I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
Which does nothing to address poverty as if 70% of people are failing to make ends meet, but with a short tail, then you have no poverty supposedly.
Whereas if you have everyone comfortably off, but with a long tail, you have lots of poverty supposedly.
Suppressing median wages should not be a way of "lowering poverty".
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
However, the most high profile sex offender in the US is Ghislaine Maxwell.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
If you make life worse for the median worker, you can certainly reduce "poverty", by that measure.
Baseline + trend monitoring is quite common although i wouldn’t use “preventative” to describe it. But it’s costly so I doubt the NHS does it outside of high risk categories
However it was interesting that Leavitt went into a lot of data about cardio and abdominal. What about neurovascular?
There are all manner of theories. This one is quite ingenious.
The drug to treat Alzheimers, Leqembi, requires regular MRIs of the head due to potential brain bleeds as a side effect. It is given by infusion. The multiple MRIs along with his hand bruising at regular intervals all point* to him getting Lewembi infusions for Alzheimers. https://x.com/lorimariemarie/status/1989524466620395676
*They could point to a lot of other things, of course
TESLA TROUGH: Tesla sales in the EU dived again in November: down 58% in France, minus 59% in Sweden, and down 49% in Denmark. Germany recorded just 750 vehicles sold in October. BYD sold more than twice as many cars. The only exception is Norway.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
It's not impossible, an income distribution with nobody below 60% of median income is perfectly feasible.
It's not feasible at all. It would require huge redistribution to the extent that even the Soviet Union would blush.
It would cost less than 3% of GDP according to my back of the envelope calculations. Because the income distribution is bell shaped most people below the threshold are quite close to it, and the number of people whose income would have to be boosted significantly is not that large. No doubt there would be many implementation challenges and I am not advocating the elimination of poverty on this relative poverty metric. I am just disputing that it would represent a huge challenge.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
It's not impossible, an income distribution with nobody below 60% of median income is perfectly feasible.
It's not feasible at all. It would require huge redistribution to the extent that even the Soviet Union would blush.
It would cost less than 3% of GDP according to my back of the envelope calculations. Because the income distribution is bell shaped most people below the threshold are quite close to it, and the number of people whose income would have to be boosted significantly is not that large. No doubt there would be many implementation challenges and I am not advocating the elimination of poverty on this relative poverty metric. I am just disputing that it would represent a huge challenge.
It wouldn't need to cost anything at all. The driver of this is the labour market. As I recall, Denmark and Finland simply do not have the same problem with in-work poverty that we do, and their social security bill is much lower as result, even while the poverty rate is half ours (and what remains is almost entirely out-of-work).
The thing to grasp here is that taxes we pay to fund in-work benefits are effectively a subsidy to minimum wage employers. If you take into account housing benefits, another large chunk of it is a subsidy to slum landlords.
I don't mind paying taxes but I'd much prefer they went on disability benefits, child support, or on public health and transport investment, than on this manipulation of the labour market. I don't know how to fix it though - and the end result would mean lower taxes, but more expensive coffees and pints.
YP are nibbling at Labour. They're not damaging much. But Labour are too wounded to shrug them off. That "If you disagree you can leave" speech from Starmer was really dumb.
Meanwhile, in "bet this won't be on the front pages" news,
A senior official at the UK's economic forecaster has said he does not believe the chancellor was being misleading when she said the state of the public finances were "very challenging" in the run-up to the Budget.
Prof David Miles from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) told MPs Rachel Reeves's comments ahead of announcing her tax and spending plans were "not inconsistent" with the situation she faced.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Convict more women to bring the numbers up?
Impose targets on organised crime to promote women?
Promote crime as a career among girls in school?
Meanwhile in the real world women live in - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/sarah-everard-inquiry-news-0dlwjtvxx "Women’s lives are “at stake” because police chiefs and ministers are failing to stop predatory men committing sexually motivated crimes in public, a report has warned. Basic questions about the scale of rape, sexual assaults and indecent exposure “cannot be answered” because data collection is “patchy and difficult to obtain”, the Angiolini inquiry found.
....
Addressing police chiefs and ministers, Angiolini said: “I continue to be worried about [women’s] safety in public spaces. There is no better time to act than now. I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.
“My report sets out how sexually-motivated crimes against women remain widespread across public spaces in England and Wales, yet efforts to prevent them are fragmented, underfunded and overly-reliant on short-term solutions."
Previous recommendations not implemented etc, a failure described as "deeply disappointing". And so on.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
If you make life worse for the median worker, you can certainly reduce "poverty", by that measure.
But the lefties will feel oh so good about themselves having eliminated poverty by making everyone poor.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
It's not impossible, an income distribution with nobody below 60% of median income is perfectly feasible.
It's not feasible at all. It would require huge redistribution to the extent that even the Soviet Union would blush.
It would cost less than 3% of GDP according to my back of the envelope calculations. Because the income distribution is bell shaped most people below the threshold are quite close to it, and the number of people whose income would have to be boosted significantly is not that large. No doubt there would be many implementation challenges and I am not advocating the elimination of poverty on this relative poverty metric. I am just disputing that it would represent a huge challenge.
The problem with that logic is in your phrasing of it though, a number are quite close to it. Giving people enough to be a penny over the threshold instead of a penny below it may tick a box for them on a binary basis but does it change their lives?
More importantly it results in perverse incentives. We don't tax high earning working people more than ~47% but we effectively tax low earning working people 55% on top of 20% and 8% and potentially 9% too.
This broken system may tick a box that claims that individuals are no longer in poverty, but it traps them into low incomes making it effectively impossible to earn more as no more earned will be kept without taking a huge leap of earnings rise that is unattainable.
It also means that lower median salaries equates to lower poverty, supposedly. Do you really believe that?
The UK justice system's approach to crimes committed by car drivers makes my blood boil.
The TV presenter Holly Willoughby turns right without bothering to indicate or look in her mirror, collides with a scooter rider resulting in him fracturing his neck.
There is a point of principle involved in connection with the proposed Tourist Tax (to be levied by the directly-elected Mayors); how do you reconcile this tax with the fundamental principle of Democracy "No Taxation without Representation"?
Tourists are not part of the demos.
You tax things you want less of.
I don't think we want less tourists - though in individual locales such as Skye, some do.
Personally I want more tourists, for example lots more Chinese. So I would reduce tax on them, namely VAT. Then we would compete with France for tourism, and that would be some way to redress the vast BOP deficit we have with that country.
Tourists impose a burden on infrastructure and capacity utilisation. They also generate revenues for the tax man.
Exactly where the optimal rate of tax is I don’t know. But it’s greater than zero. I also don’t think that adding a couple of pounds to a hotel bill, for example, will change people’s purchasing decision.
Google tells me that there were 154m visitor nights in London in 2024 (58% international). At £2 per night that’s £300m that can be invested in the cultural sector / tube / visit Britain, etc
I would reduce the tax payers investment by £150m to save some money and find the extra from travellers.
Meanwhile, in "bet this won't be on the front pages" news,
A senior official at the UK's economic forecaster has said he does not believe the chancellor was being misleading when she said the state of the public finances were "very challenging" in the run-up to the Budget.
Prof David Miles from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) told MPs Rachel Reeves's comments ahead of announcing her tax and spending plans were "not inconsistent" with the situation she faced.
Baseline + trend monitoring is quite common although i wouldn’t use “preventative” to describe it. But it’s costly so I doubt the NHS does it outside of high risk categories
However it was interesting that Leavitt went into a lot of data about cardio and abdominal. What about neurovascular?
There are all manner of theories. This one is quite ingenious.
The drug to treat Alzheimers, Leqembi, requires regular MRIs of the head due to potential brain bleeds as a side effect. It is given by infusion. The multiple MRIs along with his hand bruising at regular intervals all point* to him getting Lewembi infusions for Alzheimers. https://x.com/lorimariemarie/status/1989524466620395676
*They could point to a lot of other things, of course
Not enough advantage in treatment for the NHS to buy it, apparently.
YP are nibbling at Labour. They're not damaging much. But Labour are too wounded to shrug them off. That "If you disagree you can leave" speech from Starmer was really dumb.
That's a hypothetical poll including Your Party, so not really directly comparable with last week's VI poll not including them, and the comparison is with July. Not sure if they will have started including YP as standard yey
Baseline + trend monitoring is quite common although i wouldn’t use “preventative” to describe it. But it’s costly so I doubt the NHS does it outside of high risk categories
However it was interesting that Leavitt went into a lot of data about cardio and abdominal. What about neurovascular?
There are all manner of theories. This one is quite ingenious.
The drug to treat Alzheimers, Leqembi, requires regular MRIs of the head due to potential brain bleeds as a side effect. It is given by infusion. The multiple MRIs along with his hand bruising at regular intervals all point* to him getting Lewembi infusions for Alzheimers. https://x.com/lorimariemarie/status/1989524466620395676
*They could point to a lot of other things, of course
Not enough advantage in treatment for the NHS to buy it, apparently.
I guess NICE have been watching Trump's press conferences.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
If you make life worse for the median worker, you can certainly reduce "poverty", by that measure.
Yes, you can. But that's not the erroneous claim that was being made, and to which I was responding.
"Police inquiry into Post Office and Horizon may run out of cash Officers have told victims there will have to be ‘tough decisions’ on Operation Olympos despite the number of criminal suspects doubling to eight"
There never is. The British state is like an abuser who gets away with years of abuse but is never held properly accountable: it is untrustworthy, incompetent, malicious and unwilling / incapable of change, no matter what promises it makes or how many apologies are dragged out of it. We have a Potemkin justice system. And the inquiry reports lead to little more than a lot of bad headlines for a few days but no real change.
There is absolutely no point any more to any of it.
Budget eh?
Sorry I forgot to add that to my list -
Prediction - "It turned out that there 146 senior people potentially chargeable in matters arising from the Post Office. 3 are dead. 112 have taken early retirement. The rest have been diagnosed with stress and are in the luxury sections of various in-patient facilities paid for from their Post Office packages. So it would not be in the interests of justice to pursue them further. We have charged the lady who cleans on Thursdays with misconduct in a public office."
- the final report is being “trimmed” from thousands of pages to 400. In the interests of clarity - the full report will be archived, not released - all police officers involved are dead or retired.
So why, you ask, not release everything?
Well, *after* Hillsborough, for years, people in the system lied and covered up. Some of them are still alive. Some of them are still working in government.
Many will be The Right Sort. A Safe Pair of Hands.
#NU10K
What more is there to know?
The Police f*cked up, then they lied to cover this up, the Government supported them, and various members of the great and the good tried to write reports telling us all what we knew already but were hampered by concerns that they might upset too many of those who were to blame.
Need we spend more money on this?
I would add - the culture of football hooliganism was the main cause of the disaster. No need for fences to control hooligans = no one dying at Hillsborough. People don't like it but many of the fans who were at Hillsborough were also at Heysel, and some of them were probably amongst those who contributed to 39 Juventus fans dying. Then add in the poor condition of football stadia at the time. Then add in the fact that despite the awful conditions it had safety certificates.
And then add in the police making mistakes.
Swiss cheese model of accident prevention applies.
However the cover-up and lies were atrocious, and sadly, all too many people were prepared to believe them.
People have a natural instinct to want justice for wrongs, and sometimes revenge. Sometimes its better to have truth and reconciliation.
Truth? Too nuanced and complex. What they really want is for everyone to parrot the new narrative, e.g
- every single Liverpool fan at Hillsborough was an innocent victim and a wonderful person who never did anything wrong and certainly had nothing to do with an entirely unrelated Heysel incident.
- every single police officer there was a fascist bully scum.
- every single journalist reporting on it had evil intentions.
...and so on. This is the 'stunning and brave' version of 'truth' that we all must accept without question.
That is not what we are being asked to believe.
- The authorities knew very well there was a problem with football hooliganism which is why they were under an obligation to ensure that the steps taken were effective and safe. They failed in that. - We know exactly who died at Hillsborough. Do you have evidence that any of them were at Heysel or responsible for the rioting there? - The police did not do their job as well as they should have done. Some lied. Others tried to cover up what happened. - Journalists jumped to conclusions and wrote stories they had been fed by the police without doing any checking. - It took one hell of an effort to get the truth out of the authorities. That compounded a sense of victimhood, which was entirely justified for the families of those who died. - The fact that some of those at that football match have been less than saints does not justify anything the authorities did. Nor the untrue statements they made about those present who did not die.
Just to absolutely precise, my initial point was not that anyone who died at Hillsborough was responsible for Heysel. Read what I wrote. In the main the ones who died at Hillsborough were more likely to have been early to the ground and thus at the front of the cages.
My point was that the Liverpool (and all other English hooligans) created the culture where cages were needed at all.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
If you make life worse for the median worker, you can certainly reduce "poverty", by that measure.
Yes, you can. But that's not the erroneous claim that was being made, and to which I was responding.
Indeed, you're right that it is possible to have everyone above 60% of median, if we hold the median low, but it doesn't assist anyone to achieve that by that method, does it?
Which is why the metric is fundamentally flawed.
A measure of cost of living then a measure of whether people can afford that cost of living would make more sense. And should over time result in raising the bar as we have higher expectations today than we did in the past.
But holding down ever higher portions of our bell curve so that the minimum wage is the maximum wage for more and more people does not lower poverty in any true meaning of the word.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
If you make life worse for the median worker, you can certainly reduce "poverty", by that measure.
But the lefties will feel oh so good about themselves having eliminated poverty by making everyone poor.
But no one here is suggesting that's the best way to do it. Obviously. Because it doesn't improve the lot of people on low incomes.
If you don't like idea of trying to get people out of deprivation then own it. Don't hide behind mathematical gotchas.
YP are nibbling at Labour. They're not damaging much. But Labour are too wounded to shrug them off. That "If you disagree you can leave" speech from Starmer was really dumb.
YP are nibbling at the Green vote share more than they are at Labour's, I suggest.
"Police inquiry into Post Office and Horizon may run out of cash Officers have told victims there will have to be ‘tough decisions’ on Operation Olympos despite the number of criminal suspects doubling to eight"
There never is. The British state is like an abuser who gets away with years of abuse but is never held properly accountable: it is untrustworthy, incompetent, malicious and unwilling / incapable of change, no matter what promises it makes or how many apologies are dragged out of it. We have a Potemkin justice system. And the inquiry reports lead to little more than a lot of bad headlines for a few days but no real change.
There is absolutely no point any more to any of it.
Budget eh?
Sorry I forgot to add that to my list -
Prediction - "It turned out that there 146 senior people potentially chargeable in matters arising from the Post Office. 3 are dead. 112 have taken early retirement. The rest have been diagnosed with stress and are in the luxury sections of various in-patient facilities paid for from their Post Office packages. So it would not be in the interests of justice to pursue them further. We have charged the lady who cleans on Thursdays with misconduct in a public office."
- the final report is being “trimmed” from thousands of pages to 400. In the interests of clarity - the full report will be archived, not released - all police officers involved are dead or retired.
So why, you ask, not release everything?
Well, *after* Hillsborough, for years, people in the system lied and covered up. Some of them are still alive. Some of them are still working in government.
Many will be The Right Sort. A Safe Pair of Hands.
#NU10K
What more is there to know?
The Police f*cked up, then they lied to cover this up, the Government supported them, and various members of the great and the good tried to write reports telling us all what we knew already but were hampered by concerns that they might upset too many of those who were to blame.
Need we spend more money on this?
I would add - the culture of football hooliganism was the main cause of the disaster. No need for fences to control hooligans = no one dying at Hillsborough. People don't like it but many of the fans who were at Hillsborough were also at Heysel, and some of them were probably amongst those who contributed to 39 Juventus fans dying. Then add in the poor condition of football stadia at the time. Then add in the fact that despite the awful conditions it had safety certificates.
And then add in the police making mistakes.
Swiss cheese model of accident prevention applies.
However the cover-up and lies were atrocious, and sadly, all too many people were prepared to believe them.
People have a natural instinct to want justice for wrongs, and sometimes revenge. Sometimes its better to have truth and reconciliation.
Truth? Too nuanced and complex. What they really want is for everyone to parrot the new narrative, e.g
- every single Liverpool fan at Hillsborough was an innocent victim and a wonderful person who never did anything wrong and certainly had nothing to do with an entirely unrelated Heysel incident.
- every single police officer there was a fascist bully scum.
- every single journalist reporting on it had evil intentions.
...and so on. This is the 'stunning and brave' version of 'truth' that we all must accept without question.
That is not what we are being asked to believe.
- The authorities knew very well there was a problem with football hooliganism which is why they were under an obligation to ensure that the steps taken were effective and safe. They failed in that. - We know exactly who died at Hillsborough. Do you have evidence that any of them were at Heysel or responsible for the rioting there? - The police did not do their job as well as they should have done. Some lied. Others tried to cover up what happened. - Journalists jumped to conclusions and wrote stories they had been fed by the police without doing any checking. - It took one hell of an effort to get the truth out of the authorities. That compounded a sense of victimhood, which was entirely justified for the families of those who died. - The fact that some of those at that football match have been less than saints does not justify anything the authorities did. Nor the untrue statements they made about those present who did not die.
Just to absolutely precise, my initial point was not that anyone who died at Hillsborough was responsible for Heysel. Read what I wrote. In the main the ones who died at Hillsborough were more likely to have been early to the ground and thus at the front of the cages.
My point was that the Liverpool (and all other English hooligans) created the culture where cages were needed at all.
The real culprits might have been the oil companies / automotive industry though:
Meanwhile, in "bet this won't be on the front pages" news,
A senior official at the UK's economic forecaster has said he does not believe the chancellor was being misleading when she said the state of the public finances were "very challenging" in the run-up to the Budget.
Prof David Miles from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) told MPs Rachel Reeves's comments ahead of announcing her tax and spending plans were "not inconsistent" with the situation she faced.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
If you make life worse for the median worker, you can certainly reduce "poverty", by that measure.
Yes, you can. But that's not the erroneous claim that was being made, and to which I was responding.
Indeed, you're right that it is possible to have everyone above 60% of median, if we hold the median low, but it doesn't assist anyone to achieve that by that method, does it?
Which is why the metric is fundamentally flawed.
A measure of cost of living then a measure of whether people can afford that cost of living would make more sense. And should over time result in raising the bar as we have higher expectations today than we did in the past.
But holding down ever higher portions of our bell curve so that the minimum wage is the maximum wage for more and more people does not lower poverty in any true meaning of the word.
I did not say that holding the median low is the way to have everyone above 60% of the median. I said the way was to have "the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed", which applies whether the median is low, high or in between.
I was not making a comment on the government's approach or raising the minimum wage.
I was just pointing out that some people don't understand how medians work.
The UK justice system's approach to crimes committed by car drivers makes my blood boil.
The TV presenter Holly Willoughby turns right without bothering to indicate or look in her mirror, collides with a scooter rider resulting in him fracturing his neck.
What genuinely puzzles me is that those convicted of serious motoring offences often receive long stretches in prison but are allowed to drive again on return to civilian life. Surely they should be permanently banned.
A driving licence should not be seen as a right, but a privilege which is removed for misconduct.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
If you make life worse for the median worker, you can certainly reduce "poverty", by that measure.
But the lefties will feel oh so good about themselves having eliminated poverty by making everyone poor.
But no one here is suggesting that's the best way to do it. Obviously. Because it doesn't improve the lot of people on low incomes.
If you don't like idea of trying to get people out of deprivation then own it. Don't hide behind mathematical gotchas.
Actually anyone defending this metric is defending that as a way of doing it.
And it is quite literally what politicians on both sides of the aisle have been doing in recent decades, chasing headlines over this stupid measure.
There was a comment a few days ago quoted by someone that compared a newly qualified teacher to minimum wage over time. Previously they were on 85% more than minimum wage, whereas now they're on 35% more than minimum wage. That's before taking into account things like student loans that the graduate is required to have.
Looking at it another way, previously the minimum wage was 54% of that income, whereas now it is 74% of it, thus meaning it has "reduced poverty".
That is not simply as the minimum wage has risen in real terms (it has) but because the teacher's salary has fallen in real terms (it has).
This wage suppression has occurred in industry after industry across the country. Ever higher proportions of the economy have seen their real incomes fall, and the delta between qualified or promoted individuals salaries and minimum wage has been falling across the board in many sectors, which has lowered living standards while supposedly reducing poverty.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
However, the most high profile sex offender in the US is Ghislaine Maxwell.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Convict more women to bring the numbers up?
Impose targets on organised crime to promote women?
Promote crime as a career among girls in school?
Meanwhile in the real world women live in - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/sarah-everard-inquiry-news-0dlwjtvxx "Women’s lives are “at stake” because police chiefs and ministers are failing to stop predatory men committing sexually motivated crimes in public, a report has warned. Basic questions about the scale of rape, sexual assaults and indecent exposure “cannot be answered” because data collection is “patchy and difficult to obtain”, the Angiolini inquiry found.
....
Addressing police chiefs and ministers, Angiolini said: “I continue to be worried about [women’s] safety in public spaces. There is no better time to act than now. I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.
“My report sets out how sexually-motivated crimes against women remain widespread across public spaces in England and Wales, yet efforts to prevent them are fragmented, underfunded and overly-reliant on short-term solutions."
Previous recommendations not implemented etc, a failure described as "deeply disappointing". And so on.
File under: Women. Don't Count - Example 5381.
"Underfunded" is perhaps the key word there ? As with criminal justice in general, the lack of resources is the real problem.
There are plenty of laws (see also the new-ish problem of sexual deepfakes, where the UK has been quite quick to legislate compared with other countries), but they mean very little without the resources to enforce them.
And you're almost certainly right in saying that women are disproportionately affected (greatly so), not least as they're more likely to be victims than offenders.
I see that the proposed Jury trial compromise is to "sentences likrly more than 3 years", plus a raised Upper Sentencing limit for magistrates, and various chinless wonders suggesting that this is the end of the world.
Richard Burgon (Lab) says the prospect of someone being jailed for three years without a jury hearing the case “sends a chill through my heart”. He suggest this is the sort of thing that would happen in Putin’s Russia.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
If you make life worse for the median worker, you can certainly reduce "poverty", by that measure.
Yes, you can. But that's not the erroneous claim that was being made, and to which I was responding.
Indeed, you're right that it is possible to have everyone above 60% of median, if we hold the median low, but it doesn't assist anyone to achieve that by that method, does it?
Which is why the metric is fundamentally flawed.
A measure of cost of living then a measure of whether people can afford that cost of living would make more sense. And should over time result in raising the bar as we have higher expectations today than we did in the past.
But holding down ever higher portions of our bell curve so that the minimum wage is the maximum wage for more and more people does not lower poverty in any true meaning of the word.
I did not say that holding the median low is the way to have everyone above 60% of the median. I said the way was to have "the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed", which applies whether the median is low, high or in between.
I was not making a comment on the government's approach or raising the minimum wage.
I was just pointing out that some people don't understand how medians work.
I agree with you on the Maths.
However I don't think lowering medians is a way of reducing poverty, which is why this measure is fundamentally broken and should be axed entirely.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Convict more women to bring the numbers up?
Impose targets on organised crime to promote women?
Promote crime as a career among girls in school?
Meanwhile in the real world women live in - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/sarah-everard-inquiry-news-0dlwjtvxx "Women’s lives are “at stake” because police chiefs and ministers are failing to stop predatory men committing sexually motivated crimes in public, a report has warned. Basic questions about the scale of rape, sexual assaults and indecent exposure “cannot be answered” because data collection is “patchy and difficult to obtain”, the Angiolini inquiry found.
....
Addressing police chiefs and ministers, Angiolini said: “I continue to be worried about [women’s] safety in public spaces. There is no better time to act than now. I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.
“My report sets out how sexually-motivated crimes against women remain widespread across public spaces in England and Wales, yet efforts to prevent them are fragmented, underfunded and overly-reliant on short-term solutions."
Previous recommendations not implemented etc, a failure described as "deeply disappointing". And so on.
I see that the proposed Jury trial compromise is to "sentences likrly more than 3 years", plus a raised Upper Sentencing limit for magistrates, and various chinless wonders suggesting that this is the end of the world.
Richard Burgon (Lab) says the prospect of someone being jailed for three years without a jury hearing the case “sends a chill through my heart”. He suggest this is the sort of thing that would happen in Putin’s Russia.
I'd like to see a separation of the argument that it's a good thing, from the argument we should do it because there's a backlog. These are being deliberately conflated by the government. Are we getting jury trials back when the backlog is cleared? Of course not.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
However, the most high profile sex offender in the US is Ghislaine Maxwell.
I see that the proposed Jury trial compromise is to "sentences likrly more than 3 years", plus a raised Upper Sentencing limit for magistrates, and various chinless wonders suggesting that this is the end of the world.
Richard Burgon (Lab) says the prospect of someone being jailed for three years without a jury hearing the case “sends a chill through my heart”. He suggest this is the sort of thing that would happen in Putin’s Russia.
- they appoint 10,000 new People's Judges. With the right views of course. - who then send people to prison for three years for possessing an offensive wife in a public place, loud shirt in a built up area... - but what about the appeal, you say? Mr Kodogo and his entire family were deported 10 minutes after sentencing - so it wouldn't make sense to have appeal. Waste of time. Lessons will be learnt.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
“To win”? This isn’t a game. Politics and government is (or should be) about improving everyone’s lot by tackling problems and issues, almost all of which are insoluble by any reasonable definition; at best, we can only strive to make things better. We strive to tackle ill health and disease, yet we will all succumb to death from something in the end. We strive to combat crime, yet the human society where there is no crime has never, and likely never will, be achieved. We strive to improve the lot of those denied the basic comforts of life - whatever those are defined as in that place and time - yet relative poverty will never be eliminated.
People who aren’t satisfied until the problems they are interested in are “solved” probably shouldn’t be interested in politics.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
So sure there would be no '1925-level absolute poverty' but there would still be a problem, just not one we were measuring.
(*Actually, there would probably still be some people who were unable to access welfare benefits because of their mental state, immigration status, or some bureaucratic cock-up.)
So there should be some reasonable metric as to what is a reasonable level of income (and given housing costs that likely would be higher than it was a century ago) but inequality is not the same as that.
The problem with the percentage of median income metric is it is fundamentally flawed, as you can lower "poverty" by boosting poor people's income (great you probably think) or you can lower "poverty" by suppressing the median income. The latter is not so great.
The problem is that in too many fields the minimum wage has become a maximum wage. Get 51% of people working on minimum wage and then poverty is eliminated for anyone working full time, no matter how shoddy or poor the minimum wage is or how much that fails or succeeds at meeting living standards.
It also leads to perverse incentives on politics like enabling the poverty trap whereby people are given just enough to artificially tip them over the line, but then with draconianly high withdrawal rates on benefits meaning they can't lift themselves any further even they work overtime or get a pay rise as they won't keep any of that income.
I don't disagree. But what should the 'reasonable metric' be?
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
If you make life worse for the median worker, you can certainly reduce "poverty", by that measure.
Yes, you can. But that's not the erroneous claim that was being made, and to which I was responding.
Indeed, you're right that it is possible to have everyone above 60% of median, if we hold the median low, but it doesn't assist anyone to achieve that by that method, does it?
Which is why the metric is fundamentally flawed.
A measure of cost of living then a measure of whether people can afford that cost of living would make more sense. And should over time result in raising the bar as we have higher expectations today than we did in the past.
But holding down ever higher portions of our bell curve so that the minimum wage is the maximum wage for more and more people does not lower poverty in any true meaning of the word.
I did not say that holding the median low is the way to have everyone above 60% of the median. I said the way was to have "the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed", which applies whether the median is low, high or in between.
I was not making a comment on the government's approach or raising the minimum wage.
I was just pointing out that some people don't understand how medians work.
I agree with you on the Maths.
However I don't think lowering medians is a way of reducing poverty, which is why this measure is fundamentally broken and should be axed entirely.
I'm not aware of any party whose policy is to reduce poverty by lowering the median.
The figure is, adjusting for inflation, below the 2008 figure. The median did fall slighly over the period Tories were in No. 10, but I don't think it was Tory policy to drive down the median.
Another government service given over to a private monopoly that cannot be removed & has no inventive to serve it’s users in a timely or reasonable fashion whatsoever inevitably turns into an engine of misery and fury for everyone involved. Accountability is no where to be found, neither in the private company running the service, nor the NHS management.
It’s entirely plausible that NHS management were forced to privatise this service by past UK governments, in the vague hope that “savings” would result. Ever since, everyone involved has had a huge incentive to turn a blind eye to the actual experience of their end-users. Those who could afford to do so simply opt out of the service as far as possible, whilst those who can’t end up back in hospital & so no longer need to be serviced.
It’s this kind of thing that generates so much combined anger & depression amongst the electorate - it demonstrates that the government simply doesn’t care about the experiences of people on the receiving end, who are forced to endure whatever limited service the system can be bothered to give them. Money alone can’t solve this - indeed, throwing more money into this system will probably make it worse, as Blair discovered when he tried to “fix” the NHS the first time around.
It's a very good piece that highlights many issues (and misses some out).
The stark points are that the service needs to be high quality, and we need to get away from a 1950s "them and us" mentality; any of us could be a wheelchair user for life next week; all it needs is for a dozy driver to hit you on a Zebra crossing, or a schoolrun mum not to see a child on a pavement when she's parking on it.
The other is that of lifecycle effectiveness. Maximum benefit for society does not come from short-term, ill thought out, "cheap on the face of it" solutions. Thought and investment are required, which requires an absence of short term fixes and quality staff, rather than approaching it like a cave man with a chainsaw.
One subtle one it misses out in measure is how difficult it is to enforce rights if you are disabled. Cameron and Co made it much more difficult when they came in in 2010 in various ways, and now a Council is likely to spend more money on their solicitors sending nastygrams rather than get a access officer to deal with that actual problem, which may be cheaper. Part of that is that austerity imposed on Councils means that they have almost all got rid of all their access officers, so each exercise now needs a consultant or gets a kludge from a generalist staff member who knows little.
An irony in the story is that had a better service been available, he could have been more productive for society and perhaps even paying more taxes.
One of the reasons I am on anti-wheelchair barriers is that I have a body of established law I can use to force action if necessary.
The UK is hoping to reach an agreement to re-join the Erasmus scheme by January .
The Turing scheme is an insult to the memory of the great man . A cheap knock-off where the Tories stuck his name on the scheme to give it some kudos and to dupe the gullible into thinking it delivered the same benefits post Brexit .
I see that the proposed Jury trial compromise is to "sentences likrly more than 3 years", plus a raised Upper Sentencing limit for magistrates, and various chinless wonders suggesting that this is the end of the world.
Richard Burgon (Lab) says the prospect of someone being jailed for three years without a jury hearing the case “sends a chill through my heart”. He suggest this is the sort of thing that would happen in Putin’s Russia.
I'd like to see a separation of the argument that it's a good thing, from the argument we should do it because there's a backlog. These are being deliberately conflated by the government. Are we getting jury trials back when the backlog is cleared? Of course not.
Absolutely. And the reduction in backlog as a result of this alone wouldn't be that great.
"Not like Russia" is a bar so low that it's not worth the waste of his breath to say it.
Ah, relative poverty. The measure that concludes if everyone in the UK earned £100 a year, nobody would be poor.
'Relative' is, I think you'll find, an important part of the term 'relative poverty'.
If everyone in the UK earned £100 a year there wouldn't be a government to measure poverty in the first place. It's a facile observation.
No measure is perfect, but there's no doubt that an income if 60% median is pretty tough, and there's a decent rationale for it given the current structure of our labour market, welfare system and economy. Other options are available and I look forward to Morris_Dancer explaining which is best.
Here is someone's calculation. TLDR The National Living Wage does not achieve this. QED minimum wages have to rise again* and QED2. Companies with a high labour content need to plan how to increase productivity or die**
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
If you make life worse for the median worker, you can certainly reduce "poverty", by that measure.
Yes, you can. But that's not the erroneous claim that was being made, and to which I was responding.
Indeed, you're right that it is possible to have everyone above 60% of median, if we hold the median low, but it doesn't assist anyone to achieve that by that method, does it?
Which is why the metric is fundamentally flawed.
A measure of cost of living then a measure of whether people can afford that cost of living would make more sense. And should over time result in raising the bar as we have higher expectations today than we did in the past.
But holding down ever higher portions of our bell curve so that the minimum wage is the maximum wage for more and more people does not lower poverty in any true meaning of the word.
I did not say that holding the median low is the way to have everyone above 60% of the median. I said the way was to have "the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed", which applies whether the median is low, high or in between.
I was not making a comment on the government's approach or raising the minimum wage.
I was just pointing out that some people don't understand how medians work.
I agree with you on the Maths.
However I don't think lowering medians is a way of reducing poverty, which is why this measure is fundamentally broken and should be axed entirely.
I'm not aware of any party whose policy is to reduce poverty by lowering the median.
The figure is, adjusting for inflation, below the 2008 figure. The median did fall slighly over the period Tories were in No. 10, but I don't think it was Tory policy to drive down the median.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
It's not impossible, an income distribution with nobody below 60% of median income is perfectly feasible.
It's not feasible at all. It would require huge redistribution to the extent that even the Soviet Union would blush.
It would cost less than 3% of GDP according to my back of the envelope calculations. Because the income distribution is bell shaped most people below the threshold are quite close to it, and the number of people whose income would have to be boosted significantly is not that large. No doubt there would be many implementation challenges and I am not advocating the elimination of poverty on this relative poverty metric. I am just disputing that it would represent a huge challenge.
The problem with that logic is in your phrasing of it though, a number are quite close to it. Giving people enough to be a penny over the threshold instead of a penny below it may tick a box for them on a binary basis but does it change their lives?
More importantly it results in perverse incentives. We don't tax high earning working people more than ~47% but we effectively tax low earning working people 55% on top of 20% and 8% and potentially 9% too.
This broken system may tick a box that claims that individuals are no longer in poverty, but it traps them into low incomes making it effectively impossible to earn more as no more earned will be kept without taking a huge leap of earnings rise that is unattainable.
It also means that lower median salaries equates to lower poverty, supposedly. Do you really believe that?
I don't disagree with any of that really. I still think that when it comes down to it all our definitions of poverty are relative ones, and we might as well be explicit about that.
On a different note, I am currently at Southwark Cathedral about to see two of my children playing in the orchestra for the Christmas carols concert, which officially kicks off the Christmas season for me and fills me with joy and goodwill for weeks.
It will be difficult for Farage to criticise a Kemi too much in light of his glowing praise for her when she first ran for the Tory leadership. I suppose he could say she has failed to deliver, but hopefully it leads to some sort of pact
The UK is hoping to reach an agreement to re-join the Erasmus scheme by January .
The Turing scheme is an insult to the memory of the great man . A cheap knock-off where the Tories stuck his name on the scheme to give it some kudos and to dupe the gullible into thinking it delivered the same benefits post Brexit .
Erasmus was everything that was wrong about our relationship with Europe. A standard plundering of British resources that was not reciprocated at anywhere the same scale. Am approx. 2:1 ratio of EU students coming to the UK as UK going out. This EU plundering was everywhere. A means to extract resources out of Britain presented as fairness. Free movement of people, a ratio of 3:1, financial contributions 2:1, the common agricultural policy. No matter what the policy, every single one had a net detrimental impact on British institutions, the British taxpayer and the British fabric.
The UK is hoping to reach an agreement to re-join the Erasmus scheme by January .
The Turing scheme is an insult to the memory of the great man . A cheap knock-off where the Tories stuck his name on the scheme to give it some kudos and to dupe the gullible into thinking it delivered the same benefits post Brexit .
Weirdly I'm lined up to host two Danish students next semester and two Texans over the summer, all without Erasmus. The EU were rather juvenile over Erasmus and I understand why we didn't cave. I hope we are rejoining on more sensible terms.
One new factor in modern poverty is we are slowly making life impossible, or at least very difficult, without web access, especially via Smartphone apps. And they don't come cheap.
So Rachel from accounts won the sack race against Richard Hughes, with the OBR chief forced out rather than testify to the Committee today.
American sack race next, who wins out of SecDef Peter Hegseth and Minnesota Gov Tim Walz, both on the front pages for separate scandals over the weekend?
Ed Balls reckons they should reject the resignation
I find it hard to feel that the OBR early report release was a resignation matter. It's a nice easy to understand Westminster gossip type story that the media can get excited about, but at bottom it's "we made a mistake with the config of our Wordpress site so it wasn't requiring authentication for the file the way we expected". Yes, there's the "market sensitive information" aspect, but in practice that doesn't seem to have actually caused major harm. The closest to a real management failure is that they probably should have assessed whether they were taking the risks seriously enough (e.g. testing that their embargoed docs process really did prevent access) and whether the system they set up in 2013 was still the right one given how important the OBR has become these days. But if we lose a decent head of the OBR and it spends the next six months leaderless while selecting a new one who then has to get up to speed with the organisation's issues, is that really a benefit to the country?
No accountability, eh?
Next week - “Bombed the shipwrecked survivors *twice*. But losing the head of the military, is that really a benefit to the country? At this point does it really matter?”
If no one is punished for anything, then anything goes.
“Just open the gates, Constable, it’s not like anyone does anything if a bunch of scousers get crushed.”
I think that if we treat every mistake and oversight as if it was a wilful decision that could foreseeably cause multiple deaths, then every senior leader of every organisation or enterprise in the country would be out of a job every three months, to absolutely no benefit -- and those who presided over the real horrors will be no worse off than those where some minor mishap happened under their watch, which I'm sure they'd be happy about. There should be accountability, yes. But it should be proportional.
So we should just do nothing?
Excellent news for those who have a major fuck up on their watch, every three months or so.
I was in a meeting in a bank, where they explained Sarbanes-Oxley. When it was bought in.
A manger put his hand up - “So if someone working for me fucks up, I could go to prison? in America?”
Answer - “Yes. If you can’t prove they acted against policy and systems weren’t there to stop them.”
Within hours, shit was being tightened up. No more developers with access to production, traders “fixing” trades using the “admin” login.
I think fundamentally I disagree that this is "a major fuckup". And as far as I'm aware it's not part of a pattern of the organisation having major screwups every three months.
What do graphs like this say?
Oh, and an early release like this is a sacking offence in many contexts.
The fact that a junior employee hasn’t been binned strongly suggests that they don’t have a proper system in place. Probably because a senior manager decided not to fund it.
It wasn’t an early release. It was someone typing website links in on spec
That was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened. It should be fixed. It should even go on his review and impact his rating and his compensation for the year.
But this is a “stern talking to by your boss@ level error not a sacking offence.
The government is contriving to make Farage look like the leader who has the civil service's back.
Whatever the OBR’s failings, they have not wilfully misled the public.
The wrong person resigned today. It should have been Rachel Reeves.
I’m now calling on Richard Hughes to release his correspondence with the Chancellor so we can see exactly what she knew.
Maybe Farage should spend his time on developing some sort of vaguely coherent tax and spending politics for Reform UK rather than wasting time with this.
Write to the fellow at the North Pole, and you may get your wish - if you have behaved yourself.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
If you make life worse for the median worker, you can certainly reduce "poverty", by that measure.
Yes, you can. But that's not the erroneous claim that was being made, and to which I was responding.
Indeed, you're right that it is possible to have everyone above 60% of median, if we hold the median low, but it doesn't assist anyone to achieve that by that method, does it?
Which is why the metric is fundamentally flawed.
A measure of cost of living then a measure of whether people can afford that cost of living would make more sense. And should over time result in raising the bar as we have higher expectations today than we did in the past.
But holding down ever higher portions of our bell curve so that the minimum wage is the maximum wage for more and more people does not lower poverty in any true meaning of the word.
I did not say that holding the median low is the way to have everyone above 60% of the median. I said the way was to have "the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed", which applies whether the median is low, high or in between.
I was not making a comment on the government's approach or raising the minimum wage.
I was just pointing out that some people don't understand how medians work.
I agree with you on the Maths.
However I don't think lowering medians is a way of reducing poverty, which is why this measure is fundamentally broken and should be axed entirely.
I'm not aware of any party whose policy is to reduce poverty by lowering the median.
The figure is, adjusting for inflation, below the 2008 figure. The median did fall slighly over the period Tories were in No. 10, but I don't think it was Tory policy to drive down the median.
Blimey, that's a grim set of graphs.
Worth posting that graph here:
Labour in office: real incomes rise; Tories in office: not a chance.
The UK is hoping to reach an agreement to re-join the Erasmus scheme by January .
The Turing scheme is an insult to the memory of the great man . A cheap knock-off where the Tories stuck his name on the scheme to give it some kudos and to dupe the gullible into thinking it delivered the same benefits post Brexit .
Weirdly I'm lined up to host two Danish students next semester and two Texans over the summer, all without Erasmus. The EU were rather juvenile over Erasmus and I understand why we didn't cave. I hope we are rejoining on more sensible terms.
The original terms quoted for remaining in Erasmus were a FuckOffQuote - rather like the terms to join the EU Vaccine consortium, in COVID.
It will be difficult for Farage to criticise a Kemi too much in light of his glowing praise for her when she first ran for the Tory leadership. I suppose he could say she has failed to deliver, but hopefully it leads to some sort of pact
I'd put that down as mistake by Nigel. When he was drenching Kemi with plaudits he was very much playing the role of the wise old statesman picking out a starlet for the distant future. But we've since had the Kemigasm, that future is now the present, and Nigel is fighting for his political survival. He needs her to fail. My God. He desperately needs her to fail.
Ah, relative poverty. The measure that concludes if everyone in the UK earned £100 a year, nobody would be poor.
'Relative' is, I think you'll find, an important part of the term 'relative poverty'.
If everyone in the UK earned £100 a year there wouldn't be a government to measure poverty in the first place. It's a facile observation.
No measure is perfect, but there's no doubt that an income if 60% median is pretty tough, and there's a decent rationale for it given the current structure of our labour market, welfare system and economy. Other options are available and I look forward to Morris_Dancer explaining which is best.
Here is someone's calculation. TLDR The National Living Wage does not achieve this. QED minimum wages have to rise again* and QED2. Companies with a high labour content need to plan how to increase productivity or die**
According to this, for a 'minimum income standard' a couple with two children (pre school and primary) need an annual post income tax income of £64,767.
I know a lot of lovely mostly WWC people standing with me in the playground collecting children in north Cumberland who would find that a fascinating piece of information about life on planet Zarg.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
If you make life worse for the median worker, you can certainly reduce "poverty", by that measure.
Yes, you can. But that's not the erroneous claim that was being made, and to which I was responding.
Indeed, you're right that it is possible to have everyone above 60% of median, if we hold the median low, but it doesn't assist anyone to achieve that by that method, does it?
Which is why the metric is fundamentally flawed.
A measure of cost of living then a measure of whether people can afford that cost of living would make more sense. And should over time result in raising the bar as we have higher expectations today than we did in the past.
But holding down ever higher portions of our bell curve so that the minimum wage is the maximum wage for more and more people does not lower poverty in any true meaning of the word.
I did not say that holding the median low is the way to have everyone above 60% of the median. I said the way was to have "the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed", which applies whether the median is low, high or in between.
I was not making a comment on the government's approach or raising the minimum wage.
I was just pointing out that some people don't understand how medians work.
I agree with you on the Maths.
However I don't think lowering medians is a way of reducing poverty, which is why this measure is fundamentally broken and should be axed entirely.
I'm not aware of any party whose policy is to reduce poverty by lowering the median.
The figure is, adjusting for inflation, below the 2008 figure. The median did fall slighly over the period Tories were in No. 10, but I don't think it was Tory policy to drive down the median.
Blimey, that's a grim set of graphs.
Worth posting that graph here:
Labour in office: real incomes rise; Tories in office: not a chance.
Cheeky - what does it look like from say 1979 to 1997?
The UK is hoping to reach an agreement to re-join the Erasmus scheme by January .
The Turing scheme is an insult to the memory of the great man . A cheap knock-off where the Tories stuck his name on the scheme to give it some kudos and to dupe the gullible into thinking it delivered the same benefits post Brexit .
Weirdly I'm lined up to host two Danish students next semester and two Texans over the summer, all without Erasmus. The EU were rather juvenile over Erasmus and I understand why we didn't cave. I hope we are rejoining on more sensible terms.
The original terms quoted for remaining in Erasmus were a FuckOffQuote - rather like the terms to join the EU Vaccine consortium, in COVID.
Our entire membership from 1974 was conducted on that basis, well rid.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
If you make life worse for the median worker, you can certainly reduce "poverty", by that measure.
Yes, you can. But that's not the erroneous claim that was being made, and to which I was responding.
Indeed, you're right that it is possible to have everyone above 60% of median, if we hold the median low, but it doesn't assist anyone to achieve that by that method, does it?
Which is why the metric is fundamentally flawed.
A measure of cost of living then a measure of whether people can afford that cost of living would make more sense. And should over time result in raising the bar as we have higher expectations today than we did in the past.
But holding down ever higher portions of our bell curve so that the minimum wage is the maximum wage for more and more people does not lower poverty in any true meaning of the word.
I did not say that holding the median low is the way to have everyone above 60% of the median. I said the way was to have "the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed", which applies whether the median is low, high or in between.
I was not making a comment on the government's approach or raising the minimum wage.
I was just pointing out that some people don't understand how medians work.
I agree with you on the Maths.
However I don't think lowering medians is a way of reducing poverty, which is why this measure is fundamentally broken and should be axed entirely.
I'm not aware of any party whose policy is to reduce poverty by lowering the median.
The figure is, adjusting for inflation, below the 2008 figure. The median did fall slighly over the period Tories were in No. 10, but I don't think it was Tory policy to drive down the median.
Blimey, that's a grim set of graphs.
Worth posting that graph here:
Labour in office: real incomes rise; Tories in office: not a chance.
Cheeky - what does it look like from say 1979 to 1997?
What do you want, the repeal of the Corn Laws?! That's going back 45 years already.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
If you make life worse for the median worker, you can certainly reduce "poverty", by that measure.
Yes, you can. But that's not the erroneous claim that was being made, and to which I was responding.
Indeed, you're right that it is possible to have everyone above 60% of median, if we hold the median low, but it doesn't assist anyone to achieve that by that method, does it?
Which is why the metric is fundamentally flawed.
A measure of cost of living then a measure of whether people can afford that cost of living would make more sense. And should over time result in raising the bar as we have higher expectations today than we did in the past.
But holding down ever higher portions of our bell curve so that the minimum wage is the maximum wage for more and more people does not lower poverty in any true meaning of the word.
I did not say that holding the median low is the way to have everyone above 60% of the median. I said the way was to have "the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed", which applies whether the median is low, high or in between.
I was not making a comment on the government's approach or raising the minimum wage.
I was just pointing out that some people don't understand how medians work.
I agree with you on the Maths.
However I don't think lowering medians is a way of reducing poverty, which is why this measure is fundamentally broken and should be axed entirely.
I'm not aware of any party whose policy is to reduce poverty by lowering the median.
The figure is, adjusting for inflation, below the 2008 figure. The median did fall slighly over the period Tories were in No. 10, but I don't think it was Tory policy to drive down the median.
Blimey, that's a grim set of graphs.
Worth posting that graph here:
Labour in office: real incomes rise; Tories in office: not a chance.
Cheeky - what does it look like from say 1979 to 1997?
What do you want, the repeal of the Corn Laws?! That's going back 45 years already.
President Trump's advisers Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin. They are expected to travel from Moscow to a European country and meet Ukrainian President Zelensky
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
If you make life worse for the median worker, you can certainly reduce "poverty", by that measure.
Yes, you can. But that's not the erroneous claim that was being made, and to which I was responding.
Indeed, you're right that it is possible to have everyone above 60% of median, if we hold the median low, but it doesn't assist anyone to achieve that by that method, does it?
Which is why the metric is fundamentally flawed.
A measure of cost of living then a measure of whether people can afford that cost of living would make more sense. And should over time result in raising the bar as we have higher expectations today than we did in the past.
But holding down ever higher portions of our bell curve so that the minimum wage is the maximum wage for more and more people does not lower poverty in any true meaning of the word.
I did not say that holding the median low is the way to have everyone above 60% of the median. I said the way was to have "the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed", which applies whether the median is low, high or in between.
I was not making a comment on the government's approach or raising the minimum wage.
I was just pointing out that some people don't understand how medians work.
I agree with you on the Maths.
However I don't think lowering medians is a way of reducing poverty, which is why this measure is fundamentally broken and should be axed entirely.
I'm not aware of any party whose policy is to reduce poverty by lowering the median.
The figure is, adjusting for inflation, below the 2008 figure. The median did fall slighly over the period Tories were in No. 10, but I don't think it was Tory policy to drive down the median.
Blimey, that's a grim set of graphs.
Worth posting that graph here:
Labour in office: real incomes rise; Tories in office: not a chance.
Cheeky - what does it look like from say 1979 to 1997?
What do you want, the repeal of the Corn Laws?! That's going back 45 years already.
President Trump's advisers Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin. They are expected to travel from Moscow to a European country and meet Ukrainian President Zelensky
Kushner - no official role - is just there for the graft. (As also is Witkoff, of course.)
The UK is hoping to reach an agreement to re-join the Erasmus scheme by January .
The Turing scheme is an insult to the memory of the great man . A cheap knock-off where the Tories stuck his name on the scheme to give it some kudos and to dupe the gullible into thinking it delivered the same benefits post Brexit .
Weirdly I'm lined up to host two Danish students next semester and two Texans over the summer, all without Erasmus. The EU were rather juvenile over Erasmus and I understand why we didn't cave. I hope we are rejoining on more sensible terms.
The original terms quoted for remaining in Erasmus were a FuckOffQuote - rather like the terms to join the EU Vaccine consortium, in COVID.
TL/DR; thousands of tons dumped in a sophisticated fly-tipping operation. Environment Agency, police, councils do nothing, very slowly.
The pattern is repeated through many things.
The game works like this -
- A property is owned through an offshore company. - This is rented to an onshore company. The onshore company is owned in the names of people whose identities have been "Stolen". I use quotes, because, often, they are paid to allow this to happen. - The rent is excessive and is how the profits are laundered. - The onshore company may sub let the property to other fake companies as further "layering" - Crimes are committed using the property. - The Big Boss(es) live in a big house in the UK. All tax paid etc, on their income from abroad. When they are clever, this is from a different country to the that of the offshore company at the top. That company is owned by a company in another offshore company.
So, you arrest the underlings here, make your way up the ladder of companies in the UK and then need years of diplomatic stuff to get (if at all) information on the first company abroad.
Which, further hasn't committed a provable crime. They (or more exactly the lawyers handing their property in the UK) rented a piece of property. Sure it was for a lot of money, but that isn't a crime. And they are shocked and horrified it was used for crime. But the money was paid in rent, all above board. Taxes paid and everything. Accounts filed with all relevant authorities.
The UK is hoping to reach an agreement to re-join the Erasmus scheme by January .
The Turing scheme is an insult to the memory of the great man . A cheap knock-off where the Tories stuck his name on the scheme to give it some kudos and to dupe the gullible into thinking it delivered the same benefits post Brexit .
Weirdly I'm lined up to host two Danish students next semester and two Texans over the summer, all without Erasmus. The EU were rather juvenile over Erasmus and I understand why we didn't cave. I hope we are rejoining on more sensible terms.
The original terms quoted for remaining in Erasmus were a FuckOffQuote - rather like the terms to join the EU Vaccine consortium, in COVID.
Soare you saying Starmer will accept them then?
He would never do that. Shame on you!
No, I'm quite sure that the price has been doubled, and what the UK students will receive has been reduced.
Ah, relative poverty. The measure that concludes if everyone in the UK earned £100 a year, nobody would be poor.
'Relative' is, I think you'll find, an important part of the term 'relative poverty'.
If everyone in the UK earned £100 a year there wouldn't be a government to measure poverty in the first place. It's a facile observation.
No measure is perfect, but there's no doubt that an income if 60% median is pretty tough, and there's a decent rationale for it given the current structure of our labour market, welfare system and economy. Other options are available and I look forward to Morris_Dancer explaining which is best.
Here is someone's calculation. TLDR The National Living Wage does not achieve this. QED minimum wages have to rise again* and QED2. Companies with a high labour content need to plan how to increase productivity or die**
According to this, for a 'minimum income standard' a couple with two children (pre school and primary) need an annual post income tax income of £64,767.
I know a lot of lovely mostly WWC people standing with me in the playground collecting children in north Cumberland who would find that a fascinating piece of information about life on planet Zarg.
Mad. Isn't it. Most people know there is something wrong with the benefits system but can't put their finger on it. So different theories emerge.
As a starting point, those receiving "working age" benefits are in work. This essentially means that the taxpayer is paying UK businesses a subsidy for employing people and quite a large one.
The second point, as illustrated by the graphs earlier, is that productivity has been forecast to grow in the UK but never does. So every budget that assumes future productivity growth is very likely to be wrong.
So what is the best way to grow productivity? Essentially you have to make work pay be reducing the compression that has built up between being in a job and on benefits. Some argue, freeze or reduce benefits but this doesn't address the issue of productivity which is the difference between the relative cost of labour versus capital. Normally in a capitalist society, this happens all the time as second nature but it's broken in the UK and has been for some time.
So time to reduce all those subsides to companies who threaten to leave. Allow then to go and take their low value, low productivity jobs with them.
On a different note, I am currently at Southwark Cathedral about to see two of my children playing in the orchestra for the Christmas carols concert, which officially kicks off the Christmas season for me and fills me with joy and goodwill for weeks.
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Got my choir’s Christmas carol concerts coming up this Sunday at St Paul’s Covent Garden. A cheesy one in the afternoon for the Buble-bashers (not fun) then a proper one in the evening for the bible-bashers / musos (fun). Only 21 tickets left.
TL/DR; thousands of tons dumped in a sophisticated fly-tipping operation. Environment Agency, police, councils do nothing, very slowly.
The pattern is repeated through many things.
The game works like this -
- A property is owned through an offshore company. - This is rented to an onshore company. The onshore company is owned in the names of people whose identities have been "Stolen". I use quotes, because, often, they are paid to allow this to happen. - The rent is excessive and is how the profits are laundered. - The onshore company may sub let the property to other fake companies as further "layering" - Crimes are committed using the property. - The Big Boss(es) live in a big house in the UK. All tax paid etc, on their income from abroad. When they are clever, this is from a different country to the that of the offshore company at the top. That company is owned by a company in another offshore company.
So, you arrest the underlings here, make your way up the ladder of companies in the UK and then need years of diplomatic stuff to get (if at all) information on the first company abroad.
Which, further hasn't committed a provable crime. They (or more exactly the lawyers handing their property in the UK) rented a piece of property. Sure it was for a lot of money, but that isn't a crime. And they are shocked and horrified it was used for crime. But the money was paid in rent, all above board. Taxes paid and everything. Accounts filed with all relevant authorities.
Given how ubiquitous this sort of thing is, and how much hassle it causes for the rest of us, what's the answer?
We're not talking galaxy brain evil genius, after all. Just shameless shabbiness. Half the scandals London Centric reports on seem to be "rich bloke ensures that the money flows to him, but the associated liability doesn't".
The thing that strikes me looking at the graph is how similar that’s all now looking to how it went in France and Italy, historical main and winning parties obliterated by the extremes and unable to come back.
“Globalisation, the invention of social media and pre-WW3 European politics 2010-2035”.
Someone’s history PhD thesis in 2080, except nobody will be doing PhDs by then because of AI or because we’re all back living in caves.
They’ll still be writing thesis at that point as a social status signifier. They may, however, be graded and assessed automatically.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Convict more women to bring the numbers up?
Impose targets on organised crime to promote women?
Promote crime as a career among girls in school?
Meanwhile in the real world women live in - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/sarah-everard-inquiry-news-0dlwjtvxx "Women’s lives are “at stake” because police chiefs and ministers are failing to stop predatory men committing sexually motivated crimes in public, a report has warned. Basic questions about the scale of rape, sexual assaults and indecent exposure “cannot be answered” because data collection is “patchy and difficult to obtain”, the Angiolini inquiry found.
....
Addressing police chiefs and ministers, Angiolini said: “I continue to be worried about [women’s] safety in public spaces. There is no better time to act than now. I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.
“My report sets out how sexually-motivated crimes against women remain widespread across public spaces in England and Wales, yet efforts to prevent them are fragmented, underfunded and overly-reliant on short-term solutions."
Previous recommendations not implemented etc, a failure described as "deeply disappointing". And so on.
File under: Women. Don't Count - Example 5381.
Cyclefree as ever is quick to call out men for raping and murdering women but she says nothing about the modern plague of female escalator crime.
TfL passenger to stand trial after she's charged with walking wrong way on escalator ... Michaela Copeland was charged with "walking on an escalator in the wrong direction" at North Greenwich Underground Station on the Transport for London (TfL) regional railway network on Thursday, November 27. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tfl-passenger-stand-trial-after-36336912
TL/DR; thousands of tons dumped in a sophisticated fly-tipping operation. Environment Agency, police, councils do nothing, very slowly.
The pattern is repeated through many things.
The game works like this -
- A property is owned through an offshore company. - This is rented to an onshore company. The onshore company is owned in the names of people whose identities have been "Stolen". I use quotes, because, often, they are paid to allow this to happen. - The rent is excessive and is how the profits are laundered. - The onshore company may sub let the property to other fake companies as further "layering" - Crimes are committed using the property. - The Big Boss(es) live in a big house in the UK. All tax paid etc, on their income from abroad. When they are clever, this is from a different country to the that of the offshore company at the top. That company is owned by a company in another offshore company.
So, you arrest the underlings here, make your way up the ladder of companies in the UK and then need years of diplomatic stuff to get (if at all) information on the first company abroad.
Which, further hasn't committed a provable crime. They (or more exactly the lawyers handing their property in the UK) rented a piece of property. Sure it was for a lot of money, but that isn't a crime. And they are shocked and horrified it was used for crime. But the money was paid in rent, all above board. Taxes paid and everything. Accounts filed with all relevant authorities.
Given how ubiquitous this sort of thing is, and how much hassle it causes for the rest of us, what's the answer?
We're not talking galaxy brain evil genius, after all. Just shameless shabbiness. Half the scandals London Centric reports on seem to be "rich bloke ensures that the money flows to him, but the associated liability doesn't".
If I had the answer, I would have set up a company (offshore of course) and hired @Cyclefree to go after them, Robin Hood style.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Convict more women to bring the numbers up?
Impose targets on organised crime to promote women?
Promote crime as a career among girls in school?
Meanwhile in the real world women live in - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/sarah-everard-inquiry-news-0dlwjtvxx "Women’s lives are “at stake” because police chiefs and ministers are failing to stop predatory men committing sexually motivated crimes in public, a report has warned. Basic questions about the scale of rape, sexual assaults and indecent exposure “cannot be answered” because data collection is “patchy and difficult to obtain”, the Angiolini inquiry found.
....
Addressing police chiefs and ministers, Angiolini said: “I continue to be worried about [women’s] safety in public spaces. There is no better time to act than now. I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.
“My report sets out how sexually-motivated crimes against women remain widespread across public spaces in England and Wales, yet efforts to prevent them are fragmented, underfunded and overly-reliant on short-term solutions."
Previous recommendations not implemented etc, a failure described as "deeply disappointing". And so on.
File under: Women. Don't Count - Example 5381.
Cyclefree as ever is quick to call out men for raping and murdering women but she says nothing about the modern plague of female escalator crime.
TfL passenger to stand trial after she's charged with walking wrong way on escalator ... Michaela Copeland was charged with "walking on an escalator in the wrong direction" at North Greenwich Underground Station on the Transport for London (TfL) regional railway network on Thursday, November 27. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tfl-passenger-stand-trial-after-36336912
Ah, relative poverty. The measure that concludes if everyone in the UK earned £100 a year, nobody would be poor.
'Relative' is, I think you'll find, an important part of the term 'relative poverty'.
If everyone in the UK earned £100 a year there wouldn't be a government to measure poverty in the first place. It's a facile observation.
No measure is perfect, but there's no doubt that an income if 60% median is pretty tough, and there's a decent rationale for it given the current structure of our labour market, welfare system and economy. Other options are available and I look forward to Morris_Dancer explaining which is best.
Here is someone's calculation. TLDR The National Living Wage does not achieve this. QED minimum wages have to rise again* and QED2. Companies with a high labour content need to plan how to increase productivity or die**
According to this, for a 'minimum income standard' a couple with two children (pre school and primary) need an annual post income tax income of £64,767.
I know a lot of lovely mostly WWC people standing with me in the playground collecting children in north Cumberland who would find that a fascinating piece of information about life on planet Zarg.
Mad. Isn't it. Most people know there is something wrong with the benefits system but can't put their finger on it. So different theories emerge.
As a starting point, those receiving "working age" benefits are in work. This essentially means that the taxpayer is paying UK businesses a subsidy for employing people and quite a large one.
The second point, as illustrated by the graphs earlier, is that productivity has been forecast to grow in the UK but never does. So every budget that assumes future productivity growth is very likely to be wrong.
So what is the best way to grow productivity? Essentially you have to make work pay be reducing the compression that has built up between being in a job and on benefits. Some argue, freeze or reduce benefits but this doesn't address the issue of productivity which is the difference between the relative cost of labour versus capital. Normally in a capitalist society, this happens all the time as second nature but it's broken in the UK and has been for some time.
So time to reduce all those subsides to companies who threaten to leave. Allow then to go and take their low value, low productivity jobs with them.
I Know I keep mentioning the Speenhamland System. Which startled me when I first read about it. Taxpayers subsidising rich bastards not to pay their workers properly ( and even then the workers half-starved).
But historians keep saying it was a Bad Thing, like truck payments, the Norman idea of urban-improving Hartlepool, etc. etc.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
If you make life worse for the median worker, you can certainly reduce "poverty", by that measure.
But the lefties will feel oh so good about themselves having eliminated poverty by making everyone poor.
But no one here is suggesting that's the best way to do it. Obviously. Because it doesn't improve the lot of people on low incomes.
If you don't like idea of trying to get people out of deprivation then own it. Don't hide behind mathematical gotchas.
But I didn't say that? I said that the current way we measure it is stupid and the idea of relative poverty is also stupid. Poverty should me measured on an absolute basis with the definition being updated every few years to take into account inflation. It doesn't seem sensible to me to have a measure of poverty that looks better if a million high earners leave the country. That doesn't make the person on £20k a year better off.
Ah, relative poverty. The measure that concludes if everyone in the UK earned £100 a year, nobody would be poor.
'Relative' is, I think you'll find, an important part of the term 'relative poverty'.
If everyone in the UK earned £100 a year there wouldn't be a government to measure poverty in the first place. It's a facile observation.
No measure is perfect, but there's no doubt that an income if 60% median is pretty tough, and there's a decent rationale for it given the current structure of our labour market, welfare system and economy. Other options are available and I look forward to Morris_Dancer explaining which is best.
Here is someone's calculation. TLDR The National Living Wage does not achieve this. QED minimum wages have to rise again* and QED2. Companies with a high labour content need to plan how to increase productivity or die**
According to this, for a 'minimum income standard' a couple with two children (pre school and primary) need an annual post income tax income of £64,767.
I know a lot of lovely mostly WWC people standing with me in the playground collecting children in north Cumberland who would find that a fascinating piece of information about life on planet Zarg.
Mad. Isn't it. Most people know there is something wrong with the benefits system but can't put their finger on it. So different theories emerge.
As a starting point, those receiving "working age" benefits are in work. This essentially means that the taxpayer is paying UK businesses a subsidy for employing people and quite a large one.
The second point, as illustrated by the graphs earlier, is that productivity has been forecast to grow in the UK but never does. So every budget that assumes future productivity growth is very likely to be wrong.
So what is the best way to grow productivity? Essentially you have to make work pay be reducing the compression that has built up between being in a job and on benefits. Some argue, freeze or reduce benefits but this doesn't address the issue of productivity which is the difference between the relative cost of labour versus capital. Normally in a capitalist society, this happens all the time as second nature but it's broken in the UK and has been for some time.
So time to reduce all those subsides to companies who threaten to leave. Allow then to go and take their low value, low productivity jobs with them.
I Know I keep mentioning the Speenhamland System. Which startled me when I first read about it. Taxpayers subsidising rich bastards not to pay their workers properly ( and even then the workers half-starved).
But historians keep saying it was a Bad Thing, like truck payments, the Norman idea of urban-improving Hartlepool, etc. etc.
Yet now it's almost the default.
If you talk to people in and around governments they will tell you that a real crackdown on sub-minimum wage jobs will “collapse chunks of the economy”.
See my idea to go after the employers for being scumbags.
The reality is that, like expensive & scarce housing, change is blocked by huge vested interests. And often, those vested interests are us.
It will be difficult for Farage to criticise a Kemi too much in light of his glowing praise for her when she first ran for the Tory leadership. I suppose he could say she has failed to deliver, but hopefully it leads to some sort of pact
I'd put that down as mistake by Nigel. When he was drenching Kemi with plaudits he was very much playing the role of the wise old statesman picking out a starlet for the distant future. But we've since had the Kemigasm, that future is now the present, and Nigel is fighting for his political survival. He needs her to fail. My God. He desperately needs her to fail.
He's also had relatively good words to say about Starmer in the past. That's just the kind of consensus politician he is.
People are frankly sick of the divisive approach of Labour and the Tories and want the gentler form of politics that he represents.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
If you make life worse for the median worker, you can certainly reduce "poverty", by that measure.
But the lefties will feel oh so good about themselves having eliminated poverty by making everyone poor.
But no one here is suggesting that's the best way to do it. Obviously. Because it doesn't improve the lot of people on low incomes.
If you don't like idea of trying to get people out of deprivation then own it. Don't hide behind mathematical gotchas.
But I didn't say that? I said that the current way we measure it is stupid and the idea of relative poverty is also stupid. Poverty should me measured on an absolute basis with the definition being updated every few years to take into account inflation. It doesn't seem sensible to me to have a measure of poverty that looks better if a million high earners leave the country. That doesn't make the person on £20k a year better off.
We have an absolute poverty measure for that, but even then it gets re-calibrated for median incomes occasionally. That's because, ultimately, poverty does need a society level baseline to measure from to be meaningful.
Over time what we consider acceptable changes. We don't have mass starvation, we have very few children living on the street - but, as the JRF work demonstrates, when the public are asked to construct such a baseline it's much more generous than our current measures, and that baseline has increases over time. Even a material deprivation measure runs into this problem.
TLDR poverty has always been a measure of inequality, and necessarily so
The UK is hoping to reach an agreement to re-join the Erasmus scheme by January .
The Turing scheme is an insult to the memory of the great man . A cheap knock-off where the Tories stuck his name on the scheme to give it some kudos and to dupe the gullible into thinking it delivered the same benefits post Brexit .
Weirdly I'm lined up to host two Danish students next semester and two Texans over the summer, all without Erasmus. The EU were rather juvenile over Erasmus and I understand why we didn't cave. I hope we are rejoining on more sensible terms.
The original terms quoted for remaining in Erasmus were a FuckOffQuote - rather like the terms to join the EU Vaccine consortium, in COVID.
And the fixed fee of 6bn then 4bn requested for joining the EU Defence programme (total size: 150bn).
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Convict more women to bring the numbers up?
Impose targets on organised crime to promote women?
Promote crime as a career among girls in school?
Meanwhile in the real world women live in - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/sarah-everard-inquiry-news-0dlwjtvxx "Women’s lives are “at stake” because police chiefs and ministers are failing to stop predatory men committing sexually motivated crimes in public, a report has warned. Basic questions about the scale of rape, sexual assaults and indecent exposure “cannot be answered” because data collection is “patchy and difficult to obtain”, the Angiolini inquiry found.
....
Addressing police chiefs and ministers, Angiolini said: “I continue to be worried about [women’s] safety in public spaces. There is no better time to act than now. I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.
“My report sets out how sexually-motivated crimes against women remain widespread across public spaces in England and Wales, yet efforts to prevent them are fragmented, underfunded and overly-reliant on short-term solutions."
Previous recommendations not implemented etc, a failure described as "deeply disappointing". And so on.
File under: Women. Don't Count - Example 5381.
Cyclefree as ever is quick to call out men for raping and murdering women but she says nothing about the modern plague of female escalator crime.
TfL passenger to stand trial after she's charged with walking wrong way on escalator ... Michaela Copeland was charged with "walking on an escalator in the wrong direction" at North Greenwich Underground Station on the Transport for London (TfL) regional railway network on Thursday, November 27. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tfl-passenger-stand-trial-after-36336912
Up to £1000 fine.
We've all done it. And most of us have done it largely because it is not allowed. (But who else has done its vertical equivalent and been through the pit of a paternoster?)
Comments
Whereas if you have everyone comfortably off, but with a long tail, you have lots of poverty supposedly.
Suppressing median wages should not be a way of "lowering poverty".
War with Venezuela ?
There’s an issue with his MRI scan and his health prognosis is not good ?
Peace plan for Ukraine agreed by all parties ?
He’s pardoning the Tiger guy ?
This one is quite ingenious.
The drug to treat Alzheimers, Leqembi, requires regular MRIs of the head due to potential brain bleeds as a side effect. It is given by infusion. The multiple MRIs along with his hand bruising at regular intervals all point* to him getting Lewembi infusions for Alzheimers.
https://x.com/lorimariemarie/status/1989524466620395676
*They could point to a lot of other things, of course
The thing to grasp here is that taxes we pay to fund in-work benefits are effectively a subsidy to minimum wage employers. If you take into account housing benefits, another large chunk of it is a subsidy to slum landlords.
I don't mind paying taxes but I'd much prefer they went on disability benefits, child support, or on public health and transport investment, than on this manipulation of the labour market. I don't know how to fix it though - and the end result would mean lower taxes, but more expensive coffees and pints.
A senior official at the UK's economic forecaster has said he does not believe the chancellor was being misleading when she said the state of the public finances were "very challenging" in the run-up to the Budget.
Prof David Miles from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) told MPs Rachel Reeves's comments ahead of announcing her tax and spending plans were "not inconsistent" with the situation she faced.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czj0ngnkl2vo
"Women’s lives are “at stake” because police chiefs and ministers are failing to stop predatory men committing sexually motivated crimes in public, a report has warned. Basic questions about the scale of rape, sexual assaults and indecent exposure “cannot be answered” because data collection is “patchy and difficult to obtain”, the Angiolini inquiry found.
....
Addressing police chiefs and ministers, Angiolini said: “I continue to be worried about [women’s] safety in public spaces. There is no better time to act than now. I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.
“My report sets out how sexually-motivated crimes against women remain widespread across public spaces in England and Wales, yet efforts to prevent them are fragmented, underfunded and overly-reliant on short-term solutions."
Previous recommendations not implemented etc, a failure described as "deeply disappointing". And so on.
File under: Women. Don't Count - Example 5381.
More importantly it results in perverse incentives. We don't tax high earning working people more than ~47% but we effectively tax low earning working people 55% on top of 20% and 8% and potentially 9% too.
This broken system may tick a box that claims that individuals are no longer in poverty, but it traps them into low incomes making it effectively impossible to earn more as no more earned will be kept without taking a huge leap of earnings rise that is unattainable.
It also means that lower median salaries equates to lower poverty, supposedly. Do you really believe that?
The TV presenter Holly Willoughby turns right without bothering to indicate or look in her mirror, collides with a scooter rider resulting in him fracturing his neck.
Punishment? Six points and an insignificant fine.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15344457/Holly-Willoughby-court-driving-carelessly-Mini-Cooper.html
Exactly where the optimal rate of tax is I don’t know. But it’s greater than zero. I also don’t think that adding a couple of pounds to a hotel bill, for example, will change people’s purchasing decision.
Google tells me that there were 154m visitor nights in London in 2024 (58% international). At £2 per night that’s £300m that can be invested in the cultural sector / tube / visit Britain, etc
I would reduce the tax payers investment by £150m to save some money and find the extra from travellers.
And that’s just London
My point was that the Liverpool (and all other English hooligans) created the culture where cages were needed at all.
Which is why the metric is fundamentally flawed.
A measure of cost of living then a measure of whether people can afford that cost of living would make more sense. And should over time result in raising the bar as we have higher expectations today than we did in the past.
But holding down ever higher portions of our bell curve so that the minimum wage is the maximum wage for more and more people does not lower poverty in any true meaning of the word.
If you don't like idea of trying to get people out of deprivation then own it. Don't hide behind mathematical gotchas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis
I was not making a comment on the government's approach or raising the minimum wage.
I was just pointing out that some people don't understand how medians work.
A driving licence should not be seen as a right, but a privilege which is removed for misconduct.
And it is quite literally what politicians on both sides of the aisle have been doing in recent decades, chasing headlines over this stupid measure.
There was a comment a few days ago quoted by someone that compared a newly qualified teacher to minimum wage over time. Previously they were on 85% more than minimum wage, whereas now they're on 35% more than minimum wage. That's before taking into account things like student loans that the graduate is required to have.
Looking at it another way, previously the minimum wage was 54% of that income, whereas now it is 74% of it, thus meaning it has "reduced poverty".
That is not simply as the minimum wage has risen in real terms (it has) but because the teacher's salary has fallen in real terms (it has).
This wage suppression has occurred in industry after industry across the country. Ever higher proportions of the economy have seen their real incomes fall, and the delta between qualified or promoted individuals salaries and minimum wage has been falling across the board in many sectors, which has lowered living standards while supposedly reducing poverty.
This is how Trump treats a sex offender.
As with criminal justice in general, the lack of resources is the real problem.
There are plenty of laws (see also the new-ish problem of sexual deepfakes, where the UK has been quite quick to legislate compared with other countries), but they mean very little without the resources to enforce them.
And you're almost certainly right in saying that women are disproportionately affected (greatly so), not least as they're more likely to be victims than offenders.
Richard Burgon (Lab) says the prospect of someone being jailed for three years without a jury hearing the case “sends a chill through my heart”. He suggest this is the sort of thing that would happen in Putin’s Russia.
Lammy says justice is not being served now. And he says he would not view the courts in this country as being anything like Russia.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2025/dec/02/david-lammy-courts-law-starmer-labour-reeves-budget-obr-uk-politics-live-news-updates
I'm not sure.
However I don't think lowering medians is a way of reducing poverty, which is why this measure is fundamentally broken and should be axed entirely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytA-0xTYRUo&t=21s
Bet it doesn't have a disco for salmon - obvious violation of the law.
- they appoint 10,000 new People's Judges. With the right views of course.
- who then send people to prison for three years for possessing an offensive wife in a public place, loud shirt in a built up area...
- but what about the appeal, you say? Mr Kodogo and his entire family were deported 10 minutes after sentencing - so it wouldn't make sense to have appeal. Waste of time. Lessons will be learnt.
People who aren’t satisfied until the problems they are interested in are “solved” probably shouldn’t be interested in politics.
In Labour's first year of government (approximately), the median income in the UK has, after adjusting for inflation, gone up by 1.7%. See https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8456/
The figure is, adjusting for inflation, below the 2008 figure. The median did fall slighly over the period Tories were in No. 10, but I don't think it was Tory policy to drive down the median.
The stark points are that the service needs to be high quality, and we need to get away from a 1950s "them and us" mentality; any of us could be a wheelchair user for life next week; all it needs is for a dozy driver to hit you on a Zebra crossing, or a schoolrun mum not to see a child on a pavement when she's parking on it.
The other is that of lifecycle effectiveness. Maximum benefit for society does not come from short-term, ill thought out, "cheap on the face of it" solutions. Thought and investment are required, which requires an absence of short term fixes and quality staff, rather than approaching it like a cave man with a chainsaw.
One subtle one it misses out in measure is how difficult it is to enforce rights if you are disabled. Cameron and Co made it much more difficult when they came in in 2010 in various ways, and now a Council is likely to spend more money on their solicitors sending nastygrams rather than get a access officer to deal with that actual problem, which may be cheaper. Part of that is that austerity imposed on Councils means that they have almost all got rid of all their access officers, so each exercise now needs a consultant or gets a kludge from a generalist staff member who knows little.
An irony in the story is that had a better service been available, he could have been more productive for society and perhaps even paying more taxes.
One of the reasons I am on anti-wheelchair barriers is that I have a body of established law I can use to force action if necessary.
The UK is hoping to reach an agreement to re-join the Erasmus scheme by January .
The Turing scheme is an insult to the memory of the great man . A cheap knock-off where the Tories stuck his name on the scheme to give it some kudos and to dupe the gullible into thinking it delivered the same benefits post Brexit .
And the reduction in backlog as a result of this alone wouldn't be that great.
"Not like Russia" is a bar so low that it's not worth the waste of his breath to say it.
https://www.jrf.org.uk/a-minimum-income-standard-for-the-united-kingdom-in-2025
* This is good
* * This is even better
Trump is insane.
The US plans to return Russia's frozen assets once a peace agreement is signed, — Politico.
The US has informed EU sanctions chief David O'Sullivan of its decision to return frozen Russian assets to Russia after a peace plan is finalized.
Trump's plan: Russia destroys Ukraine, Europe has to pay for the reconstruction, and he does business with the Russians...
https://x.com/jurgen_nauditt/status/1995831352105521285
This you, Nigel? 👀
https://x.com/cchqpress/status/1995797598444101637?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
New 'Real Poverty' measure announced as part of the Government's drive to eradicate poverty.
The Government is to set up a new committee of four experts to establish a measure of Real Poverty..."
OBR_poverty_measure_3Dec25
No wonder we voted to leave.
A gigantic pile of rubbish was dumped in a field in Oxfordshire. The response sums up everything wrong with British bureaucracy.
https://martinrobbins.substack.com/p/rubbish-mountain
TL/DR; thousands of tons dumped in a sophisticated fly-tipping operation. Environment Agency, police, councils do nothing, very slowly.
Labour in office: real incomes rise; Tories in office: not a chance.
I know a lot of lovely mostly WWC people standing with me in the playground collecting children in north Cumberland who would find that a fascinating piece of information about life on planet Zarg.
President Trump's advisers Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin. They are expected to travel from Moscow to a European country and meet Ukrainian President Zelensky
(As also is Witkoff, of course.)
The game works like this -
- A property is owned through an offshore company.
- This is rented to an onshore company. The onshore company is owned in the names of people whose identities have been "Stolen". I use quotes, because, often, they are paid to allow this to happen.
- The rent is excessive and is how the profits are laundered.
- The onshore company may sub let the property to other fake companies as further "layering"
- Crimes are committed using the property.
- The Big Boss(es) live in a big house in the UK. All tax paid etc, on their income from abroad. When they are clever, this is from a different country to the that of the offshore company at the top. That company is owned by a company in another offshore company.
So, you arrest the underlings here, make your way up the ladder of companies in the UK and then need years of diplomatic stuff to get (if at all) information on the first company abroad.
Which, further hasn't committed a provable crime. They (or more exactly the lawyers handing their property in the UK) rented a piece of property. Sure it was for a lot of money, but that isn't a crime. And they are shocked and horrified it was used for crime. But the money was paid in rent, all above board. Taxes paid and everything. Accounts filed with all relevant authorities.
No, I'm quite sure that the price has been doubled, and what the UK students will receive has been reduced.
New Delhi says "Hold my Lassi":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F39M2mqm7og
@LeftieStats
➡️ REF: 31% (+4)
🔵 CON: 21% (+1)
🔴 LAB: 20% (-2)
🟠 LD: 12% (-1)
🟢 GRN: 8% (+2)
🟣 YP: 4% (-4)
Via
@Moreincommon_
, 28 Nov-1 Dec (+/- vs July)"
https://x.com/LeftieStats/status/1995827789380157840
As a starting point, those receiving "working age" benefits are in work. This essentially means that the taxpayer is paying UK businesses a subsidy for employing people and quite a large one.
The second point, as illustrated by the graphs earlier, is that productivity has been forecast to grow in the UK but never does. So every budget that assumes future productivity growth is very likely to be wrong.
So what is the best way to grow productivity? Essentially you have to make work pay be reducing the compression that has built up between being in a job and on benefits. Some argue, freeze or reduce benefits but this doesn't address the issue of productivity which is the difference between the relative cost of labour versus capital. Normally in a capitalist society, this happens all the time as second nature but it's broken in the UK and has been for some time.
So time to reduce all those subsides to companies who threaten to leave. Allow then to go and take their low value, low productivity jobs with them.
Got my choir’s Christmas carol concerts coming up this Sunday at St Paul’s Covent Garden. A cheesy one in the afternoon for the Buble-bashers (not fun) then a proper one in the evening for the bible-bashers / musos (fun). Only 21 tickets left.
We're not talking galaxy brain evil genius, after all. Just shameless shabbiness. Half the scandals London Centric reports on seem to be "rich bloke ensures that the money flows to him, but the associated liability doesn't".
TfL passenger to stand trial after she's charged with walking wrong way on escalator
...
Michaela Copeland was charged with "walking on an escalator in the wrong direction" at North Greenwich Underground Station on the Transport for London (TfL) regional railway network on Thursday, November 27.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tfl-passenger-stand-trial-after-36336912
But historians keep saying it was a Bad Thing, like truck payments, the Norman idea of urban-improving Hartlepool, etc. etc.
Yet now it's almost the default.
See my idea to go after the employers for being scumbags.
The reality is that, like expensive & scarce housing, change is blocked by huge vested interests. And often, those vested interests are us.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/25666628.scottish-councils-given-greater-flexibility-tourist-tax/?ref=ebbn&nid=1457&u=f140ec39d500193051a33e140c12bd95&date=021225
People are frankly sick of the divisive approach of Labour and the Tories and want the gentler form of politics that he represents.
Tbf, the Corbyn-Farage vote flow kinda makes sense. If burning down the house is the objective.
Over time what we consider acceptable changes. We don't have mass starvation, we have very few children living on the street - but, as the JRF work demonstrates, when the public are asked to construct such a baseline it's much more generous than our current measures, and that baseline has increases over time. Even a material deprivation measure runs into this problem.
TLDR poverty has always been a measure of inequality, and necessarily so
(But who else has done its vertical equivalent and been through the pit of a paternoster?)