Starmer has managed to put out the perfect post, encapsulating his government in eight words. Vacuous, lacking in any thought or policy to achieve the end. Believing that if you can talk yourself into a recession (or close to one), you can talk yourself out of one.
Moan about Starmer talking the economy down, moan about him talking it up.
Moan about too much borrowing, moan about measures to reduce it. WFA, moan. Employers NI, moan. VAT on private schools, moan. Tax non-doms, moan. Close IHT loopholes on farmland, moan.
Moan about no plans for growth, moan about every growth initiative. Loosen Regs, moan. Free up pension schemes, moan. Carbon capture, moan. Closer to the EU, moan. More trade with China, moan.
Moan moan moan moan moan. I hope you guys aren't like this irl.
Sorry to labour my point, but here is another gem from the author of the paper that the previous header was based on. It is about the impact of AirBnB:
"The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation."
That paper opened my eyes. I've let out my spare bedroom on Airbnb a couple of times and I'm shocked - SHOCKED - to discover that I was taking part in a system of colonialism and racialized expropriation. I thought I was just trying to make a few spare pounds with an otherwise unused asset. I promise to spent the whole of the next year on my knees to atone for my unacceptable oppression of ethnic minorities.
And I still can't believe that the author of the paper blames all of society's ills on the far right but gives the far left a free pass.
Did this guy get paid a shedload of cash to come up with this crap ?
If it’s any consolation this kind of crap is completely doomed in our Brave New World. No one will commission it, no one will pay for it, no one will care
You will be able to generate this stuff instantly for zero pence by pushing a button, and it will be “better” - and endless
An entire edifice - academe, academic publishing, the university sector - is about to collapse. See Cardiff university right now - on the verge of bankruptcy. Many more universities will follow it into oblivion. Most of them in fact
AI isn't what is destroying Cardiff and other universities - it's lack of income relative to expenditure.
The last Government not increasing fees whilst also reducing overseas students was the final straw but universities have been a slow moving train wreck for the past 2 years. The only question was where the true scale of the problem would be reveal first.
It’s a perfect storm. New technology is just going to make the storm way more severe and destructive
The collapse of universities will be an epic spectacle
The universities have loaded themselves with debt and spent it on administration, it’s a pyramid scheme waiting to come down in an era where their actual product, of learning and research, has been massively democratised.
They’re now mostly selling scarcity of accreditation through the admissions process.
Talk on X of the entire Welsh university sector crumbling into dust
It will massively impact towns and constituencies where this happens. And it will happen
I remember when a teacher training college closed in my small home town. That was big and bad. These are UNIVERSITIES. Grim
The govt doesn’t have the £££ to bail them all out
Cardiff annual deficit is around 35 million. Pretty sure the Government could find that kind of money (even across ALL universities).
Oy it could actual raise the tuition fees in line with inflation, as it has done for NHS salaries.
As I understand it this would only kick the can down the road. We did this: 1) Slash government funding for universities 2) Replace this with tuition fees which the government then caps 3) Universities are short of cash and fill the hole with foreign students paying £lots 4) Cities like Sheffield fill up with expensive student apartment blocks occupied exclusively by Chinese students 5) People get the hump and so we reduce the number of foreign students which creates a funding crisis and imperils the entire institution
Lets assume that we jack tuition fees up to £15k a year. This isn't paid by the student, its private sector cash - tuition fees sit as an asset on the balance sheet of whichever company buys the debt. The default rate on these loans is already high (40%?) and increasing the size of the loan only increases the size of the money eventually written off. Which reduced the number of investors willing to stump up the cash which the universities need to operate.
Do I have that roughly right? If so its the British problem - we can't afford the cash to pay for it in the short term, we can't afford the damage to our economy in the medium to long term in not paying for it.
The Treasury has stopped selling off student loans.
Because nobody would buy them at those default levels?
OK, so lets assume that we raise tuition fees to £12k or £15k. That is cash which the government now needs to find up front, and will then need to write 40% off. The larger the tuition fees the larger the financial black hole.
A huge debt hypothecated to students. Creating a burden on the government to fund. With a large proportion never to be repaid. As universities are starved of cash.
I'm a big advocate of the blank sheet of paper approach. Nobody would design this structure because its absurd. Can we put something more sensible in place?
How about we sell university places to foreign students at five times the cost to a UK student? Sounds like good business.
Is it if they bring along a family of economically inactive dependents who then need to be housed and have access to services we provide ?
They pay for the accomodation already. Access to healthcare and primary and secondary education could be charged to the student,'s nation of origin.
The dependents were cut because of immigration figures which were politically unacceptable. The baby was thrown out with the bathwater.
So the govt is paying tuition fees up front in any case and then administering repayments, which have a large default level, and put off the able but financially cautious. They also have other sub-optimal results such as emigration to avoid loan repayments, avoiding career progression, high marginal deductions etc etc Why not scrap tuition fees and ration university places by ability?
That, I suspect was why the Conservatives followed the policies they did. Turn the clock back to universities being exclusively for the wealthiest 7%. We don't want any of this positive social engineering caper.
150 years ago only the top 1% went to university never mind the top 7%, as the only universities were Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Manchester, UCL, Kings London and St Andrews, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh and Aberystwyth.
Even most solicitors and accountants and bankers didn't have degrees let alone most nurses and middle managers like now. Degrees were only really needed if you wanted to be a barrister, doctor/surgeon or vicar/bishop or permanent secretary or academic or public school/grammar school teacher
Do you want to return to the top 1%? Of course you do, so long as your children will find themselves in that 1%.
No, top 10% to 20% would be fine.
Though of course the top 1% academically who went to university 150 years ago were not necessarily the richest 1%.
For example many became Vicars or teachers while bankers and solicitors and business directors often didn't have degrees at all
Working people and businesses are set to benefit from new rules that will give more flexibility over how occupational defined benefit pension schemes are managed, as the government continues to remove blockages that are inhibiting its growth agenda that will improve lives of working people across the UK.
Hosting a meeting with leaders of Britain’s biggest businesses in the City of London today (Tuesday 28 January), the Prime Minister and the Chancellor will set out the details of changes and tell some of the country’s leading CEOs that Britain is back and open for business.
At the roundtable, the PM and Chancellor will outline how restrictions will be lifted on how well-funded, occupational defined benefit pension funds that are performing well will be able to invest their surplus funds.
The current rules heavily tilt defined benefit pensions towards investing in the safest possible financial instruments - effectively gilts or the highest quality corporate bonds.
This makes sense on at the individual fund level, but absolutely no sense whatsoever at the national level: Pension funds have the longest possible time horizons - they’re the ones who ought to be investing in national infrastructure & reaping the long term benefits.
There’s been a weird double-think in much of the UK for the last few decades, where much talk is made of “growth” but at the same time every part of the system has been constrained to allow as little economic growth as possible. For economic growth to happen somebody, somewhere has to do the actual work: houses have to be built, roads maintained, computer programs have to be written, and so on & on. Preventing pension funds from funding that work helps nobody.
(Economics types will recognise this as an example of the fallacy of composition that Keynes railed against.)
The rules were set up primarily, I think, to force pension funds into funding government borrowing. It's been an issue for decades; it's encouraging that desperation is finally forcing them to take look at them. Desperate measures do carry a degree of extra risk though.
So what happens when that risk does not pay off ?
The members of the scheme get reduced benefits presumably.
Why should private defined schemes take that risk, especially when so many are now closed to new members and their age profile is far older than DC schemes.
As I said yesterday even by Rachel from accounts standards this is an unbelievably stupid idea. Does she really think that £160bn of surplus is sitting around doing nothing? Of course not. So where is it? Well, its invested in UK companies, foreign companies and gilts. So it is already a major source of our investment.
The real problem is that since Brown changed the rules on dividends for pension funds less and less of UK funds are invested in UK quoted companies. But that is a consequence of tax policies, not a consequence of surplus funds lying around. If this "surplus" is removed by the supporting employer they might invest it or they might pay dividends with it. Who can say, but another part of the growth problem is that pension funds have driven UK companies to be cash cows rather than investing for future growth so it is a fair bet that the latter will be the most common.
The issues are: (1) that UK pension funds are reluctant to invest in FTSE companies (roughly 10% of their holdings at present). (2) That unlike in the US UK funds seem more interested in dividends and squeezing cash out of companies than capital growth. (3) That this makes it more difficult than is ideal for startups and small companies to access capital in the UK.
None of these problems are addressed by Reeves' proposals. Indeed some of them may become worse.
Can I please challenge you on this "Rachel from accounts" thing. It is open and petty misogyny - you would not have referred to "Kwazi from Accounts" or "Rishi from Accounts" or "Gordon from Accounts"
She is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and she's a woman. Feel free to consider that she is doing a poor job - that's fair. But "Rachel from accounts" is attacking her for her crime of being a woman. Please stop. You are better than than even if so many Tories and right wing commentators are not.
If she wasn't stupid people wouldn't think she was stupid and so they wouldn't call her Rachel From Accounts. In fact the name exaggerates her abilities. If she doe have any qualifications in Economics, or A Level Sums that says more about the institution that gave her that qualififcation than it does about her.
But whilst no-one doubts Starmer is the worst Prime Minister ever, Rachel has stiffer competition. There is a very amusing come snide section of Dick Crossman's diaries where he discusses the abilities of the then Chancellor Jim Callaghan. Of course the whole of those diaries are focussed on pointing out he would have been so much better a PM than Wilson. Which he probably would have been. I doubt there are many Diary writers in the present cabinet, just another minimum entry requirement for their jobs which they don't have.
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
I loved it although there were some serious bumps along the road. I find young children in particular delightful and hilarious. I am so looking forward to my first grandchild being born next month so I get to do some of that again.
This standing on cold wet football pitches as a parent - is this a modern thing?
I played cub and scout football at the local pitch most Saturdays through many winters in 1970s and there wasn't a single parent there in support.
I used to go and watch my son play cricket for the school but that was mainly because I love to watch cricket. Thankfully he didn't make the school football team.
Working people and businesses are set to benefit from new rules that will give more flexibility over how occupational defined benefit pension schemes are managed, as the government continues to remove blockages that are inhibiting its growth agenda that will improve lives of working people across the UK.
Hosting a meeting with leaders of Britain’s biggest businesses in the City of London today (Tuesday 28 January), the Prime Minister and the Chancellor will set out the details of changes and tell some of the country’s leading CEOs that Britain is back and open for business.
At the roundtable, the PM and Chancellor will outline how restrictions will be lifted on how well-funded, occupational defined benefit pension funds that are performing well will be able to invest their surplus funds.
The current rules heavily tilt defined benefit pensions towards investing in the safest possible financial instruments - effectively gilts or the highest quality corporate bonds.
This makes sense on at the individual fund level, but absolutely no sense whatsoever at the national level: Pension funds have the longest possible time horizons - they’re the ones who ought to be investing in national infrastructure & reaping the long term benefits.
There’s been a weird double-think in much of the UK for the last few decades, where much talk is made of “growth” but at the same time every part of the system has been constrained to allow as little economic growth as possible. For economic growth to happen somebody, somewhere has to do the actual work: houses have to be built, roads maintained, computer programs have to be written, and so on & on. Preventing pension funds from funding that work helps nobody.
(Economics types will recognise this as an example of the fallacy of composition that Keynes railed against.)
The rules were set up primarily, I think, to force pension funds into funding government borrowing. It's been an issue for decades; it's encouraging that desperation is finally forcing them to take look at them. Desperate measures do carry a degree of extra risk though.
So what happens when that risk does not pay off ?
The members of the scheme get reduced benefits presumably.
Why should private defined schemes take that risk, especially when so many are now closed to new members and their age profile is far older than DC schemes.
As I said yesterday even by Rachel from accounts standards this is an unbelievably stupid idea. Does she really think that £160bn of surplus is sitting around doing nothing? Of course not. So where is it? Well, its invested in UK companies, foreign companies and gilts. So it is already a major source of our investment.
The real problem is that since Brown changed the rules on dividends for pension funds less and less of UK funds are invested in UK quoted companies. But that is a consequence of tax policies, not a consequence of surplus funds lying around. If this "surplus" is removed by the supporting employer they might invest it or they might pay dividends with it. Who can say, but another part of the growth problem is that pension funds have driven UK companies to be cash cows rather than investing for future growth so it is a fair bet that the latter will be the most common.
The issues are: (1) that UK pension funds are reluctant to invest in FTSE companies (roughly 10% of their holdings at present). (2) That unlike in the US UK funds seem more interested in dividends and squeezing cash out of companies than capital growth. (3) That this makes it more difficult than is ideal for startups and small companies to access capital in the UK.
None of these problems are addressed by Reeves' proposals. Indeed some of them may become worse.
Can I please challenge you on this "Rachel from accounts" thing. It is open and petty misogyny - you would not have referred to "Kwazi from Accounts" or "Rishi from Accounts" or "Gordon from Accounts"
She is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and she's a woman. Feel free to consider that she is doing a poor job - that's fair. But "Rachel from accounts" is attacking her for her crime of being a woman. Please stop. You are better than than even if so many Tories and right wing commentators are not.
It’s not remotely misogynistic- it’s a critique (rightly or wrongly) of a position within a company as a means to mock.
For most people the image of. “Colin from accounts” or a “Rachel from accounts” is of a mid level back office functionary with very little or no influence on corporate matters and no wider business skills.
There is a reason why the fast show had “Colin from accounts” as people can recognise a mid/low level character with little imagination and skill but a professional qualification.
I have worked with many of these in companies I’ve worked for and there is a reason why they are mocked - whether it’s fair or unfair is a different matter.
I would absolutely have lambasted EmRishi as “Rishi from accounts” if there was a perception he had only reached a low level finance role however, as he had a pretty high level financial career it would be a silly barb to level.
Kwazi got loads of grief - called Kami-Kwasi - was that because he was one of those foreigners so we can apply a funny negative name or because he was holding the baby went it went tits up?
John Major was mocked with his underpants - is that misandrist as men wear Y-fronts so we can mock him.
Using the misogyny defence of RR is ridiculous and taking offence for someone else where that offence is unfounded.
Defend her abilities and say people are wrong about them but don’t pull a sexism card to shut down a line of mockery.
Yes, "Rachel from Accounts" perfectly encapsulates her
Extraordinary mediocrity is what really marks out this government. It is like being governed by the most ludicorus bunch of middle managers in history. A bunch of senior librarians and deputy head teachers. County councillors who struggle with technology. Dweebs
Sorry to labour my point, but here is another gem from the author of the paper that the previous header was based on. It is about the impact of AirBnB:
"The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation."
That paper opened my eyes. I've let out my spare bedroom on Airbnb a couple of times and I'm shocked - SHOCKED - to discover that I was taking part in a system of colonialism and racialized expropriation. I thought I was just trying to make a few spare pounds with an otherwise unused asset. I promise to spent the whole of the next year on my knees to atone for my unacceptable oppression of ethnic minorities.
And I still can't believe that the author of the paper blames all of society's ills on the far right but gives the far left a free pass.
Did this guy get paid a shedload of cash to come up with this crap ?
If it’s any consolation this kind of crap is completely doomed in our Brave New World. No one will commission it, no one will pay for it, no one will care
You will be able to generate this stuff instantly for zero pence by pushing a button, and it will be “better” - and endless
An entire edifice - academe, academic publishing, the university sector - is about to collapse. See Cardiff university right now - on the verge of bankruptcy. Many more universities will follow it into oblivion. Most of them in fact
AI isn't what is destroying Cardiff and other universities - it's lack of income relative to expenditure.
The last Government not increasing fees whilst also reducing overseas students was the final straw but universities have been a slow moving train wreck for the past 2 years. The only question was where the true scale of the problem would be reveal first.
It’s a perfect storm. New technology is just going to make the storm way more severe and destructive
The collapse of universities will be an epic spectacle
The universities have loaded themselves with debt and spent it on administration, it’s a pyramid scheme waiting to come down in an era where their actual product, of learning and research, has been massively democratised.
They’re now mostly selling scarcity of accreditation through the admissions process.
Talk on X of the entire Welsh university sector crumbling into dust
It will massively impact towns and constituencies where this happens. And it will happen
I remember when a teacher training college closed in my small home town. That was big and bad. These are UNIVERSITIES. Grim
The govt doesn’t have the £££ to bail them all out
Cardiff annual deficit is around 35 million. Pretty sure the Government could find that kind of money (even across ALL universities).
Oy it could actual raise the tuition fees in line with inflation, as it has done for NHS salaries.
What would be the point of doing that if they won't get the money back anyway.
IANAE on university tuition fees at all, in my day only the top 5 or so percent went to Uni. I got an apprenticeship. However it strikes me the current fees system is not fit for purpose at all and is crying out for reform. It is not reasonable to expect min wage shelf stackers to pay for peoples higher education when over half go to Uni. However the current system needs reform.
I Also think for some professions, like the Junior Doctors, as part of their pay offer some sort of fee forgiveness should be looked at.
My younger son is 17 and has a few months left in education. Doesn't want to go to university but understandably has no clue what they want to do with their life (for you are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today...)
I started a (currently very small) business last autumn with him in mind to build it (ecommerce). There's definitely something here, but it needs time and focus I don't have. He has the time, I have the business nous. Could be a good option for him, but he needs to want to graft.
That’s awesome, good luck to him.
What is undoubtedly coming down the line is an explosion of a hybrid work/study model, sustained by degree apprenticeships, Open University - type models, professional qualifications such as ACCA, PMP etc.
Fewer kids want to be 21 and in £50k of debt unless they’re getting a top class degree that gets them straight into the City.
It’s been said a hundred times before, but absolutely everything is being driven by the cost of housing.
Starmer has managed to put out the perfect post, encapsulating his government in eight words. Vacuous, lacking in any thought or policy to achieve the end. Believing that if you can talk yourself into a recession (or close to one), you can talk yourself out of one.
Moan about Starmer talking the economy down, moan about him talking it up.
Moan about too much borrowing, moan about measures to reduce it. WFA, moan. Employers NI, moan. VAT on private schools, moan. Tax non-doms, moan. Close IHT loopholes on farmland, moan.
Moan about no plans for growth, moan about every growth initiative. Loosen Regs, moan. Free up pension schemes, moan. Carbon capture, moan. Closer to the EU, moan. More trade with China, moan.
Moan moan moan moan moan. I hope you guys aren't like this irl.
Yes.
Such a contrast with PB Labour under a Conservative government.
Who can forget the “PB Labour for National Optimism” drive? Collected enough to buy several cabbages for Liz Truss, IIRC.
Working people and businesses are set to benefit from new rules that will give more flexibility over how occupational defined benefit pension schemes are managed, as the government continues to remove blockages that are inhibiting its growth agenda that will improve lives of working people across the UK.
Hosting a meeting with leaders of Britain’s biggest businesses in the City of London today (Tuesday 28 January), the Prime Minister and the Chancellor will set out the details of changes and tell some of the country’s leading CEOs that Britain is back and open for business.
At the roundtable, the PM and Chancellor will outline how restrictions will be lifted on how well-funded, occupational defined benefit pension funds that are performing well will be able to invest their surplus funds.
The current rules heavily tilt defined benefit pensions towards investing in the safest possible financial instruments - effectively gilts or the highest quality corporate bonds.
This makes sense on at the individual fund level, but absolutely no sense whatsoever at the national level: Pension funds have the longest possible time horizons - they’re the ones who ought to be investing in national infrastructure & reaping the long term benefits.
There’s been a weird double-think in much of the UK for the last few decades, where much talk is made of “growth” but at the same time every part of the system has been constrained to allow as little economic growth as possible. For economic growth to happen somebody, somewhere has to do the actual work: houses have to be built, roads maintained, computer programs have to be written, and so on & on. Preventing pension funds from funding that work helps nobody.
(Economics types will recognise this as an example of the fallacy of composition that Keynes railed against.)
The rules were set up primarily, I think, to force pension funds into funding government borrowing. It's been an issue for decades; it's encouraging that desperation is finally forcing them to take look at them. Desperate measures do carry a degree of extra risk though.
So what happens when that risk does not pay off ?
The members of the scheme get reduced benefits presumably.
Why should private defined schemes take that risk, especially when so many are now closed to new members and their age profile is far older than DC schemes.
As I said yesterday even by Rachel from accounts standards this is an unbelievably stupid idea. Does she really think that £160bn of surplus is sitting around doing nothing? Of course not. So where is it? Well, its invested in UK companies, foreign companies and gilts. So it is already a major source of our investment.
The real problem is that since Brown changed the rules on dividends for pension funds less and less of UK funds are invested in UK quoted companies. But that is a consequence of tax policies, not a consequence of surplus funds lying around. If this "surplus" is removed by the supporting employer they might invest it or they might pay dividends with it. Who can say, but another part of the growth problem is that pension funds have driven UK companies to be cash cows rather than investing for future growth so it is a fair bet that the latter will be the most common.
The issues are: (1) that UK pension funds are reluctant to invest in FTSE companies (roughly 10% of their holdings at present). (2) That unlike in the US UK funds seem more interested in dividends and squeezing cash out of companies than capital growth. (3) That this makes it more difficult than is ideal for startups and small companies to access capital in the UK.
None of these problems are addressed by Reeves' proposals. Indeed some of them may become worse.
Can I please challenge you on this "Rachel from accounts" thing. It is open and petty misogyny - you would not have referred to "Kwazi from Accounts" or "Rishi from Accounts" or "Gordon from Accounts"
She is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and she's a woman. Feel free to consider that she is doing a poor job - that's fair. But "Rachel from accounts" is attacking her for her crime of being a woman. Please stop. You are better than than even if so many Tories and right wing commentators are not.
It’s not remotely misogynistic- it’s a critique (rightly or wrongly) of a position within a company as a means to mock.
For most people the image of. “Colin from accounts” or a “Rachel from accounts” is of a mid level back office functionary with very little or no influence on corporate matters and no wider business skills.
There is a reason why the fast show had “Colin from accounts” as people can recognise a mid/low level character with little imagination and skill but a professional qualification.
I have worked with many of these in companies I’ve worked for and there is a reason why they are mocked - whether it’s fair or unfair is a different matter.
I would absolutely have lambasted EmRishi as “Rishi from accounts” if there was a perception he had only reached a low level finance role however, as he had a pretty high level financial career it would be a silly barb to level.
Kwazi got loads of grief - called Kami-Kwasi - was that because he was one of those foreigners so we can apply a funny negative name or because he was holding the baby went it went tits up?
John Major was mocked with his underpants - is that misandrist as men wear Y-fronts so we can mock him.
Using the misogyny defence of RR is ridiculous and taking offence for someone else where that offence is unfounded.
Defend her abilities and say people are wrong about them but don’t pull a sexism card to shut down a line of mockery.
Good defence. I can see it both ways. Probably err on the its "fair game" side but also confident that it is a phrase that will be latched onto by the misogynists so those using it persistently may get perceived that way as well.
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
Starmer has managed to put out the perfect post, encapsulating his government in eight words. Vacuous, lacking in any thought or policy to achieve the end. Believing that if you can talk yourself into a recession (or close to one), you can talk yourself out of one.
Moan about Starmer talking the economy down, moan about him talking it up.
Moan about too much borrowing, moan about measures to reduce it. WFA, moan. Employers NI, moan. VAT on private schools, moan. Tax non-doms, moan. Close IHT loopholes on farmland, moan.
Moan about no plans for growth, moan about every growth initiative. Loosen Regs, moan. Free up pension schemes, moan. Carbon capture, moan. Closer to the EU, moan. More trade with China, moan.
Moan moan moan moan moan. I hope you guys aren't like this irl.
1. I don't recall you doing a lot of jubilant whooping during the long 14 years of Tory rule? In fact I recall you doing quite a lot of moaning
2. This government really is inexpressibly shite. But we do our best to express it
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
I loved it although there were some serious bumps along the road. I find young children in particular delightful and hilarious. I am so looking forward to my first grandchild being born next month so I get to do some of that again.
This standing on cold wet football pitches as a parent - is this a modern thing?
I played cub and scout football at the local pitch most Saturdays through many winters in 1970s and there wasn't a single parent there in support.
Yes. A massive culture change; a mixture of helicoptering, safeguarding, anxiously wanting to be part of your child's life, etc. As a child of the 1950s/60s, it would never have crossed my father's mind to have the smallest interest in whether, where and with whom I was doing any sport of any sort. That would seen really odd now, but it was fine and I still thinks it was fine.
A lot of fathers would be working on a Saturday morning back in 50/60/70s I guess.
There was no way my mother would have had time. There was a ton of housework and she worked during the week.
As you say, a different world.
Modern parents overdo it all imho and then say they are permanently exhausted.
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
For what it's worth, I've not used the 'Rachel from accounts' line but I think it's fair. Politicians get mocked all the time. Women want equality, and equality means also having the piss taken (just like the men).
Working people and businesses are set to benefit from new rules that will give more flexibility over how occupational defined benefit pension schemes are managed, as the government continues to remove blockages that are inhibiting its growth agenda that will improve lives of working people across the UK.
Hosting a meeting with leaders of Britain’s biggest businesses in the City of London today (Tuesday 28 January), the Prime Minister and the Chancellor will set out the details of changes and tell some of the country’s leading CEOs that Britain is back and open for business.
At the roundtable, the PM and Chancellor will outline how restrictions will be lifted on how well-funded, occupational defined benefit pension funds that are performing well will be able to invest their surplus funds.
The current rules heavily tilt defined benefit pensions towards investing in the safest possible financial instruments - effectively gilts or the highest quality corporate bonds.
This makes sense on at the individual fund level, but absolutely no sense whatsoever at the national level: Pension funds have the longest possible time horizons - they’re the ones who ought to be investing in national infrastructure & reaping the long term benefits.
There’s been a weird double-think in much of the UK for the last few decades, where much talk is made of “growth” but at the same time every part of the system has been constrained to allow as little economic growth as possible. For economic growth to happen somebody, somewhere has to do the actual work: houses have to be built, roads maintained, computer programs have to be written, and so on & on. Preventing pension funds from funding that work helps nobody.
(Economics types will recognise this as an example of the fallacy of composition that Keynes railed against.)
The rules were set up primarily, I think, to force pension funds into funding government borrowing. It's been an issue for decades; it's encouraging that desperation is finally forcing them to take look at them. Desperate measures do carry a degree of extra risk though.
So what happens when that risk does not pay off ?
The members of the scheme get reduced benefits presumably.
Why should private defined schemes take that risk, especially when so many are now closed to new members and their age profile is far older than DC schemes.
As I said yesterday even by Rachel from accounts standards this is an unbelievably stupid idea. Does she really think that £160bn of surplus is sitting around doing nothing? Of course not. So where is it? Well, its invested in UK companies, foreign companies and gilts. So it is already a major source of our investment.
The real problem is that since Brown changed the rules on dividends for pension funds less and less of UK funds are invested in UK quoted companies. But that is a consequence of tax policies, not a consequence of surplus funds lying around. If this "surplus" is removed by the supporting employer they might invest it or they might pay dividends with it. Who can say, but another part of the growth problem is that pension funds have driven UK companies to be cash cows rather than investing for future growth so it is a fair bet that the latter will be the most common.
The issues are: (1) that UK pension funds are reluctant to invest in FTSE companies (roughly 10% of their holdings at present). (2) That unlike in the US UK funds seem more interested in dividends and squeezing cash out of companies than capital growth. (3) That this makes it more difficult than is ideal for startups and small companies to access capital in the UK.
None of these problems are addressed by Reeves' proposals. Indeed some of them may become worse.
Can I please challenge you on this "Rachel from accounts" thing. It is open and petty misogyny - you would not have referred to "Kwazi from Accounts" or "Rishi from Accounts" or "Gordon from Accounts"
She is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and she's a woman. Feel free to consider that she is doing a poor job - that's fair. But "Rachel from accounts" is attacking her for her crime of being a woman. Please stop. You are better than than even if so many Tories and right wing commentators are not.
BS.
If any of them had embellished their career history in the same way she had, they'd absolutely have been liable to the nickname.
Working people and businesses are set to benefit from new rules that will give more flexibility over how occupational defined benefit pension schemes are managed, as the government continues to remove blockages that are inhibiting its growth agenda that will improve lives of working people across the UK.
Hosting a meeting with leaders of Britain’s biggest businesses in the City of London today (Tuesday 28 January), the Prime Minister and the Chancellor will set out the details of changes and tell some of the country’s leading CEOs that Britain is back and open for business.
At the roundtable, the PM and Chancellor will outline how restrictions will be lifted on how well-funded, occupational defined benefit pension funds that are performing well will be able to invest their surplus funds.
The current rules heavily tilt defined benefit pensions towards investing in the safest possible financial instruments - effectively gilts or the highest quality corporate bonds.
This makes sense on at the individual fund level, but absolutely no sense whatsoever at the national level: Pension funds have the longest possible time horizons - they’re the ones who ought to be investing in national infrastructure & reaping the long term benefits.
There’s been a weird double-think in much of the UK for the last few decades, where much talk is made of “growth” but at the same time every part of the system has been constrained to allow as little economic growth as possible. For economic growth to happen somebody, somewhere has to do the actual work: houses have to be built, roads maintained, computer programs have to be written, and so on & on. Preventing pension funds from funding that work helps nobody.
(Economics types will recognise this as an example of the fallacy of composition that Keynes railed against.)
True but the DB scheme I am in closed may years ago, is relatively small, has around 250 members (there was 1 for staff and one for works) and the age profile is skewed toward 50 plus.
That schemed really should not be investing in illiquid assets or risky assets given the age profile of its members in my view.
Of course not. Does anything in the proposals compel that (I don't think so) ?
The existing rules have basically forced large funds, with a horizon of many decades, to underperform the market, long term. That's good neither for the funds nor the economy.
The devil will be in the detail, as always, in the past chancellors have spoken of accessing pension funds to pay for infrastructure and the like.
A pension is a vehicle to fund someones retirement. First and foremost it must do that. If it helps the economy then all well and good but its priority should be fund growth to fund the retiree's retirement.
The govt will bring forward the details in the spring. Depends what is meant by this.
"With the right guardrails in place, the government’s proposals could help channel more funding into the economy, by enabling schemes to invest more widely and take on greater risk, while allowing for members to receive an uplift to pension benefits."
The Government could take more risk with public sector DB schemes, but leave private sector DB schemes unchanged. If the public sector schemes fail, the Government will then have to decide whether they bail out their own employees.
I'm sorry, what she is proposing to do is just a version of what Robert Maxwell did. She, and any MP who votes in favour of this change should be personally liable, IN FULL even if that leaves them homeless and in a gutter somewhere. Their predecessors in the same seats for the same party were quick enough to say never again Robert Maxwell, and they were right.
Working people and businesses are set to benefit from new rules that will give more flexibility over how occupational defined benefit pension schemes are managed, as the government continues to remove blockages that are inhibiting its growth agenda that will improve lives of working people across the UK.
Hosting a meeting with leaders of Britain’s biggest businesses in the City of London today (Tuesday 28 January), the Prime Minister and the Chancellor will set out the details of changes and tell some of the country’s leading CEOs that Britain is back and open for business.
At the roundtable, the PM and Chancellor will outline how restrictions will be lifted on how well-funded, occupational defined benefit pension funds that are performing well will be able to invest their surplus funds.
The current rules heavily tilt defined benefit pensions towards investing in the safest possible financial instruments - effectively gilts or the highest quality corporate bonds.
This makes sense on at the individual fund level, but absolutely no sense whatsoever at the national level: Pension funds have the longest possible time horizons - they’re the ones who ought to be investing in national infrastructure & reaping the long term benefits.
There’s been a weird double-think in much of the UK for the last few decades, where much talk is made of “growth” but at the same time every part of the system has been constrained to allow as little economic growth as possible. For economic growth to happen somebody, somewhere has to do the actual work: houses have to be built, roads maintained, computer programs have to be written, and so on & on. Preventing pension funds from funding that work helps nobody.
(Economics types will recognise this as an example of the fallacy of composition that Keynes railed against.)
The rules were set up primarily, I think, to force pension funds into funding government borrowing. It's been an issue for decades; it's encouraging that desperation is finally forcing them to take look at them. Desperate measures do carry a degree of extra risk though.
So what happens when that risk does not pay off ?
The members of the scheme get reduced benefits presumably.
Why should private defined schemes take that risk, especially when so many are now closed to new members and their age profile is far older than DC schemes.
As I said yesterday even by Rachel from accounts standards this is an unbelievably stupid idea. Does she really think that £160bn of surplus is sitting around doing nothing? Of course not. So where is it? Well, its invested in UK companies, foreign companies and gilts. So it is already a major source of our investment.
The real problem is that since Brown changed the rules on dividends for pension funds less and less of UK funds are invested in UK quoted companies. But that is a consequence of tax policies, not a consequence of surplus funds lying around. If this "surplus" is removed by the supporting employer they might invest it or they might pay dividends with it. Who can say, but another part of the growth problem is that pension funds have driven UK companies to be cash cows rather than investing for future growth so it is a fair bet that the latter will be the most common.
The issues are: (1) that UK pension funds are reluctant to invest in FTSE companies (roughly 10% of their holdings at present). (2) That unlike in the US UK funds seem more interested in dividends and squeezing cash out of companies than capital growth. (3) That this makes it more difficult than is ideal for startups and small companies to access capital in the UK.
None of these problems are addressed by Reeves' proposals. Indeed some of them may become worse.
Can I please challenge you on this "Rachel from accounts" thing. It is open and petty misogyny - you would not have referred to "Kwazi from Accounts" or "Rishi from Accounts" or "Gordon from Accounts"
She is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and she's a woman. Feel free to consider that she is doing a poor job - that's fair. But "Rachel from accounts" is attacking her for her crime of being a woman. Please stop. You are better than than even if so many Tories and right wing commentators are not.
If she wasn't stupid people wouldn't think she was stupid and so they wouldn't call her Rachel From Accounts. In fact the name exaggerates her abilities. If she doe have any qualifications in Economics, or A Level Sums that says more about the institution that gave her that qualififcation than it does about her.
But whilst no-one doubts Starmer is the worst Prime Minister ever, Rachel has stiffer competition. There is a very amusing come snide section of Dick Crossman's diaries where he discusses the abilities of the then Chancellor Jim Callaghan. Of course the whole of those diaries are focussed on pointing out he would have been so much better a PM than Wilson. Which he probably would have been. I doubt there are many Diary writers in the present cabinet, just another minimum entry requirement for their jobs which they don't have.
I loved reading the Crossman diaries at University. There was an almost charming lack of self knowledge when he speculated, time and again, that Wilson might have contrived how things turned out. It was hilarious. I could never make up my mind whether this showed insight or not but Wilson was very clearly running rings around the intellectual force that was Dick Crossman.
Working people and businesses are set to benefit from new rules that will give more flexibility over how occupational defined benefit pension schemes are managed, as the government continues to remove blockages that are inhibiting its growth agenda that will improve lives of working people across the UK.
Hosting a meeting with leaders of Britain’s biggest businesses in the City of London today (Tuesday 28 January), the Prime Minister and the Chancellor will set out the details of changes and tell some of the country’s leading CEOs that Britain is back and open for business.
At the roundtable, the PM and Chancellor will outline how restrictions will be lifted on how well-funded, occupational defined benefit pension funds that are performing well will be able to invest their surplus funds.
The current rules heavily tilt defined benefit pensions towards investing in the safest possible financial instruments - effectively gilts or the highest quality corporate bonds.
This makes sense on at the individual fund level, but absolutely no sense whatsoever at the national level: Pension funds have the longest possible time horizons - they’re the ones who ought to be investing in national infrastructure & reaping the long term benefits.
There’s been a weird double-think in much of the UK for the last few decades, where much talk is made of “growth” but at the same time every part of the system has been constrained to allow as little economic growth as possible. For economic growth to happen somebody, somewhere has to do the actual work: houses have to be built, roads maintained, computer programs have to be written, and so on & on. Preventing pension funds from funding that work helps nobody.
(Economics types will recognise this as an example of the fallacy of composition that Keynes railed against.)
The rules were set up primarily, I think, to force pension funds into funding government borrowing. It's been an issue for decades; it's encouraging that desperation is finally forcing them to take look at them. Desperate measures do carry a degree of extra risk though.
So what happens when that risk does not pay off ?
The members of the scheme get reduced benefits presumably.
Why should private defined schemes take that risk, especially when so many are now closed to new members and their age profile is far older than DC schemes.
As I said yesterday even by Rachel from accounts standards this is an unbelievably stupid idea. Does she really think that £160bn of surplus is sitting around doing nothing? Of course not. So where is it? Well, its invested in UK companies, foreign companies and gilts. So it is already a major source of our investment.
The real problem is that since Brown changed the rules on dividends for pension funds less and less of UK funds are invested in UK quoted companies. But that is a consequence of tax policies, not a consequence of surplus funds lying around. If this "surplus" is removed by the supporting employer they might invest it or they might pay dividends with it. Who can say, but another part of the growth problem is that pension funds have driven UK companies to be cash cows rather than investing for future growth so it is a fair bet that the latter will be the most common.
The issues are: (1) that UK pension funds are reluctant to invest in FTSE companies (roughly 10% of their holdings at present). (2) That unlike in the US UK funds seem more interested in dividends and squeezing cash out of companies than capital growth. (3) That this makes it more difficult than is ideal for startups and small companies to access capital in the UK.
None of these problems are addressed by Reeves' proposals. Indeed some of them may become worse.
Can I please challenge you on this "Rachel from accounts" thing. It is open and petty misogyny - you would not have referred to "Kwazi from Accounts" or "Rishi from Accounts" or "Gordon from Accounts"
She is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and she's a woman. Feel free to consider that she is doing a poor job - that's fair. But "Rachel from accounts" is attacking her for her crime of being a woman. Please stop. You are better than than even if so many Tories and right wing commentators are not.
Ok. I take the point. I did not mean it in a misogynistic way, its more a reflection on her CV as she has narrated it but I accept it could be seen that way.
Nah, don't cave. It's not mysogynistic in any way, shape or form, and if people choose to see it that way, quite frankly it's a them problem.
Sorry to labour my point, but here is another gem from the author of the paper that the previous header was based on. It is about the impact of AirBnB:
"The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation."
That paper opened my eyes. I've let out my spare bedroom on Airbnb a couple of times and I'm shocked - SHOCKED - to discover that I was taking part in a system of colonialism and racialized expropriation. I thought I was just trying to make a few spare pounds with an otherwise unused asset. I promise to spent the whole of the next year on my knees to atone for my unacceptable oppression of ethnic minorities.
And I still can't believe that the author of the paper blames all of society's ills on the far right but gives the far left a free pass.
Looks like the paper is 99.9% bollocks with a 0.1% interesting grain of an idea to me. It's strange how academics can get away with imposing their totally slanted views onto their piblished 'academic' papers.
But, freedom of speech and all that - is it worth getting het up about?
It's an extremely rambling way of saying that AirBnB usage has grown faster than trend in predominantly black neighbourhoods, and that most renters are white.
Apart from adding "computational hermeneutics" to my bullshit dictionary, a waste of five minutes of my time.
You mean that AirBnB usage has grown faster in poorer, cheaper neighbourhoods?
There might be some real, interesting stuff in whether AirBnB is creating a more rapid gentrification at the intersections of richer and poorer neighbourhoods. Because of the rapid cycle - people comparing prices vs crimes maps vs cool coffee shops on a daily basis…..
Insofar as the 'poorer' and 'majority black' correlate, yes. There might have been a very interesting paper to be written about the central point, given further research, but this wan't it.
There’s definitely no funding for anyone who might write an academic paper, especially in the US, that suggests that the real societal problem is actually income and social class, rather than race.
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
I loved it although there were some serious bumps along the road. I find young children in particular delightful and hilarious. I am so looking forward to my first grandchild being born next month so I get to do some of that again.
This standing on cold wet football pitches as a parent - is this a modern thing?
I played cub and scout football at the local pitch most Saturdays through many winters in 1970s and there wasn't a single parent there in support.
Yes. A massive culture change; a mixture of helicoptering, safeguarding, anxiously wanting to be part of your child's life, etc. As a child of the 1950s/60s, it would never have crossed my father's mind to have the smallest interest in whether, where and with whom I was doing any sport of any sort. That would seen really odd now, but it was fine and I still thinks it was fine.
A lot of fathers would be working on a Saturday morning back in 50/60/70s I guess.
There was no way my mother would have had time. There was a ton of housework and she worked during the week.
As you say, a different world.
Modern parents overdo it all imho and then say they are permanently exhausted.
I remember once I was about 16 and I got talking about rugby with my Dad. We were both fans
I mentioned that I enjoyed playing it at school level, but was unsure if I would continue into 6th Form (I didn't)
He looked at me quite confused. He was unaware that I was in the school rugby team and had been so for the last four years, playing every Saturday throughout my school days (home and away, etc)
Sorry to labour my point, but here is another gem from the author of the paper that the previous header was based on. It is about the impact of AirBnB:
"The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation."
That paper opened my eyes. I've let out my spare bedroom on Airbnb a couple of times and I'm shocked - SHOCKED - to discover that I was taking part in a system of colonialism and racialized expropriation. I thought I was just trying to make a few spare pounds with an otherwise unused asset. I promise to spent the whole of the next year on my knees to atone for my unacceptable oppression of ethnic minorities.
And I still can't believe that the author of the paper blames all of society's ills on the far right but gives the far left a free pass.
Did this guy get paid a shedload of cash to come up with this crap ?
If it’s any consolation this kind of crap is completely doomed in our Brave New World. No one will commission it, no one will pay for it, no one will care
You will be able to generate this stuff instantly for zero pence by pushing a button, and it will be “better” - and endless
An entire edifice - academe, academic publishing, the university sector - is about to collapse. See Cardiff university right now - on the verge of bankruptcy. Many more universities will follow it into oblivion. Most of them in fact
AI isn't what is destroying Cardiff and other universities - it's lack of income relative to expenditure.
The last Government not increasing fees whilst also reducing overseas students was the final straw but universities have been a slow moving train wreck for the past 2 years. The only question was where the true scale of the problem would be reveal first.
It’s a perfect storm. New technology is just going to make the storm way more severe and destructive
The collapse of universities will be an epic spectacle
The universities have loaded themselves with debt and spent it on administration, it’s a pyramid scheme waiting to come down in an era where their actual product, of learning and research, has been massively democratised.
They’re now mostly selling scarcity of accreditation through the admissions process.
Talk on X of the entire Welsh university sector crumbling into dust
It will massively impact towns and constituencies where this happens. And it will happen
I remember when a teacher training college closed in my small home town. That was big and bad. These are UNIVERSITIES. Grim
The govt doesn’t have the £££ to bail them all out
Cardiff annual deficit is around 35 million. Pretty sure the Government could find that kind of money (even across ALL universities).
Oy it could actual raise the tuition fees in line with inflation, as it has done for NHS salaries.
What would be the point of doing that if they won't get the money back anyway.
IANAE on university tuition fees at all, in my day only the top 5 or so percent went to Uni. I got an apprenticeship. However it strikes me the current fees system is not fit for purpose at all and is crying out for reform. It is not reasonable to expect min wage shelf stackers to pay for peoples higher education when over half go to Uni. However the current system needs reform.
I Also think for some professions, like the Junior Doctors, as part of their pay offer some sort of fee forgiveness should be looked at.
My younger son is 17 and has a few months left in education. Doesn't want to go to university but understandably has no clue what they want to do with their life (for you are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today...)
I started a (currently very small) business last autumn with him in mind to build it (ecommerce). There's definitely something here, but it needs time and focus I don't have. He has the time, I have the business nous. Could be a good option for him, but he needs to want to graft.
That’s awesome, good luck to him.
What is undoubtedly coming down the line is an explosion of a hybrid work/study model, sustained by degree apprenticeships, Open University - type models, professional qualifications such as ACCA, PMP etc.
Fewer kids want to be 21 and in £50k of debt unless they’re getting a top class degree that gets them straight into the City.
It’s been said a hundred times before, but absolutely everything is being driven by the cost of housing.
Leave school at 18, stay in the North and Midlands or Wales, become an apprentice and plumber or electrician and you can probably buy a house at 25-30.
Do a degree and get a job in London or the Home Counties and unless the job is in corporate law or finance or you have significant parental funds for a deposit you would be doing well to get a house by 40
Sorry to labour my point, but here is another gem from the author of the paper that the previous header was based on. It is about the impact of AirBnB:
"The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation."
That paper opened my eyes. I've let out my spare bedroom on Airbnb a couple of times and I'm shocked - SHOCKED - to discover that I was taking part in a system of colonialism and racialized expropriation. I thought I was just trying to make a few spare pounds with an otherwise unused asset. I promise to spent the whole of the next year on my knees to atone for my unacceptable oppression of ethnic minorities.
And I still can't believe that the author of the paper blames all of society's ills on the far right but gives the far left a free pass.
Did this guy get paid a shedload of cash to come up with this crap ?
If it’s any consolation this kind of crap is completely doomed in our Brave New World. No one will commission it, no one will pay for it, no one will care
You will be able to generate this stuff instantly for zero pence by pushing a button, and it will be “better” - and endless
An entire edifice - academe, academic publishing, the university sector - is about to collapse. See Cardiff university right now - on the verge of bankruptcy. Many more universities will follow it into oblivion. Most of them in fact
AI isn't what is destroying Cardiff and other universities - it's lack of income relative to expenditure.
The last Government not increasing fees whilst also reducing overseas students was the final straw but universities have been a slow moving train wreck for the past 2 years. The only question was where the true scale of the problem would be reveal first.
It’s a perfect storm. New technology is just going to make the storm way more severe and destructive
The collapse of universities will be an epic spectacle
The universities have loaded themselves with debt and spent it on administration, it’s a pyramid scheme waiting to come down in an era where their actual product, of learning and research, has been massively democratised.
They’re now mostly selling scarcity of accreditation through the admissions process.
Talk on X of the entire Welsh university sector crumbling into dust
It will massively impact towns and constituencies where this happens. And it will happen
I remember when a teacher training college closed in my small home town. That was big and bad. These are UNIVERSITIES. Grim
The govt doesn’t have the £££ to bail them all out
Cardiff annual deficit is around 35 million. Pretty sure the Government could find that kind of money (even across ALL universities).
Oy it could actual raise the tuition fees in line with inflation, as it has done for NHS salaries.
As I understand it this would only kick the can down the road. We did this: 1) Slash government funding for universities 2) Replace this with tuition fees which the government then caps 3) Universities are short of cash and fill the hole with foreign students paying £lots 4) Cities like Sheffield fill up with expensive student apartment blocks occupied exclusively by Chinese students 5) People get the hump and so we reduce the number of foreign students which creates a funding crisis and imperils the entire institution
Lets assume that we jack tuition fees up to £15k a year. This isn't paid by the student, its private sector cash - tuition fees sit as an asset on the balance sheet of whichever company buys the debt. The default rate on these loans is already high (40%?) and increasing the size of the loan only increases the size of the money eventually written off. Which reduced the number of investors willing to stump up the cash which the universities need to operate.
Do I have that roughly right? If so its the British problem - we can't afford the cash to pay for it in the short term, we can't afford the damage to our economy in the medium to long term in not paying for it.
The Treasury has stopped selling off student loans.
Because nobody would buy them at those default levels?
OK, so lets assume that we raise tuition fees to £12k or £15k. That is cash which the government now needs to find up front, and will then need to write 40% off. The larger the tuition fees the larger the financial black hole.
A huge debt hypothecated to students. Creating a burden on the government to fund. With a large proportion never to be repaid. As universities are starved of cash.
I'm a big advocate of the blank sheet of paper approach. Nobody would design this structure because its absurd. Can we put something more sensible in place?
How about we sell university places to foreign students at five times the cost to a UK student? Sounds like good business.
Is it if they bring along a family of economically inactive dependents who then need to be housed and have access to services we provide ?
They pay for the accomodation already. Access to healthcare and primary and secondary education could be charged to the student,'s nation of origin.
The dependents were cut because of immigration figures which were politically unacceptable. The baby was thrown out with the bathwater.
So the govt is paying tuition fees up front in any case and then administering repayments, which have a large default level, and put off the able but financially cautious. They also have other sub-optimal results such as emigration to avoid loan repayments, avoiding career progression, high marginal deductions etc etc Why not scrap tuition fees and ration university places by ability?
That, I suspect was why the Conservatives followed the policies they did. Turn the clock back to universities being exclusively for the wealthiest 7%. We don't want any of this positive social engineering caper.
There was no shortage of clever working class teenagers going to university from the 1970s onwards.
The increase in students in recent decades has come from the thicker middle class teenagers.
I'm not sure how getting them into £50k of debt in return for three years of 'making memories' is 'positive social engineering'.
Let alone preparing them for an ever more challenging world.
You Conservatives of a certain shade (don't forget it was the enlightened John Major who amalgamated universities and polytechnics) are desperate for the majority to do modern apprenticeships and Boris Johnson to read Classics at Oxford.
Working people and businesses are set to benefit from new rules that will give more flexibility over how occupational defined benefit pension schemes are managed, as the government continues to remove blockages that are inhibiting its growth agenda that will improve lives of working people across the UK.
Hosting a meeting with leaders of Britain’s biggest businesses in the City of London today (Tuesday 28 January), the Prime Minister and the Chancellor will set out the details of changes and tell some of the country’s leading CEOs that Britain is back and open for business.
At the roundtable, the PM and Chancellor will outline how restrictions will be lifted on how well-funded, occupational defined benefit pension funds that are performing well will be able to invest their surplus funds.
The current rules heavily tilt defined benefit pensions towards investing in the safest possible financial instruments - effectively gilts or the highest quality corporate bonds.
This makes sense on at the individual fund level, but absolutely no sense whatsoever at the national level: Pension funds have the longest possible time horizons - they’re the ones who ought to be investing in national infrastructure & reaping the long term benefits.
There’s been a weird double-think in much of the UK for the last few decades, where much talk is made of “growth” but at the same time every part of the system has been constrained to allow as little economic growth as possible. For economic growth to happen somebody, somewhere has to do the actual work: houses have to be built, roads maintained, computer programs have to be written, and so on & on. Preventing pension funds from funding that work helps nobody.
(Economics types will recognise this as an example of the fallacy of composition that Keynes railed against.)
The rules were set up primarily, I think, to force pension funds into funding government borrowing. It's been an issue for decades; it's encouraging that desperation is finally forcing them to take look at them. Desperate measures do carry a degree of extra risk though.
So what happens when that risk does not pay off ?
The members of the scheme get reduced benefits presumably.
Why should private defined schemes take that risk, especially when so many are now closed to new members and their age profile is far older than DC schemes.
As I said yesterday even by Rachel from accounts standards this is an unbelievably stupid idea. Does she really think that £160bn of surplus is sitting around doing nothing? Of course not. So where is it? Well, its invested in UK companies, foreign companies and gilts. So it is already a major source of our investment.
The real problem is that since Brown changed the rules on dividends for pension funds less and less of UK funds are invested in UK quoted companies. But that is a consequence of tax policies, not a consequence of surplus funds lying around. If this "surplus" is removed by the supporting employer they might invest it or they might pay dividends with it. Who can say, but another part of the growth problem is that pension funds have driven UK companies to be cash cows rather than investing for future growth so it is a fair bet that the latter will be the most common.
The issues are: (1) that UK pension funds are reluctant to invest in FTSE companies (roughly 10% of their holdings at present). (2) That unlike in the US UK funds seem more interested in dividends and squeezing cash out of companies than capital growth. (3) That this makes it more difficult than is ideal for startups and small companies to access capital in the UK.
None of these problems are addressed by Reeves' proposals. Indeed some of them may become worse.
Can I please challenge you on this "Rachel from accounts" thing. It is open and petty misogyny - you would not have referred to "Kwazi from Accounts" or "Rishi from Accounts" or "Gordon from Accounts"
She is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and she's a woman. Feel free to consider that she is doing a poor job - that's fair. But "Rachel from accounts" is attacking her for her crime of being a woman. Please stop. You are better than than even if so many Tories and right wing commentators are not.
If she wasn't stupid people wouldn't think she was stupid and so they wouldn't call her Rachel From Accounts. In fact the name exaggerates her abilities. If she doe have any qualifications in Economics, or A Level Sums that says more about the institution that gave her that qualififcation than it does about her.
But whilst no-one doubts Starmer is the worst Prime Minister ever, Rachel has stiffer competition. There is a very amusing come snide section of Dick Crossman's diaries where he discusses the abilities of the then Chancellor Jim Callaghan. Of course the whole of those diaries are focussed on pointing out he would have been so much better a PM than Wilson. Which he probably would have been. I doubt there are many Diary writers in the present cabinet, just another minimum entry requirement for their jobs which they don't have.
PPE at the University of Oxford and a Master's degree in Economics from the London School of Economics.
Sorry to labour my point, but here is another gem from the author of the paper that the previous header was based on. It is about the impact of AirBnB:
"The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation."
That paper opened my eyes. I've let out my spare bedroom on Airbnb a couple of times and I'm shocked - SHOCKED - to discover that I was taking part in a system of colonialism and racialized expropriation. I thought I was just trying to make a few spare pounds with an otherwise unused asset. I promise to spent the whole of the next year on my knees to atone for my unacceptable oppression of ethnic minorities.
And I still can't believe that the author of the paper blames all of society's ills on the far right but gives the far left a free pass.
Did this guy get paid a shedload of cash to come up with this crap ?
If it’s any consolation this kind of crap is completely doomed in our Brave New World. No one will commission it, no one will pay for it, no one will care
You will be able to generate this stuff instantly for zero pence by pushing a button, and it will be “better” - and endless
An entire edifice - academe, academic publishing, the university sector - is about to collapse. See Cardiff university right now - on the verge of bankruptcy. Many more universities will follow it into oblivion. Most of them in fact
AI isn't what is destroying Cardiff and other universities - it's lack of income relative to expenditure.
The last Government not increasing fees whilst also reducing overseas students was the final straw but universities have been a slow moving train wreck for the past 2 years. The only question was where the true scale of the problem would be reveal first.
It’s a perfect storm. New technology is just going to make the storm way more severe and destructive
The collapse of universities will be an epic spectacle
The universities have loaded themselves with debt and spent it on administration, it’s a pyramid scheme waiting to come down in an era where their actual product, of learning and research, has been massively democratised.
They’re now mostly selling scarcity of accreditation through the admissions process.
Talk on X of the entire Welsh university sector crumbling into dust
It will massively impact towns and constituencies where this happens. And it will happen
I remember when a teacher training college closed in my small home town. That was big and bad. These are UNIVERSITIES. Grim
The govt doesn’t have the £££ to bail them all out
Cardiff annual deficit is around 35 million. Pretty sure the Government could find that kind of money (even across ALL universities).
Oy it could actual raise the tuition fees in line with inflation, as it has done for NHS salaries.
As I understand it this would only kick the can down the road. We did this: 1) Slash government funding for universities 2) Replace this with tuition fees which the government then caps 3) Universities are short of cash and fill the hole with foreign students paying £lots 4) Cities like Sheffield fill up with expensive student apartment blocks occupied exclusively by Chinese students 5) People get the hump and so we reduce the number of foreign students which creates a funding crisis and imperils the entire institution
Lets assume that we jack tuition fees up to £15k a year. This isn't paid by the student, its private sector cash - tuition fees sit as an asset on the balance sheet of whichever company buys the debt. The default rate on these loans is already high (40%?) and increasing the size of the loan only increases the size of the money eventually written off. Which reduced the number of investors willing to stump up the cash which the universities need to operate.
Do I have that roughly right? If so its the British problem - we can't afford the cash to pay for it in the short term, we can't afford the damage to our economy in the medium to long term in not paying for it.
The Treasury has stopped selling off student loans.
Because nobody would buy them at those default levels?
OK, so lets assume that we raise tuition fees to £12k or £15k. That is cash which the government now needs to find up front, and will then need to write 40% off. The larger the tuition fees the larger the financial black hole.
A huge debt hypothecated to students. Creating a burden on the government to fund. With a large proportion never to be repaid. As universities are starved of cash.
I'm a big advocate of the blank sheet of paper approach. Nobody would design this structure because its absurd. Can we put something more sensible in place?
How about we sell university places to foreign students at five times the cost to a UK student? Sounds like good business.
Is it if they bring along a family of economically inactive dependents who then need to be housed and have access to services we provide ?
They pay for the accomodation already. Access to healthcare and primary and secondary education could be charged to the student,'s nation of origin.
The dependents were cut because of immigration figures which were politically unacceptable. The baby was thrown out with the bathwater.
So the govt is paying tuition fees up front in any case and then administering repayments, which have a large default level, and put off the able but financially cautious. They also have other sub-optimal results such as emigration to avoid loan repayments, avoiding career progression, high marginal deductions etc etc Why not scrap tuition fees and ration university places by ability?
That, I suspect was why the Conservatives followed the policies they did. Turn the clock back to universities being exclusively for the wealthiest 7%. We don't want any of this positive social engineering caper.
There was no shortage of clever working class teenagers going to university from the 1970s onwards.
The increase in students in recent decades has come from the thicker middle class teenagers.
I'm not sure how getting them into £50k of debt in return for three years of 'making memories' is 'positive social engineering'.
Let alone preparing them for an ever more challenging world.
You Conservatives of a certain shade (don't forget it was the enlightened John Major who amalgamated universities and polytechnics) are desperate for the majority to do modern apprenticeships and Boris Johnson to read Classics at Oxford.
It's all very "in your place", isn't it.
Only if you're a chippy working class northerner "made good" who still flinches when told he's holding his knife the wrong way
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
Yes it can be a challenge for narcissists.
Though there is a serious point in there somewhere.
The expectation that every single second of parenthood is a triumphal, joyous, life affirming moment, complete with background music, puts enormous pressure on parents.
It’s been linked to depression and feelings of failure. Even suicides.
Note to parents - it’s all right to feel that waking up 4 times a night to change nappies is a shit job. Because it is.
For what it's worth, I've not used the 'Rachel from accounts' line but I think it's fair. Politicians get mocked all the time. Women want equality, and equality means also having the piss taken (just like the men).
It's unfortunate that she's the first female chancellor in the same way that it's bloody fortunate that Truss wasn't the first female PM.
Working people and businesses are set to benefit from new rules that will give more flexibility over how occupational defined benefit pension schemes are managed, as the government continues to remove blockages that are inhibiting its growth agenda that will improve lives of working people across the UK.
Hosting a meeting with leaders of Britain’s biggest businesses in the City of London today (Tuesday 28 January), the Prime Minister and the Chancellor will set out the details of changes and tell some of the country’s leading CEOs that Britain is back and open for business.
At the roundtable, the PM and Chancellor will outline how restrictions will be lifted on how well-funded, occupational defined benefit pension funds that are performing well will be able to invest their surplus funds.
The current rules heavily tilt defined benefit pensions towards investing in the safest possible financial instruments - effectively gilts or the highest quality corporate bonds.
This makes sense on at the individual fund level, but absolutely no sense whatsoever at the national level: Pension funds have the longest possible time horizons - they’re the ones who ought to be investing in national infrastructure & reaping the long term benefits.
There’s been a weird double-think in much of the UK for the last few decades, where much talk is made of “growth” but at the same time every part of the system has been constrained to allow as little economic growth as possible. For economic growth to happen somebody, somewhere has to do the actual work: houses have to be built, roads maintained, computer programs have to be written, and so on & on. Preventing pension funds from funding that work helps nobody.
(Economics types will recognise this as an example of the fallacy of composition that Keynes railed against.)
The rules were set up primarily, I think, to force pension funds into funding government borrowing. It's been an issue for decades; it's encouraging that desperation is finally forcing them to take look at them. Desperate measures do carry a degree of extra risk though.
So what happens when that risk does not pay off ?
The members of the scheme get reduced benefits presumably.
Why should private defined schemes take that risk, especially when so many are now closed to new members and their age profile is far older than DC schemes.
As I said yesterday even by Rachel from accounts standards this is an unbelievably stupid idea. Does she really think that £160bn of surplus is sitting around doing nothing? Of course not. So where is it? Well, its invested in UK companies, foreign companies and gilts. So it is already a major source of our investment.
The real problem is that since Brown changed the rules on dividends for pension funds less and less of UK funds are invested in UK quoted companies. But that is a consequence of tax policies, not a consequence of surplus funds lying around. If this "surplus" is removed by the supporting employer they might invest it or they might pay dividends with it. Who can say, but another part of the growth problem is that pension funds have driven UK companies to be cash cows rather than investing for future growth so it is a fair bet that the latter will be the most common.
The issues are: (1) that UK pension funds are reluctant to invest in FTSE companies (roughly 10% of their holdings at present). (2) That unlike in the US UK funds seem more interested in dividends and squeezing cash out of companies than capital growth. (3) That this makes it more difficult than is ideal for startups and small companies to access capital in the UK.
None of these problems are addressed by Reeves' proposals. Indeed some of them may become worse.
Can I please challenge you on this "Rachel from accounts" thing. It is open and petty misogyny - you would not have referred to "Kwazi from Accounts" or "Rishi from Accounts" or "Gordon from Accounts"
She is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and she's a woman. Feel free to consider that she is doing a poor job - that's fair. But "Rachel from accounts" is attacking her for her crime of being a woman. Please stop. You are better than than even if so many Tories and right wing commentators are not.
Ok. I take the point. I did not mean it in a misogynistic way, its more a reflection on her CV as she has narrated it but I accept it could be seen that way.
Nah, don't cave. It's not mysogynistic in any way, shape or form, and if people choose to see it that way, quite frankly it's a them problem.
I thought about the arguments on both sides and I do not think it is clear cut but there is enough in @RochdalePioneers point for me to retire the phrase from my perspective. But knock yourself out.
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
Yes it can be a challenge for narcissists.
Though there is a serious point in there somewhere.
The expectation that every single second of parenthood is a triumphal, joyous, life affirming moment, complete with background music, puts enormous pressure on parents.
It’s been linked to depression and feelings of failure. Even suicides.
Note to parents - it’s all right to feel that waking up 4 times a night to change nappies is a shit job. Because it is.
Yes, it's total bollocks
Having a baby is like Brexiting. It won't all be good. Some of it will be really bad, boring and painful, and it will restrict your life for many years. But on the whole most people don't regret it, and in retrospect you will remember and cherish the joys
Starmer has managed to put out the perfect post, encapsulating his government in eight words. Vacuous, lacking in any thought or policy to achieve the end. Believing that if you can talk yourself into a recession (or close to one), you can talk yourself out of one.
Moan about Starmer talking the economy down, moan about him talking it up.
Moan about too much borrowing, moan about measures to reduce it. WFA, moan. Employers NI, moan. VAT on private schools, moan. Tax non-doms, moan. Close IHT loopholes on farmland, moan.
Moan about no plans for growth, moan about every growth initiative. Loosen Regs, moan. Free up pension schemes, moan. Carbon capture, moan. Closer to the EU, moan. More trade with China, moan.
Moan moan moan moan moan. I hope you guys aren't like this irl.
Yes.
Such a contrast with PB Labour under a Conservative government.
Who can forget the “PB Labour for National Optimism” drive? Collected enough to buy several cabbages for Liz Truss, IIRC.
Sure but they were a total shower and they'd been in for ages.
On topic, I can't see the WFA cut being much of an issue at the next election for two reasons - firstly rises in pensions under the triple lock will wipe out any losses or 'hardship' incurred. This is the toughest bit for the government - when people feel they've 'lost' something they were long told they deserved, even if it had become a bit of an absurdity, without the subsequent gains they get elsewhere. Each year it becomes less of a pressing issue and slips into "Oh, I didn't like it but the sky hasn't fallen in" territory.
Secondly, are the Tories really going to go into the next election promising to restore a payment to wealthier pensioners that was a Brown accountancy trick to alleviate pensioner poverty without uprating? One that hasn't changed since 2001 - when it really was sizeable enough to make a big difference.
No, thought not.
Reform might well, but that may depend on whether they want to be seen as a credible government and have limited money for more important pet policies, or whether repeat their 2024 manifesto and its attempt to make Jeremy Corbyn look like a fiscal conservative.
It doesn't need to be a direct issue to influence the way people see Labour, though.
Working people and businesses are set to benefit from new rules that will give more flexibility over how occupational defined benefit pension schemes are managed, as the government continues to remove blockages that are inhibiting its growth agenda that will improve lives of working people across the UK.
Hosting a meeting with leaders of Britain’s biggest businesses in the City of London today (Tuesday 28 January), the Prime Minister and the Chancellor will set out the details of changes and tell some of the country’s leading CEOs that Britain is back and open for business.
At the roundtable, the PM and Chancellor will outline how restrictions will be lifted on how well-funded, occupational defined benefit pension funds that are performing well will be able to invest their surplus funds.
The current rules heavily tilt defined benefit pensions towards investing in the safest possible financial instruments - effectively gilts or the highest quality corporate bonds.
This makes sense on at the individual fund level, but absolutely no sense whatsoever at the national level: Pension funds have the longest possible time horizons - they’re the ones who ought to be investing in national infrastructure & reaping the long term benefits.
There’s been a weird double-think in much of the UK for the last few decades, where much talk is made of “growth” but at the same time every part of the system has been constrained to allow as little economic growth as possible. For economic growth to happen somebody, somewhere has to do the actual work: houses have to be built, roads maintained, computer programs have to be written, and so on & on. Preventing pension funds from funding that work helps nobody.
(Economics types will recognise this as an example of the fallacy of composition that Keynes railed against.)
The rules were set up primarily, I think, to force pension funds into funding government borrowing. It's been an issue for decades; it's encouraging that desperation is finally forcing them to take look at them. Desperate measures do carry a degree of extra risk though.
So what happens when that risk does not pay off ?
The members of the scheme get reduced benefits presumably.
Why should private defined schemes take that risk, especially when so many are now closed to new members and their age profile is far older than DC schemes.
As I said yesterday even by Rachel from accounts standards this is an unbelievably stupid idea. Does she really think that £160bn of surplus is sitting around doing nothing? Of course not. So where is it? Well, its invested in UK companies, foreign companies and gilts. So it is already a major source of our investment.
The real problem is that since Brown changed the rules on dividends for pension funds less and less of UK funds are invested in UK quoted companies. But that is a consequence of tax policies, not a consequence of surplus funds lying around. If this "surplus" is removed by the supporting employer they might invest it or they might pay dividends with it. Who can say, but another part of the growth problem is that pension funds have driven UK companies to be cash cows rather than investing for future growth so it is a fair bet that the latter will be the most common.
The issues are: (1) that UK pension funds are reluctant to invest in FTSE companies (roughly 10% of their holdings at present). (2) That unlike in the US UK funds seem more interested in dividends and squeezing cash out of companies than capital growth. (3) That this makes it more difficult than is ideal for startups and small companies to access capital in the UK.
None of these problems are addressed by Reeves' proposals. Indeed some of them may become worse.
Can I please challenge you on this "Rachel from accounts" thing. It is open and petty misogyny - you would not have referred to "Kwazi from Accounts" or "Rishi from Accounts" or "Gordon from Accounts"
She is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and she's a woman. Feel free to consider that she is doing a poor job - that's fair. But "Rachel from accounts" is attacking her for her crime of being a woman. Please stop. You are better than than even if so many Tories and right wing commentators are not.
Ok. I take the point. I did not mean it in a misogynistic way, its more a reflection on her CV as she has narrated it but I accept it could be seen that way.
Nah, don't cave. It's not mysogynistic in any way, shape or form, and if people choose to see it that way, quite frankly it's a them problem.
I thought about the arguments on both sides and I do not think it is clear cut but there is enough in @RochdalePioneers point for me to retire the phrase from my perspective. But knock yourself out.
I am now going to mention RACHEL FROM ACCOUNTS in every single comment
Starmer has managed to put out the perfect post, encapsulating his government in eight words. Vacuous, lacking in any thought or policy to achieve the end. Believing that if you can talk yourself into a recession (or close to one), you can talk yourself out of one.
Moan about Starmer talking the economy down, moan about him talking it up.
Moan about too much borrowing, moan about measures to reduce it. WFA, moan. Employers NI, moan. VAT on private schools, moan. Tax non-doms, moan. Close IHT loopholes on farmland, moan.
Moan about no plans for growth, moan about every growth initiative. Loosen Regs, moan. Free up pension schemes, moan. Carbon capture, moan. Closer to the EU, moan. More trade with China, moan.
Moan moan moan moan moan. I hope you guys aren't like this irl.
Yes.
Such a contrast with PB Labour under a Conservative government.
Who can forget the “PB Labour for National Optimism” drive? Collected enough to buy several cabbages for Liz Truss, IIRC.
Sure but they were a total shower and they'd been in for ages.
The whining started *before* Cameron & Clegg announced the coalition.
Sorry to labour my point, but here is another gem from the author of the paper that the previous header was based on. It is about the impact of AirBnB:
"The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation."
That paper opened my eyes. I've let out my spare bedroom on Airbnb a couple of times and I'm shocked - SHOCKED - to discover that I was taking part in a system of colonialism and racialized expropriation. I thought I was just trying to make a few spare pounds with an otherwise unused asset. I promise to spent the whole of the next year on my knees to atone for my unacceptable oppression of ethnic minorities.
And I still can't believe that the author of the paper blames all of society's ills on the far right but gives the far left a free pass.
Did this guy get paid a shedload of cash to come up with this crap ?
If it’s any consolation this kind of crap is completely doomed in our Brave New World. No one will commission it, no one will pay for it, no one will care
You will be able to generate this stuff instantly for zero pence by pushing a button, and it will be “better” - and endless
An entire edifice - academe, academic publishing, the university sector - is about to collapse. See Cardiff university right now - on the verge of bankruptcy. Many more universities will follow it into oblivion. Most of them in fact
AI isn't what is destroying Cardiff and other universities - it's lack of income relative to expenditure.
The last Government not increasing fees whilst also reducing overseas students was the final straw but universities have been a slow moving train wreck for the past 2 years. The only question was where the true scale of the problem would be reveal first.
It’s a perfect storm. New technology is just going to make the storm way more severe and destructive
The collapse of universities will be an epic spectacle
The universities have loaded themselves with debt and spent it on administration, it’s a pyramid scheme waiting to come down in an era where their actual product, of learning and research, has been massively democratised.
They’re now mostly selling scarcity of accreditation through the admissions process.
Talk on X of the entire Welsh university sector crumbling into dust
It will massively impact towns and constituencies where this happens. And it will happen
I remember when a teacher training college closed in my small home town. That was big and bad. These are UNIVERSITIES. Grim
The govt doesn’t have the £££ to bail them all out
Cardiff annual deficit is around 35 million. Pretty sure the Government could find that kind of money (even across ALL universities).
Oy it could actual raise the tuition fees in line with inflation, as it has done for NHS salaries.
As I understand it this would only kick the can down the road. We did this: 1) Slash government funding for universities 2) Replace this with tuition fees which the government then caps 3) Universities are short of cash and fill the hole with foreign students paying £lots 4) Cities like Sheffield fill up with expensive student apartment blocks occupied exclusively by Chinese students 5) People get the hump and so we reduce the number of foreign students which creates a funding crisis and imperils the entire institution
Lets assume that we jack tuition fees up to £15k a year. This isn't paid by the student, its private sector cash - tuition fees sit as an asset on the balance sheet of whichever company buys the debt. The default rate on these loans is already high (40%?) and increasing the size of the loan only increases the size of the money eventually written off. Which reduced the number of investors willing to stump up the cash which the universities need to operate.
Do I have that roughly right? If so its the British problem - we can't afford the cash to pay for it in the short term, we can't afford the damage to our economy in the medium to long term in not paying for it.
The Treasury has stopped selling off student loans.
Because nobody would buy them at those default levels?
OK, so lets assume that we raise tuition fees to £12k or £15k. That is cash which the government now needs to find up front, and will then need to write 40% off. The larger the tuition fees the larger the financial black hole.
A huge debt hypothecated to students. Creating a burden on the government to fund. With a large proportion never to be repaid. As universities are starved of cash.
I'm a big advocate of the blank sheet of paper approach. Nobody would design this structure because its absurd. Can we put something more sensible in place?
How about we sell university places to foreign students at five times the cost to a UK student? Sounds like good business.
Is it if they bring along a family of economically inactive dependents who then need to be housed and have access to services we provide ?
They pay for the accomodation already. Access to healthcare and primary and secondary education could be charged to the student,'s nation of origin.
The dependents were cut because of immigration figures which were politically unacceptable. The baby was thrown out with the bathwater.
So the govt is paying tuition fees up front in any case and then administering repayments, which have a large default level, and put off the able but financially cautious. They also have other sub-optimal results such as emigration to avoid loan repayments, avoiding career progression, high marginal deductions etc etc Why not scrap tuition fees and ration university places by ability?
That, I suspect was why the Conservatives followed the policies they did. Turn the clock back to universities being exclusively for the wealthiest 7%. We don't want any of this positive social engineering caper.
There was no shortage of clever working class teenagers going to university from the 1970s onwards.
The increase in students in recent decades has come from the thicker middle class teenagers.
I'm not sure how getting them into £50k of debt in return for three years of 'making memories' is 'positive social engineering'.
Let alone preparing them for an ever more challenging world.
You Conservatives of a certain shade (don't forget it was the enlightened John Major who amalgamated universities and polytechnics) are desperate for the majority to do modern apprenticeships and Boris Johnson to read Classics at Oxford.
It's all very "in your place", isn't it.
Only if you're a chippy working class northerner "made good" who still flinches when told he's holding his knife the wrong way
The opposite actually. You haven't grasped the point.
Starmer has managed to put out the perfect post, encapsulating his government in eight words. Vacuous, lacking in any thought or policy to achieve the end. Believing that if you can talk yourself into a recession (or close to one), you can talk yourself out of one.
Moan about Starmer talking the economy down, moan about him talking it up.
Moan about too much borrowing, moan about measures to reduce it. WFA, moan. Employers NI, moan. VAT on private schools, moan. Tax non-doms, moan. Close IHT loopholes on farmland, moan.
Moan about no plans for growth, moan about every growth initiative. Loosen Regs, moan. Free up pension schemes, moan. Carbon capture, moan. Closer to the EU, moan. More trade with China, moan.
Moan moan moan moan moan. I hope you guys aren't like this irl.
Now you see how you were seen for the last few years.
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
Oh God yeah, running the line is hell, I avoid it like the plague and am only picked in extremis because the coach knows I'm hopeless at it. Plenty of girls play football too these days, although luckily my daughters don't - their thing was/is drama.
Working people and businesses are set to benefit from new rules that will give more flexibility over how occupational defined benefit pension schemes are managed, as the government continues to remove blockages that are inhibiting its growth agenda that will improve lives of working people across the UK.
Hosting a meeting with leaders of Britain’s biggest businesses in the City of London today (Tuesday 28 January), the Prime Minister and the Chancellor will set out the details of changes and tell some of the country’s leading CEOs that Britain is back and open for business.
At the roundtable, the PM and Chancellor will outline how restrictions will be lifted on how well-funded, occupational defined benefit pension funds that are performing well will be able to invest their surplus funds.
The current rules heavily tilt defined benefit pensions towards investing in the safest possible financial instruments - effectively gilts or the highest quality corporate bonds.
This makes sense on at the individual fund level, but absolutely no sense whatsoever at the national level: Pension funds have the longest possible time horizons - they’re the ones who ought to be investing in national infrastructure & reaping the long term benefits.
There’s been a weird double-think in much of the UK for the last few decades, where much talk is made of “growth” but at the same time every part of the system has been constrained to allow as little economic growth as possible. For economic growth to happen somebody, somewhere has to do the actual work: houses have to be built, roads maintained, computer programs have to be written, and so on & on. Preventing pension funds from funding that work helps nobody.
(Economics types will recognise this as an example of the fallacy of composition that Keynes railed against.)
The rules were set up primarily, I think, to force pension funds into funding government borrowing. It's been an issue for decades; it's encouraging that desperation is finally forcing them to take look at them. Desperate measures do carry a degree of extra risk though.
So what happens when that risk does not pay off ?
The members of the scheme get reduced benefits presumably.
Why should private defined schemes take that risk, especially when so many are now closed to new members and their age profile is far older than DC schemes.
As I said yesterday even by Rachel from accounts standards this is an unbelievably stupid idea. Does she really think that £160bn of surplus is sitting around doing nothing? Of course not. So where is it? Well, its invested in UK companies, foreign companies and gilts. So it is already a major source of our investment.
The real problem is that since Brown changed the rules on dividends for pension funds less and less of UK funds are invested in UK quoted companies. But that is a consequence of tax policies, not a consequence of surplus funds lying around. If this "surplus" is removed by the supporting employer they might invest it or they might pay dividends with it. Who can say, but another part of the growth problem is that pension funds have driven UK companies to be cash cows rather than investing for future growth so it is a fair bet that the latter will be the most common.
The issues are: (1) that UK pension funds are reluctant to invest in FTSE companies (roughly 10% of their holdings at present). (2) That unlike in the US UK funds seem more interested in dividends and squeezing cash out of companies than capital growth. (3) That this makes it more difficult than is ideal for startups and small companies to access capital in the UK.
None of these problems are addressed by Reeves' proposals. Indeed some of them may become worse.
Can I please challenge you on this "Rachel from accounts" thing. It is open and petty misogyny - you would not have referred to "Kwazi from Accounts" or "Rishi from Accounts" or "Gordon from Accounts"
She is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and she's a woman. Feel free to consider that she is doing a poor job - that's fair. But "Rachel from accounts" is attacking her for her crime of being a woman. Please stop. You are better than than even if so many Tories and right wing commentators are not.
Ok. I take the point. I did not mean it in a misogynistic way, its more a reflection on her CV as she has narrated it but I accept it could be seen that way.
Nah, don't cave. It's not mysogynistic in any way, shape or form, and if people choose to see it that way, quite frankly it's a them problem.
I thought about the arguments on both sides and I do not think it is clear cut but there is enough in @RochdalePioneers point for me to retire the phrase from my perspective. But knock yourself out.
I don't like the use of derogatory names for any politicians. The more fun we poke at politicians, the fewer people want to become politicians and the worse our politicians get. It chips away at democracy. No wonder Trump's such a fan.
Working people and businesses are set to benefit from new rules that will give more flexibility over how occupational defined benefit pension schemes are managed, as the government continues to remove blockages that are inhibiting its growth agenda that will improve lives of working people across the UK.
Hosting a meeting with leaders of Britain’s biggest businesses in the City of London today (Tuesday 28 January), the Prime Minister and the Chancellor will set out the details of changes and tell some of the country’s leading CEOs that Britain is back and open for business.
At the roundtable, the PM and Chancellor will outline how restrictions will be lifted on how well-funded, occupational defined benefit pension funds that are performing well will be able to invest their surplus funds.
The current rules heavily tilt defined benefit pensions towards investing in the safest possible financial instruments - effectively gilts or the highest quality corporate bonds.
This makes sense on at the individual fund level, but absolutely no sense whatsoever at the national level: Pension funds have the longest possible time horizons - they’re the ones who ought to be investing in national infrastructure & reaping the long term benefits.
There’s been a weird double-think in much of the UK for the last few decades, where much talk is made of “growth” but at the same time every part of the system has been constrained to allow as little economic growth as possible. For economic growth to happen somebody, somewhere has to do the actual work: houses have to be built, roads maintained, computer programs have to be written, and so on & on. Preventing pension funds from funding that work helps nobody.
(Economics types will recognise this as an example of the fallacy of composition that Keynes railed against.)
The rules were set up primarily, I think, to force pension funds into funding government borrowing. It's been an issue for decades; it's encouraging that desperation is finally forcing them to take look at them. Desperate measures do carry a degree of extra risk though.
So what happens when that risk does not pay off ?
The members of the scheme get reduced benefits presumably.
Why should private defined schemes take that risk, especially when so many are now closed to new members and their age profile is far older than DC schemes.
As I said yesterday even by Rachel from accounts standards this is an unbelievably stupid idea. Does she really think that £160bn of surplus is sitting around doing nothing? Of course not. So where is it? Well, its invested in UK companies, foreign companies and gilts. So it is already a major source of our investment.
The real problem is that since Brown changed the rules on dividends for pension funds less and less of UK funds are invested in UK quoted companies. But that is a consequence of tax policies, not a consequence of surplus funds lying around. If this "surplus" is removed by the supporting employer they might invest it or they might pay dividends with it. Who can say, but another part of the growth problem is that pension funds have driven UK companies to be cash cows rather than investing for future growth so it is a fair bet that the latter will be the most common.
The issues are: (1) that UK pension funds are reluctant to invest in FTSE companies (roughly 10% of their holdings at present). (2) That unlike in the US UK funds seem more interested in dividends and squeezing cash out of companies than capital growth. (3) That this makes it more difficult than is ideal for startups and small companies to access capital in the UK.
None of these problems are addressed by Reeves' proposals. Indeed some of them may become worse.
Can I please challenge you on this "Rachel from accounts" thing. It is open and petty misogyny - you would not have referred to "Kwazi from Accounts" or "Rishi from Accounts" or "Gordon from Accounts"
She is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and she's a woman. Feel free to consider that she is doing a poor job - that's fair. But "Rachel from accounts" is attacking her for her crime of being a woman. Please stop. You are better than than even if so many Tories and right wing commentators are not.
If she wasn't stupid people wouldn't think she was stupid and so they wouldn't call her Rachel From Accounts. In fact the name exaggerates her abilities. If she doe have any qualifications in Economics, or A Level Sums that says more about the institution that gave her that qualififcation than it does about her.
But whilst no-one doubts Starmer is the worst Prime Minister ever, Rachel has stiffer competition. There is a very amusing come snide section of Dick Crossman's diaries where he discusses the abilities of the then Chancellor Jim Callaghan. Of course the whole of those diaries are focussed on pointing out he would have been so much better a PM than Wilson. Which he probably would have been. I doubt there are many Diary writers in the present cabinet, just another minimum entry requirement for their jobs which they don't have.
PPE at the University of Oxford and a Master's degree in Economics from the London School of Economics.
To be fair, I learnt to put my covid facemask properly on with a 1 minute youtube video, why it takes some 3 years study at Oxford heaven only knows.
Working people and businesses are set to benefit from new rules that will give more flexibility over how occupational defined benefit pension schemes are managed, as the government continues to remove blockages that are inhibiting its growth agenda that will improve lives of working people across the UK.
Hosting a meeting with leaders of Britain’s biggest businesses in the City of London today (Tuesday 28 January), the Prime Minister and the Chancellor will set out the details of changes and tell some of the country’s leading CEOs that Britain is back and open for business.
At the roundtable, the PM and Chancellor will outline how restrictions will be lifted on how well-funded, occupational defined benefit pension funds that are performing well will be able to invest their surplus funds.
The current rules heavily tilt defined benefit pensions towards investing in the safest possible financial instruments - effectively gilts or the highest quality corporate bonds.
This makes sense on at the individual fund level, but absolutely no sense whatsoever at the national level: Pension funds have the longest possible time horizons - they’re the ones who ought to be investing in national infrastructure & reaping the long term benefits.
There’s been a weird double-think in much of the UK for the last few decades, where much talk is made of “growth” but at the same time every part of the system has been constrained to allow as little economic growth as possible. For economic growth to happen somebody, somewhere has to do the actual work: houses have to be built, roads maintained, computer programs have to be written, and so on & on. Preventing pension funds from funding that work helps nobody.
(Economics types will recognise this as an example of the fallacy of composition that Keynes railed against.)
The rules were set up primarily, I think, to force pension funds into funding government borrowing. It's been an issue for decades; it's encouraging that desperation is finally forcing them to take look at them. Desperate measures do carry a degree of extra risk though.
So what happens when that risk does not pay off ?
The members of the scheme get reduced benefits presumably.
Why should private defined schemes take that risk, especially when so many are now closed to new members and their age profile is far older than DC schemes.
As I said yesterday even by Rachel from accounts standards this is an unbelievably stupid idea. Does she really think that £160bn of surplus is sitting around doing nothing? Of course not. So where is it? Well, its invested in UK companies, foreign companies and gilts. So it is already a major source of our investment.
The real problem is that since Brown changed the rules on dividends for pension funds less and less of UK funds are invested in UK quoted companies. But that is a consequence of tax policies, not a consequence of surplus funds lying around. If this "surplus" is removed by the supporting employer they might invest it or they might pay dividends with it. Who can say, but another part of the growth problem is that pension funds have driven UK companies to be cash cows rather than investing for future growth so it is a fair bet that the latter will be the most common.
The issues are: (1) that UK pension funds are reluctant to invest in FTSE companies (roughly 10% of their holdings at present). (2) That unlike in the US UK funds seem more interested in dividends and squeezing cash out of companies than capital growth. (3) That this makes it more difficult than is ideal for startups and small companies to access capital in the UK.
None of these problems are addressed by Reeves' proposals. Indeed some of them may become worse.
Can I please challenge you on this "Rachel from accounts" thing. It is open and petty misogyny - you would not have referred to "Kwazi from Accounts" or "Rishi from Accounts" or "Gordon from Accounts"
She is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and she's a woman. Feel free to consider that she is doing a poor job - that's fair. But "Rachel from accounts" is attacking her for her crime of being a woman. Please stop. You are better than than even if so many Tories and right wing commentators are not.
If she wasn't stupid people wouldn't think she was stupid and so they wouldn't call her Rachel From Accounts. In fact the name exaggerates her abilities. If she doe have any qualifications in Economics, or A Level Sums that says more about the institution that gave her that qualififcation than it does about her.
But whilst no-one doubts Starmer is the worst Prime Minister ever, Rachel has stiffer competition. There is a very amusing come snide section of Dick Crossman's diaries where he discusses the abilities of the then Chancellor Jim Callaghan. Of course the whole of those diaries are focussed on pointing out he would have been so much better a PM than Wilson. Which he probably would have been. I doubt there are many Diary writers in the present cabinet, just another minimum entry requirement for their jobs which they don't have.
PPE at the University of Oxford and a Master's degree in Economics from the London School of Economics.
You can't really ask for much more. The CofE is ultimately a political position, and that's why Osborne/Brown etc never got this kind of nonsense despite their backgrounds. If Reeves has a weakness, it's her politics not her economics.
For what it's worth, I've not used the 'Rachel from accounts' line but I think it's fair. Politicians get mocked all the time. Women want equality, and equality means also having the piss taken (just like the men).
Indeed. I haven't (AFAIR) used it either but it's absolutely within the realm of legitimate mockery, and the only sexist is the one trying to shut down criticism because she's a woman so different standards should apply.
Working people and businesses are set to benefit from new rules that will give more flexibility over how occupational defined benefit pension schemes are managed, as the government continues to remove blockages that are inhibiting its growth agenda that will improve lives of working people across the UK.
Hosting a meeting with leaders of Britain’s biggest businesses in the City of London today (Tuesday 28 January), the Prime Minister and the Chancellor will set out the details of changes and tell some of the country’s leading CEOs that Britain is back and open for business.
At the roundtable, the PM and Chancellor will outline how restrictions will be lifted on how well-funded, occupational defined benefit pension funds that are performing well will be able to invest their surplus funds.
The current rules heavily tilt defined benefit pensions towards investing in the safest possible financial instruments - effectively gilts or the highest quality corporate bonds.
This makes sense on at the individual fund level, but absolutely no sense whatsoever at the national level: Pension funds have the longest possible time horizons - they’re the ones who ought to be investing in national infrastructure & reaping the long term benefits.
There’s been a weird double-think in much of the UK for the last few decades, where much talk is made of “growth” but at the same time every part of the system has been constrained to allow as little economic growth as possible. For economic growth to happen somebody, somewhere has to do the actual work: houses have to be built, roads maintained, computer programs have to be written, and so on & on. Preventing pension funds from funding that work helps nobody.
(Economics types will recognise this as an example of the fallacy of composition that Keynes railed against.)
The rules were set up primarily, I think, to force pension funds into funding government borrowing. It's been an issue for decades; it's encouraging that desperation is finally forcing them to take look at them. Desperate measures do carry a degree of extra risk though.
So what happens when that risk does not pay off ?
The members of the scheme get reduced benefits presumably.
Why should private defined schemes take that risk, especially when so many are now closed to new members and their age profile is far older than DC schemes.
As I said yesterday even by Rachel from accounts standards this is an unbelievably stupid idea. Does she really think that £160bn of surplus is sitting around doing nothing? Of course not. So where is it? Well, its invested in UK companies, foreign companies and gilts. So it is already a major source of our investment.
The real problem is that since Brown changed the rules on dividends for pension funds less and less of UK funds are invested in UK quoted companies. But that is a consequence of tax policies, not a consequence of surplus funds lying around. If this "surplus" is removed by the supporting employer they might invest it or they might pay dividends with it. Who can say, but another part of the growth problem is that pension funds have driven UK companies to be cash cows rather than investing for future growth so it is a fair bet that the latter will be the most common.
The issues are: (1) that UK pension funds are reluctant to invest in FTSE companies (roughly 10% of their holdings at present). (2) That unlike in the US UK funds seem more interested in dividends and squeezing cash out of companies than capital growth. (3) That this makes it more difficult than is ideal for startups and small companies to access capital in the UK.
None of these problems are addressed by Reeves' proposals. Indeed some of them may become worse.
Can I please challenge you on this "Rachel from accounts" thing. It is open and petty misogyny - you would not have referred to "Kwazi from Accounts" or "Rishi from Accounts" or "Gordon from Accounts"
She is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and she's a woman. Feel free to consider that she is doing a poor job - that's fair. But "Rachel from accounts" is attacking her for her crime of being a woman. Please stop. You are better than than even if so many Tories and right wing commentators are not.
Ok. I take the point. I did not mean it in a misogynistic way, its more a reflection on her CV as she has narrated it but I accept it could be seen that way.
Nah, don't cave. It's not mysogynistic in any way, shape or form, and if people choose to see it that way, quite frankly it's a them problem.
Sorry to labour my point, but here is another gem from the author of the paper that the previous header was based on. It is about the impact of AirBnB:
"The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation."
That paper opened my eyes. I've let out my spare bedroom on Airbnb a couple of times and I'm shocked - SHOCKED - to discover that I was taking part in a system of colonialism and racialized expropriation. I thought I was just trying to make a few spare pounds with an otherwise unused asset. I promise to spent the whole of the next year on my knees to atone for my unacceptable oppression of ethnic minorities.
And I still can't believe that the author of the paper blames all of society's ills on the far right but gives the far left a free pass.
Did this guy get paid a shedload of cash to come up with this crap ?
If it’s any consolation this kind of crap is completely doomed in our Brave New World. No one will commission it, no one will pay for it, no one will care
You will be able to generate this stuff instantly for zero pence by pushing a button, and it will be “better” - and endless
An entire edifice - academe, academic publishing, the university sector - is about to collapse. See Cardiff university right now - on the verge of bankruptcy. Many more universities will follow it into oblivion. Most of them in fact
AI isn't what is destroying Cardiff and other universities - it's lack of income relative to expenditure.
The last Government not increasing fees whilst also reducing overseas students was the final straw but universities have been a slow moving train wreck for the past 2 years. The only question was where the true scale of the problem would be reveal first.
It’s a perfect storm. New technology is just going to make the storm way more severe and destructive
The collapse of universities will be an epic spectacle
The universities have loaded themselves with debt and spent it on administration, it’s a pyramid scheme waiting to come down in an era where their actual product, of learning and research, has been massively democratised.
They’re now mostly selling scarcity of accreditation through the admissions process.
Talk on X of the entire Welsh university sector crumbling into dust
It will massively impact towns and constituencies where this happens. And it will happen
I remember when a teacher training college closed in my small home town. That was big and bad. These are UNIVERSITIES. Grim
The govt doesn’t have the £££ to bail them all out
Cardiff annual deficit is around 35 million. Pretty sure the Government could find that kind of money (even across ALL universities).
Oy it could actual raise the tuition fees in line with inflation, as it has done for NHS salaries.
As I understand it this would only kick the can down the road. We did this: 1) Slash government funding for universities 2) Replace this with tuition fees which the government then caps 3) Universities are short of cash and fill the hole with foreign students paying £lots 4) Cities like Sheffield fill up with expensive student apartment blocks occupied exclusively by Chinese students 5) People get the hump and so we reduce the number of foreign students which creates a funding crisis and imperils the entire institution
Lets assume that we jack tuition fees up to £15k a year. This isn't paid by the student, its private sector cash - tuition fees sit as an asset on the balance sheet of whichever company buys the debt. The default rate on these loans is already high (40%?) and increasing the size of the loan only increases the size of the money eventually written off. Which reduced the number of investors willing to stump up the cash which the universities need to operate.
Do I have that roughly right? If so its the British problem - we can't afford the cash to pay for it in the short term, we can't afford the damage to our economy in the medium to long term in not paying for it.
The Treasury has stopped selling off student loans.
Because nobody would buy them at those default levels?
OK, so lets assume that we raise tuition fees to £12k or £15k. That is cash which the government now needs to find up front, and will then need to write 40% off. The larger the tuition fees the larger the financial black hole.
A huge debt hypothecated to students. Creating a burden on the government to fund. With a large proportion never to be repaid. As universities are starved of cash.
I'm a big advocate of the blank sheet of paper approach. Nobody would design this structure because its absurd. Can we put something more sensible in place?
How about we sell university places to foreign students at five times the cost to a UK student? Sounds like good business.
Is it if they bring along a family of economically inactive dependents who then need to be housed and have access to services we provide ?
They pay for the accomodation already. Access to healthcare and primary and secondary education could be charged to the student,'s nation of origin.
The dependents were cut because of immigration figures which were politically unacceptable. The baby was thrown out with the bathwater.
So the govt is paying tuition fees up front in any case and then administering repayments, which have a large default level, and put off the able but financially cautious. They also have other sub-optimal results such as emigration to avoid loan repayments, avoiding career progression, high marginal deductions etc etc Why not scrap tuition fees and ration university places by ability?
That, I suspect was why the Conservatives followed the policies they did. Turn the clock back to universities being exclusively for the wealthiest 7%. We don't want any of this positive social engineering caper.
There was no shortage of clever working class teenagers going to university from the 1970s onwards.
The increase in students in recent decades has come from the thicker middle class teenagers.
I'm not sure how getting them into £50k of debt in return for three years of 'making memories' is 'positive social engineering'.
Let alone preparing them for an ever more challenging world.
You Conservatives of a certain shade (don't forget it was the enlightened John Major who amalgamated universities and polytechnics) are desperate for the majority to do modern apprenticeships and Boris Johnson to read Classics at Oxford.
It's all very "in your place", isn't it.
Only if you're a chippy working class northerner "made good" who still flinches when told he's holding his knife the wrong way
The opposite actually. You haven't grasped the point.
You have deep status anxiety. To be fair you generally hide it well. But it occasionally observable
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
Yes it can be a challenge for narcissists.
Though there is a serious point in there somewhere.
The expectation that every single second of parenthood is a triumphal, joyous, life affirming moment, complete with background music, puts enormous pressure on parents.
It’s been linked to depression and feelings of failure. Even suicides.
Note to parents - it’s all right to feel that waking up 4 times a night to change nappies is a shit job. Because it is.
Yes, I was making an uncalled-for joke. Anyone not having a great time as a parent of young child(ren), or even older children, should at least know that it's pretty common to feel that way a lot of the time. Personally, I did love it a lot of the time (but I did have the luxury of not having to work for a while)- I'm finding the thought of my son becoming an adolescent soon more challenging.
Sorry to labour my point, but here is another gem from the author of the paper that the previous header was based on. It is about the impact of AirBnB:
"The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation."
That paper opened my eyes. I've let out my spare bedroom on Airbnb a couple of times and I'm shocked - SHOCKED - to discover that I was taking part in a system of colonialism and racialized expropriation. I thought I was just trying to make a few spare pounds with an otherwise unused asset. I promise to spent the whole of the next year on my knees to atone for my unacceptable oppression of ethnic minorities.
And I still can't believe that the author of the paper blames all of society's ills on the far right but gives the far left a free pass.
Did this guy get paid a shedload of cash to come up with this crap ?
If it’s any consolation this kind of crap is completely doomed in our Brave New World. No one will commission it, no one will pay for it, no one will care
You will be able to generate this stuff instantly for zero pence by pushing a button, and it will be “better” - and endless
An entire edifice - academe, academic publishing, the university sector - is about to collapse. See Cardiff university right now - on the verge of bankruptcy. Many more universities will follow it into oblivion. Most of them in fact
AI isn't what is destroying Cardiff and other universities - it's lack of income relative to expenditure.
The last Government not increasing fees whilst also reducing overseas students was the final straw but universities have been a slow moving train wreck for the past 2 years. The only question was where the true scale of the problem would be reveal first.
It’s a perfect storm. New technology is just going to make the storm way more severe and destructive
The collapse of universities will be an epic spectacle
Sigh, here we go again.
This is just the beginning
“Staff at Cardiff University fear huge job cuts are about to be announced by a senior management team that has already spoken of an ‘immediate existential crisis’ ✍️@Ship”
You may not care, entire towns and cities are gonna be gutted by this
I think there's a tendency for people to believe that Radical Tech will destroy the things they dislike. In this case, for you, Universities which you don't like because they are incubators of progressive values. I'm trying to be more objective. Apply logic rather wishful thinking. Ask not what I want to happen but what is likely to happen.
So in this vein, the main thing I foresee is the total collapse of the far right. Why? Because it won't be too long before the combination of AI and VR means you'll be able to wear e-contacts allowing you to transform your immediate environment. In particular a "no foreign" or "get your country back" setting which will make everything look nice and normal, turn mosques into churches, burkas into dresses, hijabs into baseball caps, etc.
Imagine the political impact of that. Why would anybody feel the need to vote for far right parties when they can simply pop that tech on every time they leave the house and the problem is sorted? The answer is they won't. It's game over for the far right populists. If I were them I'd be thinking urgently about retraining and a change of career.
I think the opposite will happen in the sense that people are going to finally get fed up with using technology all the time, staring at a screen for a large part of the day.
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
I loved it although there were some serious bumps along the road. I find young children in particular delightful and hilarious. I am so looking forward to my first grandchild being born next month so I get to do some of that again.
This standing on cold wet football pitches as a parent - is this a modern thing?
I played cub and scout football at the local pitch most Saturdays through many winters in 1970s and there wasn't a single parent there in support.
Yes. A massive culture change; a mixture of helicoptering, safeguarding, anxiously wanting to be part of your child's life, etc. As a child of the 1950s/60s, it would never have crossed my father's mind to have the smallest interest in whether, where and with whom I was doing any sport of any sort. That would seen really odd now, but it was fine and I still thinks it was fine.
It's fine to not go and watch, plenty of parents don't. I try to go every week. My son is 15 and is generally a good kid who works hard and does well at school, but occasionally he does something stupid and is at an impressionable age so I think it's good for him to know his dad has a close interest in his life and values something he is doing enough to give up 3 hours every Sunday and drive him to wet fields in SE London and watch him doing something he loves. Also, I sometimes feel a bit less connected to him than to his sisters, I'm not totally sure why, and I think watching him play football - something he is passionate about - helps to bring us closer. My kids are the most important thing in my life and my greatest rresponsibility, end of story.
Coming back to the issue of babies and why the domestic population trying to have them in the UK is difficult, look at Household wealth statistics
Median wealth (2022) was about £300K made up of property (40%), Private Pensions (35%), Net Wealth (14%) and Physical Wealth (10%). So if you want to save for a home, or a pension and you have some student debt, the chances of you being able to afford children means hard choices.
Alternatively if you are a single mum on benefits, you are limited to 2 children (and a financial cap) if you go beyond that.
So if you don't like migration you have to have some serious discussions about the child bearing barriers in the UK.
...which ties in with my rant that "GDP growth" is not a good metric to judge progress, it's "net household income". If the country grows but the individual cannot pay the bills that's bad, and if the individual cannot have children that's lethal.
Starmer has managed to put out the perfect post, encapsulating his government in eight words. Vacuous, lacking in any thought or policy to achieve the end. Believing that if you can talk yourself into a recession (or close to one), you can talk yourself out of one.
Moan about Starmer talking the economy down, moan about him talking it up.
Moan about too much borrowing, moan about measures to reduce it. WFA, moan. Employers NI, moan. VAT on private schools, moan. Tax non-doms, moan. Close IHT loopholes on farmland, moan.
Moan about no plans for growth, moan about every growth initiative. Loosen Regs, moan. Free up pension schemes, moan. Carbon capture, moan. Closer to the EU, moan. More trade with China, moan.
Moan moan moan moan moan. I hope you guys aren't like this irl.
1. I don't recall you doing a lot of jubilant whooping during the long 14 years of Tory rule? In fact I recall you doing quite a lot of moaning
2. This government really is inexpressibly shite. But we do our best to express it
I'm calm and fair. Eg I gave Cameron a chance, and May, and Sunak. Johnson and Truss, less so for obvious reasons. One was a charlatan, the other a nutcase.
The abuse from Tories heaped on this Labour government is irrational and wildly OTT. It's because there hasn't been one for so long. It's seen as an affront.
You especially ought to put a sock in it. You voted for this. So, ok, now you're getting it.
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
I loved it although there were some serious bumps along the road. I find young children in particular delightful and hilarious. I am so looking forward to my first grandchild being born next month so I get to do some of that again.
This standing on cold wet football pitches as a parent - is this a modern thing?
I played cub and scout football at the local pitch most Saturdays through many winters in 1970s and there wasn't a single parent there in support.
Yes. A massive culture change; a mixture of helicoptering, safeguarding, anxiously wanting to be part of your child's life, etc. As a child of the 1950s/60s, it would never have crossed my father's mind to have the smallest interest in whether, where and with whom I was doing any sport of any sort. That would seen really odd now, but it was fine and I still thinks it was fine.
A lot of fathers would be working on a Saturday morning back in 50/60/70s I guess.
There was no way my mother would have had time. There was a ton of housework and she worked during the week.
As you say, a different world.
Modern parents overdo it all imho and then say they are permanently exhausted.
I remember once I was about 16 and I got talking about rugby with my Dad. We were both fans
I mentioned that I enjoyed playing it at school level, but was unsure if I would continue into 6th Form (I didn't)
He looked at me quite confused. He was unaware that I was in the school rugby team and had been so for the last four years, playing every Saturday throughout my school days (home and away, etc)
I can relate to that. Not the rugby, which I've never played in my life. But my Dad's apparent lack of awareness of or interest in anything I was doing. As a father myself now, I find it even harder to understand.
Working people and businesses are set to benefit from new rules that will give more flexibility over how occupational defined benefit pension schemes are managed, as the government continues to remove blockages that are inhibiting its growth agenda that will improve lives of working people across the UK.
Hosting a meeting with leaders of Britain’s biggest businesses in the City of London today (Tuesday 28 January), the Prime Minister and the Chancellor will set out the details of changes and tell some of the country’s leading CEOs that Britain is back and open for business.
At the roundtable, the PM and Chancellor will outline how restrictions will be lifted on how well-funded, occupational defined benefit pension funds that are performing well will be able to invest their surplus funds.
The current rules heavily tilt defined benefit pensions towards investing in the safest possible financial instruments - effectively gilts or the highest quality corporate bonds.
This makes sense on at the individual fund level, but absolutely no sense whatsoever at the national level: Pension funds have the longest possible time horizons - they’re the ones who ought to be investing in national infrastructure & reaping the long term benefits.
There’s been a weird double-think in much of the UK for the last few decades, where much talk is made of “growth” but at the same time every part of the system has been constrained to allow as little economic growth as possible. For economic growth to happen somebody, somewhere has to do the actual work: houses have to be built, roads maintained, computer programs have to be written, and so on & on. Preventing pension funds from funding that work helps nobody.
(Economics types will recognise this as an example of the fallacy of composition that Keynes railed against.)
The rules were set up primarily, I think, to force pension funds into funding government borrowing. It's been an issue for decades; it's encouraging that desperation is finally forcing them to take look at them. Desperate measures do carry a degree of extra risk though.
So what happens when that risk does not pay off ?
The members of the scheme get reduced benefits presumably.
Why should private defined schemes take that risk, especially when so many are now closed to new members and their age profile is far older than DC schemes.
As I said yesterday even by Rachel from accounts standards this is an unbelievably stupid idea. Does she really think that £160bn of surplus is sitting around doing nothing? Of course not. So where is it? Well, its invested in UK companies, foreign companies and gilts. So it is already a major source of our investment.
The real problem is that since Brown changed the rules on dividends for pension funds less and less of UK funds are invested in UK quoted companies. But that is a consequence of tax policies, not a consequence of surplus funds lying around. If this "surplus" is removed by the supporting employer they might invest it or they might pay dividends with it. Who can say, but another part of the growth problem is that pension funds have driven UK companies to be cash cows rather than investing for future growth so it is a fair bet that the latter will be the most common.
The issues are: (1) that UK pension funds are reluctant to invest in FTSE companies (roughly 10% of their holdings at present). (2) That unlike in the US UK funds seem more interested in dividends and squeezing cash out of companies than capital growth. (3) That this makes it more difficult than is ideal for startups and small companies to access capital in the UK.
None of these problems are addressed by Reeves' proposals. Indeed some of them may become worse.
Can I please challenge you on this "Rachel from accounts" thing. It is open and petty misogyny - you would not have referred to "Kwazi from Accounts" or "Rishi from Accounts" or "Gordon from Accounts"
She is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and she's a woman. Feel free to consider that she is doing a poor job - that's fair. But "Rachel from accounts" is attacking her for her crime of being a woman. Please stop. You are better than than even if so many Tories and right wing commentators are not.
If she wasn't stupid people wouldn't think she was stupid and so they wouldn't call her Rachel From Accounts. In fact the name exaggerates her abilities. If she doe have any qualifications in Economics, or A Level Sums that says more about the institution that gave her that qualififcation than it does about her.
But whilst no-one doubts Starmer is the worst Prime Minister ever, Rachel has stiffer competition. There is a very amusing come snide section of Dick Crossman's diaries where he discusses the abilities of the then Chancellor Jim Callaghan. Of course the whole of those diaries are focussed on pointing out he would have been so much better a PM than Wilson. Which he probably would have been. I doubt there are many Diary writers in the present cabinet, just another minimum entry requirement for their jobs which they don't have.
PPE at the University of Oxford and a Master's degree in Economics from the London School of Economics.
You can't really ask for much more. The CofE is ultimately a political position, and that's why Osborne/Brown etc never got this kind of nonsense despite their backgrounds. If Reeves has a weakness, it's her politics not her economics.
It does have a whiff of sexism about it.
Her weakness is her lack of political skill not her political views
I'm glad this is being reinvestigated. It seemed strange to me at the time that the police had apparently simply accepted her story that she'd had an epileptic fit (the first in her life) and couldn't remember anything. Odds that she was on her phone?
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
Yes it can be a challenge for narcissists.
Though there is a serious point in there somewhere.
The expectation that every single second of parenthood is a triumphal, joyous, life affirming moment, complete with background music, puts enormous pressure on parents.
It’s been linked to depression and feelings of failure. Even suicides.
Note to parents - it’s all right to feel that waking up 4 times a night to change nappies is a shit job. Because it is.
Yes, it's total bollocks
Having a baby is like Brexiting. It won't all be good. Some of it will be really bad, boring and painful, and it will restrict your life for many years. But on the whole most people don't regret it, and in retrospect you will remember and cherish the joys
You are the only person I've heard of who looks back and 'cherishes the joys' of Brexit!
Sorry to labour my point, but here is another gem from the author of the paper that the previous header was based on. It is about the impact of AirBnB:
"The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation."
That paper opened my eyes. I've let out my spare bedroom on Airbnb a couple of times and I'm shocked - SHOCKED - to discover that I was taking part in a system of colonialism and racialized expropriation. I thought I was just trying to make a few spare pounds with an otherwise unused asset. I promise to spent the whole of the next year on my knees to atone for my unacceptable oppression of ethnic minorities.
And I still can't believe that the author of the paper blames all of society's ills on the far right but gives the far left a free pass.
Did this guy get paid a shedload of cash to come up with this crap ?
If it’s any consolation this kind of crap is completely doomed in our Brave New World. No one will commission it, no one will pay for it, no one will care
You will be able to generate this stuff instantly for zero pence by pushing a button, and it will be “better” - and endless
An entire edifice - academe, academic publishing, the university sector - is about to collapse. See Cardiff university right now - on the verge of bankruptcy. Many more universities will follow it into oblivion. Most of them in fact
AI isn't what is destroying Cardiff and other universities - it's lack of income relative to expenditure.
The last Government not increasing fees whilst also reducing overseas students was the final straw but universities have been a slow moving train wreck for the past 2 years. The only question was where the true scale of the problem would be reveal first.
It’s a perfect storm. New technology is just going to make the storm way more severe and destructive
The collapse of universities will be an epic spectacle
Sigh, here we go again.
This is just the beginning
“Staff at Cardiff University fear huge job cuts are about to be announced by a senior management team that has already spoken of an ‘immediate existential crisis’ ✍️@Ship”
You may not care, entire towns and cities are gonna be gutted by this
I think there's a tendency for people to believe that Radical Tech will destroy the things they dislike. In this case, for you, Universities which you don't like because they are incubators of progressive values. I'm trying to be more objective. Apply logic rather wishful thinking. Ask not what I want to happen but what is likely to happen.
So in this vein, the main thing I foresee is the total collapse of the far right. Why? Because it won't be too long before the combination of AI and VR means you'll be able to wear e-contacts allowing you to transform your immediate environment. In particular a "no foreign" or "get your country back" setting which will make everything look nice and normal, turn mosques into churches, burkas into dresses, hijabs into baseball caps, etc.
Imagine the political impact of that. Why would anybody feel the need to vote for far right parties when they can simply pop that tech on every time they leave the house and the problem is sorted? The answer is they won't. It's game over for the far right populists. If I were them I'd be thinking urgently about retraining and a change of career.
I think the opposite will happen in the sense that people are going to finally get fed up with using technology all the time, staring at a screen for a large part of the day.
Yes, maybe so. A computer screen is so tiny compared to everything else around you. It's odd to focus such a large chunk of your attention on it.
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
Yes it can be a challenge for narcissists.
Though there is a serious point in there somewhere.
The expectation that every single second of parenthood is a triumphal, joyous, life affirming moment, complete with background music, puts enormous pressure on parents.
It’s been linked to depression and feelings of failure. Even suicides.
Note to parents - it’s all right to feel that waking up 4 times a night to change nappies is a shit job. Because it is.
Yes, it's total bollocks
Having a baby is like Brexiting. It won't all be good. Some of it will be really bad, boring and painful, and it will restrict your life for many years. But on the whole most people don't regret it, and in retrospect you will remember and cherish the joys
You are the only person I've heard of who looks back and 'cherishes the joys' of Brexit!
Early days yet for all that. Brexit is like having a baby. The first 30 years are the worst. After that it's not too bad.
Starmer has managed to put out the perfect post, encapsulating his government in eight words. Vacuous, lacking in any thought or policy to achieve the end. Believing that if you can talk yourself into a recession (or close to one), you can talk yourself out of one.
Moan about Starmer talking the economy down, moan about him talking it up.
Moan about too much borrowing, moan about measures to reduce it. WFA, moan. Employers NI, moan. VAT on private schools, moan. Tax non-doms, moan. Close IHT loopholes on farmland, moan.
Moan about no plans for growth, moan about every growth initiative. Loosen Regs, moan. Free up pension schemes, moan. Carbon capture, moan. Closer to the EU, moan. More trade with China, moan.
Moan moan moan moan moan. I hope you guys aren't like this irl.
Now you see how you were seen for the last few years.
Secondary effects of social media include people trying to set fire to immigrants and then being puzzled as to why people think they are a bit Racialist.
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
Yes it can be a challenge for narcissists.
Though there is a serious point in there somewhere.
The expectation that every single second of parenthood is a triumphal, joyous, life affirming moment, complete with background music, puts enormous pressure on parents.
It’s been linked to depression and feelings of failure. Even suicides.
Note to parents - it’s all right to feel that waking up 4 times a night to change nappies is a shit job. Because it is.
Yes, it's total bollocks
Having a baby is like Brexiting. It won't all be good. Some of it will be really bad, boring and painful, and it will restrict your life for many years. But on the whole most people don't regret it, and in retrospect you will remember and cherish the joys
You are the only person I've heard of who looks back and 'cherishes the joys' of Brexit!
Early days yet for all that. Brexit is like having a baby. The first 30 years are the worst. After that it's not too bad.
Good point. Plus when I think about it, the summer of 2016, those wonderful days when the worst thing to worry about was bloody brexit, before bloody Trump became president for the first time, before bloody Covid, before bloody Putin invaded the rest of Ukraine.
In the words of the poet: Oh what fun we had But at the time it seemed so bad
Sorry to labour my point, but here is another gem from the author of the paper that the previous header was based on. It is about the impact of AirBnB:
"The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation."
That paper opened my eyes. I've let out my spare bedroom on Airbnb a couple of times and I'm shocked - SHOCKED - to discover that I was taking part in a system of colonialism and racialized expropriation. I thought I was just trying to make a few spare pounds with an otherwise unused asset. I promise to spent the whole of the next year on my knees to atone for my unacceptable oppression of ethnic minorities.
And I still can't believe that the author of the paper blames all of society's ills on the far right but gives the far left a free pass.
Did this guy get paid a shedload of cash to come up with this crap ?
If it’s any consolation this kind of crap is completely doomed in our Brave New World. No one will commission it, no one will pay for it, no one will care
You will be able to generate this stuff instantly for zero pence by pushing a button, and it will be “better” - and endless
An entire edifice - academe, academic publishing, the university sector - is about to collapse. See Cardiff university right now - on the verge of bankruptcy. Many more universities will follow it into oblivion. Most of them in fact
AI isn't what is destroying Cardiff and other universities - it's lack of income relative to expenditure.
The last Government not increasing fees whilst also reducing overseas students was the final straw but universities have been a slow moving train wreck for the past 2 years. The only question was where the true scale of the problem would be reveal first.
It’s a perfect storm. New technology is just going to make the storm way more severe and destructive
The collapse of universities will be an epic spectacle
The universities have loaded themselves with debt and spent it on administration, it’s a pyramid scheme waiting to come down in an era where their actual product, of learning and research, has been massively democratised.
They’re now mostly selling scarcity of accreditation through the admissions process.
Talk on X of the entire Welsh university sector crumbling into dust
It will massively impact towns and constituencies where this happens. And it will happen
I remember when a teacher training college closed in my small home town. That was big and bad. These are UNIVERSITIES. Grim
The govt doesn’t have the £££ to bail them all out
Cardiff annual deficit is around 35 million. Pretty sure the Government could find that kind of money (even across ALL universities).
Oy it could actual raise the tuition fees in line with inflation, as it has done for NHS salaries.
As I understand it this would only kick the can down the road. We did this: 1) Slash government funding for universities 2) Replace this with tuition fees which the government then caps 3) Universities are short of cash and fill the hole with foreign students paying £lots 4) Cities like Sheffield fill up with expensive student apartment blocks occupied exclusively by Chinese students 5) People get the hump and so we reduce the number of foreign students which creates a funding crisis and imperils the entire institution
Lets assume that we jack tuition fees up to £15k a year. This isn't paid by the student, its private sector cash - tuition fees sit as an asset on the balance sheet of whichever company buys the debt. The default rate on these loans is already high (40%?) and increasing the size of the loan only increases the size of the money eventually written off. Which reduced the number of investors willing to stump up the cash which the universities need to operate.
Do I have that roughly right? If so its the British problem - we can't afford the cash to pay for it in the short term, we can't afford the damage to our economy in the medium to long term in not paying for it.
The Treasury has stopped selling off student loans.
Because nobody would buy them at those default levels?
OK, so lets assume that we raise tuition fees to £12k or £15k. That is cash which the government now needs to find up front, and will then need to write 40% off. The larger the tuition fees the larger the financial black hole.
A huge debt hypothecated to students. Creating a burden on the government to fund. With a large proportion never to be repaid. As universities are starved of cash.
I'm a big advocate of the blank sheet of paper approach. Nobody would design this structure because its absurd. Can we put something more sensible in place?
How about we sell university places to foreign students at five times the cost to a UK student? Sounds like good business.
Is it if they bring along a family of economically inactive dependents who then need to be housed and have access to services we provide ?
They pay for the accomodation already. Access to healthcare and primary and secondary education could be charged to the student,'s nation of origin.
The dependents were cut because of immigration figures which were politically unacceptable. The baby was thrown out with the bathwater.
So the govt is paying tuition fees up front in any case and then administering repayments, which have a large default level, and put off the able but financially cautious. They also have other sub-optimal results such as emigration to avoid loan repayments, avoiding career progression, high marginal deductions etc etc Why not scrap tuition fees and ration university places by ability?
That, I suspect was why the Conservatives followed the policies they did. Turn the clock back to universities being exclusively for the wealthiest 7%. We don't want any of this positive social engineering caper.
There was no shortage of clever working class teenagers going to university from the 1970s onwards.
The increase in students in recent decades has come from the thicker middle class teenagers.
I'm not sure how getting them into £50k of debt in return for three years of 'making memories' is 'positive social engineering'.
Let alone preparing them for an ever more challenging world.
You Conservatives of a certain shade (don't forget it was the enlightened John Major who amalgamated universities and polytechnics) are desperate for the majority to do modern apprenticeships and Boris Johnson to read Classics at Oxford.
It's all very "in your place", isn't it.
Only if you're a chippy working class northerner "made good" who still flinches when told he's holding his knife the wrong way
The opposite actually. You haven't grasped the point.
You have deep status anxiety. To be fair you generally hide it well. But it occasionally observable
It’s also perfectly understandable
Hmm, no that is genuinely off the mark. I do have deep anxieties but they are not around that.
Course I'm not keen on over-confident, self-regarding poshos, but who on earth is.
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
I loved it although there were some serious bumps along the road. I find young children in particular delightful and hilarious. I am so looking forward to my first grandchild being born next month so I get to do some of that again.
This standing on cold wet football pitches as a parent - is this a modern thing?
I played cub and scout football at the local pitch most Saturdays through many winters in 1970s and there wasn't a single parent there in support.
Yes. A massive culture change; a mixture of helicoptering, safeguarding, anxiously wanting to be part of your child's life, etc. As a child of the 1950s/60s, it would never have crossed my father's mind to have the smallest interest in whether, where and with whom I was doing any sport of any sort. That would seen really odd now, but it was fine and I still thinks it was fine.
A lot of fathers would be working on a Saturday morning back in 50/60/70s I guess.
There was no way my mother would have had time. There was a ton of housework and she worked during the week.
As you say, a different world.
Modern parents overdo it all imho and then say they are permanently exhausted.
I remember once I was about 16 and I got talking about rugby with my Dad. We were both fans
I mentioned that I enjoyed playing it at school level, but was unsure if I would continue into 6th Form (I didn't)
He looked at me quite confused. He was unaware that I was in the school rugby team and had been so for the last four years, playing every Saturday throughout my school days (home and away, etc)
Starmer has managed to put out the perfect post, encapsulating his government in eight words. Vacuous, lacking in any thought or policy to achieve the end. Believing that if you can talk yourself into a recession (or close to one), you can talk yourself out of one.
Moan about Starmer talking the economy down, moan about him talking it up.
Moan about too much borrowing, moan about measures to reduce it. WFA, moan. Employers NI, moan. VAT on private schools, moan. Tax non-doms, moan. Close IHT loopholes on farmland, moan.
Moan about no plans for growth, moan about every growth initiative. Loosen Regs, moan. Free up pension schemes, moan. Carbon capture, moan. Closer to the EU, moan. More trade with China, moan.
Moan moan moan moan moan. I hope you guys aren't like this irl.
Might go and watch "Threads" later this evening. Cheer myself up.
It's an analogy, not an identity. The point was that cigarette addiction is indicated by constant use and difficulty in coping without. Andy was saying that constant phone use and difficulty in coping without phones similarly indicated addiction.
Whether a thing is medicalised as 'addiction' or indeed anyone else is not a neutral process. Any strict criteria as between 'normal' 'medical' 'criminal' 'a matter of willpower' 'inappropriate' and so on are going to be artificial and also inconsistently applied.
Weight is a recent and developing example where it is tending to move from the 'willpower' category to the 'medical' one.
The Southport case comes to mind. To most modern fairly secular non professionals the defendant has to be 'mad' 'insane' or whatever because it is not imaginable to us (me) that a sane person cab do it. It just isn't close to what 'sane' can look like.
But to the medical and criminal system he is fine. Nothing wrong with him. I am not convinced.
Working people and businesses are set to benefit from new rules that will give more flexibility over how occupational defined benefit pension schemes are managed, as the government continues to remove blockages that are inhibiting its growth agenda that will improve lives of working people across the UK.
Hosting a meeting with leaders of Britain’s biggest businesses in the City of London today (Tuesday 28 January), the Prime Minister and the Chancellor will set out the details of changes and tell some of the country’s leading CEOs that Britain is back and open for business.
At the roundtable, the PM and Chancellor will outline how restrictions will be lifted on how well-funded, occupational defined benefit pension funds that are performing well will be able to invest their surplus funds.
The current rules heavily tilt defined benefit pensions towards investing in the safest possible financial instruments - effectively gilts or the highest quality corporate bonds.
This makes sense on at the individual fund level, but absolutely no sense whatsoever at the national level: Pension funds have the longest possible time horizons - they’re the ones who ought to be investing in national infrastructure & reaping the long term benefits.
There’s been a weird double-think in much of the UK for the last few decades, where much talk is made of “growth” but at the same time every part of the system has been constrained to allow as little economic growth as possible. For economic growth to happen somebody, somewhere has to do the actual work: houses have to be built, roads maintained, computer programs have to be written, and so on & on. Preventing pension funds from funding that work helps nobody.
(Economics types will recognise this as an example of the fallacy of composition that Keynes railed against.)
The rules were set up primarily, I think, to force pension funds into funding government borrowing. It's been an issue for decades; it's encouraging that desperation is finally forcing them to take look at them. Desperate measures do carry a degree of extra risk though.
So what happens when that risk does not pay off ?
The members of the scheme get reduced benefits presumably.
Why should private defined schemes take that risk, especially when so many are now closed to new members and their age profile is far older than DC schemes.
As I said yesterday even by Rachel from accounts standards this is an unbelievably stupid idea. Does she really think that £160bn of surplus is sitting around doing nothing? Of course not. So where is it? Well, its invested in UK companies, foreign companies and gilts. So it is already a major source of our investment.
The real problem is that since Brown changed the rules on dividends for pension funds less and less of UK funds are invested in UK quoted companies. But that is a consequence of tax policies, not a consequence of surplus funds lying around. If this "surplus" is removed by the supporting employer they might invest it or they might pay dividends with it. Who can say, but another part of the growth problem is that pension funds have driven UK companies to be cash cows rather than investing for future growth so it is a fair bet that the latter will be the most common.
The issues are: (1) that UK pension funds are reluctant to invest in FTSE companies (roughly 10% of their holdings at present). (2) That unlike in the US UK funds seem more interested in dividends and squeezing cash out of companies than capital growth. (3) That this makes it more difficult than is ideal for startups and small companies to access capital in the UK.
None of these problems are addressed by Reeves' proposals. Indeed some of them may become worse.
Can I please challenge you on this "Rachel from accounts" thing. It is open and petty misogyny - you would not have referred to "Kwazi from Accounts" or "Rishi from Accounts" or "Gordon from Accounts"
She is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and she's a woman. Feel free to consider that she is doing a poor job - that's fair. But "Rachel from accounts" is attacking her for her crime of being a woman. Please stop. You are better than than even if so many Tories and right wing commentators are not.
If she wasn't stupid people wouldn't think she was stupid and so they wouldn't call her Rachel From Accounts. In fact the name exaggerates her abilities. If she doe have any qualifications in Economics, or A Level Sums that says more about the institution that gave her that qualififcation than it does about her.
But whilst no-one doubts Starmer is the worst Prime Minister ever, Rachel has stiffer competition. There is a very amusing come snide section of Dick Crossman's diaries where he discusses the abilities of the then Chancellor Jim Callaghan. Of course the whole of those diaries are focussed on pointing out he would have been so much better a PM than Wilson. Which he probably would have been. I doubt there are many Diary writers in the present cabinet, just another minimum entry requirement for their jobs which they don't have.
PPE at the University of Oxford and a Master's degree in Economics from the London School of Economics.
You can't really ask for much more. The CofE is ultimately a political position, and that's why Osborne/Brown etc never got this kind of nonsense despite their backgrounds. If Reeves has a weakness, it's her politics not her economics.
It does have a whiff of sexism about it.
Her weakness is her lack of political skill not her political views
The weakness is the lack of substantive ideas, viable plans, and ability to execute them. I honestly find it amazing how bad Labour have been so far. Given how much they were banging on about growth before being elected I really expected a lot more from them.
It's like the Labour Party have promised us a sumptuous feast, and told us about what great cooks they are. We have been licking our lips in anticipation of the wonderous meal they are preparing. Then Reeves comes in with beans on toast and we rightly say "that's it?!"
And you know not only do Labour need to achieve above trend growth to balance the books, a tall order in itself, but if they fail democracy may be on the line if some loonies like Reform get in as a result.
Starmer has managed to put out the perfect post, encapsulating his government in eight words. Vacuous, lacking in any thought or policy to achieve the end. Believing that if you can talk yourself into a recession (or close to one), you can talk yourself out of one.
Moan about Starmer talking the economy down, moan about him talking it up.
Moan about too much borrowing, moan about measures to reduce it. WFA, moan. Employers NI, moan. VAT on private schools, moan. Tax non-doms, moan. Close IHT loopholes on farmland, moan.
Moan about no plans for growth, moan about every growth initiative. Loosen Regs, moan. Free up pension schemes, moan. Carbon capture, moan. Closer to the EU, moan. More trade with China, moan.
Moan moan moan moan moan. I hope you guys aren't like this irl.
1. I don't recall you doing a lot of jubilant whooping during the long 14 years of Tory rule? In fact I recall you doing quite a lot of moaning
2. This government really is inexpressibly shite. But we do our best to express it
I'm calm and fair. Eg I gave Cameron a chance, and May, and Sunak. Johnson and Truss, less so for obvious reasons. One was a charlatan, the other a nutcase.
The abuse from Tories heaped on this Labour government is irrational and wildly OTT. It's because there hasn't been one for so long. It's seen as an affront.
You especially ought to put a sock in it. You voted for this. So, ok, now you're getting it.
I voted for them mainly to discomfort you
I mean, the twat Keir was bound to win in my constituency, bound to win overall, and bound to put RACHEL FROM ACCOUNTS in Number 11, so I thought: This is all quite grim, what can I do, I know I’ll vote for Labour because it might slightly annoy that @kinabalu off of PB, thereby affording me some tiny tiny rancid shred of Schadenfreudian pleasure, so at least there will be a trivial and nasty positive
So in a very real sense this is all your fault. Own it
Starmer has managed to put out the perfect post, encapsulating his government in eight words. Vacuous, lacking in any thought or policy to achieve the end. Believing that if you can talk yourself into a recession (or close to one), you can talk yourself out of one.
Moan about Starmer talking the economy down, moan about him talking it up.
Moan about too much borrowing, moan about measures to reduce it. WFA, moan. Employers NI, moan. VAT on private schools, moan. Tax non-doms, moan. Close IHT loopholes on farmland, moan.
Moan about no plans for growth, moan about every growth initiative. Loosen Regs, moan. Free up pension schemes, moan. Carbon capture, moan. Closer to the EU, moan. More trade with China, moan.
Moan moan moan moan moan. I hope you guys aren't like this irl.
Now you see how you were seen for the last few years.
Me? No way. I was never like this. Just go and read all my posts for the last 7 years if you don't believe me. They're all there. My profile isn't private.
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
Yes it can be a challenge for narcissists.
Though there is a serious point in there somewhere.
The expectation that every single second of parenthood is a triumphal, joyous, life affirming moment, complete with background music, puts enormous pressure on parents.
It’s been linked to depression and feelings of failure. Even suicides.
Note to parents - it’s all right to feel that waking up 4 times a night to change nappies is a shit job. Because it is.
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
Yes it can be a challenge for narcissists.
Though there is a serious point in there somewhere.
The expectation that every single second of parenthood is a triumphal, joyous, life affirming moment, complete with background music, puts enormous pressure on parents.
It’s been linked to depression and feelings of failure. Even suicides.
Note to parents - it’s all right to feel that waking up 4 times a night to change nappies is a shit job. Because it is.
Yes, it's total bollocks
Having a baby is like Brexiting. It won't all be good. Some of it will be really bad, boring and painful, and it will restrict your life for many years. But on the whole most people don't regret it, and in retrospect you will remember and cherish the joys
You are the only person I've heard of who looks back and 'cherishes the joys' of Brexit!
After he left lockdown Penarth in 2020 he's only been in Blighty for approximately 3 days, so of course he can say that.
Working people and businesses are set to benefit from new rules that will give more flexibility over how occupational defined benefit pension schemes are managed, as the government continues to remove blockages that are inhibiting its growth agenda that will improve lives of working people across the UK.
Hosting a meeting with leaders of Britain’s biggest businesses in the City of London today (Tuesday 28 January), the Prime Minister and the Chancellor will set out the details of changes and tell some of the country’s leading CEOs that Britain is back and open for business.
At the roundtable, the PM and Chancellor will outline how restrictions will be lifted on how well-funded, occupational defined benefit pension funds that are performing well will be able to invest their surplus funds.
The current rules heavily tilt defined benefit pensions towards investing in the safest possible financial instruments - effectively gilts or the highest quality corporate bonds.
This makes sense on at the individual fund level, but absolutely no sense whatsoever at the national level: Pension funds have the longest possible time horizons - they’re the ones who ought to be investing in national infrastructure & reaping the long term benefits.
There’s been a weird double-think in much of the UK for the last few decades, where much talk is made of “growth” but at the same time every part of the system has been constrained to allow as little economic growth as possible. For economic growth to happen somebody, somewhere has to do the actual work: houses have to be built, roads maintained, computer programs have to be written, and so on & on. Preventing pension funds from funding that work helps nobody.
(Economics types will recognise this as an example of the fallacy of composition that Keynes railed against.)
The rules were set up primarily, I think, to force pension funds into funding government borrowing. It's been an issue for decades; it's encouraging that desperation is finally forcing them to take look at them. Desperate measures do carry a degree of extra risk though.
So what happens when that risk does not pay off ?
The members of the scheme get reduced benefits presumably.
Why should private defined schemes take that risk, especially when so many are now closed to new members and their age profile is far older than DC schemes.
As I said yesterday even by Rachel from accounts standards this is an unbelievably stupid idea. Does she really think that £160bn of surplus is sitting around doing nothing? Of course not. So where is it? Well, its invested in UK companies, foreign companies and gilts. So it is already a major source of our investment.
The real problem is that since Brown changed the rules on dividends for pension funds less and less of UK funds are invested in UK quoted companies. But that is a consequence of tax policies, not a consequence of surplus funds lying around. If this "surplus" is removed by the supporting employer they might invest it or they might pay dividends with it. Who can say, but another part of the growth problem is that pension funds have driven UK companies to be cash cows rather than investing for future growth so it is a fair bet that the latter will be the most common.
The issues are: (1) that UK pension funds are reluctant to invest in FTSE companies (roughly 10% of their holdings at present). (2) That unlike in the US UK funds seem more interested in dividends and squeezing cash out of companies than capital growth. (3) That this makes it more difficult than is ideal for startups and small companies to access capital in the UK.
None of these problems are addressed by Reeves' proposals. Indeed some of them may become worse.
Can I please challenge you on this "Rachel from accounts" thing. It is open and petty misogyny - you would not have referred to "Kwazi from Accounts" or "Rishi from Accounts" or "Gordon from Accounts"
She is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and she's a woman. Feel free to consider that she is doing a poor job - that's fair. But "Rachel from accounts" is attacking her for her crime of being a woman. Please stop. You are better than than even if so many Tories and right wing commentators are not.
It’s not remotely misogynistic- it’s a critique (rightly or wrongly) of a position within a company as a means to mock.
For most people the image of. “Colin from accounts” or a “Rachel from accounts” is of a mid level back office functionary with very little or no influence on corporate matters and no wider business skills.
There is a reason why the fast show had “Colin from accounts” as people can recognise a mid/low level character with little imagination and skill but a professional qualification.
I have worked with many of these in companies I’ve worked for and there is a reason why they are mocked - whether it’s fair or unfair is a different matter.
I would absolutely have lambasted EmRishi as “Rishi from accounts” if there was a perception he had only reached a low level finance role however, as he had a pretty high level financial career it would be a silly barb to level.
Kwazi got loads of grief - called Kami-Kwasi - was that because he was one of those foreigners so we can apply a funny negative name or because he was holding the baby went it went tits up?
John Major was mocked with his underpants - is that misandrist as men wear Y-fronts so we can mock him.
Using the misogyny defence of RR is ridiculous and taking offence for someone else where that offence is unfounded.
Defend her abilities and say people are wrong about them but don’t pull a sexism card to shut down a line of mockery.
Yes, "Rachel from Accounts" perfectly encapsulates her
Extraordinary mediocrity is what really marks out this government. It is like being governed by the most ludicorus bunch of middle managers in history. A bunch of senior librarians and deputy head teachers. County councillors who struggle with technology. Dweebs
And yet they’re still better than the previous Tory government. How embarrassing
Sorry to labour my point, but here is another gem from the author of the paper that the previous header was based on. It is about the impact of AirBnB:
"The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation."
That paper opened my eyes. I've let out my spare bedroom on Airbnb a couple of times and I'm shocked - SHOCKED - to discover that I was taking part in a system of colonialism and racialized expropriation. I thought I was just trying to make a few spare pounds with an otherwise unused asset. I promise to spent the whole of the next year on my knees to atone for my unacceptable oppression of ethnic minorities.
And I still can't believe that the author of the paper blames all of society's ills on the far right but gives the far left a free pass.
Did this guy get paid a shedload of cash to come up with this crap ?
If it’s any consolation this kind of crap is completely doomed in our Brave New World. No one will commission it, no one will pay for it, no one will care
You will be able to generate this stuff instantly for zero pence by pushing a button, and it will be “better” - and endless
An entire edifice - academe, academic publishing, the university sector - is about to collapse. See Cardiff university right now - on the verge of bankruptcy. Many more universities will follow it into oblivion. Most of them in fact
AI isn't what is destroying Cardiff and other universities - it's lack of income relative to expenditure.
The last Government not increasing fees whilst also reducing overseas students was the final straw but universities have been a slow moving train wreck for the past 2 years. The only question was where the true scale of the problem would be reveal first.
It’s a perfect storm. New technology is just going to make the storm way more severe and destructive
The collapse of universities will be an epic spectacle
Sigh, here we go again.
This is just the beginning
“Staff at Cardiff University fear huge job cuts are about to be announced by a senior management team that has already spoken of an ‘immediate existential crisis’ ✍️@Ship”
You may not care, entire towns and cities are gonna be gutted by this
I think there's a tendency for people to believe that Radical Tech will destroy the things they dislike. In this case, for you, Universities which you don't like because they are incubators of progressive values. I'm trying to be more objective. Apply logic rather wishful thinking. Ask not what I want to happen but what is likely to happen.
So in this vein, the main thing I foresee is the total collapse of the far right. Why? Because it won't be too long before the combination of AI and VR means you'll be able to wear e-contacts allowing you to transform your immediate environment. In particular a "no foreign" or "get your country back" setting which will make everything look nice and normal, turn mosques into churches, burkas into dresses, hijabs into baseball caps, etc.
Imagine the political impact of that. Why would anybody feel the need to vote for far right parties when they can simply pop that tech on every time they leave the house and the problem is sorted? The answer is they won't. It's game over for the far right populists. If I were them I'd be thinking urgently about retraining and a change of career.
I think the opposite will happen in the sense that people are going to finally get fed up with using technology all the time, staring at a screen for a large part of the day.
Yes, maybe so. A computer screen is so tiny compared to everything else around you. It's odd to focus such a large chunk of your attention on it.
Screens are on the way out
Soon we will all have spectacles (or even contact lenses) on which a screen will be projected - but translucent (if you want) - you will open your eyes and all this info will be hovering in front of you
Thereby freeing up your hands and ending the absurd stoop of early 21st century humans, hunched over smartphones
This tech exists now and is getting better, it is not some sci fi dream. PB can thank me later for keeping everyone abreast
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
Yes it can be a challenge for narcissists.
Though there is a serious point in there somewhere.
The expectation that every single second of parenthood is a triumphal, joyous, life affirming moment, complete with background music, puts enormous pressure on parents.
It’s been linked to depression and feelings of failure. Even suicides.
Note to parents - it’s all right to feel that waking up 4 times a night to change nappies is a shit job. Because it is.
Yes, it's total bollocks
Having a baby is like Brexiting. It won't all be good. Some of it will be really bad, boring and painful, and it will restrict your life for many years. But on the whole most people don't regret it, and in retrospect you will remember and cherish the joys
How would you know, having absented yourself form large parts of both processes ?
Starmer has managed to put out the perfect post, encapsulating his government in eight words. Vacuous, lacking in any thought or policy to achieve the end. Believing that if you can talk yourself into a recession (or close to one), you can talk yourself out of one.
Moan about Starmer talking the economy down, moan about him talking it up.
Moan about too much borrowing, moan about measures to reduce it. WFA, moan. Employers NI, moan. VAT on private schools, moan. Tax non-doms, moan. Close IHT loopholes on farmland, moan.
Moan about no plans for growth, moan about every growth initiative. Loosen Regs, moan. Free up pension schemes, moan. Carbon capture, moan. Closer to the EU, moan. More trade with China, moan.
Moan moan moan moan moan. I hope you guys aren't like this irl.
Yes.
Such a contrast with PB Labour under a Conservative government.
Who can forget the “PB Labour for National Optimism” drive? Collected enough to buy several cabbages for Liz Truss, IIRC.
Sure but they were a total shower and they'd been in for ages.
The whining started *before* Cameron & Clegg announced the coalition.
Not from me. I specifically recall thinking, Ok, guess it is time for a change and they don't seem *too* terrible for Tories. I'll survive.
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
Yes it can be a challenge for narcissists.
Though there is a serious point in there somewhere.
The expectation that every single second of parenthood is a triumphal, joyous, life affirming moment, complete with background music, puts enormous pressure on parents.
It’s been linked to depression and feelings of failure. Even suicides.
Note to parents - it’s all right to feel that waking up 4 times a night to change nappies is a shit job. Because it is.
Yes, it's total bollocks
Having a baby is like Brexiting. It won't all be good. Some of it will be really bad, boring and painful, and it will restrict your life for many years. But on the whole most people don't regret it, and in retrospect you will remember and cherish the joys
You are the only person I've heard of who looks back and 'cherishes the joys' of Brexit!
Early days yet for all that. Brexit is like having a baby. The first 30 years are the worst. After that it's not too bad.
Good point. Plus when I think about it, the summer of 2016, those wonderful days when the worst thing to worry about was bloody brexit, before bloody Trump became president for the first time, before bloody Covid, before bloody Putin invaded the rest of Ukraine.
In the words of the poet: Oh what fun we had But at the time it seemed so bad
I am 70 and have lived through revolutions, which don't all seem so at the time. The sexual revolution (Larkin's 1963); Islamification; computers; EU and end of cold war; internet and smartphones - than which the world has never seen anything like; but right now in very short order we have TrumpUkraineGazaBrexit which feels too much too quickly. With AI to come.
Sorry to labour my point, but here is another gem from the author of the paper that the previous header was based on. It is about the impact of AirBnB:
"The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation."
That paper opened my eyes. I've let out my spare bedroom on Airbnb a couple of times and I'm shocked - SHOCKED - to discover that I was taking part in a system of colonialism and racialized expropriation. I thought I was just trying to make a few spare pounds with an otherwise unused asset. I promise to spent the whole of the next year on my knees to atone for my unacceptable oppression of ethnic minorities.
And I still can't believe that the author of the paper blames all of society's ills on the far right but gives the far left a free pass.
Did this guy get paid a shedload of cash to come up with this crap ?
If it’s any consolation this kind of crap is completely doomed in our Brave New World. No one will commission it, no one will pay for it, no one will care
You will be able to generate this stuff instantly for zero pence by pushing a button, and it will be “better” - and endless
An entire edifice - academe, academic publishing, the university sector - is about to collapse. See Cardiff university right now - on the verge of bankruptcy. Many more universities will follow it into oblivion. Most of them in fact
AI isn't what is destroying Cardiff and other universities - it's lack of income relative to expenditure.
The last Government not increasing fees whilst also reducing overseas students was the final straw but universities have been a slow moving train wreck for the past 2 years. The only question was where the true scale of the problem would be reveal first.
It’s a perfect storm. New technology is just going to make the storm way more severe and destructive
The collapse of universities will be an epic spectacle
The universities have loaded themselves with debt and spent it on administration, it’s a pyramid scheme waiting to come down in an era where their actual product, of learning and research, has been massively democratised.
They’re now mostly selling scarcity of accreditation through the admissions process.
Talk on X of the entire Welsh university sector crumbling into dust
It will massively impact towns and constituencies where this happens. And it will happen
I remember when a teacher training college closed in my small home town. That was big and bad. These are UNIVERSITIES. Grim
The govt doesn’t have the £££ to bail them all out
Cardiff annual deficit is around 35 million. Pretty sure the Government could find that kind of money (even across ALL universities).
Oy it could actual raise the tuition fees in line with inflation, as it has done for NHS salaries.
As I understand it this would only kick the can down the road. We did this: 1) Slash government funding for universities 2) Replace this with tuition fees which the government then caps 3) Universities are short of cash and fill the hole with foreign students paying £lots 4) Cities like Sheffield fill up with expensive student apartment blocks occupied exclusively by Chinese students 5) People get the hump and so we reduce the number of foreign students which creates a funding crisis and imperils the entire institution
Lets assume that we jack tuition fees up to £15k a year. This isn't paid by the student, its private sector cash - tuition fees sit as an asset on the balance sheet of whichever company buys the debt. The default rate on these loans is already high (40%?) and increasing the size of the loan only increases the size of the money eventually written off. Which reduced the number of investors willing to stump up the cash which the universities need to operate.
Do I have that roughly right? If so its the British problem - we can't afford the cash to pay for it in the short term, we can't afford the damage to our economy in the medium to long term in not paying for it.
The Treasury has stopped selling off student loans.
Because nobody would buy them at those default levels?
OK, so lets assume that we raise tuition fees to £12k or £15k. That is cash which the government now needs to find up front, and will then need to write 40% off. The larger the tuition fees the larger the financial black hole.
A huge debt hypothecated to students. Creating a burden on the government to fund. With a large proportion never to be repaid. As universities are starved of cash.
I'm a big advocate of the blank sheet of paper approach. Nobody would design this structure because its absurd. Can we put something more sensible in place?
How about we sell university places to foreign students at five times the cost to a UK student? Sounds like good business.
Is it if they bring along a family of economically inactive dependents who then need to be housed and have access to services we provide ?
They pay for the accomodation already. Access to healthcare and primary and secondary education could be charged to the student,'s nation of origin.
The dependents were cut because of immigration figures which were politically unacceptable. The baby was thrown out with the bathwater.
So the govt is paying tuition fees up front in any case and then administering repayments, which have a large default level, and put off the able but financially cautious. They also have other sub-optimal results such as emigration to avoid loan repayments, avoiding career progression, high marginal deductions etc etc Why not scrap tuition fees and ration university places by ability?
That, I suspect was why the Conservatives followed the policies they did. Turn the clock back to universities being exclusively for the wealthiest 7%. We don't want any of this positive social engineering caper.
150 years ago only the top 1% went to university never mind the top 7%, as the only universities were Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Manchester, UCL, Kings London and St Andrews, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh and Aberystwyth.
Even most solicitors and accountants and bankers didn't have degrees let alone most nurses and middle managers like now. Degrees were only really needed if you wanted to be a barrister, doctor/surgeon or vicar/bishop or permanent secretary or academic or public school/grammar school teacher
Do you want to return to the top 1%? Of course you do, so long as your children will find themselves in that 1%.
No, top 10% to 20% would be fine.
Though of course the top 1% academically who went to university 150 years ago were not necessarily the richest 1%.
For example many became Vicars or teachers while bankers and solicitors and business directors often didn't have degrees at all
I always thought the Clergy were usually the youngest sons who never inherited anything. Also teaching wasn't a graduate profession except in the public schools etc.
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
Yes it can be a challenge for narcissists.
Though there is a serious point in there somewhere.
The expectation that every single second of parenthood is a triumphal, joyous, life affirming moment, complete with background music, puts enormous pressure on parents.
It’s been linked to depression and feelings of failure. Even suicides.
Note to parents - it’s all right to feel that waking up 4 times a night to change nappies is a shit job. Because it is.
It's certainly not ideal for the selfish.
Its not about being selfish. Life is just better when you've had a decent sleep. Sunday night our son was unaccountably awake in the middle of the night and wouldn't sleep anywhere other than our bed. Poor night of broken sleep. Parents grumpy. Shit journey into work (roadworks added to roadworks so 30 minute trip is now 90.)
Last night - unbroken sleep, worse journey to work but didn't feel anything like as grumpy.
Sorry to labour my point, but here is another gem from the author of the paper that the previous header was based on. It is about the impact of AirBnB:
"The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation."
That paper opened my eyes. I've let out my spare bedroom on Airbnb a couple of times and I'm shocked - SHOCKED - to discover that I was taking part in a system of colonialism and racialized expropriation. I thought I was just trying to make a few spare pounds with an otherwise unused asset. I promise to spent the whole of the next year on my knees to atone for my unacceptable oppression of ethnic minorities.
And I still can't believe that the author of the paper blames all of society's ills on the far right but gives the far left a free pass.
Did this guy get paid a shedload of cash to come up with this crap ?
If it’s any consolation this kind of crap is completely doomed in our Brave New World. No one will commission it, no one will pay for it, no one will care
You will be able to generate this stuff instantly for zero pence by pushing a button, and it will be “better” - and endless
An entire edifice - academe, academic publishing, the university sector - is about to collapse. See Cardiff university right now - on the verge of bankruptcy. Many more universities will follow it into oblivion. Most of them in fact
AI isn't what is destroying Cardiff and other universities - it's lack of income relative to expenditure.
The last Government not increasing fees whilst also reducing overseas students was the final straw but universities have been a slow moving train wreck for the past 2 years. The only question was where the true scale of the problem would be reveal first.
It’s a perfect storm. New technology is just going to make the storm way more severe and destructive
The collapse of universities will be an epic spectacle
Sigh, here we go again.
This is just the beginning
“Staff at Cardiff University fear huge job cuts are about to be announced by a senior management team that has already spoken of an ‘immediate existential crisis’ ✍️@Ship”
You may not care, entire towns and cities are gonna be gutted by this
I think there's a tendency for people to believe that Radical Tech will destroy the things they dislike. In this case, for you, Universities which you don't like because they are incubators of progressive values. I'm trying to be more objective. Apply logic rather wishful thinking. Ask not what I want to happen but what is likely to happen.
So in this vein, the main thing I foresee is the total collapse of the far right. Why? Because it won't be too long before the combination of AI and VR means you'll be able to wear e-contacts allowing you to transform your immediate environment. In particular a "no foreign" or "get your country back" setting which will make everything look nice and normal, turn mosques into churches, burkas into dresses, hijabs into baseball caps, etc.
Imagine the political impact of that. Why would anybody feel the need to vote for far right parties when they can simply pop that tech on every time they leave the house and the problem is sorted? The answer is they won't. It's game over for the far right populists. If I were them I'd be thinking urgently about retraining and a change of career.
I think the opposite will happen in the sense that people are going to finally get fed up with using technology all the time, staring at a screen for a large part of the day.
Yes, maybe so. A computer screen is so tiny compared to everything else around you. It's odd to focus such a large chunk of your attention on it.
Screens are on the way out
Soon we will all have spectacles (or even contact lenses) on which a screen will be projected - but translucent (if you want) - you will open your eyes and all this info will be hovering in front of you
Thereby freeing up your hands and ending the absurd stoop of early 21st century humans, hunched over smartphones
This tech exists now and is getting better, it is not some sci fi dream. PB can thank me later for keeping everyone abreast
Thanks to this government, Britain's oldest racing car manufacturer (a British, profitable, well run business, with pipeline investment) has had to put all their new vehicle plans on hold, costing jobs there and throughout the chain in the UK, along with the government losing the taxes the investment would have provided.
Suspect all other niche motor companies, that we thrive with, will be thinking the same
Why don't you tell them to stop moaning from the comfort of your retirement chair? Real life impacts, clearly not open for business.
I'll let you get back to your life and soul of tea and dunking biscuits and bad takes.
Lawrence Whittaker @ListerLawrence A statement from the Lister Motor Company.
Lab and Con at their floors. And Reform at their ceiling? But "settled", not so sure about that.
When people seriously want Labour out then the Tories will start recovering. But some time to go before that.
Yes, I think that is it and I do think, for as poor as this govt has been so far (and there are signs they are getting it) they still have some goodwill out there and can turn it around unlike the Tories who were fatally wounded after the Sunak succession.
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
Yes it can be a challenge for narcissists.
Though there is a serious point in there somewhere.
The expectation that every single second of parenthood is a triumphal, joyous, life affirming moment, complete with background music, puts enormous pressure on parents.
It’s been linked to depression and feelings of failure. Even suicides.
Note to parents - it’s all right to feel that waking up 4 times a night to change nappies is a shit job. Because it is.
Yes, it's total bollocks
Having a baby is like Brexiting. It won't all be good. Some of it will be really bad, boring and painful, and it will restrict your life for many years. But on the whole most people don't regret it, and in retrospect you will remember and cherish the joys
How would you know, having absented yourself form large parts of both processes ?
I was there for the important bit. That initial jolt of orgasmic pleasure
I will never forget my joy when David Dimblebimblebimbleby said
“That’s it. We’re out!”
Ahhh…….. and what makes it better is that we’re never going back in, LOSER
Sorry to labour my point, but here is another gem from the author of the paper that the previous header was based on. It is about the impact of AirBnB:
"The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation."
That paper opened my eyes. I've let out my spare bedroom on Airbnb a couple of times and I'm shocked - SHOCKED - to discover that I was taking part in a system of colonialism and racialized expropriation. I thought I was just trying to make a few spare pounds with an otherwise unused asset. I promise to spent the whole of the next year on my knees to atone for my unacceptable oppression of ethnic minorities.
And I still can't believe that the author of the paper blames all of society's ills on the far right but gives the far left a free pass.
Did this guy get paid a shedload of cash to come up with this crap ?
If it’s any consolation this kind of crap is completely doomed in our Brave New World. No one will commission it, no one will pay for it, no one will care
You will be able to generate this stuff instantly for zero pence by pushing a button, and it will be “better” - and endless
An entire edifice - academe, academic publishing, the university sector - is about to collapse. See Cardiff university right now - on the verge of bankruptcy. Many more universities will follow it into oblivion. Most of them in fact
AI isn't what is destroying Cardiff and other universities - it's lack of income relative to expenditure.
The last Government not increasing fees whilst also reducing overseas students was the final straw but universities have been a slow moving train wreck for the past 2 years. The only question was where the true scale of the problem would be reveal first.
It’s a perfect storm. New technology is just going to make the storm way more severe and destructive
The collapse of universities will be an epic spectacle
The universities have loaded themselves with debt and spent it on administration, it’s a pyramid scheme waiting to come down in an era where their actual product, of learning and research, has been massively democratised.
They’re now mostly selling scarcity of accreditation through the admissions process.
Talk on X of the entire Welsh university sector crumbling into dust
It will massively impact towns and constituencies where this happens. And it will happen
I remember when a teacher training college closed in my small home town. That was big and bad. These are UNIVERSITIES. Grim
The govt doesn’t have the £££ to bail them all out
Cardiff annual deficit is around 35 million. Pretty sure the Government could find that kind of money (even across ALL universities).
Oy it could actual raise the tuition fees in line with inflation, as it has done for NHS salaries.
As I understand it this would only kick the can down the road. We did this: 1) Slash government funding for universities 2) Replace this with tuition fees which the government then caps 3) Universities are short of cash and fill the hole with foreign students paying £lots 4) Cities like Sheffield fill up with expensive student apartment blocks occupied exclusively by Chinese students 5) People get the hump and so we reduce the number of foreign students which creates a funding crisis and imperils the entire institution
Lets assume that we jack tuition fees up to £15k a year. This isn't paid by the student, its private sector cash - tuition fees sit as an asset on the balance sheet of whichever company buys the debt. The default rate on these loans is already high (40%?) and increasing the size of the loan only increases the size of the money eventually written off. Which reduced the number of investors willing to stump up the cash which the universities need to operate.
Do I have that roughly right? If so its the British problem - we can't afford the cash to pay for it in the short term, we can't afford the damage to our economy in the medium to long term in not paying for it.
The Treasury has stopped selling off student loans.
Because nobody would buy them at those default levels?
OK, so lets assume that we raise tuition fees to £12k or £15k. That is cash which the government now needs to find up front, and will then need to write 40% off. The larger the tuition fees the larger the financial black hole.
A huge debt hypothecated to students. Creating a burden on the government to fund. With a large proportion never to be repaid. As universities are starved of cash.
I'm a big advocate of the blank sheet of paper approach. Nobody would design this structure because its absurd. Can we put something more sensible in place?
How about we sell university places to foreign students at five times the cost to a UK student? Sounds like good business.
Is it if they bring along a family of economically inactive dependents who then need to be housed and have access to services we provide ?
They pay for the accomodation already. Access to healthcare and primary and secondary education could be charged to the student,'s nation of origin.
The dependents were cut because of immigration figures which were politically unacceptable. The baby was thrown out with the bathwater.
So the govt is paying tuition fees up front in any case and then administering repayments, which have a large default level, and put off the able but financially cautious. They also have other sub-optimal results such as emigration to avoid loan repayments, avoiding career progression, high marginal deductions etc etc Why not scrap tuition fees and ration university places by ability?
That, I suspect was why the Conservatives followed the policies they did. Turn the clock back to universities being exclusively for the wealthiest 7%. We don't want any of this positive social engineering caper.
150 years ago only the top 1% went to university never mind the top 7%, as the only universities were Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Manchester, UCL, Kings London and St Andrews, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh and Aberystwyth.
Even most solicitors and accountants and bankers didn't have degrees let alone most nurses and middle managers like now. Degrees were only really needed if you wanted to be a barrister, doctor/surgeon or vicar/bishop or permanent secretary or academic or public school/grammar school teacher
Do you want to return to the top 1%? Of course you do, so long as your children will find themselves in that 1%.
No, top 10% to 20% would be fine.
Though of course the top 1% academically who went to university 150 years ago were not necessarily the richest 1%.
For example many became Vicars or teachers while bankers and solicitors and business directors often didn't have degrees at all
I always thought the Clergy were usually the youngest sons who never inherited anything. Also teaching wasn't a graduate profession except in the public schools etc.
Grammar school teachers were mostly graduate. The clergy have never been and still are not all graduate. In former times there was a huge distinction between the clergy graduate class with connections and those without, especially non grads. The actual annual stipend could vary from several thousand (ie several hundred thousand today) to £50, ie £5000 today. Trollope is good on this.
Sorry to labour my point, but here is another gem from the author of the paper that the previous header was based on. It is about the impact of AirBnB:
"The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation."
That paper opened my eyes. I've let out my spare bedroom on Airbnb a couple of times and I'm shocked - SHOCKED - to discover that I was taking part in a system of colonialism and racialized expropriation. I thought I was just trying to make a few spare pounds with an otherwise unused asset. I promise to spent the whole of the next year on my knees to atone for my unacceptable oppression of ethnic minorities.
And I still can't believe that the author of the paper blames all of society's ills on the far right but gives the far left a free pass.
Did this guy get paid a shedload of cash to come up with this crap ?
If it’s any consolation this kind of crap is completely doomed in our Brave New World. No one will commission it, no one will pay for it, no one will care
You will be able to generate this stuff instantly for zero pence by pushing a button, and it will be “better” - and endless
An entire edifice - academe, academic publishing, the university sector - is about to collapse. See Cardiff university right now - on the verge of bankruptcy. Many more universities will follow it into oblivion. Most of them in fact
AI isn't what is destroying Cardiff and other universities - it's lack of income relative to expenditure.
The last Government not increasing fees whilst also reducing overseas students was the final straw but universities have been a slow moving train wreck for the past 2 years. The only question was where the true scale of the problem would be reveal first.
It’s a perfect storm. New technology is just going to make the storm way more severe and destructive
The collapse of universities will be an epic spectacle
Sigh, here we go again.
This is just the beginning
“Staff at Cardiff University fear huge job cuts are about to be announced by a senior management team that has already spoken of an ‘immediate existential crisis’ ✍️@Ship”
You may not care, entire towns and cities are gonna be gutted by this
I think there's a tendency for people to believe that Radical Tech will destroy the things they dislike. In this case, for you, Universities which you don't like because they are incubators of progressive values. I'm trying to be more objective. Apply logic rather wishful thinking. Ask not what I want to happen but what is likely to happen.
So in this vein, the main thing I foresee is the total collapse of the far right. Why? Because it won't be too long before the combination of AI and VR means you'll be able to wear e-contacts allowing you to transform your immediate environment. In particular a "no foreign" or "get your country back" setting which will make everything look nice and normal, turn mosques into churches, burkas into dresses, hijabs into baseball caps, etc.
Imagine the political impact of that. Why would anybody feel the need to vote for far right parties when they can simply pop that tech on every time they leave the house and the problem is sorted? The answer is they won't. It's game over for the far right populists. If I were them I'd be thinking urgently about retraining and a change of career.
I think the opposite will happen in the sense that people are going to finally get fed up with using technology all the time, staring at a screen for a large part of the day.
Yes, maybe so. A computer screen is so tiny compared to everything else around you. It's odd to focus such a large chunk of your attention on it.
Screens are on the way out
Soon we will all have spectacles (or even contact lenses) on which a screen will be projected - but translucent (if you want) - you will open your eyes and all this info will be hovering in front of you
Thereby freeing up your hands and ending the absurd stoop of early 21st century humans, hunched over smartphones
This tech exists now and is getting better, it is not some sci fi dream. PB can thank me later for keeping everyone abreast
Yep, e-contacts with VR functionality. Dizzying possibilities. When that train pulls out of the station there'll be no going back. I just hope there'll be a robust regulatory framework which probably means a Labour government.
Whether a thing is medicalised as 'addiction' or indeed anyone else is not a neutral process. Any strict criteria as between 'normal' 'medical' 'criminal' 'a matter of willpower' 'inappropriate' and so on are going to be artificial and also inconsistently applied.
Weight is a recent and developing example where it is tending to move from the 'willpower' category to the 'medical' one.
The Southport case comes to mind. To most modern fairly secular non professionals the defendant has to be 'mad' 'insane' or whatever because it is not imaginable to us (me) that a sane person cab do it. It just isn't close to what 'sane' can look like.
But to the medical and criminal system he is fine. Nothing wrong with him. I am not convinced.
Does anyone get sent to Broadmoor or Carstairs any more?
Last week’s case would likely have been sent there a decade or two ago.
(I grew up close to Broadmoor, they used to test the escape siren every week and you could hear it from miles away).
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
Yes it can be a challenge for narcissists.
Though there is a serious point in there somewhere.
The expectation that every single second of parenthood is a triumphal, joyous, life affirming moment, complete with background music, puts enormous pressure on parents.
It’s been linked to depression and feelings of failure. Even suicides.
Note to parents - it’s all right to feel that waking up 4 times a night to change nappies is a shit job. Because it is.
Yes, it's total bollocks
Having a baby is like Brexiting. It won't all be good. Some of it will be really bad, boring and painful, and it will restrict your life for many years. But on the whole most people don't regret it, and in retrospect you will remember and cherish the joys
How would you know, having absented yourself form large parts of both processes ?
I was there for the important bit. That initial jolt of orgasmic pleasure
I will never forget my joy when David Dimblebimblebimbleby said
“That’s it. We’re out!”
Ahhh…….. and what makes it better is that we’re never going back in, LOSER
Also, RACHEL FROM ACCOUNTS
A bit like voting Labour for the first time, then.
Whether a thing is medicalised as 'addiction' or indeed anyone else is not a neutral process. Any strict criteria as between 'normal' 'medical' 'criminal' 'a matter of willpower' 'inappropriate' and so on are going to be artificial and also inconsistently applied.
Weight is a recent and developing example where it is tending to move from the 'willpower' category to the 'medical' one.
The Southport case comes to mind. To most modern fairly secular non professionals the defendant has to be 'mad' 'insane' or whatever because it is not imaginable to us (me) that a sane person cab do it. It just isn't close to what 'sane' can look like.
But to the medical and criminal system he is fine. Nothing wrong with him. I am not convinced.
Does anyone get sent to Broadmoor or Carstairs any more?
Last week’s case would likely have been sent there a decade or two ago.
(I grew up close to Broadmoor, they used to test the escape siren every week and you could hear it from miles away).
Yes. Both. Went past Carstairs just recently. Lots there. It's just that there are also thousands in the prison system who in ordinary lingo are insane.
On thread: I was running the line at a junior football match at the weekend. Leafy Cheshire against WWC Manchester. As linesman, I got to eavesdrop on both sets of conversations. The Cheshire conversation was about disappointment with Labour "most of us had just been hanging on until Labour got in, thinking things would improve, interest rates would come down, but it's just getting worse ... Reeves hasn't got a clue"; the Manchester conversation somewhat earthier and angrier, and focused on the Christmas party which had been cancelled because the venue had been turned into a hotel for illegal immigrants.
Obviously these were just snippets. These are normal people mainly talking about their kids and football. But it was striking to hear politics discussed at all in the real world. I still find it slightly jarring to hear peoplebeing openly critical of Labour (aside from the Corbyn era). For my whole lifetime, my experience in real life has been that only people who know you very well are openly critical of the Labour Party lest people think they are Tories.
You obviously had better weather than we did. I think all the conversations at the sideline last Sunday were on the topic of how terrible it was standing in freezing driving rain, how cold we were, whether anyone could feel their feet, and if the ref could end the game early as we were 5-0 up and the other team had stopped trying.
That rings true for me. Thank God those days are over. I'd almost managed to blot out the memories of endless hours stood in the freezing cold and pouring rain next to some godforsaken field on the edge of a disused industrial estate. That's if you were lucky. If unlucky, you'd be running the line having accidentally accepted the flag without thinking or having been finally shamed into the job. Then you'd be spending the next hour and a half also trying desperately to judge offsides and penalties on a pitch with barely discernable markings. Those of you with just daughters - consider yourselves blessed.
I thought if you have kids then that is one of the joys of having them.
Plus are you suggesting peoples' daughters are at home playing with their dolls
It's one of the joys of having them IN RETROSPECT
When I was a parent to a young child, my experience was always: I hate parenting, I love *having parented*
Yes it can be a challenge for narcissists.
Though there is a serious point in there somewhere.
The expectation that every single second of parenthood is a triumphal, joyous, life affirming moment, complete with background music, puts enormous pressure on parents.
It’s been linked to depression and feelings of failure. Even suicides.
Note to parents - it’s all right to feel that waking up 4 times a night to change nappies is a shit job. Because it is.
It's certainly not ideal for the selfish.
Its not about being selfish. Life is just better when you've had a decent sleep. Sunday night our son was unaccountably awake in the middle of the night and wouldn't sleep anywhere other than our bed. Poor night of broken sleep. Parents grumpy. Shit journey into work (roadworks added to roadworks so 30 minute trip is now 90.)
Last night - unbroken sleep, worse journey to work but didn't feel anything like as grumpy.
Love him to bits but not so much at 2 am.
As I said, it's not for the selfish, since many just won't handle the pain.
(My first didn't sleep through the night for well over two years.)
Sorry to labour my point, but here is another gem from the author of the paper that the previous header was based on. It is about the impact of AirBnB:
"The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation."
That paper opened my eyes. I've let out my spare bedroom on Airbnb a couple of times and I'm shocked - SHOCKED - to discover that I was taking part in a system of colonialism and racialized expropriation. I thought I was just trying to make a few spare pounds with an otherwise unused asset. I promise to spent the whole of the next year on my knees to atone for my unacceptable oppression of ethnic minorities.
And I still can't believe that the author of the paper blames all of society's ills on the far right but gives the far left a free pass.
Did this guy get paid a shedload of cash to come up with this crap ?
If it’s any consolation this kind of crap is completely doomed in our Brave New World. No one will commission it, no one will pay for it, no one will care
You will be able to generate this stuff instantly for zero pence by pushing a button, and it will be “better” - and endless
An entire edifice - academe, academic publishing, the university sector - is about to collapse. See Cardiff university right now - on the verge of bankruptcy. Many more universities will follow it into oblivion. Most of them in fact
AI isn't what is destroying Cardiff and other universities - it's lack of income relative to expenditure.
The last Government not increasing fees whilst also reducing overseas students was the final straw but universities have been a slow moving train wreck for the past 2 years. The only question was where the true scale of the problem would be reveal first.
It’s a perfect storm. New technology is just going to make the storm way more severe and destructive
The collapse of universities will be an epic spectacle
Sigh, here we go again.
This is just the beginning
“Staff at Cardiff University fear huge job cuts are about to be announced by a senior management team that has already spoken of an ‘immediate existential crisis’ ✍️@Ship”
You may not care, entire towns and cities are gonna be gutted by this
I think there's a tendency for people to believe that Radical Tech will destroy the things they dislike. In this case, for you, Universities which you don't like because they are incubators of progressive values. I'm trying to be more objective. Apply logic rather wishful thinking. Ask not what I want to happen but what is likely to happen.
So in this vein, the main thing I foresee is the total collapse of the far right. Why? Because it won't be too long before the combination of AI and VR means you'll be able to wear e-contacts allowing you to transform your immediate environment. In particular a "no foreign" or "get your country back" setting which will make everything look nice and normal, turn mosques into churches, burkas into dresses, hijabs into baseball caps, etc.
Imagine the political impact of that. Why would anybody feel the need to vote for far right parties when they can simply pop that tech on every time they leave the house and the problem is sorted? The answer is they won't. It's game over for the far right populists. If I were them I'd be thinking urgently about retraining and a change of career.
I think the opposite will happen in the sense that people are going to finally get fed up with using technology all the time, staring at a screen for a large part of the day.
Yes, maybe so. A computer screen is so tiny compared to everything else around you. It's odd to focus such a large chunk of your attention on it.
Screens are on the way out
Soon we will all have spectacles (or even contact lenses) on which a screen will be projected - but translucent (if you want) - you will open your eyes and all this info will be hovering in front of you
Thereby freeing up your hands and ending the absurd stoop of early 21st century humans, hunched over smartphones
This tech exists now and is getting better, it is not some sci fi dream. PB can thank me later for keeping everyone abreast
Yep, e-contacts with VR functionality. Dizzying possibilities. When that train pulls out of the station there'll be no going back. I just hope there'll be a robust regulatory framework which probably means a Labour government.
It is genuinely exciting, and it is now almost certain to happen
One of the ways I cope with this dismal Labour government - following several Tory governments which were very nearly as bad (and in some ways worse, looking at you Boris “Boriswave” Johnson) - and also the shambolic state of my country (which I do love, despite being absent 90% of the time) - is by consoling myself that none of this matters. We are about to enter an era where change will come so fast and so profoundly it’s going to render all our arguments completely pointless and laughably insignificant
Comments
Moan about Starmer talking the economy down, moan about him talking it up.
Moan about too much borrowing, moan about measures to reduce it. WFA, moan. Employers NI, moan. VAT on private schools, moan. Tax non-doms, moan. Close IHT loopholes on farmland, moan.
Moan about no plans for growth, moan about every growth initiative. Loosen Regs, moan. Free up pension schemes, moan. Carbon capture, moan. Closer to the EU, moan. More trade with China, moan.
Moan moan moan moan moan. I hope you guys aren't like this irl.
Though of course the top 1% academically who went to university 150 years ago were not necessarily the richest 1%.
For example many became Vicars or teachers while bankers and solicitors and business directors often didn't have degrees at all
But whilst no-one doubts Starmer is the worst Prime Minister ever, Rachel has stiffer competition. There is a very amusing come snide section of Dick Crossman's diaries where he discusses the abilities of the then Chancellor Jim Callaghan. Of course the whole of those diaries are focussed on pointing out he would have been so much better a PM than Wilson. Which he probably would have been. I doubt there are many Diary writers in the present cabinet, just another minimum entry requirement for their jobs which they don't have.
Extraordinary mediocrity is what really marks out this government. It is like being governed by the most ludicorus bunch of middle managers in history. A bunch of senior librarians and deputy head teachers. County councillors who struggle with technology. Dweebs
If we think the care and NHS sectors are broken now or that we can manage them without further immigration we ain't see nothing yet.
What is undoubtedly coming down the line is an explosion of a hybrid work/study model, sustained by degree apprenticeships, Open University - type models, professional qualifications such as ACCA, PMP etc.
Fewer kids want to be 21 and in £50k of debt unless they’re getting a top class degree that gets them straight into the City.
It’s been said a hundred times before, but absolutely everything is being driven by the cost of housing.
Such a contrast with PB Labour under a Conservative government.
Who can forget the “PB Labour for National Optimism” drive? Collected enough to buy several cabbages for Liz Truss, IIRC.
2. This government really is inexpressibly shite. But we do our best to express it
There was no way my mother would have had time. There was a ton of housework and she worked during the week.
As you say, a different world.
Modern parents overdo it all imho and then say they are permanently exhausted.
If any of them had embellished their career history in the same way she had, they'd absolutely have been liable to the nickname.
I mentioned that I enjoyed playing it at school level, but was unsure if I would continue into 6th Form (I didn't)
He looked at me quite confused. He was unaware that I was in the school rugby team and had been so for the last four years, playing every Saturday throughout my school days (home and away, etc)
Do a degree and get a job in London or the Home Counties and unless the job is in corporate law or finance or you have significant parental funds for a deposit you would be doing well to get a house by 40
The expectation that every single second of parenthood is a triumphal, joyous, life affirming moment, complete with background music, puts enormous pressure on parents.
It’s been linked to depression and feelings of failure. Even suicides.
Note to parents - it’s all right to feel that waking up 4 times a night to change nappies is a shit job. Because it is.
Having a baby is like Brexiting. It won't all be good. Some of it will be really bad, boring and painful, and it will restrict your life for many years. But on the whole most people don't regret it, and in retrospect you will remember and cherish the joys
Plenty of girls play football too these days, although luckily my daughters don't - their thing was/is drama.
It does have a whiff of sexism about it.
It’s also perfectly understandable
The abuse from Tories heaped on this Labour government is irrational and wildly OTT. It's because there hasn't been one for so long. It's seen as an affront.
You especially ought to put a sock in it. You voted for this. So, ok, now you're getting it.
Driver rearrested over girls' school crash deaths
"Everyone is on their phones.
But is it really phone addiction we’re experiencing?"
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2024/jan/03/what-is-phone-addiction-definition-science-debate
RACHEL FROM ACCOUNTS
When people seriously want Labour out then the Tories will start recovering. But some time to go before that.
You using a phone isn’t going to give me cancer.
In the words of the poet:
Oh what fun we had
But at the time it seemed so bad
Course I'm not keen on over-confident, self-regarding poshos, but who on earth is.
Weight is a recent and developing example where it is tending to move from the 'willpower' category to the 'medical' one.
The Southport case comes to mind. To most modern fairly secular non professionals the defendant has to be 'mad' 'insane' or whatever because it is not imaginable to us (me) that a sane person cab do it. It just isn't close to what 'sane' can look like.
But to the medical and criminal system he is fine. Nothing wrong with him. I am not convinced.
It's like the Labour Party have promised us a sumptuous feast, and told us about what great cooks they are. We have been licking our lips in anticipation of the wonderous meal they are preparing. Then Reeves comes in with beans on toast and we rightly say "that's it?!"
And you know not only do Labour need to achieve above trend growth to balance the books, a tall order in itself, but if they fail democracy may be on the line if some loonies like Reform get in as a result.
I mean, the twat Keir was bound to win in my constituency, bound to win overall, and bound to put RACHEL FROM ACCOUNTS in Number 11, so I thought: This is all quite grim, what can I do, I know I’ll vote for Labour because it might slightly annoy that @kinabalu off of PB, thereby affording me some tiny tiny rancid shred of Schadenfreudian pleasure, so at least there will be a trivial and nasty positive
So in a very real sense this is all your fault. Own it
Soon we will all have spectacles (or even contact lenses) on which a screen will be projected - but translucent (if you want) - you will open your eyes and all this info will be hovering in front of you
Thereby freeing up your hands and ending the absurd stoop of early 21st century humans, hunched over smartphones
This tech exists now and is getting better, it is not some sci fi dream. PB can thank me later for keeping everyone abreast
Won't be dull.
Last night - unbroken sleep, worse journey to work but didn't feel anything like as grumpy.
Love him to bits but not so much at 2 am.
Thanks to this government, Britain's oldest racing car manufacturer (a British, profitable, well run business, with pipeline investment) has had to put all their new vehicle plans on hold, costing jobs there and throughout the chain in the UK, along with the government losing the taxes the investment would have provided.
Suspect all other niche motor companies, that we thrive with, will be thinking the same
Why don't you tell them to stop moaning from the comfort of your retirement chair? Real life impacts, clearly not open for business.
I'll let you get back to your life and soul of tea and dunking biscuits and bad takes.
Lawrence Whittaker
@ListerLawrence
A statement from the Lister Motor Company.
https://x.com/ListerLawrence/status/1884190555015635225
I will never forget my joy when David Dimblebimblebimbleby said
“That’s it. We’re out!”
Ahhh…….. and what makes it better is that we’re never going back in, LOSER
Also, RACHEL FROM ACCOUNTS
Last week’s case would likely have been sent there a decade or two ago.
(I grew up close to Broadmoor, they used to test the escape siren every week and you could hear it from miles away).
If you keep on repeating the same phrase over and over again in your posts then the spam trap thinks you’re a spammer.
It’s the ultimate collective punishment.
(My first didn't sleep through the night for well over two years.)
One of the ways I cope with this dismal Labour government - following several Tory governments which were very nearly as bad (and in some ways worse, looking at you Boris “Boriswave” Johnson) - and also the shambolic state of my country (which I do love, despite being absent 90% of the time) - is by consoling myself that none of this matters. We are about to enter an era where change will come so fast and so profoundly it’s going to render all our arguments completely pointless and laughably insignificant