industry. And if you want to roll it all away, you need to get rid of that - which kicked it all off
The many many laws which prohibit racial and sexiual discrimination in hiring etc etc etc all remain firmly in place
Absolute crap. Firstly one person said it not many and it is nonsense. You don't get rid of something very sensible because you don't like something else that came later and then keep the duff stuff. I mean what nutty nonsense is that. Keep the good stuff and get rid of the bad stuff.
You know jolly well that is not Trump's aim. He is just throwing a bone to the idiots that follow him like you who can't think for themselves
I know I chuck around “you’re stupid” comments like the confetti of insults, but the only conclusion I can reach from your comments today, passim, is that you are genuinely too thick to understand all this. I’ve given up trying
Let us talk of happier things, old bean
So you don't have an answer to that then.
We have a whole lot of good stuff and a whole lot of bad stuff. The bad stuff followed the good stuff. So the logical thing to do is get rid of the good stuff and keep the bad stuff. Yes I can see that is logical in an idiots mind.
And the arguments keep changing. Others have said people are still protected by later laws so it is ok. Yet these are the ones you want to get rid of. And when you get rid of them you are going to have to reintroduce a version of LBJ's EO aren't you or are we going back to the bad old days.
Nonsense on stilts.
Lol
Someone actually LIKED your comment. So at least you’re not alone, over there on the bottom left of the bell curve
I’d give you a wave but there’s a big *bell shaped thing* in the way
As usual when you can't deal with the argument you avoid it.
I note December 2024 government borrowing was £7.7bn higher than December 2023.
Hard to lay the blame for that at the door of the Tories.
(Let the attempts commence here!)
Hunt’s NI cuts.
Nah, it's spending rises and debt interest that are the cause. There was enough tax growth elsewhere to cover the cut in NI without spending rises and debt interest increases, both of which are owned by the new government due to their shit policies.
At least as of Jan 25, the spending rises are largely not optional, and much (but perhaps not all) of the debt interest increases are due to global factors.
I’ve been very disappointed by Reeves but you are in denial about the incredibly poor situation she inherited. You’ve already forgotten that Rishi effectively “cut and run”,
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
WFH can have its place, but it needs to be thought through and managed properly on a role-by-role and project-by-project basis.
In theory, a government call centre would be a great candidate for 90% WFH, but there simply doesn’t appear to be the management and productivity-focus required to execute it properly. My suspicion is that the root cause is an adversarial relationship between unions and management surrounding monitoring of remote workers. The political optics are also terrible.
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
And also: you don't queue at a registrar's. You book an appointment.
If there aren't enough registrars then the soluition is obvious.
Anecdata (is it the same registrar that does births and deaths?): when child three was born, the local registrar had no appointments to register the birth within the maximum allowed legal window. We had to go to the city to register. Luckily it wasn't too far from work, so not a big problem for me, but would have been a pain for others.
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
Likewise FIX THE FUCKING INLAND REVENUE
I am still waiting for a document - a document which will release many thousands in foreign earnings, to me - which I requested over a year ago. Unbelievable. I have rung them half a dozen times and always been told “OMG we’re so sorry I have your papers right here this will be fixed NOW”
It is never fixed. FIX HMRC!!!
Whoever is in charge of the Passport Office, put that person in charge of HMRC. In fact, put them in charge of EVERYTHING
The Probate Registry is now fine for simple applications. Anything out of the ordinary can take over a year to sort out.
Is that a post Covid, maybe-WFH thing?
With HRMC it is definitely a post-Covid WFH thing. I’ve been told that, directly, by HMRC managers
I note that one of The Donald’s many Orders is that everyone in the USG must now go back to work, in work, 5 days a week. Very sensible
I would say that the Probate and Land Registries function a lot worse, post-COVID, and WFH is likely a part of that.
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
WFH can have its place, but it needs to be thought through and managed properly on a role-by-role and project-by-project basis.
In theory, a government call centre would be a great candidate for 90% WFH, but there simply doesn’t appear to be the management and productivity-focus required to execute it properly. My suspicion is that the root cause is an adversarial relationship between unions and management surrounding monitoring of remote workers. The political optics are also terrible.
I think anyone with more than 50,000 posts to PB should not be allowed to work from home. Anyone with less than 15,000, they’re fine.
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
Yup, that's the difference, companies have got enough productivity measures to make sure remote workers are actually working. The public sector has weak systems in place and before all of the various public sector workers on here jump up and down about how hard they have it, public sector productivity is the worst it's ever been, we could sack 20-30% of the lowest performers and no one would notice.
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
WFH can have its place, but it needs to be thought through and managed properly on a role-by-role and project-by-project basis.
In theory, a government call centre would be a great candidate for 90% WFH, but there simply doesn’t appear to be the management and productivity-focus required to execute it properly. My suspicion is that the root cause is an adversarial relationship between unions and management surrounding monitoring of remote workers. The political optics are also terrible.
I don’t monitor remote workers, per se. Of my 450 workforce, perhaps a third are full time WFH.
However, we try to maintain a high performance culture, and as I said upthread, ultimately I am judged by my P&L and client satisfaction.
Both men have written other books on the subject, but those two would be good places to start.
As for affirmative action, the meaning has changed since 1965: It used to mean, for example, advertising in black publications, and sending recruiters to historically black colleges and universities. Now, it too often means discriminating against whites and East Asians, especially men, in college admisions and hiring.
I note December 2024 government borrowing was £7.7bn higher than December 2023.
Hard to lay the blame for that at the door of the Tories.
(Let the attempts commence here!)
Hunt’s NI cuts.
Nah, it's spending rises and debt interest that are the cause. There was enough tax growth elsewhere to cover the cut in NI without spending rises and debt interest increases, both of which are owned by the new government due to their shit policies.
At least as of Jan 25, the spending rises are largely not optional, and much (but perhaps not all) of the debt interest increases are due to global factors.
I’ve been very disappointed by Reeves but you are in denial about the incredibly poor situation she inherited. You’ve already forgotten that Rishi effectively “cut and run”,
They chose to give public sector employees record pay rises, that's where the big spending rises have come from.
Please however feel free to tell Cyclefree she owes her career in law to affirmative action forcing open a door for her rather than her getting on and doing it.
That is a completely out of order.
You said that without affirmative action, you wouldn’t see half as many women lawyers.
Historically, yes. How do you think culture changes happen?
That takes nothing away from women lawyers at all, or Cyclefree, who I respect immensely and I take it as a direct attack on my character to suggest otherwise.
So do you think that affirmative action was necessary as a temporary measure to deal with historical legacies but should be abolished at some point now that the cultural change has happened?
Remember affirmative action isn’t about picking someone worse for the job, but rather about picking someone to increase diversity whereby suitability is perhaps in the balance.
A distinction without a difference. There's no such thing as two equally qualified candidates.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
I assume @Andy_JS has misunderstood and I hope that is the case for you two as well, but one can't tell, especially with someone who referred to Kemi as a coconut. Maybe you would like to comment, but the original executive order banned discrimination. It was NOT positive discrimination.
Trump's cancelling of an EO that has stood for 60 years means people can now discriminate against blacks, jews etc in employment. The only affirmative action was that they did not discriminate. They did not have to treat minorities favourable, just not treat them unfavourably.
And you object to that? Really?
I haven't read it all so am happy to be proved wrong.
This is complete drivel. You read it wrong
See my prior comment
Speaking seriously, I think the "affirmative action" mentioned in Johnson's EO 11246 (which prohibits race discrimination) is not the same as "affirmative action" in the 2020s (which enables it if deemed beneficial). This I assume causes all the confusion. Or have I misread it?
The legal underpinnings of what became 'woke' all date back to the original 60s legislation and Trump is serious about rolling it back.
The big one is disparate impact which treats unequal outcomes as evidence of discrimination and in effect makes meritocracy illegal in many cases.
Here's an example of disparate impact in action, with the Biden DOJ suing South Bend (of Pete Buttigieg fame) for using 'a written examination that discriminates against Black applicants and a physical fitness test that discriminates against female applicants'.
No I believe you, it's just that I don't think EO 11246 is an example of it. If I was getting rid of affirmative action (or taking disparate impact into account), then I wouldn't have started with EO 11246. Doing so comprehensively throws the baby out with the bathwater.
LBJ’s “affirmative action” order is the foundation stone on which the entire edifice of woke/DEI is built. It’s the beginning and kernel of the idea that you CAN discriminate by race and gender - against whites and men, but more recently East Asians in education etc - if it is perceived to achieve a greater societal good
Now, you may think it’s appalling that Trump Is reversing and demolishing all of this. The Diversity agenda, the Woke-Industrial Complex. But America is - just about - still a democracy and Trump was explicitly promising to do all this, if elected. He was elected
What he has NOT done is “suddenly made it legal to have racist hiring policies”, or “brought back Jim Crow laws” or any of that hysterical nonsense
So are you saying that it was wrong for industries historically dominated by men to consciously hire more women? Because that is the same thing.
It's wrong to choose a woman over a more qualified man for the sake of diversity, yes. Just as it would be wrong to hire a man over a more qualified woman to be a primary school teacher.
This is so naive and ignores years of careful dismantling of sexism BECAUSE of affirmative action.
You may not have noticed, but it's currently 2025 not 1970.
Yeah. And there is still work to do. It is naive to think that all these problems and inbuild prejudices have disappeared because they haven’t
Sure, but we've reached a point where enough progress has been made that policies that have become counterproductive need to be moved on from.
He has cancelled the most basic rights (not that that will have any impact because of later ones), but not the ones that have gone too far. That seems like an odd thing to do doesn't it.
Yesterday you got yourself in a tangle over climate change and the wording of who has a cervix, both of which were dancing on a pin head. Why don't you just come out with it and say you don't believe in climate change and all this woke nonsense and employers should be able to discriminate as they like.
No, he hasn’t. Non-discrimination is enshrined in other acts of congress, which are not repealed by the executive order.
Agree and I said that in that post (first line in brackets). So why do it then?
Because, as has now beem explained to you by several people; using quite short words, that LBJ EO is the foundation stone of the Woke/Diversity industry. And if you want to roll it all away, you need to get rid of that - which kicked it all off
The many many laws which prohibit racial and sexiual discrimination in hiring etc etc etc all remain firmly in place
Absolute crap. Firstly one person said it not many and it is nonsense. You don't get rid of something very sensible because you don't like something else that came later and then keep the duff stuff. I mean what nutty nonsense is that. Keep the good stuff and get rid of the bad stuff.
You know jolly well that is not Trump's aim. He is just throwing a bone to the idiots that follow him like you who can't think for themselves
I know I chuck around “you’re stupid” comments like the confetti of insults, but the only conclusion I can reach from your comments today, passim, is that you are genuinely too thick to understand all this. I’ve given up trying
Let us talk of happier things, old bean
So you don't have an answer to that then.
We have a whole lot of good stuff and a whole lot of bad stuff. The bad stuff followed the good stuff. So the logical thing to do is get rid of the good stuff and keep the bad stuff. Yes I can see that is logical in an idiots mind.
And the arguments keep changing. Others have said people are still protected by later laws so it is ok. Yet these are the ones you want to get rid of. And when you get rid of them you are going to have to reintroduce a version of LBJ's EO aren't you or are we going back to the bad old days.
Nonsense on stilts.
Lol
Someone actually LIKED your comment. So at least you’re not alone, over there on the bottom left of the bell curve
I’d give you a wave but there’s a big *bell shaped thing* in the way
As usual when you can't deal with the argument you avoid it.
I’m just bored of arguing with someone who cannot understand the basic premises of the argument; is all
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
WFH can have its place, but it needs to be thought through and managed properly on a role-by-role and project-by-project basis.
In theory, a government call centre would be a great candidate for 90% WFH, but there simply doesn’t appear to be the management and productivity-focus required to execute it properly. My suspicion is that the root cause is an adversarial relationship between unions and management surrounding monitoring of remote workers. The political optics are also terrible.
I don’t monitor remote workers, per se. Of my 450 workforce, perhaps a third are full time WFH.
However, we try to maintain a high performance culture, and as I said upthread, ultimately I am judged by my P&L and client satisfaction.
A friend working in the civil service wanted to go into the office, but there wasn’t an office for her to go into.
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
Yup, that's the difference, companies have got enough productivity measures to make sure remote workers are actually working. The public sector has weak systems in place and before all of the various public sector workers on here jump up and down about how hard they have it, public sector productivity is the worst it's ever been, we could sack 20-30% of the lowest performers and no one would notice.
Managers should be able to notice if their team are not hitting targets and objectives, WFH or not, public or private sector or not
Both men have written other books on the subject, but those two would be good places to start.
As for affirmative action, the meaning has changed since 1965: It used to mean, for example, advertising in black publications, and sending recruiters to historically black colleges and universities. Now, it too often means discriminating against whites and East Asians, especially men, in college admisions and hiring.
McWhorter is a great writer and I really enjoy his linguistic work, but he’s not exactly a neutral commentator on these debates. He represents one side of a debate.
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
Yup, that's the difference, companies have got enough productivity measures to make sure remote workers are actually working. The public sector has weak systems in place and before all of the various public sector workers on here jump up and down about how hard they have it, public sector productivity is the worst it's ever been, we could sack 20-30% of the lowest performers and no one would notice.
How do you measure civil service productivity?
(I mean, I know how the official national statistics measure it. But how do you measure it to come to such a certain conclusion?)
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
Yup, that's the difference, companies have got enough productivity measures to make sure remote workers are actually working. The public sector has weak systems in place and before all of the various public sector workers on here jump up and down about how hard they have it, public sector productivity is the worst it's ever been, we could sack 20-30% of the lowest performers and no one would notice.
Managers should be able to notice if their team are not hitting targets and objectives, WFH or not
And good ones can, in both the private and public sector. And the third sector, for that matter.
This whole Amazon knife thing, is there any evidence that restricting the sale of knives online either reducies the number of incidents of knife crime or the severity of the injuries?
As far as I can see from the actual data there doesn't appear to be any significant knife related uptick in homicide rates. The proportion of knife related homicides seems to follow the same trend of homicides overall. Sharp instruments make up about 40% of homicides quite consistently. So it's not the availability of knives that is the real issue but the ebb and flow of the homicide rate, which perhaps broadly tracks social and economic factors like growth, employment, etc.
Oh and kitchen knives are about 14 x more likely to be used in a homicide than a "zombie" knife.
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
Not sure they can do that easily - they've sold off the office space!
Civil service should advertise more jobs on open competition and let people who lose out go. They are also far too generous to people whose roles get cut, there are many often senior people not doing much because they're holding out for some plum job when really they should be told to take what's vacant or move on.
This whole Amazon knife thing, is there any evidence that restricting the sale of knives online either reducies the number of incidents of knife crime or the severity of the injuries?
As far as I can see from the actual data there doesn't appear to be any significant knife related uptick in homicide rates. The proportion of knife related homicides seems to follow the same trend of homicides overall. Sharp instruments make up about 40% of homicides quite consistently. So it's not the availability of knives that is the real issue but the ebb and flow of the homicide rate, which perhaps broadly tracks social and economic factors like growth, employment, etc.
Oh and kitchen knives are about 14 x more likely to be used in a homicide than a "zombie" knife.
They still should not be sold to underage
I had to do the ID thing for a replacement Bamix whisk "blade" because it was categorized as a blade.
I note December 2024 government borrowing was £7.7bn higher than December 2023.
Hard to lay the blame for that at the door of the Tories.
(Let the attempts commence here!)
Hunt’s NI cuts.
Nah, it's spending rises and debt interest that are the cause. There was enough tax growth elsewhere to cover the cut in NI without spending rises and debt interest increases, both of which are owned by the new government due to their shit policies.
At least as of Jan 25, the spending rises are largely not optional, and much (but perhaps not all) of the debt interest increases are due to global factors.
I’ve been very disappointed by Reeves but you are in denial about the incredibly poor situation she inherited. You’ve already forgotten that Rishi effectively “cut and run”,
They chose to give public sector employees record pay rises, that's where the big spending rises have come from.
The payrises were not really optional if Reeves wanted to avoid a winter of strike action. Politics is the art of the possible, and the practical. As I implied, Sunak simply quit when faced with these and other decisions.
Her mistake so far has been in not demanding longer term productivity improvements alongside the payrises.
This whole Amazon knife thing, is there any evidence that restricting the sale of knives online either reducies the number of incidents of knife crime or the severity of the injuries?
As far as I can see from the actual data there doesn't appear to be any significant knife related uptick in homicide rates. The proportion of knife related homicides seems to follow the same trend of homicides overall. Sharp instruments make up about 40% of homicides quite consistently. So it's not the availability of knives that is the real issue but the ebb and flow of the homicide rate, which perhaps broadly tracks social and economic factors like growth, employment, etc.
Oh and kitchen knives are about 14 x more likely to be used in a homicide than a "zombie" knife.
They still should not be sold to underage
I had to do the ID thing for a replacement Bamix whisk "blade" because it was categorized as a blade.
Getting in the way of growth.
It does nothing to address the actual problem of radicalisation/mental illness (take your pick), and would only be effective in maybe stopping the very small number of underage nutters that go around stabbing people.
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
Not sure they can do that easily - they've sold off the office space!
Civil service should advertise more jobs on open competition and let people who lose out go. They are also far too generous to people whose roles get cut, there are many often senior people not doing much because they're holding out for some plum job when really they should be told to take what's vacant or move on.
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
WFH can have its place, but it needs to be thought through and managed properly on a role-by-role and project-by-project basis.
In theory, a government call centre would be a great candidate for 90% WFH, but there simply doesn’t appear to be the management and productivity-focus required to execute it properly. My suspicion is that the root cause is an adversarial relationship between unions and management surrounding monitoring of remote workers. The political optics are also terrible.
I think anyone with more than 50,000 posts to PB should not be allowed to work from home. Anyone with less than 15,000, they’re fine.
Ha ha true. Most of the time I’m on here I’m actually in the office watching something boring happen, like a server build or a backup run, the vast majority of which could actually be done remotely!
I note December 2024 government borrowing was £7.7bn higher than December 2023.
Hard to lay the blame for that at the door of the Tories.
(Let the attempts commence here!)
Hunt’s NI cuts.
Nah, it's spending rises and debt interest that are the cause. There was enough tax growth elsewhere to cover the cut in NI without spending rises and debt interest increases, both of which are owned by the new government due to their shit policies.
At least as of Jan 25, the spending rises are largely not optional, and much (but perhaps not all) of the debt interest increases are due to global factors.
I’ve been very disappointed by Reeves but you are in denial about the incredibly poor situation she inherited. You’ve already forgotten that Rishi effectively “cut and run”,
They chose to give public sector employees record pay rises, that's where the big spending rises have come from.
The payrises were not really optional if Reeves wanted to avoid a winter of strike action. Politics is the art of the possible, and the practical. As I implied, Sunak simply quit when faced with these and other decisions.
Her mistake so far has been in not demanding longer term productivity improvements alongside the payrises.
I am at a loss to understand how productivity is measured with for example Doctors and Nurses.
Productivity in manufacturing is a somewhat easier metric. A five percent pay rise could be reliant on averaging every worker at Cowley building 0.2 Minis a day instead of 0.1 Minis a day.
Would be the most hung parliament in UK history, neither Labour nor the Conservatives have a majority, nor do Labour plus LDs or Tories plus Reform have a majority either. SNP and Greens likely hold balance of power if LDs back Labour
US history is more complex on race than you might learn from accounts in the Guardian. Take, for example, the career of George Washington Bush, a mixed race man who married a white woman, and was one of the earliest settlers in what is now Washington state:: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bush_(pioneer)
Bush got a good start, thanks to an wealthy English merchant, for whom his father had worked.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
I assume @Andy_JS has misunderstood and I hope that is the case for you two as well, but one can't tell, especially with someone who referred to Kemi as a coconut. Maybe you would like to comment, but the original executive order banned discrimination. It was NOT positive discrimination.
Trump's cancelling of an EO that has stood for 60 years means people can now discriminate against blacks, jews etc in employment. The only affirmative action was that they did not discriminate. They did not have to treat minorities favourable, just not treat them unfavourably.
And you object to that? Really?
I haven't read it all so am happy to be proved wrong.
This is complete drivel. You read it wrong
See my prior comment
Speaking seriously, I think the "affirmative action" mentioned in Johnson's EO 11246 (which prohibits race discrimination) is not the same as "affirmative action" in the 2020s (which enables it if deemed beneficial). This I assume causes all the confusion. Or have I misread it?
The legal underpinnings of what became 'woke' all date back to the original 60s legislation and Trump is serious about rolling it back.
The big one is disparate impact which treats unequal outcomes as evidence of discrimination and in effect makes meritocracy illegal in many cases.
Here's an example of disparate impact in action, with the Biden DOJ suing South Bend (of Pete Buttigieg fame) for using 'a written examination that discriminates against Black applicants and a physical fitness test that discriminates against female applicants'.
No I believe you, it's just that I don't think EO 11246 is an example of it. If I was getting rid of affirmative action (or taking disparate impact into account), then I wouldn't have started with EO 11246. Doing so comprehensively throws the baby out with the bathwater.
LBJ’s “affirmative action” order is the foundation stone on which the entire edifice of woke/DEI is built. It’s the beginning and kernel of the idea that you CAN discriminate by race and gender - against whites and men, but more recently East Asians in education etc - if it is perceived to achieve a greater societal good
Now, you may think it’s appalling that Trump Is reversing and demolishing all of this. The Diversity agenda, the Woke-Industrial Complex. But America is - just about - still a democracy and Trump was explicitly promising to do all this, if elected. He was elected
What he has NOT done is “suddenly made it legal to have racist hiring policies”, or “brought back Jim Crow laws” or any of that hysterical nonsense
So are you saying that it was wrong for industries historically dominated by men to consciously hire more women? Because that is the same thing.
It's wrong to choose a woman over a more qualified man for the sake of diversity, yes. Just as it would be wrong to hire a man over a more qualified woman to be a primary school teacher.
This is so naive and ignores years of careful dismantling of sexism BECAUSE of affirmative action.
You may not have noticed, but it's currently 2025 not 1970.
Yeah. And there is still work to do. It is naive to think that all these problems and inbuild prejudices have disappeared because they haven’t
Sure, but we've reached a point where enough progress has been made that policies that have become counterproductive need to be moved on from.
He has cancelled the most basic rights (not that that will have any impact because of later ones), but not the ones that have gone too far. That seems like an odd thing to do doesn't it.
Yesterday you got yourself in a tangle over climate change and the wording of who has a cervix, both of which were dancing on a pin head. Why don't you just come out with it and say you don't believe in climate change and all this woke nonsense and employers should be able to discriminate as they like.
Because that would be a lie.
Fair enough. And in fairness I didn't think this yesterday until someone else challenged you as well regarding the wording in the NHS document suggesting you were going to a lot of effort for something so trivial and you motives might have been to do with the woke nature of it and not the grammar. I will admit myself that I found the wording clumsy and it was obviously to avoid criticism of not being inclusive and therefore came over as woke, so I wouldn't have disagreed with you. But if you thought that why not say that rather than get your knickers in a twist over the grammar which got you all that flack. And that made me think of the climate change argument earlier in the day yesterday which was an identical type of conversation when you are arguing with all the people about climate change. It felt like you had a huge urge to say 'It's all bollocks', but couldn't bring yourself to do it.
I didn't come back to you with it then because someone had done it and it seemed to be rude and I couldn't think of a nice way of saying it and actually I don't like it when people attribute motives to what people say rather than taking it of face value so I am being a hypocrite. But then with today's conversation it seemed to happen again and my fingers couldn't help hitting the keyboard.
Would be nice to know your unedited views on climate change and woke out of the context of being buried in another discussion.
More evidence of this useless Labour government, it extends the grants for VAT on repairs and restoration of places of worship for one year only at present and capped at just £25k
I note December 2024 government borrowing was £7.7bn higher than December 2023.
Hard to lay the blame for that at the door of the Tories.
(Let the attempts commence here!)
Hunt’s NI cuts.
Nah, it's spending rises and debt interest that are the cause. There was enough tax growth elsewhere to cover the cut in NI without spending rises and debt interest increases, both of which are owned by the new government due to their shit policies.
At least as of Jan 25, the spending rises are largely not optional, and much (but perhaps not all) of the debt interest increases are due to global factors.
I’ve been very disappointed by Reeves but you are in denial about the incredibly poor situation she inherited. You’ve already forgotten that Rishi effectively “cut and run”,
They chose to give public sector employees record pay rises, that's where the big spending rises have come from.
The payrises were not really optional if Reeves wanted to avoid a winter of strike action. Politics is the art of the possible, and the practical. As I implied, Sunak simply quit when faced with these and other decisions.
Her mistake so far has been in not demanding longer term productivity improvements alongside the payrises.
I am at a loss to understand how productivity is measured with for example Doctors and Nurses.
Productivity in manufacturing is a somewhat easier metric. A five percent pay rise could be reliant on averaging every worker at Cowley building 0.2 Minis a day instead of 0.1 Minis a day.
More evidence of this useless Labour government, it extends the grants for VAT on repairs and restoration of places of worship for one year only at present and capped at just £25k
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
Yup, that's the difference, companies have got enough productivity measures to make sure remote workers are actually working. The public sector has weak systems in place and before all of the various public sector workers on here jump up and down about how hard they have it, public sector productivity is the worst it's ever been, we could sack 20-30% of the lowest performers and no one would notice.
How do you measure civil service productivity?
(I mean, I know how the official national statistics measure it. But how do you measure it to come to such a certain conclusion?)
output / num_employees = output_per_worker
That's probably where I'd start and I'd define output at a department level, so for HMRC call centres it would be number of customer queries answered within 72h with penalties on the numerator for missing the SLA or something like that. That's with about 10 seconds of thinking so I'm sure it could be better.
Labour is inserting growth into every press release
In this one it is announcing plans to digitise the registration of deaths - a genuinely positive step that will make things easier for people during one of the hardest times of their lives
But is the current system of going to the registry office really 'getting in the way of growth', as the government puts it?
Yes. Probate delays (of which getting a death certificate is one small part) are tying up properties that could be being occupied by people that need housing, or want to move for a better job.
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
And also: you don't queue at a registrar's. You book an appointment.
If there aren't enough registrars then the soluition is obvious.
Anecdata (is it the same registrar that does births and deaths?): when child three was born, the local registrar had no appointments to register the birth within the maximum allowed legal window. We had to go to the city to register. Luckily it wasn't too far from work, so not a big problem for me, but would have been a pain for others.
President Trump has signed an executive order rescinding Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which established affirmative action, and banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.
A massive shift.
This is what anti-woke was always really about.
It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Those protections have now been removed for 20% of the US workforce.
I assume @Andy_JS has misunderstood and I hope that is the case for you two as well, but one can't tell, especially with someone who referred to Kemi as a coconut. Maybe you would like to comment, but the original executive order banned discrimination. It was NOT positive discrimination.
Trump's cancelling of an EO that has stood for 60 years means people can now discriminate against blacks, jews etc in employment. The only affirmative action was that they did not discriminate. They did not have to treat minorities favourable, just not treat them unfavourably.
And you object to that? Really?
I haven't read it all so am happy to be proved wrong.
This is complete drivel. You read it wrong
See my prior comment
Speaking seriously, I think the "affirmative action" mentioned in Johnson's EO 11246 (which prohibits race discrimination) is not the same as "affirmative action" in the 2020s (which enables it if deemed beneficial). This I assume causes all the confusion. Or have I misread it?
The legal underpinnings of what became 'woke' all date back to the original 60s legislation and Trump is serious about rolling it back.
The big one is disparate impact which treats unequal outcomes as evidence of discrimination and in effect makes meritocracy illegal in many cases.
Here's an example of disparate impact in action, with the Biden DOJ suing South Bend (of Pete Buttigieg fame) for using 'a written examination that discriminates against Black applicants and a physical fitness test that discriminates against female applicants'.
No I believe you, it's just that I don't think EO 11246 is an example of it. If I was getting rid of affirmative action (or taking disparate impact into account), then I wouldn't have started with EO 11246. Doing so comprehensively throws the baby out with the bathwater.
LBJ’s “affirmative action” order is the foundation stone on which the entire edifice of woke/DEI is built. It’s the beginning and kernel of the idea that you CAN discriminate by race and gender - against whites and men, but more recently East Asians in education etc - if it is perceived to achieve a greater societal good
Now, you may think it’s appalling that Trump Is reversing and demolishing all of this. The Diversity agenda, the Woke-Industrial Complex. But America is - just about - still a democracy and Trump was explicitly promising to do all this, if elected. He was elected
What he has NOT done is “suddenly made it legal to have racist hiring policies”, or “brought back Jim Crow laws” or any of that hysterical nonsense
So are you saying that it was wrong for industries historically dominated by men to consciously hire more women? Because that is the same thing.
It's wrong to choose a woman over a more qualified man for the sake of diversity, yes. Just as it would be wrong to hire a man over a more qualified woman to be a primary school teacher.
This is so naive and ignores years of careful dismantling of sexism BECAUSE of affirmative action.
You may not have noticed, but it's currently 2025 not 1970.
Yeah. And there is still work to do. It is naive to think that all these problems and inbuild prejudices have disappeared because they haven’t
Sure, but we've reached a point where enough progress has been made that policies that have become counterproductive need to be moved on from.
He has cancelled the most basic rights (not that that will have any impact because of later ones), but not the ones that have gone too far. That seems like an odd thing to do doesn't it.
Yesterday you got yourself in a tangle over climate change and the wording of who has a cervix, both of which were dancing on a pin head. Why don't you just come out with it and say you don't believe in climate change and all this woke nonsense and employers should be able to discriminate as they like.
No, he hasn’t. Non-discrimination is enshrined in other acts of congress, which are not repealed by the executive order.
Agree and I said that in that post (first line in brackets). So why do it then?
Because, as has now beem explained to you by several people; using quite short words, that LBJ EO is the foundation stone of the Woke/Diversity industry. And if you want to roll it all away, you need to get rid of that - which kicked it all off
The many many laws which prohibit racial and sexiual discrimination in hiring etc etc etc all remain firmly in place
Absolute crap. Firstly one person said it not many and it is nonsense. You don't get rid of something very sensible because you don't like something else that came later and then keep the duff stuff. I mean what nutty nonsense is that. Keep the good stuff and get rid of the bad stuff.
You know jolly well that is not Trump's aim. He is just throwing a bone to the idiots that follow him like you who can't think for themselves
I know I chuck around “you’re stupid” comments like the confetti of insults, but the only conclusion I can reach from your comments today, passim, is that you are genuinely too thick to understand all this. I’ve given up trying
Let us talk of happier things, old bean
So you don't have an answer to that then.
We have a whole lot of good stuff and a whole lot of bad stuff. The bad stuff followed the good stuff. So the logical thing to do is get rid of the good stuff and keep the bad stuff. Yes I can see that is logical in an idiots mind.
And the arguments keep changing. Others have said people are still protected by later laws so it is ok. Yet these are the ones you want to get rid of. And when you get rid of them you are going to have to reintroduce a version of LBJ's EO aren't you or are we going back to the bad old days.
Nonsense on stilts.
Lol
Someone actually LIKED your comment. So at least you’re not alone, over there on the bottom left of the bell curve
I’d give you a wave but there’s a big *bell shaped thing* in the way
As usual when you can't deal with the argument you avoid it.
I’m just bored of arguing with someone who cannot understand the basic premises of the argument; is all
Whatever you do then don't have an argument with yourself then, you will go mad. Oh wait
More evidence of this useless Labour government, it extends the grants for VAT on repairs and restoration of places of worship for one year only at present and capped at just £25k
More evidence of this useless Labour government, it extends the grants for VAT on repairs and restoration of places of worship for one year only at present and capped at just £25k
I note December 2024 government borrowing was £7.7bn higher than December 2023.
Hard to lay the blame for that at the door of the Tories.
(Let the attempts commence here!)
Hunt’s NI cuts.
Nah, it's spending rises and debt interest that are the cause. There was enough tax growth elsewhere to cover the cut in NI without spending rises and debt interest increases, both of which are owned by the new government due to their shit policies.
At least as of Jan 25, the spending rises are largely not optional, and much (but perhaps not all) of the debt interest increases are due to global factors.
I’ve been very disappointed by Reeves but you are in denial about the incredibly poor situation she inherited. You’ve already forgotten that Rishi effectively “cut and run”,
They chose to give public sector employees record pay rises, that's where the big spending rises have come from.
The payrises were not really optional if Reeves wanted to avoid a winter of strike action. Politics is the art of the possible, and the practical. As I implied, Sunak simply quit when faced with these and other decisions.
Her mistake so far has been in not demanding longer term productivity improvements alongside the payrises.
I am at a loss to understand how productivity is measured with for example Doctors and Nurses.
Productivity in manufacturing is a somewhat easier metric. A five percent pay rise could be reliant on averaging every worker at Cowley building 0.2 Minis a day instead of 0.1 Minis a day.
Is is not generally about working 'harder', as such. I imagine there are opportunities to make gains on all three within the health sector.
The problem that I alluded to is that the way productivity in the economy is measured is like this: what is the total amount of money earned (simplified to wages + profits), and how many hours were worked? The former is divided by the latter to calculate output per hour.
As the public sector doesn't make a profit, then it follows that public sector productivity is simply the wages of civil servants divided by the number of hours they work.
Now, you might well argue that this is nonsense (on the basis that it is, in fact, nonsense), but that is how all public sector productivity is measured.
In this world, if you increase public sector salaries by 20%, then *whoosh*, you have increased productivity by 20%.
Tory Reform coalition with LD confidence and supply?
Unless we rejoin the single market no, so a non starter.
Tories and LDs combined would have more than Reform and DUP and TUV combined though or Labour, SNP and Greens and SDLP and PC and Independents combined.
So it could offer the chance of a Conservative and LD government for the first time since 2015 but that would require Kemi to agree to Davey's demands to rejoin the EEA
The UK government should certainly follow Trump’s lead on ending WFH for the civil service.
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
Not sure they can do that easily - they've sold off the office space!
Civil service should advertise more jobs on open competition and let people who lose out go. They are also far too generous to people whose roles get cut, there are many often senior people not doing much because they're holding out for some plum job when really they should be told to take what's vacant or move on.
Comments
See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/positive-action-in-the-workplace-guidance-for-employers/positive-action-in-the-workplace
You often see ads suggesting that “applications from BAME or Global South candidates etc are particularly encouraged”, but so far as I know affirmative action as practiced in the U.S. is actually prohibited under UK law.
Ditto the company targets you mention which may be informal or generic - but not, I think, formalised metrics.
I’m happy to be corrected.
Greens up 1
Lab down 272
Selebian thinks the latter is not newsworthy but LD+6 Grn +1 is!!!
Is this particular problem a /huge/ deal? No. But the lack of economic growth in this country is partially the result of 1000s of small cuts like this one. Similarly sorting out the driving test backlog would mean that people who need to drive to get a better job would be able to do so without it taking months & months to get a test or costing £100s to bribe corrupt driving instructors to get tests. Again, is this a huge effect? No. But is it a real one that the UK would benefit from fixing? Absolutely, yes.
In which case, why does anyone bother posting them?
He saves most of his ire for basketball, where the women had been complaining about getting five-figure salaries while the men get telephone numbers, pointing that that most women can’t even name teams and players, who have for decades played in front of almost no-one, and prefer instead to sit at home and watch reality TV, making those people rich instead.
(But he’s a lot funnier and and a lot ruder than my summary!)
I am still waiting for a document - a document which will release many thousands in foreign earnings, to me - which I requested over a year ago. Unbelievable. I have rung them half a dozen times and always been told “OMG we’re so sorry I have your papers right here this will be fixed NOW”
It is never fixed. FIX HMRC!!!
Whoever is in charge of the Passport Office, put that person in charge of HMRC. In fact, put them in charge of EVERYTHING
Martin Baxter has Labour on 222 seats based on that poll.
Having just listened to it, I thought she had Starmer on the ropes - she'd finally got an issue where he can't robotically squawk "£22bn black hole" or "fixing 14 years of Tory government" which left him floundering round completely ignoring the questions for six answers in a row, because he hadn't got a good answer, and he knew it.
Someone actually LIKED your comment. So at least you’re not alone, over there on the bottom left of the bell curve
I’d give you a wave but there’s a big *bell shaped thing* in the way
Edit: Also, a DC can be issued only once, which saves confusion ...
And the registrar also triggers the Tell Us Once system which is already in place, to notify doctor, |DSS, etc. etc.
So really I'm not so sure.
The much greater issue is probate registries and the Scottish equivalents - they were getting very slow even before covid, with (in Scotland) instructions for lay users which had not been completely accurate in 2009 and had become less accurate since, needing a check with a lawyer to sort out the technicalities of the form. But I suspect they are trying to discourage lay executors to minimise messups.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/positive-action-in-the-workplace-guidance-for-employers/positive-action-in-the-workplace
Updated under the Sunak government BTW.
So as an example several medical schools run access to medicine courses aimed at communities under represented in the medical workforce, but those on these courses have to compete on a level playing field with other applicants. Mostly this is on economic rather than ethnic basis, though there is a degree of overlap. I am masked as to who has been on these courses when interviewing.
Or was it just a shitpost ?
Where companies have diversity targets it is to check that the process is working overall, e.g. if 10 separate hiring decisions result in 10 white men being appointed, then it suggests that there may be a problem with interviewer bias. It is extremely unlikely that the 10 best candidates are all white men.
With HRMC it is definitely a post-Covid WFH thing. I’ve been told that, directly, by HMRC managers
I note that one of The Donald’s many Orders is that everyone in the USG must now go back to work, in work, 5 days a week. Very sensible
We can speculate why
If there aren't enough registrars then the soluition is obvious.
And of course if you are late by an hour then you are fined, no ifs no buts. If they take A WHOLE FUCKING YEAR TO SEND ONE DOCUMENT do I get a rebate? Nah
Britain’s productivity underperformance since Covid is a global outlier and seems in decent part due to the public sector.
I am definitely sympathetic to the greater flexibility afforded by WFH, and my own company operates a 3 day in the week mandate, but I am measured by revenue and profitability, and I fear the public sector doesn’t have adequate management controls to compensate.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/22/trump-january-6-pardons-police-union
"The largest police union in the US, which endorsed Donald Trump during his campaign, said Trump’s decision to pardon more than 1,500 people convicted over the January 6 insurrection “sends a dangerous message”, in a statement on Tuesday."
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/hmrc-deliberately-made-its-helpline-worse-mps-find/ar-AA1xDqSD?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=646bd146bcfd463a9f1fbc289d7af16a&ei=11
(All with normal health warnings on polls, particularly this far from a GE. if you compare to pre-election polls then it's worse for Labour and a little bit less of a surge for Reform, but some of that may be house adjustments post-election.)
the average waiting time for a driving test down from 20.6 weeks at their peak in August 2023, to 15.1 weeks at the end of January 2024. This chart shows the waiting time over the last few months by the different zones.
Give the Tories credit for most of that.
https://despatch.blog.gov.uk/2024/02/07/how-driving-test-waiting-times-are-looking-at-the-end-of-january-2024/
As with almost everything they are blamed for, we are still not in a position to see how the current Government are doing.
I think another problem is the lack of specifics in Badenoch's attack beyond the pay cap that isn't. The specific complaints about the Schools Bill raised by the people she referenced are the removal of forced academisation for failing schools and the requirement for academies to follow the national curriculum. These criticisms might or might not have put Starmer on the ropes, but as she didn't ask them, they didn't.
Overall a draw I would say. Badenoch can claim the Conservative record on schools and Starmer make a point about children's welfare.
I’ve been very disappointed by Reeves but you are in denial about the incredibly poor situation she inherited. You’ve already forgotten that Rishi effectively “cut and run”,
In theory, a government call centre would be a great candidate for 90% WFH, but there simply doesn’t appear to be the management and productivity-focus required to execute it properly. My suspicion is that the root cause is an adversarial relationship between unions and management surrounding monitoring of remote workers. The political optics are also terrible.
Of my 450 workforce, perhaps a third are full time WFH.
However, we try to maintain a high performance culture, and as I said upthread, ultimately I am judged by my P&L and client satisfaction.
We are so cooked
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/london-resort-swanscombe-paramount-disneyland-b2684094.html
https://www.amazon.com/Civil-Rights-Rhetoric-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0688062695/ref=sr_1_1
And John McWhorter:
https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Race-Self-Sabotage-Black-America/dp/0060935936/ref=sr_1_1
(I have an older copy, so I don't know what he says in that afterword.)
Both men have written other books on the subject, but those two would be good places to start.
As for affirmative action, the meaning has changed since 1965: It used to mean, for example, advertising in black publications, and sending recruiters to historically black colleges and universities. Now, it too often means discriminating against whites and East Asians, especially men, in college admisions and hiring.
(I mean, I know how the official national statistics measure it. But how do you measure it to come to such a certain conclusion?)
Were there any Disney reps at the grand rimming of the orange emperor?
Civil service should advertise more jobs on open competition and let people who lose out go.
They are also far too generous to people whose roles get cut, there are many often senior people not doing much because they're holding out for some plum job when really they should be told to take what's vacant or move on.
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/usercode.py?scotcontrol=N&CON=25&LAB=24&LIB=12&Reform=25&Green=7&UKIP=&TVCON=&TVLAB=&TVLIB=&TVReform=&TVGreen=&TVUKIP=&SCOTCON=&SCOTLAB=&SCOTLIB=&SCOTReform=&SCOTGreen=&SCOTUKIP=&SCOTNAT=&display=AllChanged&regorseat=(none)&boundary=2024
Her mistake so far has been in not demanding longer term productivity improvements alongside the payrises.
It does nothing to address the actual problem of radicalisation/mental illness (take your pick), and would only be effective in maybe stopping the very small number of underage nutters that go around stabbing people.
On economy
Badenoch/Stride 37 [+3]
Starmer/Reeves 31 [-2 ]
6 point conservative lead
17 - 20th January
https://www.civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/index.cgi
I apply for one every now and again in case my contract is not renewed.
Productivity in manufacturing is a somewhat easier metric. A five percent pay rise could be reliant on averaging every worker at Cowley building 0.2 Minis a day instead of 0.1 Minis a day.
Bush got a good start, thanks to an wealthy English merchant, for whom his father had worked.
I didn't come back to you with it then because someone had done it and it seemed to be rude and I couldn't think of a nice way of saying it and actually I don't like it when people attribute motives to what people say rather than taking it of face value so I am being a hypocrite. But then with today's conversation it seemed to happen again and my fingers couldn't help hitting the keyboard.
Would be nice to know your unedited views on climate change and woke out of the context of being buried in another discussion.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/23-million-government-package-to-support-restoration-of-thousands-of-listed-places-of-worship
- better training;
- better technology;
- better working practices.
Is is not generally about working 'harder', as such. I imagine there are opportunities to make gains on all three within the health sector.
Do you know it is a non native species too. It is only rare in the UK as it is invasive. It is very common in Europe.
That's probably where I'd start and I'd define output at a department level, so for HMRC call centres it would be number of customer queries answered within 72h with penalties on the numerator for missing the SLA or something like that. That's with about 10 seconds of thinking so I'm sure it could be better.
More evidence of this Government's contempt for our faith communities and philistine attitude to our heritage
As the public sector doesn't make a profit, then it follows that public sector productivity is simply the wages of civil servants divided by the number of hours they work.
Now, you might well argue that this is nonsense (on the basis that it is, in fact, nonsense), but that is how all public sector productivity is measured.
In this world, if you increase public sector salaries by 20%, then *whoosh*, you have increased productivity by 20%.
Tories and LDs combined would have more than Reform and DUP and TUV combined though or Labour, SNP and Greens and SDLP and PC and Independents combined.
So it could offer the chance of a Conservative and LD government for the first time since 2015 but that would require Kemi to agree to Davey's demands to rejoin the EEA