It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Which mismanagement of covid was that? Starmer was forever demanding longer lockdowns. I think he'd probably have restrictions still now from the way he went on back then. You have a beef about the PPE contracts. So should we all. The full force of the law needs to go after those responsible and we ought to try to get the countries money back. But don't forget Starmer claiming to have a list of names for PPE that was equally as rubbish/useless as the governments contacts.
Hindsight is great. We got a lot of things wrong through covid. So did a lot of other countries. But Labour would have had mistakes too. Just different ones.
A slight perturbation in history and Corbyn could have been in charge. That would have been a mess.
If Remain had won the Brexit referendum then Britain would have been due a general election roughly at the peak of the first wave.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
It’s because “Chief contract negotiator” is a CL6 (sic) position, paying from £45,268 in year 1, to £53,826 in Year 8.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other side is making 1% of the contract value, and attracts people who want to make £10m a year.
Agreed. But you won’t fix that with cuts
Oh I’d be all in favour of central government having a crack team of contract negotiators on unlimited commission based on saving public money.
Disaster waiting to happen. For one, you wouldn’t be able to easily quantify what the “saving” was and as all commission systems do it would encourage meeting the metric only. I.e. low contract sum but costs heavily loaded in year 5 or whenever after any commission is paid.
Because the government is incapable of structuring incentive schemes that the private sector do all the time?
The same happens in the private sector.
If Tesco can build a custom facility to "negotiate" with suppliers - rooms setup so that a single representative from the supplier is brow beaten by groups of Tesco buyers - why can't the government?
Can't we just poach the Tesco team ?
Or rent them from Tesco?
Another PPI deal ? We'd get rinsed.
Especially if we were negotiating the cost of hiring the Tesco negotiators with the Tesco negotiators.
(There must be an updated Gilbert and Sullivan plot in there somewhere.)
More like a Terry Gilliam plot, Shirley?
Depends on whether you prefer nightmarish visions or jolly musical theatre.
What if I want nightmarish visions as part of (apparently) jolly musical theatre?
I find musical theatre to be nightmarish anyway. People don't burst into song every five sodding minutes.
I used to feel like that. Then I realised what I dislike is the genre of music in a musical. It's not the bursting into song per se, it's the songs they choose to burst into. The hills are alive with the sound of music? They can fuck off.
There was a cartoon musical by Bob Godfrey (animator of Rhubarb and Custard) on the life of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, called 'Great'. Only 30 minutes long, but thoroughly enjoyable. "You'll never get under the Thames, they said; he said 'Just wait and see!; Just give me a rope and a little bit of chain and I'll do it after tea'".
Musicals are always a balancing act between the absurd and the sublime (bit like life, actually). Appetites for both those things vary.
This year is the 50th anniversary of perhaps the greatest musical ever made.
It's just a jump to the left...
Not quite the movie is 50 years old, Rocky Horror's first performance was in 1973.
Got to say the Wikipedia article is incomplete as it misses the fact Richard got the money after being fired from Joseph because Andrew Lloyd Webber didn't like the idea that the Pharoh should be an Elvis impersonator (which is ironic given that is now how it's played).
I saw Joseph in the toon with Joe McElderry as the Pharoah. It wasn’t very good.
I don't like Joe, my wife does. But he does do a fair bit for charity and from what I hear is good for a laugh - he did an afternoon show a couple of weeks ago in Shields in full drag..
Edit to add - Joe is also now a fixture in the Theatre Royal's panto. The 2026 announcement has Joe, Clive and Danny as the star attractions.
Clive and Danny seem to be permanent fixtures there.
I remember Clive on the telly in the midlands in the seventies.
Curly Watts from Corrie was in one of the local ones last year. Consett or Stanley. Can’t remember
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
You are assuming that wealth means physical possessions of substantial size.
I have 100k+ tracks of music on my NAS box. Which would have required a moderate sized building to house, until quite recently.
Fair enough but let's be honest most possessions do take up space.
That's the great thing about electronics, they've shrunk a whole set of things. I would need bookshelves along every wall in my house if the books on my Kindle were physically in the house..
All those data centres will take up space and power though.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
Once the world population peaks you can have per capita personal growth with net less stuff world wide.
And, as my mother used to say, only boring people get bored. There are plenty of little projects and skills I’d like to try out that time issues currently preclude.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
I keep coming back to the AI/robot revolution. I know its sci-fi but in the Star Trek universe no-one has to work, but they can choose to do so. Its some kind of idyllic paradise than we never really see the details of. But if robots in particular become better at doing most manual jobs, added to AI meaning that you can tell 'Home-serve 1000' to do the dishes and they get done, then what will happen to society?
And were is the society of endless leisure? Who pays for it? Who gets what? At the moment we live in a capitalist world, and the rules are easy to understand (if not always fair). You get a job that pays money so you can buy stuff. The state and society looks after those that that doesn't apply to as best it can (give or take).
I know Sean T, once of this parish, was a bit of a Cassandra, but he is right that there are some pretty big shifts coming and not just for travel writers.
Mobility cars: can the government not just put out a tender process for car manufacturers that meet a range of mobility requirements and create a short-list of [5] cars which are eligible to be purchased under Mobility and at an agreed price centrally negotiated by the government?
Use government purchasing power to our advantage to reduce costs.
We have an ex-motability adapted Peugeot Partner van that has a ramp and wheelchair clamps for carting elderly parents around. Privately purchased, of course.
It has a really nasty automatic gearbox and you really wouldn't want to use it for very much other than its intended purpose.
That's what I think of as a mobility vehicle. Not a flash BMW.
Yeah 'cos disabled people should know their place. And it's not in the sort of cars nice people like us drive around in.
Honestly, the sheer smallmindedness being exhibited on this place is depressing.
KNOW THIS:
Motability leasers give up a benefit which is rightly theirs, plus they often pay a one-off non-refundable deposit, to lease a car. How dare they expect that to be like normal cars that normal people drive around in?
Why so generous @Flatlander? - 5 car options is far too much. Just go back to one model like the Invacar so that we can all distiguish disabled drivers clearly.
Every Motability user should get a Bugatti Chiron....
Between the two extremes, some compromise is sensible.
My main question is - why new cars? The sweet spot for price and reliability has long been a good brand, second hand, from the dealer, with warranties. So many people I know have done that and driven them so long that their children get tearful when the car they grew up with goes to The Scrapyard In The Sky.
I think the removal of the VAT exemption (introduced my Mrs T. haha) would be fair and valid if it were on the car itself, not the adaptation. That would lower the spec. and/or increase the upfront costs of Motability leases.
Also, I'd tax PIP and maybe means-test it, plus tighten the award criteria. All those things would contain the costs.
I agree with that (as posted above).
It isn't really the crap gearbox (apologies for giving that impression) that makes me think of it as a motability car but the heavy adaptations that would be a legitimate additional expense for someone who is disabled.
It is totally fair that these are VAT exempt (like many adaptations for the elderly too), but I'm not so sure about additional costs if you choose a more expensive car than 'necessary'.
The problem you have is that the motobility care is being provided because the person is disabled and hence given it's a disability aid it's tax exempt.
So we come down to what exactly are people complaining about - and it seems to be that there are disabled people with nice(r) cars than the people complaining have.
Here's a question for earnest PB's. Take person X. X is disabled and cannot work. How many holidays is X entitled to a year? Is X allowed Sky TV (choose your package as appropriate)? Is X allowed to shop at Waitrose, or only as Lidl?
For bonus points do X is not disabled but is a pensioner. Or even the high wire: person X is incapable of earning more than minimum wage due to being a bit slow, but not disabled.
That's not the high wire - that's person X is not efficient enough to justify paying the minimum wage but we've employed him for more than 2 years.
Remember as was shown with Waitrose last week we have a lot of slow people where they do not provide enough value to justify being paid the minimum wage but they want to work...
And better they work than just sit around completely paid for by the state.
Mobility cars: can the government not just put out a tender process for car manufacturers that meet a range of mobility requirements and create a short-list of [5] cars which are eligible to be purchased under Mobility and at an agreed price centrally negotiated by the government?
Use government purchasing power to our advantage to reduce costs.
We have an ex-motability adapted Peugeot Partner van that has a ramp and wheelchair clamps for carting elderly parents around. Privately purchased, of course.
It has a really nasty automatic gearbox and you really wouldn't want to use it for very much other than its intended purpose.
That's what I think of as a mobility vehicle. Not a flash BMW.
Yeah 'cos disabled people should know their place. And it's not in the sort of cars nice people like us drive around in.
Honestly, the sheer smallmindedness being exhibited on this place is depressing.
KNOW THIS:
Motability leasers give up a benefit which is rightly theirs, plus they often pay a one-off non-refundable deposit, to lease a car. How dare they expect that to be like normal cars that normal people drive around in?
Why so generous @Flatlander? - 5 car options is far too much. Just go back to one model like the Invacar so that we can all distiguish disabled drivers clearly.
I earn a very good salary and have never bought a car newer than than 7-years old.
The average age of cars in the UK is 9-years old.
The idea that all "normal" people drive around in news cars is laughable.
Who said 'all "normal" people drive around in new cars'?
FFS if you can't be arsed to read my posts properly don't waste your time responding to them.
The scheme lets them lease a new car. Then you go on to say “How dare they expect that to be like normal cars that normal people drive around in”.
And it's the leasing of the new car that some on here are objecting to. Yet the vast majority of new cars are owned or leased by people outside the Motability scheme.
Except in NI where apparently 50% of new cars on the road are Motability cars.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
It’s because “Chief contract negotiator” is a CL6 (sic) position, paying from £45,268 in year 1, to £53,826 in Year 8.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other side is making 1% of the contract value, and attracts people who want to make £10m a year.
Agreed. But you won’t fix that with cuts
Oh I’d be all in favour of central government having a crack team of contract negotiators on unlimited commission based on saving public money.
Disaster waiting to happen. For one, you wouldn’t be able to easily quantify what the “saving” was and as all commission systems do it would encourage meeting the metric only. I.e. low contract sum but costs heavily loaded in year 5 or whenever after any commission is paid.
Because the government is incapable of structuring incentive schemes that the private sector do all the time?
The same happens in the private sector.
If Tesco can build a custom facility to "negotiate" with suppliers - rooms setup so that a single representative from the supplier is brow beaten by groups of Tesco buyers - why can't the government?
Can't we just poach the Tesco team ?
Or rent them from Tesco?
Another PPI deal ? We'd get rinsed.
Especially if we were negotiating the cost of hiring the Tesco negotiators with the Tesco negotiators.
(There must be an updated Gilbert and Sullivan plot in there somewhere.)
More like a Terry Gilliam plot, Shirley?
Depends on whether you prefer nightmarish visions or jolly musical theatre.
What if I want nightmarish visions as part of (apparently) jolly musical theatre?
I find musical theatre to be nightmarish anyway. People don't burst into song every five sodding minutes.
I used to feel like that. Then I realised what I dislike is the genre of music in a musical. It's not the bursting into song per se, it's the songs they choose to burst into. The hills are alive with the sound of music? They can fuck off.
There was a cartoon musical by Bob Godfrey (animator of Rhubarb and Custard) on the life of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, called 'Great'. Only 30 minutes long, but thoroughly enjoyable. "You'll never get under the Thames, they said; he said 'Just wait and see!; Just give me a rope and a little bit of chain and I'll do it after tea'".
Musicals are always a balancing act between the absurd and the sublime (bit like life, actually). Appetites for both those things vary.
This year is the 50th anniversary of perhaps the greatest musical ever made.
It's just a jump to the left...
Not quite the movie is 50 years old, Rocky Horror's first performance was in 1973.
Got to say the Wikipedia article is incomplete as it misses the fact Richard got the money after being fired from Joseph because Andrew Lloyd Webber didn't like the idea that the Pharoh should be an Elvis impersonator (which is ironic given that is now how it's played).
I saw Joseph in the toon with Joe McElderry as the Pharoah. It wasn’t very good.
Even Shakespeare can be not very good (indeed frequently isn't).
Would Rocky Horror still be remembered without Tim Curry et al ?
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
You are assuming that wealth means physical possessions of substantial size.
I have 100k+ tracks of music on my NAS box. Which would have required a moderate sized building to house, until quite recently.
Fair enough but let's be honest most possessions do take up space.
That's the great thing about electronics, they've shrunk a whole set of things. I would need bookshelves along every wall in my house if the books on my Kindle were physically in the house..
My dvd collection, over 2000, now resides on three strapon hard drives. I also have a back up drive containing them all.
Mobility cars: can the government not just put out a tender process for car manufacturers that meet a range of mobility requirements and create a short-list of [5] cars which are eligible to be purchased under Mobility and at an agreed price centrally negotiated by the government?
Use government purchasing power to our advantage to reduce costs.
We have an ex-motability adapted Peugeot Partner van that has a ramp and wheelchair clamps for carting elderly parents around. Privately purchased, of course.
It has a really nasty automatic gearbox and you really wouldn't want to use it for very much other than its intended purpose.
That's what I think of as a mobility vehicle. Not a flash BMW.
Yeah 'cos disabled people should know their place. And it's not in the sort of cars nice people like us drive around in.
Honestly, the sheer smallmindedness being exhibited on this place is depressing.
KNOW THIS:
Motability leasers give up a benefit which is rightly theirs, plus they often pay a one-off non-refundable deposit, to lease a car. How dare they expect that to be like normal cars that normal people drive around in?
Why so generous @Flatlander? - 5 car options is far too much. Just go back to one model like the Invacar so that we can all distiguish disabled drivers clearly.
I earn a very good salary and have never bought a car newer than than 7-years old.
The average age of cars in the UK is 9-years old.
The idea that all "normal" people drive around in news cars is laughable.
It's a choice. I earn a much better salary than my neighbours but don't have a new BMW like they do. But they never go on holiday, don't eat out. I also really enjoy looking at my ISA balance.
I don't know why disabled people should be restricted to old cars, particularly when they depend on them so much and often don't have as many options for spending their cash. I think Ben's posts have been perfectly reasonable.
I agree it's a choice - I could have prioritised a new car but chose not to.
The issue is the mobility scheme only gives the subsidy where people buy new cars. And with the tax exemption proportional to the car cost, the monetary discount of the scheme encourages more expensive, newer cars.
No it doesn't it allows richer people who qualify for PIP to potentially get slightly better cars than they otherwise might but to do that BMW will be deducting an awful large amount off the list price to so put the i4 into the lease model. Because £8000 + PIP doesn't cover the £35,000 difference between £60,000 new and £20,000 at 3 years old.
Which tells me that BMW are knocking an awful lot off the car to sell a few to Motobility..
As for leasing second hand cars - rather you than me why would you take the maintenance risk on a vehicle you don't own..
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
You are assuming that wealth means physical possessions of substantial size.
I have 100k+ tracks of music on my NAS box. Which would have required a moderate sized building to house, until quite recently.
Fair enough but let's be honest most possessions do take up space.
That's the great thing about electronics, they've shrunk a whole set of things. I would need bookshelves along every wall in my house if the books on my Kindle were physically in the house..
My dvd collection, over 2000, now resides on three strapon hard drives. I also have a back up drive containing them all.
Must weigh you down a bit carrying those strap-ons around all the time.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
You are assuming that wealth means physical possessions of substantial size.
I have 100k+ tracks of music on my NAS box. Which would have required a moderate sized building to house, until quite recently.
Fair enough but let's be honest most possessions do take up space.
That's the great thing about electronics, they've shrunk a whole set of things. I would need bookshelves along every wall in my house if the books on my Kindle were physically in the house..
My dvd collection, over 2000, now resides on three strapon hard drives. I also have a back up drive containing them all.
our dvd collection is similar but the disks themselves reside in 4 folders in the garage...
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Which mismanagement of covid was that? Starmer was forever demanding longer lockdowns. I think he'd probably have restrictions still now from the way he went on back then. You have a beef about the PPE contracts. So should we all. The full force of the law needs to go after those responsible and we ought to try to get the countries money back. But don't forget Starmer claiming to have a list of names for PPE that was equally as rubbish/useless as the governments contacts.
Hindsight is great. We got a lot of things wrong through covid. So did a lot of other countries. But Labour would have had mistakes too. Just different ones.
Can we first try out billions of pounds wasted on PPE fast lanes to the exclusion of experienced PPE providers and manufacturers. It was a grifters charter. It wasn't only Dougie and Michie who got their superyacht. Remember too Starmer was in opposition. He could have made the most absurd suggestions and it would have made not a jot of difference. He could be ignored, and quite likely was.
And then the furlough schemes. Absolutely complicated and cumbersome, leaving out people who needed to be in and leaving in people who needed to be out of the scheme. The corruption was mind blowing. But the biggest dereliction of duty was the fact that it was a freebie grant whereas it should have been an emergency loan repayable over 3, 5 or even 10 years.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
You are assuming that wealth means physical possessions of substantial size.
I have 100k+ tracks of music on my NAS box. Which would have required a moderate sized building to house, until quite recently.
Fair enough but let's be honest most possessions do take up space.
That's the great thing about electronics, they've shrunk a whole set of things. I would need bookshelves along every wall in my house if the books on my Kindle were physically in the house..
All those data centres will take up space and power though.
You could fit all the books in the world on about 175Tb. I could get that in a 12 bay NAS drive on my shelf.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
It’s because “Chief contract negotiator” is a CL6 (sic) position, paying from £45,268 in year 1, to £53,826 in Year 8.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other side is making 1% of the contract value, and attracts people who want to make £10m a year.
Agreed. But you won’t fix that with cuts
Oh I’d be all in favour of central government having a crack team of contract negotiators on unlimited commission based on saving public money.
Disaster waiting to happen. For one, you wouldn’t be able to easily quantify what the “saving” was and as all commission systems do it would encourage meeting the metric only. I.e. low contract sum but costs heavily loaded in year 5 or whenever after any commission is paid.
Because the government is incapable of structuring incentive schemes that the private sector do all the time?
The same happens in the private sector.
If Tesco can build a custom facility to "negotiate" with suppliers - rooms setup so that a single representative from the supplier is brow beaten by groups of Tesco buyers - why can't the government?
Can't we just poach the Tesco team ?
Or rent them from Tesco?
Another PPI deal ? We'd get rinsed.
Especially if we were negotiating the cost of hiring the Tesco negotiators with the Tesco negotiators.
(There must be an updated Gilbert and Sullivan plot in there somewhere.)
More like a Terry Gilliam plot, Shirley?
Depends on whether you prefer nightmarish visions or jolly musical theatre.
What if I want nightmarish visions as part of (apparently) jolly musical theatre?
I find musical theatre to be nightmarish anyway. People don't burst into song every five sodding minutes.
I used to feel like that. Then I realised what I dislike is the genre of music in a musical. It's not the bursting into song per se, it's the songs they choose to burst into. The hills are alive with the sound of music? They can fuck off.
There was a cartoon musical by Bob Godfrey (animator of Rhubarb and Custard) on the life of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, called 'Great'. Only 30 minutes long, but thoroughly enjoyable. "You'll never get under the Thames, they said; he said 'Just wait and see!; Just give me a rope and a little bit of chain and I'll do it after tea'".
Musicals are always a balancing act between the absurd and the sublime (bit like life, actually). Appetites for both those things vary.
This year is the 50th anniversary of perhaps the greatest musical ever made.
It's just a jump to the left...
Not quite the movie is 50 years old, Rocky Horror's first performance was in 1973.
Got to say the Wikipedia article is incomplete as it misses the fact Richard got the money after being fired from Joseph because Andrew Lloyd Webber didn't like the idea that the Pharoh should be an Elvis impersonator (which is ironic given that is now how it's played).
I saw Joseph in the toon with Joe McElderry as the Pharoah. It wasn’t very good.
Even Shakespeare can be not very good (indeed frequently isn't).
Would Rocky Horror still be remembered without Tim Curry et al ?
Probably not as much as it is now.
Poor Tim Curry, he’s had his health issues. Saw an interview with him on YouTube. He’s not bitter at all.
I saw Macbeth with Patrick Stewart it was pretty good.
I bought all the BBC Shakespeare plays on DVD to watch one a day. Not got round to it yet. But I will.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
I keep coming back to the AI/robot revolution. I know its sci-fi but in the Star Trek universe no-one has to work, but they can choose to do so. Its some kind of idyllic paradise than we never really see the details of. But if robots in particular become better at doing most manual jobs, added to AI meaning that you can tell 'Home-serve 1000' to do the dishes and they get done, then what will happen to society?
And were is the society of endless leisure? Who pays for it? Who gets what? At the moment we live in a capitalist world, and the rules are easy to understand (if not always fair). You get a job that pays money so you can buy stuff. The state and society looks after those that that doesn't apply to as best it can (give or take).
I know Sean T, once of this parish, was a bit of a Cassandra, but he is right that there are some pretty big shifts coming and not just for travel writers.
There was a video of a robot trying to load a dishwasher last week - got to say paying a person to do it seems a sensible use of a few quid given the cost of the robot and how easy it was for it to get confused.
Mobility cars: can the government not just put out a tender process for car manufacturers that meet a range of mobility requirements and create a short-list of [5] cars which are eligible to be purchased under Mobility and at an agreed price centrally negotiated by the government?
Use government purchasing power to our advantage to reduce costs.
We have an ex-motability adapted Peugeot Partner van that has a ramp and wheelchair clamps for carting elderly parents around. Privately purchased, of course.
It has a really nasty automatic gearbox and you really wouldn't want to use it for very much other than its intended purpose.
That's what I think of as a mobility vehicle. Not a flash BMW.
Yeah 'cos disabled people should know their place. And it's not in the sort of cars nice people like us drive around in.
Honestly, the sheer smallmindedness being exhibited on this place is depressing.
KNOW THIS:
Motability leasers give up a benefit which is rightly theirs, plus they often pay a one-off non-refundable deposit, to lease a car. How dare they expect that to be like normal cars that normal people drive around in?
Why so generous @Flatlander? - 5 car options is far too much. Just go back to one model like the Invacar so that we can all distiguish disabled drivers clearly.
I earn a very good salary and have never bought a car newer than than 7-years old.
The average age of cars in the UK is 9-years old.
The idea that all "normal" people drive around in news cars is laughable.
Who said 'all "normal" people drive around in new cars'?
FFS if you can't be arsed to read my posts properly don't waste your time responding to them.
The scheme lets them lease a new car. Then you go on to say “How dare they expect that to be like normal cars that normal people drive around in”.
And it's the leasing of the new car that some on here are objecting to. Yet the vast majority of new cars are owned or leased by people outside the Motability scheme.
Except in NI where apparently 50% of new cars on the road are Motability cars.
I didn't know that - I wonder if the PIP criteria are different in NI?
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
You are assuming that wealth means physical possessions of substantial size.
I have 100k+ tracks of music on my NAS box. Which would have required a moderate sized building to house, until quite recently.
Fair enough but let's be honest most possessions do take up space.
That's the great thing about electronics, they've shrunk a whole set of things. I would need bookshelves along every wall in my house if the books on my Kindle were physically in the house..
All those data centres will take up space and power though.
Kindle all the books are on the kindle.
My 40,000 tracks of music and 2000+ TV shows on 5 3.5" disks on a server in the corner of my office...
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
I keep coming back to the AI/robot revolution. I know its sci-fi but in the Star Trek universe no-one has to work, but they can choose to do so. Its some kind of idyllic paradise than we never really see the details of. But if robots in particular become better at doing most manual jobs, added to AI meaning that you can tell 'Home-serve 1000' to do the dishes and they get done, then what will happen to society?
And were is the society of endless leisure? Who pays for it? Who gets what? At the moment we live in a capitalist world, and the rules are easy to understand (if not always fair). You get a job that pays money so you can buy stuff. The state and society looks after those that that doesn't apply to as best it can (give or take).
I know Sean T, once of this parish, was a bit of a Cassandra, but he is right that there are some pretty big shifts coming and not just for travel writers.
There was a video of a robot trying to load a dishwasher last week - got to say paying a person to do it seems a sensible use of a few quid given the cost of the robot and how easy it was for it to get confused.
The Benpointer robot test - load and unload the dishwasher, including collecting the dirty plates etc. and putting the clean ones away.
Mobility cars: can the government not just put out a tender process for car manufacturers that meet a range of mobility requirements and create a short-list of [5] cars which are eligible to be purchased under Mobility and at an agreed price centrally negotiated by the government?
Use government purchasing power to our advantage to reduce costs.
We have an ex-motability adapted Peugeot Partner van that has a ramp and wheelchair clamps for carting elderly parents around. Privately purchased, of course.
It has a really nasty automatic gearbox and you really wouldn't want to use it for very much other than its intended purpose.
That's what I think of as a mobility vehicle. Not a flash BMW.
Yeah 'cos disabled people should know their place. And it's not in the sort of cars nice people like us drive around in.
Honestly, the sheer smallmindedness being exhibited on this place is depressing.
KNOW THIS:
Motability leasers give up a benefit which is rightly theirs, plus they often pay a one-off non-refundable deposit, to lease a car. How dare they expect that to be like normal cars that normal people drive around in?
Why so generous @Flatlander? - 5 car options is far too much. Just go back to one model like the Invacar so that we can all distiguish disabled drivers clearly.
I earn a very good salary and have never bought a car newer than than 7-years old.
The average age of cars in the UK is 9-years old.
The idea that all "normal" people drive around in news cars is laughable.
It's a choice. I earn a much better salary than my neighbours but don't have a new BMW like they do. But they never go on holiday, don't eat out. I also really enjoy looking at my ISA balance.
I don't know why disabled people should be restricted to old cars, particularly when they depend on them so much and often don't have as many options for spending their cash. I think Ben's posts have been perfectly reasonable.
I agree it's a choice - I could have prioritised a new car but chose not to.
The issue is the mobility scheme only gives the subsidy where people buy new cars. And with the tax exemption proportional to the car cost, the monetary discount of the scheme encourages more expensive, newer cars.
No it doesn't it allows richer people who qualify for PIP to potentially get slightly better cars than they otherwise might but to do that BMW will be deducting an awful large amount off the list price to so put the i4 into the lease model. Because £8000 + PIP doesn't cover the £35,000 difference between £60,000 new and £20,000 at 3 years old.
Which tells me that BMW are knocking an awful lot off the car to sell a few to Motobility..
As for leasing second hand cars - rather you than me why would you take the maintenance risk on a vehicle you don't own..
They’re also not paying £10k in VAT on the £60k list price, which makes a massive difference to the lease cost.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
It's tricky you can read it how you like. Many will extrapolate as you have done, others will look at the 2.5s in the 2000s and expected we should be back to around that after the financial crisis, and would have done so without Brexit. We shall never know, but could continue to waste endless hours debating it.
Wasn't half the point of Brexit was that it was going to *increase* our growth rate with all this brilliant trading we'd be doing with the the rest of the world?
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
I keep coming back to the AI/robot revolution. I know its sci-fi but in the Star Trek universe no-one has to work, but they can choose to do so. Its some kind of idyllic paradise than we never really see the details of. But if robots in particular become better at doing most manual jobs, added to AI meaning that you can tell 'Home-serve 1000' to do the dishes and they get done, then what will happen to society?
And were is the society of endless leisure? Who pays for it? Who gets what? At the moment we live in a capitalist world, and the rules are easy to understand (if not always fair). You get a job that pays money so you can buy stuff. The state and society looks after those that that doesn't apply to as best it can (give or take).
I know Sean T, once of this parish, was a bit of a Cassandra, but he is right that there are some pretty big shifts coming and not just for travel writers.
Cassandra was fated to be always correct, but never believed. So only half a Leon.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
You are assuming that wealth means physical possessions of substantial size.
I have 100k+ tracks of music on my NAS box. Which would have required a moderate sized building to house, until quite recently.
Fair enough but let's be honest most possessions do take up space.
That's the great thing about electronics, they've shrunk a whole set of things. I would need bookshelves along every wall in my house if the books on my Kindle were physically in the house..
My dvd collection, over 2000, now resides on three strapon hard drives. I also have a back up drive containing them all.
our dvd collection is similar but the disks themselves reside in 4 folders in the garage...
Mine are going on eBay. Some of the Network ones go for good money.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
You are assuming that wealth means physical possessions of substantial size.
I have 100k+ tracks of music on my NAS box. Which would have required a moderate sized building to house, until quite recently.
Fair enough but let's be honest most possessions do take up space.
That's the great thing about electronics, they've shrunk a whole set of things. I would need bookshelves along every wall in my house if the books on my Kindle were physically in the house..
All those data centres will take up space and power though.
Kindle all the books are on the kindle.
My 40,000 tracks of music and 2000+ TV shows on 5 3.5" disks on a server in the corner of my office...
I still say it's excess 'stuff' - I can't believe @Malmesbury will ever listen to all his 100k+ of tracks.
But each to their own - I've got more wine stored away than I'm likely to drink :-(
Mobility cars: can the government not just put out a tender process for car manufacturers that meet a range of mobility requirements and create a short-list of [5] cars which are eligible to be purchased under Mobility and at an agreed price centrally negotiated by the government?
Use government purchasing power to our advantage to reduce costs.
We have an ex-motability adapted Peugeot Partner van that has a ramp and wheelchair clamps for carting elderly parents around. Privately purchased, of course.
It has a really nasty automatic gearbox and you really wouldn't want to use it for very much other than its intended purpose.
That's what I think of as a mobility vehicle. Not a flash BMW.
Yeah 'cos disabled people should know their place. And it's not in the sort of cars nice people like us drive around in.
Honestly, the sheer smallmindedness being exhibited on this place is depressing.
KNOW THIS:
Motability leasers give up a benefit which is rightly theirs, plus they often pay a one-off non-refundable deposit, to lease a car. How dare they expect that to be like normal cars that normal people drive around in?
Why so generous @Flatlander? - 5 car options is far too much. Just go back to one model like the Invacar so that we can all distiguish disabled drivers clearly.
I earn a very good salary and have never bought a car newer than than 7-years old.
The average age of cars in the UK is 9-years old.
The idea that all "normal" people drive around in news cars is laughable.
It's a choice. I earn a much better salary than my neighbours but don't have a new BMW like they do. But they never go on holiday, don't eat out. I also really enjoy looking at my ISA balance.
I don't know why disabled people should be restricted to old cars, particularly when they depend on them so much and often don't have as many options for spending their cash. I think Ben's posts have been perfectly reasonable.
I agree it's a choice - I could have prioritised a new car but chose not to.
The issue is the mobility scheme only gives the subsidy where people buy new cars. And with the tax exemption proportional to the car cost, the monetary discount of the scheme encourages more expensive, newer cars.
No it doesn't it allows richer people who qualify for PIP to potentially get slightly better cars than they otherwise might but to do that BMW will be deducting an awful large amount off the list price to so put the i4 into the lease model. Because £8000 + PIP doesn't cover the £35,000 difference between £60,000 new and £20,000 at 3 years old.
Which tells me that BMW are knocking an awful lot off the car to sell a few to Motobility..
As for leasing second hand cars - rather you than me why would you take the maintenance risk on a vehicle you don't own..
They’re also not paying £10k in VAT on the £60k list price, which makes a massive difference to the lease cost.
Car used for disabled people to get around - it's VAT exempt in a way that would be utterly insane to remove politically..
Why has growth stalled? Because the people we call 'wealth creators' are generally nothing of the sort; they are in fact usually simply 'wealth accumulators'.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
It's tricky you can read it how you like. Many will extrapolate as you have done, others will look at the 2.5s in the 2000s and expected we should be back to around that after the financial crisis, and would have done so without Brexit. We shall never know, but could continue to waste endless hours debating it.
Wasn't half the point of Brexit was that it was going to *increase* our growth rate with all this brilliant trading we'd be doing with the the rest of the world?
I'd put that at 10% not half. My interpretation fwiw is about 50% immigration, 25% sovereignty, 10% economy, 15% other.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
It’s because “Chief contract negotiator” is a CL6 (sic) position, paying from £45,268 in year 1, to £53,826 in Year 8.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other side is making 1% of the contract value, and attracts people who want to make £10m a year.
Agreed. But you won’t fix that with cuts
Oh I’d be all in favour of central government having a crack team of contract negotiators on unlimited commission based on saving public money.
Let me at it!
Carbon Capture Schemes? gone.
Nuclear power projects - persuade me why they shouldn't be gone....
Carbon capture was always a waste of money - added cost zero benefit
Nuclear power - we shouldn’t be building big ones except the Korean design. Small modular ones we should be investing in to get the factories working so we start exporting them
How govt hasn’t funded the RR SMR is crazy. Outside the EU, it’s the first thing that should have been funded. The US and Chinese SMRs are going to end up winning the race.
Yes, for large nuclear plants the Korean solution is now the best, as we see here in UAE.
UK nuclear power is 5 times the cost of Korean nuclear power.
The SMR business model is far from proven. A Seattle company going ahead with the project for microreactors went into Chapter 11:
Yes because we insist on reinventing the wheel every single time. The whole point of SMR is that we would have a fixed design that is repeatedly built.
Not supporting RR is one of the biggest screw ups of the past 7 years...
£800m a year goes to RR for naval reactors and has done for quite a while. I’d have to check back through their accounts to tell you for how long, - the 800 is from 2024
Mobility cars: can the government not just put out a tender process for car manufacturers that meet a range of mobility requirements and create a short-list of [5] cars which are eligible to be purchased under Mobility and at an agreed price centrally negotiated by the government?
Use government purchasing power to our advantage to reduce costs.
We have an ex-motability adapted Peugeot Partner van that has a ramp and wheelchair clamps for carting elderly parents around. Privately purchased, of course.
It has a really nasty automatic gearbox and you really wouldn't want to use it for very much other than its intended purpose.
That's what I think of as a mobility vehicle. Not a flash BMW.
Yeah 'cos disabled people should know their place. And it's not in the sort of cars nice people like us drive around in.
Honestly, the sheer smallmindedness being exhibited on this place is depressing.
KNOW THIS:
Motability leasers give up a benefit which is rightly theirs, plus they often pay a one-off non-refundable deposit, to lease a car. How dare they expect that to be like normal cars that normal people drive around in?
Why so generous @Flatlander? - 5 car options is far too much. Just go back to one model like the Invacar so that we can all distiguish disabled drivers clearly.
I earn a very good salary and have never bought a car newer than than 7-years old.
The average age of cars in the UK is 9-years old.
The idea that all "normal" people drive around in news cars is laughable.
It's a choice. I earn a much better salary than my neighbours but don't have a new BMW like they do. But they never go on holiday, don't eat out. I also really enjoy looking at my ISA balance.
I don't know why disabled people should be restricted to old cars, particularly when they depend on them so much and often don't have as many options for spending their cash. I think Ben's posts have been perfectly reasonable.
I agree it's a choice - I could have prioritised a new car but chose not to.
The issue is the mobility scheme only gives the subsidy where people buy new cars. And with the tax exemption proportional to the car cost, the monetary discount of the scheme encourages more expensive, newer cars.
No it doesn't it allows richer people who qualify for PIP to potentially get slightly better cars than they otherwise might but to do that BMW will be deducting an awful large amount off the list price to so put the i4 into the lease model. Because £8000 + PIP doesn't cover the £35,000 difference between £60,000 new and £20,000 at 3 years old.
Which tells me that BMW are knocking an awful lot off the car to sell a few to Motobility..
As for leasing second hand cars - rather you than me why would you take the maintenance risk on a vehicle you don't own..
They’re also not paying £10k in VAT on the £60k list price, which makes a massive difference to the lease cost.
Car used for disabled people to get around - it's VAT exempt in a way that would be utterly insane to remove politically..
Do we have any stats on the average list price of a motability car?
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
You are assuming that wealth means physical possessions of substantial size.
I have 100k+ tracks of music on my NAS box. Which would have required a moderate sized building to house, until quite recently.
Fair enough but let's be honest most possessions do take up space.
That's the great thing about electronics, they've shrunk a whole set of things. I would need bookshelves along every wall in my house if the books on my Kindle were physically in the house..
All those data centres will take up space and power though.
My music sits on a NAS box, locally. When not used, it goes to sleep. Barely any power.
It is backed up on the cloud - on the cheapest tier of non-immediate storage. Where they reduced cost by the discs powering down unless a read/write is required.
Mobility cars: can the government not just put out a tender process for car manufacturers that meet a range of mobility requirements and create a short-list of [5] cars which are eligible to be purchased under Mobility and at an agreed price centrally negotiated by the government?
Use government purchasing power to our advantage to reduce costs.
We have an ex-motability adapted Peugeot Partner van that has a ramp and wheelchair clamps for carting elderly parents around. Privately purchased, of course.
It has a really nasty automatic gearbox and you really wouldn't want to use it for very much other than its intended purpose.
That's what I think of as a mobility vehicle. Not a flash BMW.
Yeah 'cos disabled people should know their place. And it's not in the sort of cars nice people like us drive around in.
Honestly, the sheer smallmindedness being exhibited on this place is depressing.
KNOW THIS:
Motability leasers give up a benefit which is rightly theirs, plus they often pay a one-off non-refundable deposit, to lease a car. How dare they expect that to be like normal cars that normal people drive around in?
Why so generous @Flatlander? - 5 car options is far too much. Just go back to one model like the Invacar so that we can all distiguish disabled drivers clearly.
I earn a very good salary and have never bought a car newer than than 7-years old.
The average age of cars in the UK is 9-years old.
The idea that all "normal" people drive around in news cars is laughable.
It's a choice. I earn a much better salary than my neighbours but don't have a new BMW like they do. But they never go on holiday, don't eat out. I also really enjoy looking at my ISA balance.
I don't know why disabled people should be restricted to old cars, particularly when they depend on them so much and often don't have as many options for spending their cash. I think Ben's posts have been perfectly reasonable.
I agree it's a choice - I could have prioritised a new car but chose not to.
The issue is the mobility scheme only gives the subsidy where people buy new cars. And with the tax exemption proportional to the car cost, the monetary discount of the scheme encourages more expensive, newer cars.
No it doesn't it allows richer people who qualify for PIP to potentially get slightly better cars than they otherwise might but to do that BMW will be deducting an awful large amount off the list price to so put the i4 into the lease model. Because £8000 + PIP doesn't cover the £35,000 difference between £60,000 new and £20,000 at 3 years old.
Which tells me that BMW are knocking an awful lot off the car to sell a few to Motobility..
As for leasing second hand cars - rather you than me why would you take the maintenance risk on a vehicle you don't own..
They’re also not paying £10k in VAT on the £60k list price, which makes a massive difference to the lease cost.
Car used for disabled people to get around - it's VAT exempt in a way that would be utterly insane to remove politically..
Surely switching to a grant system instead is progressive and more effective?
Mobility cars: can the government not just put out a tender process for car manufacturers that meet a range of mobility requirements and create a short-list of [5] cars which are eligible to be purchased under Mobility and at an agreed price centrally negotiated by the government?
Use government purchasing power to our advantage to reduce costs.
We have an ex-motability adapted Peugeot Partner van that has a ramp and wheelchair clamps for carting elderly parents around. Privately purchased, of course.
It has a really nasty automatic gearbox and you really wouldn't want to use it for very much other than its intended purpose.
That's what I think of as a mobility vehicle. Not a flash BMW.
Yeah 'cos disabled people should know their place. And it's not in the sort of cars nice people like us drive around in.
Honestly, the sheer smallmindedness being exhibited on this place is depressing.
KNOW THIS:
Motability leasers give up a benefit which is rightly theirs, plus they often pay a one-off non-refundable deposit, to lease a car. How dare they expect that to be like normal cars that normal people drive around in?
Why so generous @Flatlander? - 5 car options is far too much. Just go back to one model like the Invacar so that we can all distiguish disabled drivers clearly.
I earn a very good salary and have never bought a car newer than than 7-years old.
The average age of cars in the UK is 9-years old.
The idea that all "normal" people drive around in news cars is laughable.
It's a choice. I earn a much better salary than my neighbours but don't have a new BMW like they do. But they never go on holiday, don't eat out. I also really enjoy looking at my ISA balance.
I don't know why disabled people should be restricted to old cars, particularly when they depend on them so much and often don't have as many options for spending their cash. I think Ben's posts have been perfectly reasonable.
I agree it's a choice - I could have prioritised a new car but chose not to.
The issue is the mobility scheme only gives the subsidy where people buy new cars. And with the tax exemption proportional to the car cost, the monetary discount of the scheme encourages more expensive, newer cars.
No it doesn't it allows richer people who qualify for PIP to potentially get slightly better cars than they otherwise might but to do that BMW will be deducting an awful large amount off the list price to so put the i4 into the lease model. Because £8000 + PIP doesn't cover the £35,000 difference between £60,000 new and £20,000 at 3 years old.
Which tells me that BMW are knocking an awful lot off the car to sell a few to Motobility..
As for leasing second hand cars - rather you than me why would you take the maintenance risk on a vehicle you don't own..
They’re also not paying £10k in VAT on the £60k list price, which makes a massive difference to the lease cost.
Car used for disabled people to get around - it's VAT exempt in a way that would be utterly insane to remove politically..
Surely switching to a grant system instead is progressive and more effective?
You like granting a Personal Independence Payment and then letting the recipients exercise some independence on how they spend it?
Mobility cars: can the government not just put out a tender process for car manufacturers that meet a range of mobility requirements and create a short-list of [5] cars which are eligible to be purchased under Mobility and at an agreed price centrally negotiated by the government?
Use government purchasing power to our advantage to reduce costs.
We have an ex-motability adapted Peugeot Partner van that has a ramp and wheelchair clamps for carting elderly parents around. Privately purchased, of course.
It has a really nasty automatic gearbox and you really wouldn't want to use it for very much other than its intended purpose.
That's what I think of as a mobility vehicle. Not a flash BMW.
Yeah 'cos disabled people should know their place. And it's not in the sort of cars nice people like us drive around in.
Honestly, the sheer smallmindedness being exhibited on this place is depressing.
KNOW THIS:
Motability leasers give up a benefit which is rightly theirs, plus they often pay a one-off non-refundable deposit, to lease a car. How dare they expect that to be like normal cars that normal people drive around in?
Why so generous @Flatlander? - 5 car options is far too much. Just go back to one model like the Invacar so that we can all distiguish disabled drivers clearly.
I earn a very good salary and have never bought a car newer than than 7-years old.
The average age of cars in the UK is 9-years old.
The idea that all "normal" people drive around in news cars is laughable.
It's a choice. I earn a much better salary than my neighbours but don't have a new BMW like they do. But they never go on holiday, don't eat out. I also really enjoy looking at my ISA balance.
I don't know why disabled people should be restricted to old cars, particularly when they depend on them so much and often don't have as many options for spending their cash. I think Ben's posts have been perfectly reasonable.
I agree it's a choice - I could have prioritised a new car but chose not to.
The issue is the mobility scheme only gives the subsidy where people buy new cars. And with the tax exemption proportional to the car cost, the monetary discount of the scheme encourages more expensive, newer cars.
No it doesn't it allows richer people who qualify for PIP to potentially get slightly better cars than they otherwise might but to do that BMW will be deducting an awful large amount off the list price to so put the i4 into the lease model. Because £8000 + PIP doesn't cover the £35,000 difference between £60,000 new and £20,000 at 3 years old.
Which tells me that BMW are knocking an awful lot off the car to sell a few to Motobility..
As for leasing second hand cars - rather you than me why would you take the maintenance risk on a vehicle you don't own..
They’re also not paying £10k in VAT on the £60k list price, which makes a massive difference to the lease cost.
Car used for disabled people to get around - it's VAT exempt in a way that would be utterly insane to remove politically..
Do we have any stats on the average list price of a motability car?
What would that tell you - remember Motobility cars are often models / versions that the manufacturer wants to shift excess stock of..
Mobility cars: can the government not just put out a tender process for car manufacturers that meet a range of mobility requirements and create a short-list of [5] cars which are eligible to be purchased under Mobility and at an agreed price centrally negotiated by the government?
Use government purchasing power to our advantage to reduce costs.
We have an ex-motability adapted Peugeot Partner van that has a ramp and wheelchair clamps for carting elderly parents around. Privately purchased, of course.
It has a really nasty automatic gearbox and you really wouldn't want to use it for very much other than its intended purpose.
That's what I think of as a mobility vehicle. Not a flash BMW.
Yeah 'cos disabled people should know their place. And it's not in the sort of cars nice people like us drive around in.
Honestly, the sheer smallmindedness being exhibited on this place is depressing.
KNOW THIS:
Motability leasers give up a benefit which is rightly theirs, plus they often pay a one-off non-refundable deposit, to lease a car. How dare they expect that to be like normal cars that normal people drive around in?
Why so generous @Flatlander? - 5 car options is far too much. Just go back to one model like the Invacar so that we can all distiguish disabled drivers clearly.
I earn a very good salary and have never bought a car newer than than 7-years old.
The average age of cars in the UK is 9-years old.
The idea that all "normal" people drive around in news cars is laughable.
It's a choice. I earn a much better salary than my neighbours but don't have a new BMW like they do. But they never go on holiday, don't eat out. I also really enjoy looking at my ISA balance.
I don't know why disabled people should be restricted to old cars, particularly when they depend on them so much and often don't have as many options for spending their cash. I think Ben's posts have been perfectly reasonable.
I agree it's a choice - I could have prioritised a new car but chose not to.
The issue is the mobility scheme only gives the subsidy where people buy new cars. And with the tax exemption proportional to the car cost, the monetary discount of the scheme encourages more expensive, newer cars.
No it doesn't it allows richer people who qualify for PIP to potentially get slightly better cars than they otherwise might but to do that BMW will be deducting an awful large amount off the list price to so put the i4 into the lease model. Because £8000 + PIP doesn't cover the £35,000 difference between £60,000 new and £20,000 at 3 years old.
Which tells me that BMW are knocking an awful lot off the car to sell a few to Motobility..
As for leasing second hand cars - rather you than me why would you take the maintenance risk on a vehicle you don't own..
They’re also not paying £10k in VAT on the £60k list price, which makes a massive difference to the lease cost.
Car used for disabled people to get around - it's VAT exempt in a way that would be utterly insane to remove politically..
Do we have any stats on the average list price of a motability car?
Surely it's the price actually paid by Motability that dictates the VAT exempted, not the list price. Motability (and the manufacturers) would quite reasonably regard that as commercially sensitive information, I imagine.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
Using your data, growth in the 2000s was what? 2.5%. It hasn't been since Brexit, granted COVID upset the apple cart. Economists have suggested there has been a marked decline in economic activity as a result of Brexit. If Brexit was ever going to be a fantastic economic opportunity that hasn't been delivered. Didn't you acknowledge that there would be an economic cost to Brexit, but you considered what you felt you got in terms of improved sovereignty was worth that cost? Now I appreciated your candour at the time, but I think it disingenuous to suggest one of the current crosses we have to bear isn't long Brexit.
Anyway I am about to fight my way back to the M1 through Heanor's flags of St George.
Mobility cars: can the government not just put out a tender process for car manufacturers that meet a range of mobility requirements and create a short-list of [5] cars which are eligible to be purchased under Mobility and at an agreed price centrally negotiated by the government?
Use government purchasing power to our advantage to reduce costs.
We have an ex-motability adapted Peugeot Partner van that has a ramp and wheelchair clamps for carting elderly parents around. Privately purchased, of course.
It has a really nasty automatic gearbox and you really wouldn't want to use it for very much other than its intended purpose.
That's what I think of as a mobility vehicle. Not a flash BMW.
Yeah 'cos disabled people should know their place. And it's not in the sort of cars nice people like us drive around in.
Honestly, the sheer smallmindedness being exhibited on this place is depressing.
KNOW THIS:
Motability leasers give up a benefit which is rightly theirs, plus they often pay a one-off non-refundable deposit, to lease a car. How dare they expect that to be like normal cars that normal people drive around in?
Why so generous @Flatlander? - 5 car options is far too much. Just go back to one model like the Invacar so that we can all distiguish disabled drivers clearly.
I earn a very good salary and have never bought a car newer than than 7-years old.
The average age of cars in the UK is 9-years old.
The idea that all "normal" people drive around in news cars is laughable.
It's a choice. I earn a much better salary than my neighbours but don't have a new BMW like they do. But they never go on holiday, don't eat out. I also really enjoy looking at my ISA balance.
I don't know why disabled people should be restricted to old cars, particularly when they depend on them so much and often don't have as many options for spending their cash. I think Ben's posts have been perfectly reasonable.
I agree it's a choice - I could have prioritised a new car but chose not to.
The issue is the mobility scheme only gives the subsidy where people buy new cars. And with the tax exemption proportional to the car cost, the monetary discount of the scheme encourages more expensive, newer cars.
No it doesn't it allows richer people who qualify for PIP to potentially get slightly better cars than they otherwise might but to do that BMW will be deducting an awful large amount off the list price to so put the i4 into the lease model. Because £8000 + PIP doesn't cover the £35,000 difference between £60,000 new and £20,000 at 3 years old.
Which tells me that BMW are knocking an awful lot off the car to sell a few to Motobility..
As for leasing second hand cars - rather you than me why would you take the maintenance risk on a vehicle you don't own..
They’re also not paying £10k in VAT on the £60k list price, which makes a massive difference to the lease cost.
Car used for disabled people to get around - it's VAT exempt in a way that would be utterly insane to remove politically..
Surely switching to a grant system instead is progressive and more effective?
You like granting a Personal Independence Payment and then letting the recipients exercise some independence on how they spend it?
Yes, I do. The VAT exemption essentially makes the payment bigger the richer the person is. I don't understand why that is appropriate. I don't then care if they spend it on an expensive car, a 2nd hand car, taxis or trains.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
It’s because “Chief contract negotiator” is a CL6 (sic) position, paying from £45,268 in year 1, to £53,826 in Year 8.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other side is making 1% of the contract value, and attracts people who want to make £10m a year.
Agreed. But you won’t fix that with cuts
Oh I’d be all in favour of central government having a crack team of contract negotiators on unlimited commission based on saving public money.
Disaster waiting to happen. For one, you wouldn’t be able to easily quantify what the “saving” was and as all commission systems do it would encourage meeting the metric only. I.e. low contract sum but costs heavily loaded in year 5 or whenever after any commission is paid.
Because the government is incapable of structuring incentive schemes that the private sector do all the time?
The same happens in the private sector.
If Tesco can build a custom facility to "negotiate" with suppliers - rooms setup so that a single representative from the supplier is brow beaten by groups of Tesco buyers - why can't the government?
Can't we just poach the Tesco team ?
Or rent them from Tesco?
Another PPI deal ? We'd get rinsed.
Especially if we were negotiating the cost of hiring the Tesco negotiators with the Tesco negotiators.
(There must be an updated Gilbert and Sullivan plot in there somewhere.)
More like a Terry Gilliam plot, Shirley?
Depends on whether you prefer nightmarish visions or jolly musical theatre.
What if I want nightmarish visions as part of (apparently) jolly musical theatre?
I find musical theatre to be nightmarish anyway. People don't burst into song every five sodding minutes.
I used to feel like that. Then I realised what I dislike is the genre of music in a musical. It's not the bursting into song per se, it's the songs they choose to burst into. The hills are alive with the sound of music? They can fuck off.
There was a cartoon musical by Bob Godfrey (animator of Rhubarb and Custard) on the life of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, called 'Great'. Only 30 minutes long, but thoroughly enjoyable. "You'll never get under the Thames, they said; he said 'Just wait and see!; Just give me a rope and a little bit of chain and I'll do it after tea'".
Musicals are always a balancing act between the absurd and the sublime (bit like life, actually). Appetites for both those things vary.
This year is the 50th anniversary of perhaps the greatest musical ever made.
It's just a jump to the left...
Not quite the movie is 50 years old, Rocky Horror's first performance was in 1973.
Got to say the Wikipedia article is incomplete as it misses the fact Richard got the money after being fired from Joseph because Andrew Lloyd Webber didn't like the idea that the Pharoh should be an Elvis impersonator (which is ironic given that is now how it's played).
I saw Joseph in the toon with Joe McElderry as the Pharoah. It wasn’t very good.
Even Shakespeare can be not very good (indeed frequently isn't).
Would Rocky Horror still be remembered without Tim Curry et al ?
Probably not as much as it is now.
Poor Tim Curry, he’s had his health issues. Saw an interview with him on YouTube. He’s not bitter at all.
I saw Macbeth with Patrick Stewart it was pretty good.
I bought all the BBC Shakespeare plays on DVD to watch one a day. Not got round to it yet. But I will.
Yes, I listened to his interview too. He did a great King Charles impression, and was pretty funny about Trump.
One of the good guys.
Shame his ad lib got cut from Muppet Treasure Island.
Mobility cars: can the government not just put out a tender process for car manufacturers that meet a range of mobility requirements and create a short-list of [5] cars which are eligible to be purchased under Mobility and at an agreed price centrally negotiated by the government?
Use government purchasing power to our advantage to reduce costs.
We have an ex-motability adapted Peugeot Partner van that has a ramp and wheelchair clamps for carting elderly parents around. Privately purchased, of course.
It has a really nasty automatic gearbox and you really wouldn't want to use it for very much other than its intended purpose.
That's what I think of as a mobility vehicle. Not a flash BMW.
Yeah 'cos disabled people should know their place. And it's not in the sort of cars nice people like us drive around in.
Honestly, the sheer smallmindedness being exhibited on this place is depressing.
KNOW THIS:
Motability leasers give up a benefit which is rightly theirs, plus they often pay a one-off non-refundable deposit, to lease a car. How dare they expect that to be like normal cars that normal people drive around in?
Why so generous @Flatlander? - 5 car options is far too much. Just go back to one model like the Invacar so that we can all distiguish disabled drivers clearly.
I earn a very good salary and have never bought a car newer than than 7-years old.
The average age of cars in the UK is 9-years old.
The idea that all "normal" people drive around in news cars is laughable.
It's a choice. I earn a much better salary than my neighbours but don't have a new BMW like they do. But they never go on holiday, don't eat out. I also really enjoy looking at my ISA balance.
I don't know why disabled people should be restricted to old cars, particularly when they depend on them so much and often don't have as many options for spending their cash. I think Ben's posts have been perfectly reasonable.
I agree it's a choice - I could have prioritised a new car but chose not to.
The issue is the mobility scheme only gives the subsidy where people buy new cars. And with the tax exemption proportional to the car cost, the monetary discount of the scheme encourages more expensive, newer cars.
No it doesn't it allows richer people who qualify for PIP to potentially get slightly better cars than they otherwise might but to do that BMW will be deducting an awful large amount off the list price to so put the i4 into the lease model. Because £8000 + PIP doesn't cover the £35,000 difference between £60,000 new and £20,000 at 3 years old.
Which tells me that BMW are knocking an awful lot off the car to sell a few to Motobility..
As for leasing second hand cars - rather you than me why would you take the maintenance risk on a vehicle you don't own..
They’re also not paying £10k in VAT on the £60k list price, which makes a massive difference to the lease cost.
Car used for disabled people to get around - it's VAT exempt in a way that would be utterly insane to remove politically..
Do we have any stats on the average list price of a motability car?
What would that tell you - remember Motobility cars are often models / versions that the manufacturer wants to shift excess stock of..
Mobility cars: can the government not just put out a tender process for car manufacturers that meet a range of mobility requirements and create a short-list of [5] cars which are eligible to be purchased under Mobility and at an agreed price centrally negotiated by the government?
Use government purchasing power to our advantage to reduce costs.
We have an ex-motability adapted Peugeot Partner van that has a ramp and wheelchair clamps for carting elderly parents around. Privately purchased, of course.
It has a really nasty automatic gearbox and you really wouldn't want to use it for very much other than its intended purpose.
That's what I think of as a mobility vehicle. Not a flash BMW.
Yeah 'cos disabled people should know their place. And it's not in the sort of cars nice people like us drive around in.
Honestly, the sheer smallmindedness being exhibited on this place is depressing.
KNOW THIS:
Motability leasers give up a benefit which is rightly theirs, plus they often pay a one-off non-refundable deposit, to lease a car. How dare they expect that to be like normal cars that normal people drive around in?
Why so generous @Flatlander? - 5 car options is far too much. Just go back to one model like the Invacar so that we can all distiguish disabled drivers clearly.
I earn a very good salary and have never bought a car newer than than 7-years old.
The average age of cars in the UK is 9-years old.
The idea that all "normal" people drive around in news cars is laughable.
It's a choice. I earn a much better salary than my neighbours but don't have a new BMW like they do. But they never go on holiday, don't eat out. I also really enjoy looking at my ISA balance.
I don't know why disabled people should be restricted to old cars, particularly when they depend on them so much and often don't have as many options for spending their cash. I think Ben's posts have been perfectly reasonable.
I agree it's a choice - I could have prioritised a new car but chose not to.
The issue is the mobility scheme only gives the subsidy where people buy new cars. And with the tax exemption proportional to the car cost, the monetary discount of the scheme encourages more expensive, newer cars.
No it doesn't it allows richer people who qualify for PIP to potentially get slightly better cars than they otherwise might but to do that BMW will be deducting an awful large amount off the list price to so put the i4 into the lease model. Because £8000 + PIP doesn't cover the £35,000 difference between £60,000 new and £20,000 at 3 years old.
Which tells me that BMW are knocking an awful lot off the car to sell a few to Motobility..
As for leasing second hand cars - rather you than me why would you take the maintenance risk on a vehicle you don't own..
They’re also not paying £10k in VAT on the £60k list price, which makes a massive difference to the lease cost.
Car used for disabled people to get around - it's VAT exempt in a way that would be utterly insane to remove politically..
Surely switching to a grant system instead is progressive and more effective?
You like granting a Personal Independence Payment and then letting the recipients exercise some independence on how they spend it?
Yes, I do. The VAT exemption essentially makes the payment bigger the richer the person is. I don't understand why that is appropriate. I don't then care if they spend it on an expensive car, a 2nd hand car, taxis or trains.
I've said earlier that I'd accept it if the VAT exemption went. Politically tricky but overall probably the right thing to do.
Why has growth stalled? Because the people we call 'wealth creators' are generally nothing of the sort; they are in fact usually simply 'wealth accumulators'.
I think there are choices that have been made, or not made, in the past in Britain that have encouraged rentier capitalists at the expense of innovative capitalists.
It's difficult for Britain to change this because the country lived off the rent from the capital acquired from Empire for a long time. But change it must.
Mobility cars: can the government not just put out a tender process for car manufacturers that meet a range of mobility requirements and create a short-list of [5] cars which are eligible to be purchased under Mobility and at an agreed price centrally negotiated by the government?
Use government purchasing power to our advantage to reduce costs.
That would require joined up thinking.
When I was a kid, back in the 80s, Thatcher sanctioned the use of generic drugs in the NHS and pushed for more block buyings. There was a bizarre reaction to this. One doctor, on Radio 4, declaimed that "generics are useless".
I asked my father, whose work in medical ethics was extensive what that meant - if the chemical was identical, surely....
My father explained that the generics were useless. At getting freebies from the manufacturers. Conferences at holiday resorts etc.
Generics can genuinely be less effective if the pharmaceutics is different. Simply having the same active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) isn't always enough. But in general, yes, generics do the job.
Patients can be a challenge though. Many do not like 'change' and so a different packet, from a different manufacturer and heaven forfend a different colour pill can see them traipsing back to the pharmacy for the 'proper' ones.
If is just the same api it’s not a generic. It needs to have the same Tmax, AUC, dispersion profile, etc. to be a generic
The National Audit Office has flagged serious accounting problems in the Ministry of Defence’s finances, saying missing records and unreported costs mean its latest accounts cannot be fully relied upon. https://x.com/UKDefJournal/status/1985701427432264013
Mobility cars: can the government not just put out a tender process for car manufacturers that meet a range of mobility requirements and create a short-list of [5] cars which are eligible to be purchased under Mobility and at an agreed price centrally negotiated by the government?
Use government purchasing power to our advantage to reduce costs.
We have an ex-motability adapted Peugeot Partner van that has a ramp and wheelchair clamps for carting elderly parents around. Privately purchased, of course.
It has a really nasty automatic gearbox and you really wouldn't want to use it for very much other than its intended purpose.
That's what I think of as a mobility vehicle. Not a flash BMW.
Yeah 'cos disabled people should know their place. And it's not in the sort of cars nice people like us drive around in.
Honestly, the sheer smallmindedness being exhibited on this place is depressing.
KNOW THIS:
Motability leasers give up a benefit which is rightly theirs, plus they often pay a one-off non-refundable deposit, to lease a car. How dare they expect that to be like normal cars that normal people drive around in?
Why so generous @Flatlander? - 5 car options is far too much. Just go back to one model like the Invacar so that we can all distiguish disabled drivers clearly.
I earn a very good salary and have never bought a car newer than than 7-years old.
The average age of cars in the UK is 9-years old.
The idea that all "normal" people drive around in news cars is laughable.
It's a choice. I earn a much better salary than my neighbours but don't have a new BMW like they do. But they never go on holiday, don't eat out. I also really enjoy looking at my ISA balance.
I don't know why disabled people should be restricted to old cars, particularly when they depend on them so much and often don't have as many options for spending their cash. I think Ben's posts have been perfectly reasonable.
I agree it's a choice - I could have prioritised a new car but chose not to.
The issue is the mobility scheme only gives the subsidy where people buy new cars. And with the tax exemption proportional to the car cost, the monetary discount of the scheme encourages more expensive, newer cars.
No it doesn't it allows richer people who qualify for PIP to potentially get slightly better cars than they otherwise might but to do that BMW will be deducting an awful large amount off the list price to so put the i4 into the lease model. Because £8000 + PIP doesn't cover the £35,000 difference between £60,000 new and £20,000 at 3 years old.
Which tells me that BMW are knocking an awful lot off the car to sell a few to Motobility..
As for leasing second hand cars - rather you than me why would you take the maintenance risk on a vehicle you don't own..
They’re also not paying £10k in VAT on the £60k list price, which makes a massive difference to the lease cost.
Car used for disabled people to get around - it's VAT exempt in a way that would be utterly insane to remove politically..
Do we have any stats on the average list price of a motability car?
What would that tell you - remember Motobility cars are often models / versions that the manufacturer wants to shift excess stock of..
OK, the average lease price then...
The average lease price is probably close to £333pm which is the amount of PIP a leaser gives up. The sort of cars being complained about on here (Audi, BMW etc) will cost a lot more than that because they require substantial one-off up-front payments but the majority are little Kias and Toyotas with zero up-front... because most cant afford an up-front payment anyway.
Why has growth stalled? Because the people we call 'wealth creators' are generally nothing of the sort; they are in fact usually simply 'wealth accumulators'.
One of my first jobs was an analyst at an acquisitive plc backed company. My task was to identify 'idiot sons'. People who had an idea, made a packet from exploiting it, but didn't have someone to pass it down to. This was either due to the next generation not wanting to follow in their footsteps, or being too dense, or the wealth would be wasted. Good businesses or good IP were picked up and run professionally. Rich people don't make good entrepreneurs. Poor people do.
Know millionaires with wealth between £10mn and £100mn. 90% of them want to preserve what they have and the other 10% will go onto trying to repeat their initial success. Thinking that all millionaires should be feted is just stupid.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
You are assuming that wealth means physical possessions of substantial size.
I have 100k+ tracks of music on my NAS box. Which would have required a moderate sized building to house, until quite recently.
Fair enough but let's be honest most possessions do take up space.
That's the great thing about electronics, they've shrunk a whole set of things. I would need bookshelves along every wall in my house if the books on my Kindle were physically in the house..
All those data centres will take up space and power though.
Kindle all the books are on the kindle.
My 40,000 tracks of music and 2000+ TV shows on 5 3.5" disks on a server in the corner of my office...
I still say it's excess 'stuff' - I can't believe @Malmesbury will ever listen to all his 100k+ of tracks.
But each to their own - I've got more wine stored away than I'm likely to drink :-(
Mobility cars: can the government not just put out a tender process for car manufacturers that meet a range of mobility requirements and create a short-list of [5] cars which are eligible to be purchased under Mobility and at an agreed price centrally negotiated by the government?
Use government purchasing power to our advantage to reduce costs.
That would require joined up thinking.
When I was a kid, back in the 80s, Thatcher sanctioned the use of generic drugs in the NHS and pushed for more block buyings. There was a bizarre reaction to this. One doctor, on Radio 4, declaimed that "generics are useless".
I asked my father, whose work in medical ethics was extensive what that meant - if the chemical was identical, surely....
My father explained that the generics were useless. At getting freebies from the manufacturers. Conferences at holiday resorts etc.
Just reading Empire of Pain at present. TLDR - "Who gives a shit about patients if we are making megabucks?"
FWIW the Sacklers have been despised in the industry for 20 years
Mobility cars: can the government not just put out a tender process for car manufacturers that meet a range of mobility requirements and create a short-list of [5] cars which are eligible to be purchased under Mobility and at an agreed price centrally negotiated by the government?
Use government purchasing power to our advantage to reduce costs.
We have an ex-motability adapted Peugeot Partner van that has a ramp and wheelchair clamps for carting elderly parents around. Privately purchased, of course.
It has a really nasty automatic gearbox and you really wouldn't want to use it for very much other than its intended purpose.
That's what I think of as a mobility vehicle. Not a flash BMW.
Yeah 'cos disabled people should know their place. And it's not in the sort of cars nice people like us drive around in.
Honestly, the sheer smallmindedness being exhibited on this place is depressing.
KNOW THIS:
Motability leasers give up a benefit which is rightly theirs, plus they often pay a one-off non-refundable deposit, to lease a car. How dare they expect that to be like normal cars that normal people drive around in?
Why so generous @Flatlander? - 5 car options is far too much. Just go back to one model like the Invacar so that we can all distiguish disabled drivers clearly.
I earn a very good salary and have never bought a car newer than than 7-years old.
The average age of cars in the UK is 9-years old.
The idea that all "normal" people drive around in news cars is laughable.
It's a choice. I earn a much better salary than my neighbours but don't have a new BMW like they do. But they never go on holiday, don't eat out. I also really enjoy looking at my ISA balance.
I don't know why disabled people should be restricted to old cars, particularly when they depend on them so much and often don't have as many options for spending their cash. I think Ben's posts have been perfectly reasonable.
I agree it's a choice - I could have prioritised a new car but chose not to.
The issue is the mobility scheme only gives the subsidy where people buy new cars. And with the tax exemption proportional to the car cost, the monetary discount of the scheme encourages more expensive, newer cars.
It is therefore creating a perverse incentive. We're brainstorming more sensible ways to avoid these incentives.
Another alternative: give a monetary car credit (broadly equivalent to the funding/subsidy under the current scheme) that can be spent on new and older cars alike from approved dealers. That would mean people under the scheme have the same incentives as ordinary people - they can choose to spend more on a nice, new car; or get an older, still perfectly good car for free.
Just as I choose to buy an older car to save money, while my next door neighbour (who I don't think earns any more) has a brand new EV car. Disabled people can then have the same choice.
Just to correct a fundamental error in your post. Motability is a lease scheme, not a purchase scheme. Sure you can make them an offer to purchase the car at the end of the lease at a commercial rate but the PIP you hand over and any up front deposit you pay, does not buy you a car new or otherwise.
You can buy many older cars outright for the same cost as the implied depreciation in leasing a new car for 5 years. From a taxpayer's perspective they should be treated equivalently.
Mobility cars: can the government not just put out a tender process for car manufacturers that meet a range of mobility requirements and create a short-list of [5] cars which are eligible to be purchased under Mobility and at an agreed price centrally negotiated by the government?
Use government purchasing power to our advantage to reduce costs.
That would require joined up thinking.
When I was a kid, back in the 80s, Thatcher sanctioned the use of generic drugs in the NHS and pushed for more block buyings. There was a bizarre reaction to this. One doctor, on Radio 4, declaimed that "generics are useless".
I asked my father, whose work in medical ethics was extensive what that meant - if the chemical was identical, surely....
My father explained that the generics were useless. At getting freebies from the manufacturers. Conferences at holiday resorts etc.
Just reading Empire of Pain at present. TLDR - "Who gives a shit about patients if we are making megabucks?"
FWIW the Sacklers have been despised in the industry for 20 years
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
You are assuming that wealth means physical possessions of substantial size.
I have 100k+ tracks of music on my NAS box. Which would have required a moderate sized building to house, until quite recently.
Fair enough but let's be honest most possessions do take up space.
That's the great thing about electronics, they've shrunk a whole set of things. I would need bookshelves along every wall in my house if the books on my Kindle were physically in the house..
All those data centres will take up space and power though.
Kindle all the books are on the kindle.
My 40,000 tracks of music and 2000+ TV shows on 5 3.5" disks on a server in the corner of my office...
I still say it's excess 'stuff' - I can't believe @Malmesbury will ever listen to all his 100k+ of tracks.
But each to their own - I've got more wine stored away than I'm likely to drink :-(
Can I help you with that?
Last thing you want is for it to pass it's best...
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
I keep coming back to the AI/robot revolution. I know its sci-fi but in the Star Trek universe no-one has to work, but they can choose to do so. Its some kind of idyllic paradise than we never really see the details of. But if robots in particular become better at doing most manual jobs, added to AI meaning that you can tell 'Home-serve 1000' to do the dishes and they get done, then what will happen to society?
And were is the society of endless leisure? Who pays for it? Who gets what? At the moment we live in a capitalist world, and the rules are easy to understand (if not always fair). You get a job that pays money so you can buy stuff. The state and society looks after those that that doesn't apply to as best it can (give or take).
I know Sean T, once of this parish, was a bit of a Cassandra, but he is right that there are some pretty big shifts coming and not just for travel writers.
There was a video of a robot trying to load a dishwasher last week - got to say paying a person to do it seems a sensible use of a few quid given the cost of the robot and how easy it was for it to get confused.
It has now been revealed to have been "faked". It was teleoperated as I suggested at the time. The only thing it can do is navigate itself (quite slowly) around the house ( again as I suggested at the time) . Those putting deposited down is all on the condition that the company are promising to solve this sometime in 2026. Which knowing the academic literature ain't happening. Nobody has shown in the literature anything like these capabilities. At best robot arms can be taught a task and now can cope with parts being misplaced or misaligned some what, but nowhere near wandering around the environment picking up random items that are brittle in any location and then placing them in difficult compartments. i.e. loading dishwashers.
In robotics, there hasn't any been any "ChatGPT moment" yet. Nothing close. Navigation has definitely improved significantly as has computer vision (that has had a ChatGPT-esque moment), but all these very fine motor skills aren't solved and that's before you get to solving the AI level operations to realise what to do with various household items.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
You are assuming that wealth means physical possessions of substantial size.
I have 100k+ tracks of music on my NAS box. Which would have required a moderate sized building to house, until quite recently.
Fair enough but let's be honest most possessions do take up space.
That's the great thing about electronics, they've shrunk a whole set of things. I would need bookshelves along every wall in my house if the books on my Kindle were physically in the house..
All those data centres will take up space and power though.
Kindle all the books are on the kindle.
My 40,000 tracks of music and 2000+ TV shows on 5 3.5" disks on a server in the corner of my office...
I still say it's excess 'stuff' - I can't believe @Malmesbury will ever listen to all his 100k+ of tracks.
But each to their own - I've got more wine stored away than I'm likely to drink :-(
Can I help you with that?
I heard the other day that all these data centres holding the tens of thousands of emails we’ve all got floating about in our inbox are actually using a significant quantity of energy, it could’ve been four or 5% of the global budget? I find that hard to believe but I don’t doubt that if everybody deleted the contents of their inbox and all their old emails, we could have cheaper electricity
Dick Cheney: “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him” https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1985688640199008413
Was the recent chatter of some new side deal between Mauritius and China the last straw ?
No - it was the Tory amendment requiring the government to consult the Chagossians. They were worried that the LibDems would back it, so paused the bill instead
Why has growth stalled? Because the people we call 'wealth creators' are generally nothing of the sort; they are in fact usually simply 'wealth accumulators'.
That is far too simplistic take and not the core issue behind productivity issues.
But one difference between the UK and the US, the mindset of putting your capital to work particularly risky bets is far more common. If you make money, not everybody, but lots of US people are instantly looking for how they deploy capital into the next big thing, even if profitability isnt in sight anytime soon. They are willing to bet, often big, on things that won't show a profit anytime soon. You can get £5-10 million out of these people over a lunch.
Try getting £5, let along £5 million out of UK individuals and instiututions who have money. They want to know in how many days in the future is the business going to be profitable, etc, they only want the sure thing. They would never touch a load of these US companies that are moonshots.
Deepmind being the obviously one that needed the US money, and more recently, Synthesia, all the big money they have got to turn it into a $3bn business is from the US. Two UK companies that have and most likely will end up US owned.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
Using your data, growth in the 2000s was what? 2.5%. It hasn't been since Brexit, granted COVID upset the apple cart. Economists have suggested there has been a marked decline in economic activity as a result of Brexit. If Brexit was ever going to be a fantastic economic opportunity that hasn't been delivered. Didn't you acknowledge that there would be an economic cost to Brexit, but you considered what you felt you got in terms of improved sovereignty was worth that cost? Now I appreciated your candour at the time, but I think it disingenuous to suggest one of the current crosses we have to bear isn't long Brexit.
Anyway I am about to fight my way back to the M1 through Heanor's flags of St George.
Growth rates have really slowed down across Western economies (and one would include Japan in that category), since the start of the century.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
Using your data, growth in the 2000s was what? 2.5%. It hasn't been since Brexit, granted COVID upset the apple cart. Economists have suggested there has been a marked decline in economic activity as a result of Brexit. If Brexit was ever going to be a fantastic economic opportunity that hasn't been delivered. Didn't you acknowledge that there would be an economic cost to Brexit, but you considered what you felt you got in terms of improved sovereignty was worth that cost? Now I appreciated your candour at the time, but I think it disingenuous to suggest one of the current crosses we have to bear isn't long Brexit.
Anyway I am about to fight my way back to the M1 through Heanor's flags of St George.
Growth rates have really slowed down across Western economies (and one would include Japan in that category), since the start of the century.
In the UK we dodged the dotcom bust, but about 2004 the significant growth rates started to disappear and has never really returned at the rates we saw for any length of time. 2008 crash, austerity, brexit, covid, certainly not helped, but there is more fundamental issues.
One idea I have seen raised is that a mistake that Labour and Tories made in the 2008-2012 period was the focus on rather than lays off and companies going bust, big push on keeping more people employed and keeping wages stagnant. On one hand that is perfectly understandable, redundancy is terrible on an individual level. But it also means lots of companies didn't go under or really forced to attack how to become much more efficient. Furlough being another good example of this, that definitely went on far too long and ghost companies / ghost jobs.
Why has growth stalled? Because the people we call 'wealth creators' are generally nothing of the sort; they are in fact usually simply 'wealth accumulators'.
That is far too simplistic take and not the core issue behind productivity issues.
But one difference between the UK and the US, the mindset of putting your capital to work particularly risky bets is far more common. If you make money, not everybody, but lots of US people are instantly looking for how they deploy capital into the next big thing, even if profitability isnt in sight anytime soon. They are willing to bet, often big, on things that won't show a profit anytime soon. You can get £5-10 million out of these people over a lunch.
Try getting £5, let along £5 million out of UK individuals and instiututions who have money. They want to know in how many days in the future is the business going to be profitable, etc, they only want the sure thing. They would never touch a load of these US companies that are moonshots.
Deepmind being the obviously one that needed the US money, and more recently, Synthesia, all the big money they have got to turn it into a $3bn business is from the US. Two UK companies that have and most likely will end up US owned.
And, even in the USA, the proceeds of growth are largely captured by a very small proportion of the population.
The gap in living standards between the median US worker and the median UK worker is not great.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
You are assuming that wealth means physical possessions of substantial size.
I have 100k+ tracks of music on my NAS box. Which would have required a moderate sized building to house, until quite recently.
Do you own them? Or only lease them till you die? (It's a serious point ... not trying to get at you. We're still in the CD era ourselves.)
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
Using your data, growth in the 2000s was what? 2.5%. It hasn't been since Brexit, granted COVID upset the apple cart. Economists have suggested there has been a marked decline in economic activity as a result of Brexit. If Brexit was ever going to be a fantastic economic opportunity that hasn't been delivered. Didn't you acknowledge that there would be an economic cost to Brexit, but you considered what you felt you got in terms of improved sovereignty was worth that cost? Now I appreciated your candour at the time, but I think it disingenuous to suggest one of the current crosses we have to bear isn't long Brexit.
Anyway I am about to fight my way back to the M1 through Heanor's flags of St George.
Growth rates have really slowed down across Western economies (and one would include Japan in that category), since the start of the century.
Why has growth stalled? Because the people we call 'wealth creators' are generally nothing of the sort; they are in fact usually simply 'wealth accumulators'.
I think there are choices that have been made, or not made, in the past in Britain that have encouraged rentier capitalists at the expense of innovative capitalists.
It's difficult for Britain to change this because the country lived off the rent from the capital acquired from Empire for a long time. But change it must.
Not really. The issue was transition from innovation in the late 19th century, to Too Big To Fail businesses run by accountants and lawyers. See the gun manufacturers telling Jellicoe that they wouldn’t change from wire wound to built up guns. That is, the leading manufacturers of the day said no to the British Government. Because it would have required change and investment.
By the 1950s this consolidation process had taken over whole industries.
When you go round the industrial museums in the former industrial areas, it is fascinating to see how ancient and archaic the machinery was - even in 1950, quite a lot was half a century old.
Look at the terror with which investing in production and physical technology is held today.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
You are assuming that wealth means physical possessions of substantial size.
I have 100k+ tracks of music on my NAS box. Which would have required a moderate sized building to house, until quite recently.
Fair enough but let's be honest most possessions do take up space.
That's the great thing about electronics, they've shrunk a whole set of things. I would need bookshelves along every wall in my house if the books on my Kindle were physically in the house..
All those data centres will take up space and power though.
Kindle all the books are on the kindle.
My 40,000 tracks of music and 2000+ TV shows on 5 3.5" disks on a server in the corner of my office...
I still say it's excess 'stuff' - I can't believe @Malmesbury will ever listen to all his 100k+ of tracks.
But each to their own - I've got more wine stored away than I'm likely to drink :-(
Me too. There are 3 or 4 bottles in a kitchen cupboard.
Why has growth stalled? Because the people we call 'wealth creators' are generally nothing of the sort; they are in fact usually simply 'wealth accumulators'.
That is far too simplistic take and not the core issue behind productivity issues.
But one difference between the UK and the US, the mindset of putting your capital to work particularly risky bets is far more common. If you make money, not everybody, but lots of US people are instantly looking for how they deploy capital into the next big thing, even if profitability isnt in sight anytime soon. They are willing to bet, often big, on things that won't show a profit anytime soon. You can get £5-10 million out of these people over a lunch.
Try getting £5, let along £5 million out of UK individuals and instiututions who have money. They want to know in how many days in the future is the business going to be profitable, etc, they only want the sure thing. They would never touch a load of these US companies that are moonshots.
Deepmind being the obviously one that needed the US money, and more recently, Synthesia, all the big money they have got to turn it into a $3bn business is from the US. Two UK companies that have and most likely will end up US owned.
And, even in the USA, the proceeds of growth are largely captured by a very small proportion of the population.
The gap in living standards between the median US worker and the median UK worker is not great.
Oh that's certainly true. The US has always been a country of two extremes, and that has defnitely got worse with the hollowing out of things like the well paid blue collar jobs in the rust belt mining, steel making, car making etc. But the willingness to deploy capital for risky investment has IMO lead to this much higher growth rate on paper despite shall we generously say very poor political leadership for the past 10+ years. They keep building these new big companies in new sectors time after time.
Dick Cheney: “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him” https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1985688640199008413
...and now he's dead. Coincidence or conspiracy? And he was only 84!
Why has growth stalled? Because the people we call 'wealth creators' are generally nothing of the sort; they are in fact usually simply 'wealth accumulators'.
That is far too simplistic take and not the core issue behind productivity issues.
But one difference between the UK and the US, the mindset of putting your capital to work particularly risky bets is far more common. If you make money, not everybody, but lots of US people are instantly looking for how they deploy capital into the next big thing, even if profitability isnt in sight anytime soon. They are willing to bet, often big, on things that won't show a profit anytime soon. You can get £5-10 million out of these people over a lunch.
Try getting £5, let along £5 million out of UK individuals and instiututions who have money. They want to know in how many days in the future is the business going to be profitable, etc, they only want the sure thing. They would never touch a load of these US companies that are moonshots.
Deepmind being the obviously one that needed the US money, and more recently, Synthesia, all the big money they have got to turn it into a $3bn business is from the US. Two UK companies that have and most likely will end up US owned.
It’s also about portfolios. Many Americans want to invest in the classic style - a big chunk of zero risk, some moderate risk and some Mad Money.
In the U.K. people seem to want Mad Money returns and zero risk.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
You are assuming that wealth means physical possessions of substantial size.
I have 100k+ tracks of music on my NAS box. Which would have required a moderate sized building to house, until quite recently.
Fair enough but let's be honest most possessions do take up space.
That's the great thing about electronics, they've shrunk a whole set of things. I would need bookshelves along every wall in my house if the books on my Kindle were physically in the house..
All those data centres will take up space and power though.
Kindle all the books are on the kindle.
My 40,000 tracks of music and 2000+ TV shows on 5 3.5" disks on a server in the corner of my office...
I still say it's excess 'stuff' - I can't believe @Malmesbury will ever listen to all his 100k+ of tracks.
But each to their own - I've got more wine stored away than I'm likely to drink :-(
Can I help you with that?
I heard the other day that all these data centres holding the tens of thousands of emails we’ve all got floating about in our inbox are actually using a significant quantity of energy, it could’ve been four or 5% of the global budget? I find that hard to believe but I don’t doubt that if everybody deleted the contents of their inbox and all their old emails, we could have cheaper electricity
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
It’s because “Chief contract negotiator” is a CL6 (sic) position, paying from £45,268 in year 1, to £53,826 in Year 8.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other side is making 1% of the contract value, and attracts people who want to make £10m a year.
Agreed. But you won’t fix that with cuts
Oh I’d be all in favour of central government having a crack team of contract negotiators on unlimited commission based on saving public money.
Let me at it!
Carbon Capture Schemes? gone.
Nuclear power projects - persuade me why they shouldn't be gone....
Carbon capture was always a waste of money - added cost zero benefit
Nuclear power - we shouldn’t be building big ones except the Korean design. Small modular ones we should be investing in to get the factories working so we start exporting them
Carbon capture is a designed to mitigate the amount of CO2 that is released. If you are determined that global temps need to be kept below 'x' degrees then carbon capture might be used as part of the process, even if it is hideously expensive.
Except that very few countries will be doing it, and the cost/benefit analysis is dreadful compared with other interventions.
I don't disagree - it wouldn't be my choice. I'd be going hell for leather for renewables (tidal, wind, solar, battery storage, huge storage reservoirs etc).
The one good use for carbon capture and storage would be if we used excess renewable electricity to create methane (via electrolysis and the Sabatier process) and then captured the carbon when burning that gas. You'd then have a negative carbon process to balance things like the warming from jet plane contrails.
But we're a long way from that, and instead they're talking about using CCS for production of hydrogen from fossil methane, which is absurd.
I'm trying to find the link - there was an interesting startup in the US that was looking at Solar -> Methane. But without battery storage or even converter electronics - just feed the power into the process from the panels. So it would run when there was power. The idea was simplicity and lower costs.....
We also already have a lot of infrastructure for methane distribution and storage.
Why has growth stalled? Because the people we call 'wealth creators' are generally nothing of the sort; they are in fact usually simply 'wealth accumulators'.
That is far too simplistic take and not the core issue behind productivity issues.
But one difference between the UK and the US, the mindset of putting your capital to work particularly risky bets is far more common. If you make money, not everybody, but lots of US people are instantly looking for how they deploy capital into the next big thing, even if profitability isnt in sight anytime soon. They are willing to bet, often big, on things that won't show a profit anytime soon. You can get £5-10 million out of these people over a lunch.
Try getting £5, let along £5 million out of UK individuals and instiututions who have money. They want to know in how many days in the future is the business going to be profitable, etc, they only want the sure thing. They would never touch a load of these US companies that are moonshots.
Deepmind being the obviously one that needed the US money, and more recently, Synthesia, all the big money they have got to turn it into a $3bn business is from the US. Two UK companies that have and most likely will end up US owned.
It’s also about portfolios. Many Americans want to invest in the classic style - a big chunk of zero risk, some moderate risk and some Mad Money.
In the U.K. people seem to want Mad Money returns and zero risk.
The UK is also very heavy on the buy houses, buy another one, and another and now i have 74 houses to rent out....large amounts of people's wealth is tied up in property. And its also why government are so shit scared to do too much as they know just how much of the voter base are exposed.
That is something the last government and this have made less attractive in recent years, where in combination with higher interest rates, has made that less of an option.
Mobility cars: can the government not just put out a tender process for car manufacturers that meet a range of mobility requirements and create a short-list of [5] cars which are eligible to be purchased under Mobility and at an agreed price centrally negotiated by the government?
Use government purchasing power to our advantage to reduce costs.
We have an ex-motability adapted Peugeot Partner van that has a ramp and wheelchair clamps for carting elderly parents around. Privately purchased, of course.
It has a really nasty automatic gearbox and you really wouldn't want to use it for very much other than its intended purpose.
That's what I think of as a mobility vehicle. Not a flash BMW.
Yeah 'cos disabled people should know their place. And it's not in the sort of cars nice people like us drive around in.
Honestly, the sheer smallmindedness being exhibited on this place is depressing.
KNOW THIS:
Motability leasers give up a benefit which is rightly theirs, plus they often pay a one-off non-refundable deposit, to lease a car. How dare they expect that to be like normal cars that normal people drive around in?
Why so generous @Flatlander? - 5 car options is far too much. Just go back to one model like the Invacar so that we can all distiguish disabled drivers clearly.
I earn a very good salary and have never bought a car newer than than 7-years old.
The average age of cars in the UK is 9-years old.
The idea that all "normal" people drive around in news cars is laughable.
It's a choice. I earn a much better salary than my neighbours but don't have a new BMW like they do. But they never go on holiday, don't eat out. I also really enjoy looking at my ISA balance.
I don't know why disabled people should be restricted to old cars, particularly when they depend on them so much and often don't have as many options for spending their cash. I think Ben's posts have been perfectly reasonable.
I agree it's a choice - I could have prioritised a new car but chose not to.
The issue is the mobility scheme only gives the subsidy where people buy new cars. And with the tax exemption proportional to the car cost, the monetary discount of the scheme encourages more expensive, newer cars.
No it doesn't it allows richer people who qualify for PIP to potentially get slightly better cars than they otherwise might but to do that BMW will be deducting an awful large amount off the list price to so put the i4 into the lease model. Because £8000 + PIP doesn't cover the £35,000 difference between £60,000 new and £20,000 at 3 years old.
Which tells me that BMW are knocking an awful lot off the car to sell a few to Motobility..
As for leasing second hand cars - rather you than me why would you take the maintenance risk on a vehicle you don't own..
They’re also not paying £10k in VAT on the £60k list price, which makes a massive difference to the lease cost.
Car used for disabled people to get around - it's VAT exempt in a way that would be utterly insane to remove politically..
Do we have any stats on the average list price of a motability car?
What would that tell you - remember Motobility cars are often models / versions that the manufacturer wants to shift excess stock of..
OK, the average lease price then...
The average lease price is probably close to £333pm which is the amount of PIP a leaser gives up. The sort of cars being complained about on here (Audi, BMW etc) will cost a lot more than that because they require substantial one-off up-front payments but the majority are little Kias and Toyotas with zero up-front... because most cant afford an up-front payment anyway.
I've tried to find the statistics but haven't got very far, although it does seem that 90% of motability cars are unmodified, which I wouldn't have expected. I'm not sure that was the original intention.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
I mean she’s not wrong. We have been living beyond our means for a long time
It’s all talk.
Yet she won’t do anything about reforming the triple lock or tackling her party over the burgeoning welfare bill.
It will be taxing ourselves to prosperity and regulating ourselves to prosperity.
The only growth she’s going to see is in emigration, and if she tries to tax that it will happen straight away and all at once.
So people are going to leave the UK in big numbers because of an exit tax and perhaps move to one of US, Canada, France, Germany, Norway, Spain or Australia that all have similar or stricter exit taxes? Maybe, people are sometimes a bit dim.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. The trouble is the whinging has acquired a life of its own- the Mail is particularly whingey- but the truth is a lot more nuanced.
It is just rich people whinging in an echo chamber. The UK is a premium location, which is why we have such low emigration rates.
Number of people leaving has risen massively. The question that doesn't seem to get answered (I think because the state doesn't record this) is who are these people. Are they people who were immigrants returning home, are they retirees going to Spain, are they highly educated individuals, rich people? Basically what proprotion of the significantly increased levels of emigration do these different types of make up (and many are overlapping e.g. high educated immigrant).
Dont believe the Daily Mail and Telegraph. Emigration is rising slowly not massively, and that is to be expected when you have higher inwards migration, as not all settle permanently. Labour slowly getting to grips with deportations presumably also increases emigration.
513,000 people emigrated in 2024....that is a lot of people leaving per year. 10 years ago it was more like 300k.
Some of them will be part of the studentwave though.
Why has growth stalled? Because the people we call 'wealth creators' are generally nothing of the sort; they are in fact usually simply 'wealth accumulators'.
That is far too simplistic take and not the core issue behind productivity issues.
But one difference between the UK and the US, the mindset of putting your capital to work particularly risky bets is far more common. If you make money, not everybody, but lots of US people are instantly looking for how they deploy capital into the next big thing, even if profitability isnt in sight anytime soon. They are willing to bet, often big, on things that won't show a profit anytime soon. You can get £5-10 million out of these people over a lunch.
Try getting £5, let along £5 million out of UK individuals and instiututions who have money. They want to know in how many days in the future is the business going to be profitable, etc, they only want the sure thing. They would never touch a load of these US companies that are moonshots.
Deepmind being the obviously one that needed the US money, and more recently, Synthesia, all the big money they have got to turn it into a $3bn business is from the US. Two UK companies that have and most likely will end up US owned.
In the UK you don't invest capital in business or equities, you invest in bricks and mortar. For the last half century or so that has been the sensible and correct choice. Not only that but the profits are usually tax free as not subject to CGT.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
I mean she’s not wrong. We have been living beyond our means for a long time
It’s all talk.
Yet she won’t do anything about reforming the triple lock or tackling her party over the burgeoning welfare bill.
It will be taxing ourselves to prosperity and regulating ourselves to prosperity.
The only growth she’s going to see is in emigration, and if she tries to tax that it will happen straight away and all at once.
So people are going to leave the UK in big numbers because of an exit tax and perhaps move to one of US, Canada, France, Germany, Norway, Spain or Australia that all have similar or stricter exit taxes? Maybe, people are sometimes a bit dim.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. The trouble is the whinging has acquired a life of its own- the Mail is particularly whingey- but the truth is a lot more nuanced.
It is just rich people whinging in an echo chamber. The UK is a premium location, which is why we have such low emigration rates.
Number of people leaving has risen massively. The question that doesn't seem to get answered (I think because the state doesn't record this) is who are these people. Are they people who were immigrants returning home, are they retirees going to Spain, are they highly educated individuals, rich people? Basically what proprotion of the significantly increased levels of emigration do these different types of make up (and many are overlapping e.g. high educated immigrant).
I know a bunch of people moving to Milan (non dom) and one wealthy German person moving to Spain because of the inheritance tax changes.
The fact that the Italian government will allow you to negotiate a single year tax rate is a massive benefit. I know quite a lot of people who have taken advantage of that.
Why has growth stalled? Because the people we call 'wealth creators' are generally nothing of the sort; they are in fact usually simply 'wealth accumulators'.
That is far too simplistic take and not the core issue behind productivity issues.
But one difference between the UK and the US, the mindset of putting your capital to work particularly risky bets is far more common. If you make money, not everybody, but lots of US people are instantly looking for how they deploy capital into the next big thing, even if profitability isnt in sight anytime soon. They are willing to bet, often big, on things that won't show a profit anytime soon. You can get £5-10 million out of these people over a lunch.
Try getting £5, let along £5 million out of UK individuals and instiututions who have money. They want to know in how many days in the future is the business going to be profitable, etc, they only want the sure thing. They would never touch a load of these US companies that are moonshots.
Deepmind being the obviously one that needed the US money, and more recently, Synthesia, all the big money they have got to turn it into a $3bn business is from the US. Two UK companies that have and most likely will end up US owned.
In the UK you don't invest capital in business or equities, you invest in bricks and mortar. For the last half century or so that has been the sensible and correct choice. Not only that but the profits are usually tax free as not subject to CGT.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
Using your data, growth in the 2000s was what? 2.5%. It hasn't been since Brexit, granted COVID upset the apple cart. Economists have suggested there has been a marked decline in economic activity as a result of Brexit. If Brexit was ever going to be a fantastic economic opportunity that hasn't been delivered. Didn't you acknowledge that there would be an economic cost to Brexit, but you considered what you felt you got in terms of improved sovereignty was worth that cost? Now I appreciated your candour at the time, but I think it disingenuous to suggest one of the current crosses we have to bear isn't long Brexit.
Anyway I am about to fight my way back to the M1 through Heanor's flags of St George.
Growth rates have really slowed down across Western economies (and one would include Japan in that category), since the start of the century.
In the UK we dodged the dotcom bust, but about 2004 the significant growth rates started to disappear and has never really returned at the rates we saw for any length of time. 2008 crash, austerity, brexit, covid, certainly not helped, but there is more fundamental issues.
One idea I have seen raised is that a mistake that Labour and Tories made in the 2008-2012 period was the focus on rather than lays off and companies going bust, big push on keeping more people employed and keeping wages stagnant. On one hand that is perfectly understandable, redundancy is terrible on an individual level. But it also means lots of companies didn't go under or really forced to attack how to become much more efficient. Furlough being another good example of this, that definitely went on far too long and ghost companies / ghost jobs.
Politicans worried about the reputation given to Thatcher in the ‘80s, where serious structural reforms needed to happen but it was pretty awful for those personally affected by the changes.
As an aside, Meloni in Italy has decided the Online Safety Act was such a good idea, she's going to copy it. So... ladies and gentlemen, should you wish to watch porn in Rome without identifying yourself you'll need a VPN.
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
You are assuming that wealth means physical possessions of substantial size.
I have 100k+ tracks of music on my NAS box. Which would have required a moderate sized building to house, until quite recently.
Fair enough but let's be honest most possessions do take up space.
That's the great thing about electronics, they've shrunk a whole set of things. I would need bookshelves along every wall in my house if the books on my Kindle were physically in the house..
All those data centres will take up space and power though.
Kindle all the books are on the kindle.
My 40,000 tracks of music and 2000+ TV shows on 5 3.5" disks on a server in the corner of my office...
I still say it's excess 'stuff' - I can't believe @Malmesbury will ever listen to all his 100k+ of tracks.
But each to their own - I've got more wine stored away than I'm likely to drink :-(
Me too. There are 3 or 4 bottles in a kitchen cupboard.
As an aside, Meloni in Italy has decided the Online Safety Act was such a good idea, she's going to copy it. So... ladies and gentlemen, should you wish to watch porn in Rome without identifying yourself you'll need a VPN.
Why has growth stalled? Because the people we call 'wealth creators' are generally nothing of the sort; they are in fact usually simply 'wealth accumulators'.
That is far too simplistic take and not the core issue behind productivity issues.
But one difference between the UK and the US, the mindset of putting your capital to work particularly risky bets is far more common. If you make money, not everybody, but lots of US people are instantly looking for how they deploy capital into the next big thing, even if profitability isnt in sight anytime soon. They are willing to bet, often big, on things that won't show a profit anytime soon. You can get £5-10 million out of these people over a lunch.
Try getting £5, let along £5 million out of UK individuals and instiututions who have money. They want to know in how many days in the future is the business going to be profitable, etc, they only want the sure thing. They would never touch a load of these US companies that are moonshots.
Deepmind being the obviously one that needed the US money, and more recently, Synthesia, all the big money they have got to turn it into a $3bn business is from the US. Two UK companies that have and most likely will end up US owned.
It’s also about portfolios. Many Americans want to invest in the classic style - a big chunk of zero risk, some moderate risk and some Mad Money.
In the U.K. people seem to want Mad Money returns and zero risk.
The average Brit doesn't even want that, they want to buy a house and that the value should only ever rise due to unnecessary scarcity. The average Brit only invests in anything productive through some usually lousy pension scheme.
As an aside, Meloni in Italy has decided the Online Safety Act was such a good idea, she's going to copy it. So... ladies and gentlemen, should you wish to watch porn in Rome without identifying yourself you'll need a VPN.
The guys at Nord and Proton must be high fiving.
Never heard it called that before.
Mrs Hand and her five lovely daughters might be the grossest one I've heard.
As an aside, Meloni in Italy has decided the Online Safety Act was such a good idea, she's going to copy it. So... ladies and gentlemen, should you wish to watch porn in Rome without identifying yourself you'll need a VPN.
The guys at Nord and Proton must be high fiving.
Never heard it called that before.
Mrs Hand and her five lovely daughters might be the grossest one I've heard.
As an aside, Meloni in Italy has decided the Online Safety Act was such a good idea, she's going to copy it. So... ladies and gentlemen, should you wish to watch porn in Rome without identifying yourself you'll need a VPN.
The guys at Nord and Proton must be high fiving.
Never heard it called that before.
Mrs Hand and her five lovely daughters might be the grossest one I've heard.
Why has growth stalled? Because the people we call 'wealth creators' are generally nothing of the sort; they are in fact usually simply 'wealth accumulators'.
That is far too simplistic take and not the core issue behind productivity issues.
But one difference between the UK and the US, the mindset of putting your capital to work particularly risky bets is far more common. If you make money, not everybody, but lots of US people are instantly looking for how they deploy capital into the next big thing, even if profitability isnt in sight anytime soon. They are willing to bet, often big, on things that won't show a profit anytime soon. You can get £5-10 million out of these people over a lunch.
Try getting £5, let along £5 million out of UK individuals and instiututions who have money. They want to know in how many days in the future is the business going to be profitable, etc, they only want the sure thing. They would never touch a load of these US companies that are moonshots.
Deepmind being the obviously one that needed the US money, and more recently, Synthesia, all the big money they have got to turn it into a $3bn business is from the US. Two UK companies that have and most likely will end up US owned.
And, even in the USA, the proceeds of growth are largely captured by a very small proportion of the population.
The gap in living standards between the median US worker and the median UK worker is not great.
Oh that's certainly true. The US has always been a country of two extremes, and that has defnitely got worse with the hollowing out of things like the well paid blue collar jobs in the rust belt mining, steel making, car making etc. But the willingness to deploy capital for risky investment has IMO lead to this much higher growth rate on paper despite shall we generously say very poor political leadership for the past 10+ years. They keep building these new big companies in new sectors time after time.
I was quite struck to learn that nominal GDP per head in the US is about 70% higher than here, but the gap in full time median earnings is only 20%. Factor in, how much more expensive health care is, and the gap becomes very small.
In terms of human development indices, the UK overall ranks as equivalent to Vermont.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
It’s because “Chief contract negotiator” is a CL6 (sic) position, paying from £45,268 in year 1, to £53,826 in Year 8.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other side is making 1% of the contract value, and attracts people who want to make £10m a year.
Agreed. But you won’t fix that with cuts
Oh I’d be all in favour of central government having a crack team of contract negotiators on unlimited commission based on saving public money.
Let me at it!
Carbon Capture Schemes? gone.
Nuclear power projects - persuade me why they shouldn't be gone....
Carbon capture was always a waste of money - added cost zero benefit
Nuclear power - we shouldn’t be building big ones except the Korean design. Small modular ones we should be investing in to get the factories working so we start exporting them
Carbon capture is a designed to mitigate the amount of CO2 that is released. If you are determined that global temps need to be kept below 'x' degrees then carbon capture might be used as part of the process, even if it is hideously expensive.
Except that very few countries will be doing it, and the cost/benefit analysis is dreadful compared with other interventions.
I don't disagree - it wouldn't be my choice. I'd be going hell for leather for renewables (tidal, wind, solar, battery storage, huge storage reservoirs etc).
The one good use for carbon capture and storage would be if we used excess renewable electricity to create methane (via electrolysis and the Sabatier process) and then captured the carbon when burning that gas. You'd then have a negative carbon process to balance things like the warming from jet plane contrails.
But we're a long way from that, and instead they're talking about using CCS for production of hydrogen from fossil methane, which is absurd.
I'm trying to find the link - there was an interesting startup in the US that was looking at Solar -> Methane. But without battery storage or even converter electronics - just feed the power into the process from the panels. So it would run when there was power. The idea was simplicity and lower costs.....
We also already have a lot of infrastructure for methane distribution and storage.
Which can be repurposed for hydrogen.
Only if you ignore the safety protocols for hydrogen.
Looking possible that the Democrats might sweep the board today--which means attempts to pervert the 2026 Congressional election will go into hyperdrive.
Why has growth stalled? Because the people we call 'wealth creators' are generally nothing of the sort; they are in fact usually simply 'wealth accumulators'.
That is far too simplistic take and not the core issue behind productivity issues.
But one difference between the UK and the US, the mindset of putting your capital to work particularly risky bets is far more common. If you make money, not everybody, but lots of US people are instantly looking for how they deploy capital into the next big thing, even if profitability isnt in sight anytime soon. They are willing to bet, often big, on things that won't show a profit anytime soon. You can get £5-10 million out of these people over a lunch.
Try getting £5, let along £5 million out of UK individuals and instiututions who have money. They want to know in how many days in the future is the business going to be profitable, etc, they only want the sure thing. They would never touch a load of these US companies that are moonshots.
Deepmind being the obviously one that needed the US money, and more recently, Synthesia, all the big money they have got to turn it into a $3bn business is from the US. Two UK companies that have and most likely will end up US owned.
And, even in the USA, the proceeds of growth are largely captured by a very small proportion of the population.
The gap in living standards between the median US worker and the median UK worker is not great.
Oh that's certainly true. The US has always been a country of two extremes, and that has defnitely got worse with the hollowing out of things like the well paid blue collar jobs in the rust belt mining, steel making, car making etc. But the willingness to deploy capital for risky investment has IMO lead to this much higher growth rate on paper despite shall we generously say very poor political leadership for the past 10+ years. They keep building these new big companies in new sectors time after time.
I was quite struck to learn that nominal GDP per head in the US is about 70% higher than here, but the gap in full time median earnings is only 20%. Factor in, how much more expensive health care is, and the gap becomes very small.
In terms of human development indices, the UK overall ranks as equivalent to Vermont.
The picture is also complicated by taking the US as a whole is a bit like averaging all the stats across the everywhere from here to Turkey. Its a country of massive extremes in every which way.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
It’s because “Chief contract negotiator” is a CL6 (sic) position, paying from £45,268 in year 1, to £53,826 in Year 8.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other side is making 1% of the contract value, and attracts people who want to make £10m a year.
Agreed. But you won’t fix that with cuts
Oh I’d be all in favour of central government having a crack team of contract negotiators on unlimited commission based on saving public money.
Let me at it!
Carbon Capture Schemes? gone.
Nuclear power projects - persuade me why they shouldn't be gone....
Carbon capture was always a waste of money - added cost zero benefit
Nuclear power - we shouldn’t be building big ones except the Korean design. Small modular ones we should be investing in to get the factories working so we start exporting them
Carbon capture is a designed to mitigate the amount of CO2 that is released. If you are determined that global temps need to be kept below 'x' degrees then carbon capture might be used as part of the process, even if it is hideously expensive.
Except that very few countries will be doing it, and the cost/benefit analysis is dreadful compared with other interventions.
I don't disagree - it wouldn't be my choice. I'd be going hell for leather for renewables (tidal, wind, solar, battery storage, huge storage reservoirs etc).
The one good use for carbon capture and storage would be if we used excess renewable electricity to create methane (via electrolysis and the Sabatier process) and then captured the carbon when burning that gas. You'd then have a negative carbon process to balance things like the warming from jet plane contrails.
But we're a long way from that, and instead they're talking about using CCS for production of hydrogen from fossil methane, which is absurd.
I'm trying to find the link - there was an interesting startup in the US that was looking at Solar -> Methane. But without battery storage or even converter electronics - just feed the power into the process from the panels. So it would run when there was power. The idea was simplicity and lower costs.....
We also already have a lot of infrastructure for methane distribution and storage.
Which can be repurposed for hydrogen.
Only if you ignore the safety protocols for hydrogen.
The town gas we had before North Sea gas came on stream was roughly half hydrogen aiui
It seems Reeves is making a statement from no 10 in 5 minutes
Why and how is it right to speak to the nation just 3 weeks before her budget and outside parliament ?
Tax rises are coming.
It will be the fault of
Brexit the Tories Austerity Ukraine conflict
It won’t be the fault of
Rachel Reeves Labour
🥱🥱
And to an extent save for her NI fiasco and claiming in opposition "no new taxes", she'd be right about Austerity, Brexit, Conservative mismanagement of COVID.
Nah.
Go look at the UK growth figures by year. We are in a long term cycle of low growth that far preceeds Brexit. Ignoring the false nuber for the year after Covid as we bounced back, the last time the UK had growth above 4% was 2000. The last year we had growth above 5% was 1988.
You'd be hard pushed to look at the graph and pick out Brexit as an event that affected the medium term growth rate.
I keep coming back to the thought that 5% growth ad infinitum is unsustainable (a thought which is incontrovertible eventually).
What kind of world would it lead to? Would we be drowning in 'stuff'. And/or sitting around with nothing to do?
What we should be focused on imho is not more stuff but better health and wellbeing, more fulfilment. It's one of the reasons why I would be happy to see ever more money spent on healthcare.
You are assuming that wealth means physical possessions of substantial size.
I have 100k+ tracks of music on my NAS box. Which would have required a moderate sized building to house, until quite recently.
Fair enough but let's be honest most possessions do take up space.
That's the great thing about electronics, they've shrunk a whole set of things. I would need bookshelves along every wall in my house if the books on my Kindle were physically in the house..
All those data centres will take up space and power though.
Kindle all the books are on the kindle.
My 40,000 tracks of music and 2000+ TV shows on 5 3.5" disks on a server in the corner of my office...
I still say it's excess 'stuff' - I can't believe @Malmesbury will ever listen to all his 100k+ of tracks.
But each to their own - I've got more wine stored away than I'm likely to drink :-(
Always happy to lend a helping hand to someone who needs it.
Donald Trump or whoever controls his account screaming WE MUST TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER OR WE LOSE ELEVENTY BILLION ELECTIONS doesn't radiate "They don't think any of this matters and they'll just rig the elections" to me IDK.
It seems the country's going to be a lot quieter once all the people supposedly leaving have gone....
We all know Reeves and Starmer should have been honest about raising income tax and perhaps VAT before the election but the shadow cast by 1992 is very long and it would have been manna from heaven for Sunak and Hunt - "Labour will raise your taxes, the Conservatives will cut them" - the social media messages write themselves.
We also know, in the event of their re-election, Hunt would likely have raised taxes as well.
The deficit remains eye watering - no one objects to borrowing for long term capital investment but borrowing to get from one month to the next doesn't work well for individuals or countries. The truth is even if we can bring the deficit and borrowing down we will still be saddled with the annual debt interest payments of £60-70 billion tearing a chunk out of our available expenditure.
The priority for now must be getting the deficit down and while some of the more fanciful ideas on here about slashing civil service headcount by 50% and cutting benefits by the same amount might make some on here feel better, we all know that won't happen under a Labour, Conservative or even Reform Government.
Raising basic rate progressively to 25p, higher rate to nearer 50p and instigating a third higher tax rate is probably where Reeves is going. I'd still be looking at Land Value Taxation or some measure relating to property valuations to replace Stamp Duty and possibly Council Tax. As a small gesture of carrot, I'd put thresholds up by 2x inflation this year and pledge to keep them in line with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
It looks as though online gaming and FOBTs in betting shops will face higher tax but it may be the lobbying by the horse racing and greyhound industries has done enough to stop a significant rise in betting duty. I suspect fuel duty will go up by more than inflation as well.
The biggest problem is the entrenched belief, among the electorate, that increased taxes will simply disappear into the maw of government, without noticeable improvement.
It's fairly clear that much of Government, local and national has lost control of costs. It's Feast-Or-Famine - either there's no money for X or theres billions spent on something that should cost millions.
The migrant hotels farce is a prefect example of this - an avalanche of money for the owners. I don't blame them - times are tough in the hotel business. If someone is offering you a zero risk, unbelievably profitable multi-year contract, you'd be insane not to take it.
We need to start cutting our cloth according to the.... cloth we actually have.
I know that a British Museum catalogue without a logo, a Richard Rogeresque HQ, some abstract sculpture in the foyer and a mission statement, isn't exciting. Not to mention a "dynamic team" for the Board of Directors on 6 figures each for 2 days of work as year.
But if we ditch those things, we might be able to afford a... British Museum catalogue.
People also have very distorted ideas of where the money goes. Migrant hotels and the British Museum are not why public spending is high. The money goes on healthcare and pensions, both of which are going up with an ageing population.
But you see this pattern through government - the hospitals are both falling down and built for prices that are crazy.
My relative who runs a building business looked at the contract to build a school local to me - the price was higher, per square foot than digging luxury basements. Which is the most expensive thing to do in the construction industry. He said that he could do the job, and throw in a basement swimming pool, under the playground and still make 30%.
I can’t understand why contract management is so bad throughout the public sector.
It’s because “Chief contract negotiator” is a CL6 (sic) position, paying from £45,268 in year 1, to £53,826 in Year 8.
Meanwhile, the guy on the other side is making 1% of the contract value, and attracts people who want to make £10m a year.
Agreed. But you won’t fix that with cuts
Oh I’d be all in favour of central government having a crack team of contract negotiators on unlimited commission based on saving public money.
Let me at it!
Carbon Capture Schemes? gone.
Nuclear power projects - persuade me why they shouldn't be gone....
Carbon capture was always a waste of money - added cost zero benefit
Nuclear power - we shouldn’t be building big ones except the Korean design. Small modular ones we should be investing in to get the factories working so we start exporting them
Carbon capture is a designed to mitigate the amount of CO2 that is released. If you are determined that global temps need to be kept below 'x' degrees then carbon capture might be used as part of the process, even if it is hideously expensive.
Except that very few countries will be doing it, and the cost/benefit analysis is dreadful compared with other interventions.
I don't disagree - it wouldn't be my choice. I'd be going hell for leather for renewables (tidal, wind, solar, battery storage, huge storage reservoirs etc).
The one good use for carbon capture and storage would be if we used excess renewable electricity to create methane (via electrolysis and the Sabatier process) and then captured the carbon when burning that gas. You'd then have a negative carbon process to balance things like the warming from jet plane contrails.
But we're a long way from that, and instead they're talking about using CCS for production of hydrogen from fossil methane, which is absurd.
I'm trying to find the link - there was an interesting startup in the US that was looking at Solar -> Methane. But without battery storage or even converter electronics - just feed the power into the process from the panels. So it would run when there was power. The idea was simplicity and lower costs.....
We also already have a lot of infrastructure for methane distribution and storage.
Which can be repurposed for hydrogen.
Only if you ignore the safety protocols for hydrogen.
The town gas we had before North Sea gas came on stream was roughly half hydrogen aiui
A comment made a few times, which ignores 3 critical factors.
1: Half hydrogen is very different to fully hydrogen. Water is one-third hydrogen afterall.
2: Homes were much better ventilated (read: much worse insulated) then.
3: Many more people died then due to gas leaks etc in the home than would happen today, despite points 1 and 2.
Why has growth stalled? Because the people we call 'wealth creators' are generally nothing of the sort; they are in fact usually simply 'wealth accumulators'.
That is far too simplistic take and not the core issue behind productivity issues.
But one difference between the UK and the US, the mindset of putting your capital to work particularly risky bets is far more common. If you make money, not everybody, but lots of US people are instantly looking for how they deploy capital into the next big thing, even if profitability isnt in sight anytime soon. They are willing to bet, often big, on things that won't show a profit anytime soon. You can get £5-10 million out of these people over a lunch.
Try getting £5, let along £5 million out of UK individuals and instiututions who have money. They want to know in how many days in the future is the business going to be profitable, etc, they only want the sure thing. They would never touch a load of these US companies that are moonshots.
Deepmind being the obviously one that needed the US money, and more recently, Synthesia, all the big money they have got to turn it into a $3bn business is from the US. Two UK companies that have and most likely will end up US owned.
And, even in the USA, the proceeds of growth are largely captured by a very small proportion of the population.
The gap in living standards between the median US worker and the median UK worker is not great.
Oh that's certainly true. The US has always been a country of two extremes, and that has defnitely got worse with the hollowing out of things like the well paid blue collar jobs in the rust belt mining, steel making, car making etc. But the willingness to deploy capital for risky investment has IMO lead to this much higher growth rate on paper despite shall we generously say very poor political leadership for the past 10+ years. They keep building these new big companies in new sectors time after time.
I was quite struck to learn that nominal GDP per head in the US is about 70% higher than here, but the gap in full time median earnings is only 20%. Factor in, how much more expensive health care is, and the gap becomes very small.
In terms of human development indices, the UK overall ranks as equivalent to Vermont.
The picture is also complicated by taking the US as a whole is a bit like averaging all the stats across the everywhere from here to Turkey. Its a country of massive extremes in every which way.
Very much so. Parts of the USA have an astonishingly high standard of living. But, then you have Mississippi (attempts to claim that that State has a higher standard of living than the UK are a bit daft).
Comments
I remember Clive on the telly in the midlands in the seventies.
Curly Watts from Corrie was in one of the local ones last year. Consett or Stanley. Can’t remember
Gave the FO a clue that it might happen ...
And, as my mother used to say, only boring people get bored. There are plenty of little projects and skills I’d like to try out that time issues currently preclude.
And were is the society of endless leisure? Who pays for it? Who gets what? At the moment we live in a capitalist world, and the rules are easy to understand (if not always fair). You get a job that pays money so you can buy stuff. The state and society looks after those that that doesn't apply to as best it can (give or take).
I know Sean T, once of this parish, was a bit of a Cassandra, but he is right that there are some pretty big shifts coming and not just for travel writers.
Would Rocky Horror still be remembered without Tim Curry et al ?
Which tells me that BMW are knocking an awful lot off the car to sell a few to Motobility..
As for leasing second hand cars - rather you than me why would you take the maintenance risk on a vehicle you don't own..
And then the furlough schemes. Absolutely complicated and cumbersome, leaving out people who needed to be in and leaving in people who needed to be out of the scheme. The corruption was mind blowing. But the biggest dereliction of duty was the fact that it was a freebie grant whereas it should have been an emergency loan repayable over 3, 5 or even 10 years.
Poor Tim Curry, he’s had his health issues. Saw an interview with him on YouTube. He’s not bitter at all.
I saw Macbeth with Patrick Stewart it was pretty good.
I bought all the BBC Shakespeare plays on DVD to watch one a day. Not got round to it yet. But I will.
Edit: from a quick look they appear similar.
My 40,000 tracks of music and 2000+ TV shows on 5 3.5" disks on a server in the corner of my office...
No robot has come near yet.
So only half a Leon.
But each to their own - I've got more wine stored away than I'm likely to drink :-(
"How would you rate the economic conditions in the country today?"
November 2025 -(Trump Second Term):
🔴 Poor: 72%
🟢 Good: 28%
November 2017 - (Trump First Term):
🟢 Good: 68%
🔴 Poor: 30%
- SSRS -
https://x.com/USA_Polling/status/1985452099102998869
It is backed up on the cloud - on the cheapest tier of non-immediate storage. Where they reduced cost by the discs powering down unless a read/write is required.
Anyway I am about to fight my way back to the M1 through Heanor's flags of St George.
He did a great King Charles impression, and was pretty funny about Trump.
One of the good guys.
Shame his ad lib got cut from Muppet Treasure Island.
Ironic it was Mrs T. that introduced it though.
It's difficult for Britain to change this because the country lived off the rent from the capital acquired from Empire for a long time. But change it must.
https://x.com/UKDefJournal/status/1985701427432264013
Sounds like another few billion £ black hole.
Know millionaires with wealth between £10mn and £100mn. 90% of them want to preserve what they have and the other 10% will go onto trying to repeat their initial success. Thinking that all millionaires should be feted is just stupid.
In robotics, there hasn't any been any "ChatGPT moment" yet. Nothing close. Navigation has definitely improved significantly as has computer vision (that has had a ChatGPT-esque moment), but all these very fine motor skills aren't solved and that's before you get to solving the AI level operations to realise what to do with various household items.
A sinner repented ?
Dick Cheney: “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him”
https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1985688640199008413
But one difference between the UK and the US, the mindset of putting your capital to work particularly risky bets is far more common. If you make money, not everybody, but lots of US people are instantly looking for how they deploy capital into the next big thing, even if profitability isnt in sight anytime soon. They are willing to bet, often big, on things that won't show a profit anytime soon. You can get £5-10 million out of these people over a lunch.
Try getting £5, let along £5 million out of UK individuals and instiututions who have money. They want to know in how many days in the future is the business going to be profitable, etc, they only want the sure thing. They would never touch a load of these US companies that are moonshots.
Deepmind being the obviously one that needed the US money, and more recently, Synthesia, all the big money they have got to turn it into a $3bn business is from the US. Two UK companies that have and most likely will end up US owned.
One idea I have seen raised is that a mistake that Labour and Tories made in the 2008-2012 period was the focus on rather than lays off and companies going bust, big push on keeping more people employed and keeping wages stagnant. On one hand that is perfectly understandable, redundancy is terrible on an individual level. But it also means lots of companies didn't go under or really forced to attack how to become much more efficient. Furlough being another good example of this, that definitely went on far too long and ghost companies / ghost jobs.
The gap in living standards between the median US worker and the median UK worker is not great.
By the 1950s this consolidation process had taken over whole industries.
When you go round the industrial museums in the former industrial areas, it is fascinating to see how ancient and archaic the machinery was - even in 1950, quite a lot was half a century old.
Look at the terror with which investing in production and physical technology is held today.
In the U.K. people seem to want Mad Money returns and zero risk.
0.3% estimated in 2019.
That is something the last government and this have made less attractive in recent years, where in combination with higher interest rates, has made that less of an option.
https://x.com/Peston/status/1985660967364030586
The guys at Nord and Proton must be high fiving.
Not very festive, eh?
In terms of human development indices, the UK overall ranks as equivalent to Vermont.
@phillipspobrien.bsky.social
Looking possible that the Democrats might sweep the board today--which means attempts to pervert the 2026 Congressional election will go into hyperdrive.
Get ready.
https://bsky.app/profile/phillipspobrien.bsky.social/post/3m4ssbhp2ms22
Donald Trump or whoever controls his account screaming WE MUST TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER OR WE LOSE ELEVENTY BILLION ELECTIONS doesn't radiate "They don't think any of this matters and they'll just rig the elections" to me IDK.
https://bsky.app/profile/seed-corn-thoughts.bsky.social/post/3m4src2j3422d
1: Half hydrogen is very different to fully hydrogen. Water is one-third hydrogen afterall.
2: Homes were much better ventilated (read: much worse insulated) then.
3: Many more people died then due to gas leaks etc in the home than would happen today, despite points 1 and 2.