I expect the usual suspects will now be lobbying for Boris & Dave to make similar arrangements.
'Nicola Sturgeon vows not to take full salary after Holyrood vote makes her top-paid British politician Nicola Sturgeon is eligible to a salary of £144,687 from next month but a ministerial pay freeze means she will only take £135,605.'
That is aiming for equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity is it not ? In any case most parents doing a full time jobs barely have the energy left at the end of the busy day to help their own children never mind spend extra effort on someone else's. Not saying I disagree with you in principle, but its rather a utopian view given the average working week in the UK.
I have been tutoring a child that effectively missed preschool and started school in the first year of junior school, she isn't very clever but tries hard and is conscientious, and it has taken me four years at 3 hours a day to catch her up to where she should be in school. It takes an immense amount of effort to fix someone's education once it starts to go wrong.
The most decisive measure, which no amount of money, libraries and tbh sure-start programs can make any impact on is parental engagement in their child's education. If you have a disinterested parent, or even a parent which is intellectually well below the child, the child is going to struggle. Middle class parents just are more engaged in their child's education, and there is often a negative image for academic achievement in many working class peer groups, "swot", "nerd" etc.
I don't think it's really aiming at =outcome, just =opportunity (measures to compensate a lack of support at home should give both children more equal opportunity but who knows what the outcome will be). I was really making the point that it would indeed be lacking in compassion to lavish all the advantages you have on your own children, rather than trying to share those advantages more widely - rather in the way you are doing, which is encouraging to hear about.
Of course I agree with your final point (except I think correlating "middle class parent" and "engaged parent" is rather a sweeping statement) - any government that's serious about improving this situation has to think very long term about the causes of poor parenting and how to address them through education, access to childcare, dealing with low pay and underemployment... and so on. There's not a quick fix.
I would think this applies to many pensioners who have paid off their mortgage and have savings. I know it is a real bugbear of my parents. Same under Labour I guess
Fraser Nelson (@FraserNelson) 18/03/2015 09:49 How have savers have fared under Osborne? £1,000 deposited in an Cash ISA seven years ago is worth just £916 now. pic.twitter.com/9FQ1mEHh0S
Those same pensioners would have been (rightly) more than compensated for such a loss by the triple lock on their pensions protecting them from the austerity the rest of public expenditure has gone through. If they've paid off their mortgage, they have also benefitted from continued house price rises improving their net worth. Given that, I would far prefer a few savers see modest returns (or even mild losses) over experiencing Eurozone-style deflation.
Good for you.
Let's see how ordinary pensioners feel about it, those that aren't financial whizzkids, don't want to move from their home,and can't justify paying financial advisors
Free and unlimited patronising remarks for all pensioners under Ukip (and Fraser Nelson).
No need to go on you've made your point and shown you are clueless
You'll see from my original point I said it would be the same under labour
'Unimaginative savers'
"ordinary pensioners"
Now THAT is patronising. Seriously what are Ukip proposing - to increase interest rates by how much ? For the sole reason that cash ISAs pay out more ? Baffling.
I would think this applies to many pensioners who have paid off their mortgage and have savings. I know it is a real bugbear of my parents. Same under Labour I guess
Fraser Nelson (@FraserNelson) 18/03/2015 09:49 How have savers have fared under Osborne? £1,000 deposited in an Cash ISA seven years ago is worth just £916 now. pic.twitter.com/9FQ1mEHh0S
Those same pensioners would have been (rightly) more than compensated for such a loss by the triple lock on their pensions protecting them from the austerity the rest of public expenditure has gone through. If they've paid off their mortgage, they have also benefitted from continued house price rises improving their net worth. Given that, I would far prefer a few savers see modest returns (or even mild losses) over experiencing Eurozone-style deflation.
Good for you.
Let's see how ordinary pensioners feel about it, those that aren't financial whizzkids, don't want to move from their home,and can't justify paying financial advisors
They don't need to. Plenty of thoroughly boring high street financial institutions like building societies offer access to savings products linked to stock markets or the like. It's not difficult and people need to take some responsibility for their own lives and decisions.
Very forceful Dave
Nasty party are back... the ultimate wolves in gay green sheeps clothing
Those numbers are simply shocking if true! What are you extrapolating the numbers to? I saw the coverage of a similar situation in Oxford, but nothing beyond that.
There have been "grooming gangs" in a number of towns and cities around the UK, including South London, Bradford and others.
The issue is that it is quite difficult to get hold of numbers - in part because a great many of the girls are very isolated from society already. The 1,400 number is Rotherham - if I understand correctly, and I may well not do, so please don't jump down my throat if I have misunderstood - was an extrapolation from 74 cases. The numbers Sean_F are using are the best guess we have, but there are an extrapolation from an extrapolation and therefore subject to even greater levels of uncertainty.
What can be taken as read, however, is that in a great many places, police and social services willfully ignored evidence of abuse - either because they did not find the girls plausible, or because they did not wish to be seen as racist.
I would think this applies to many pensioners who have paid off their mortgage and have savings. I know it is a real bugbear of my parents. Same under Labour I guess
Fraser Nelson (@FraserNelson) 18/03/2015 09:49 How have savers have fared under Osborne? £1,000 deposited in an Cash ISA seven years ago is worth just £916 now. pic.twitter.com/9FQ1mEHh0S
Those same pensioners would have been (rightly) more than compensated for such a loss by the triple lock on their pensions protecting them from the austerity the rest of public expenditure has gone through. If they've paid off their mortgage, they have also benefitted from continued house price rises improving their net worth. Given that, I would far prefer a few savers see modest returns (or even mild losses) over experiencing Eurozone-style deflation.
Good for you.
Let's see how ordinary pensioners feel about it, those that aren't financial whizzkids, don't want to move from their home,and can't justify paying financial advisors
They don't need to. Plenty of thoroughly boring high street financial institutions like building societies offer access to savings products linked to stock markets or the like. It's not difficult and people need to take some responsibility for their own lives and decisions.
Yes, but it is difficult to handle the capital risk at that sort of age (70s and up) when people ought to be moving out of shares and into more liquid assets anyway, so inflation/interest remains an issue. And those products can be difficult to sell quickly, especially for an elderly person without his own computer. I've just had to help out an elderly relative who held a non-trivial chunk of his savings in an asset trust's shares in an ISA - it turned out to be impossible to sell them immediately; one had to instruct the ISA company in writing and then wait till the following Monday for them to actually do it; and they wouldn't accept any other instructions such as 'do not sell if below xp'. We were lucky that the market didn't tank in the week or so we were waiting.
After the last slew of polls I'm getting the distinct impression that there are just too many who share the left wing values of concern for the disadvantaged for the Tories to win however competently they run the economy.
The clue lies with the 22% who voted Lib Dem last time. However much credit they get for instigating popular and even socially equitable policies their stock just keeps falling
The only available explanation is that the compassionate left have decided that having spent the last five years sleeping with dogs they are now so infected with flees there is only one party that can represent their values.
So Ed or George don't really matter. The big hearted British have no other choice.
Mike - can we be sure that Lord Ashcroft is using the same pollster for his national polls and his constituency polls? Otherwise some of the difference could be due to house effect.
The same question also applies to his new constituency polls compared to when they were first done.
It's important for Conservative supporters not to discount the polls just because we don't like the results.
Personally, I can't understand any logical reason why Worcester would have swung to the Tories, and Chester heavily to Labour - they're old Middle England historic towns/cities in not dissimiliar parts of the country.
But any critique I'd like to be on evidence - like margin of error - not conjecture.
Casino - I'm not a Con supporter. The point I'm making is that we wouldn't compare this month's Populus to last month's ICM. We compare Populus to Populus and ICM to ICM. What we have been doing here is comparing Lord Ashcroft's Polls against one another as Apples to Apples but we don't know who has done the polling so in some cases we may actually be comparing Apples to Oranges.
Another point I would make is that a lot of people are investing money in individual constituencies based on these polls. We know there are outliers in the national polls but these are generally easy to spot. How can you spot outliers in the constituency polls if there is only 1 poll per constituency? Looking at the changes in Chester and Southampton this suggests there is either a very large house effect (if different pollsters were used 1st and 2nd time round) or either the 1st or 2nd poll is an outlier. My best guess looking at the results last time would be that the 1st Southampton and 2nd Chester polls are the outliers.
If you want people to receive more in interest on their savings, then you are saying that borrowers (the government, people with mortgages, etc.) must pay more. There is no magic money tree: interest paid to savers is interest extracted from borrowers.
'JZ Rogers school was 30k pa..he doesn't want anyone else to have a good education outside of the state schools... along with Chukka and Tristram.. it is called hypocrisy..'
Was rather surprised to hear Kitty Ussher's seemingly ignorant response to the question she was asked on R4 earlier about how Weird Ed would respond to the budget; she said,
"We'll have to wait and see what Ed Balls says"
Didn't she work for years in the treasury? Shouldn't she know that the LotO responds, not the shadow chancellor?
Mike - can we be sure that Lord Ashcroft is using the same pollster for his national polls and his constituency polls? Otherwise some of the difference could be due to house effect.
The same question also applies to his new constituency polls compared to when they were first done.
It's important for Conservative supporters not to discount the polls just because we don't like the results.
Personally, I can't understand any logical reason why Worcester would have swung to the Tories, and Chester heavily to Labour - they're old Middle England historic towns/cities in not dissimiliar parts of the country.
But any critique I'd like to be on evidence - like margin of error - not conjecture.
Casino - I'm not a Con supporter. The point I'm making is that we wouldn't compare this month's Populus to last month's ICM. We compare Populus to Populus and ICM to ICM. What we have been doing here is comparing Lord Ashcroft's Polls against one another as Apples to Apples but we don't know who has done the polling so in some cases we may actually be comparing Apples to Oranges.
Another point I would make is that a lot of people are investing money in individual constituencies based on these polls. We know there are outliers in the national polls but these are generally easy to spot. How can you spot outliers in the constituency polls if there is only 1 poll per constituency? Looking at the changes in Chester and Southampton this suggests there is either a very large house effect (if different pollsters were used 1st and 2nd time round) or either the 1st or 2nd poll is an outlier. My best guess looking at the results last time would be that the 1st Southampton and 2nd Chester polls are the outliers.
Looking at these polls further, I suspect the current Worcester poll may be an outlier too as UKIP is up 10% but Con is static
PB Tories and Lefties alike united on the glory that is Blackpudding.
I am afraid Black Pudding is in the "take it or leave it" category for me, the local interpretation here is what amounts to black pudding soup, which I really can live without ! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinuguan
If you want people to receive more in interest on their savings, then you are saying that borrowers (the government, people with mortgages, etc.) must pay more. There is no magic money tree: interest paid to savers is interest extracted from borrowers.
Who said anything about a magic money tree?
People generally (this is normal people) think that prudence should be rewarded and risk taking/spending what you haven't got and cant afford should not be.. this is why many OAPs have paid off hteir mortgages and have surplus funds in their bank accounts.. rather than being rewarded for their prudence they are, as you say, paying for younger generations to be irresponsible, greedy and live beyonf their means
Banks were bailed out for irresponsible trading, and now society is being encouraged to be irresponsible...mo "lessons learned"
So the magic money tree, you could say, is the old and prudent, and when they die out who will we borrow from at such good rates?
Nicola Sturgeon is eligible to a salary of £144,687 from next month but a ministerial pay freeze means she will only take £135,605.'
She's giving up less than 100 quid a week in her hand - but of course her full salary counts towards her big fat taxpayer funded final salary pension ?
Whoop de doo.
The levels of pay in the Scottish Parliament were determined and set by the Labour Party. The SNP have done nothing to raise or lower these other than inflation linked increases (which during the current term they have kept below that for other public sector workers).
The only reason the PM salary is lower is that Gordon Brown cut it by £50k a few months before he was booted out. In any case it seems fine for a leader with a +40 rating to earn more than Dave with his -30 rating.
It also seems fair she should earn more than the PM after all she's about to be running the UK as well as Scotland.
If you want people to receive more in interest on their savings, then you are saying that borrowers (the government, people with mortgages, etc.) must pay more. There is no magic money tree: interest paid to savers is interest extracted from borrowers.
Funny as a city man you're always keen to remind us that only RBS and Lloyds group took money from the government. Let's just forget the astonishingly low BOE rates as they lend to us at 4 or 5%.
So the magic money tree, you could say, is the old and prudent, and when they die out who will we borrow from at such good rates?
I agree with the thrust of your argument, but I have a problem with the "old and prudent dying out" line of argument, in the same way as I have a problem with the "traditional Tories dying out" (so its all right to be Cameroon liberals) argument.
People get more prudent as they get older because they have more responsibilities, and less life left to sort out any screw ups. People get more conservative as they get older, when they have been mugged enough times by reality to see the problem with socialism. They are both dynamic equilibriums, some fall off, more are created, in both categories.
Nothing about black pudding appeals to me. Ever. The white bits in particular.
Or tripe. The most amusing Tripe Marketing Board on Twitter is very funny. It started life as a PR vehicle and took on a life of its own - I've no idea if the butchers that funded the original campaign are still coughing up - but it's still active more than a year later.
@Garethofthevale - Do you really expect large house effects just by having a different company man the phones for Ashcroft's Polls? The methodology they apply to the sample will be as directed by him, or whatever experts he has consulted, and the methodology will be invariant.
It is completely different to comparing ICM (phone, past vote weighting) with Populus (online, party ID weighting).
I think that is genuinely the saddest thing I have heard this month.
Nor have I had bacon (which really depresses my friends)
I'm a good Muslim boy.
So should your Economically Dry But Not Banging On About Europe Or Gays Party miraculously rise to power, you will not be attempting the bacon sandwich test so beloved of the press and our current leaders (even those that alleged out of the other side of their mouth that they will be Britain's first Jewish Prime Minister).
I think that is genuinely the saddest thing I have heard this month.
Nor have I had bacon (which really depresses my friends)
I'm a good Muslim boy.
So should your Economically Dry But Not Banging On About Europe Or Gays Party miraculously rise to power, you will not be attempting the bacon sandwich test so beloved of the press and our current leaders (even those that alleged out of the other side of their mouth that they will be Britain's first Jewish Prime Minister).
Is Disraeli coming back for a second term in office ?
If we see that we know they think they are toast. Any else got a candidate for expensive measures politically impossible for Ed & Ed to repeal if they win ?
If you're a Sunday Times subscriber or reader - this week had a brilliant piece on the sandwich factory industry - really great stuff and some gobsmacking factoids. It's a business that didn't exist 20yrs ago and now makes millions of them a week because we can't be arsed. And funny with it.
I think that is genuinely the saddest thing I have heard this month.
Nor have I had bacon (which really depresses my friends)
I'm a good Muslim boy.
So should your Economically Dry But Not Banging On About Europe Or Gays Party miraculously rise to power, you will not be attempting the bacon sandwich test so beloved of the press and our current leaders (even those that alleged out of the other side of their mouth that they will be Britain's first Jewish Prime Minister).
I'll be avoiding that accident waiting to happen.
Though pigs will get me into trouble, when I pose the following question.
I would think this applies to many pensioners who have paid off their mortgage and have savings. I know it is a real bugbear of my parents. Same under Labour I guess
Fraser Nelson (@FraserNelson) 18/03/2015 09:49 How have savers have fared under Osborne? £1,000 deposited in an Cash ISA seven years ago is worth just £916 now. pic.twitter.com/9FQ1mEHh0S
Those same pensioners would have been (rightly) more than compensated for such a loss by the triple lock on their pensions protecting them from the austerity the rest of public expenditure has gone through. If they've paid off their mortgage, they have also benefitted from continued house price rises improving their net worth. Given that, I would far prefer a few savers see modest returns (or even mild losses) over experiencing Eurozone-style deflation.
Good for you.
Let's see how ordinary pensioners feel about it, those that aren't financial whizzkids, don't want to move from their home,and can't justify paying financial advisors
They don't need to. Plenty of thoroughly boring high street financial institutions like building societies offer access to savings products linked to stock markets or the like. It's not difficult and people need to take some responsibility for their own lives and decisions.
Very forceful Dave
Nasty party are back... the ultimate wolves in gay green sheeps clothing
What's nasty about providing choice? If you have choice and reasonable information then people are best placed to judge what's best for their own circumstances - and the consequence of that is that they're responsible for those decisions. The alternative is the infantilisation of the population, implicit in the belief that they're not capable of looking after themselves and that bureaucrats should do it for them.
I think that is genuinely the saddest thing I have heard this month.
Nor have I had bacon (which really depresses my friends)
I'm a good Muslim boy.
So should your Economically Dry But Not Banging On About Europe Or Gays Party miraculously rise to power, you will not be attempting the bacon sandwich test so beloved of the press and our current leaders (even those that alleged out of the other side of their mouth that they will be Britain's first Jewish Prime Minister).
Is Disraeli coming back for a second term in office ?
I believe not, although this might be news to Miliband Minor, he was either conveniently forgetful, or was trying to imply a religious status somewhat at odds with his dietary preferences regarding pork products.
I would think this applies to many pensioners who have paid off their mortgage and have savings. I know it is a real bugbear of my parents. Same under Labour I guess
Fraser Nelson (@FraserNelson) 18/03/2015 09:49 How have savers have fared under Osborne? £1,000 deposited in an Cash ISA seven years ago is worth just £916 now. pic.twitter.com/9FQ1mEHh0S
Those same pensioners would have been (rightly) more than compensated for such a loss by the triple lock on their pensions protecting them from the austerity the rest of public expenditure has gone through. If they've paid off their mortgage, they have also benefitted from continued house price rises improving their net worth. Given that, I would far prefer a few savers see modest returns (or even mild losses) over experiencing Eurozone-style deflation.
Good for you.
Let's see how ordinary pensioners feel about it, those that aren't financial whizzkids, don't want to move from their home,and can't justify paying financial advisors
I'm not meaning this in a rude way, but are you sure you responded to the right person? My comment did not entail anything about being a financial whizzkid. Benefitting from state pension increases and rises in house prices (meaning you can pass on more inheritance to your children) happens completely passively. I'm sure pensioners would prefer being in the UK than in other countries where steep cuts to their pensions have been pushed through.
So the magic money tree, you could say, is the old and prudent, and when they die out who will we borrow from at such good rates?
I agree with the thrust of your argument, but I have a problem with the "old and prudent dying out" line of argument, in the same way as I have a problem with the "traditional Tories dying out" (so its all right to be Cameroon liberals) argument.
People get more prudent as they get older because they have more responsibilities, and less life left to sort out any screw ups. People get more conservative as they get older, when they have been mugged enough times by reality to see the problem with socialism. They are both dynamic equilibriums, some fall off, more are created, in both categories.
The debate seems to be off track.
It is not about prudence and risk.
The problem with the UK is that there is NO suitable long term investment vehicle.
The FTSE has only grown 300% since 1990.
The Dow has grown 900%.
Cash savings invested in the bank since 1990 would have grown more (substantially more) than stock investments. Not only that, there wouldn't have been 1% per annum in charges on the entire fund as a someone would pay on a tracker fund.
Speaking of Disraeli on Budget Day - Mr Fink notes that the tradition of holding up the Red Box dates back to IIRC 1868 when David Ward Hunt was CoE. He left his speech at home on Budget Day and so every CoE since has held up the briefcase to prove he has it with him.
I think that is genuinely the saddest thing I have heard this month.
Nor have I had bacon (which really depresses my friends)
I'm a good Muslim boy.
So should your Economically Dry But Not Banging On About Europe Or Gays Party miraculously rise to power, you will not be attempting the bacon sandwich test so beloved of the press and our current leaders (even those that alleged out of the other side of their mouth that they will be Britain's first Jewish Prime Minister).
Is Disraeli coming back for a second term in office ?
I believe not, although this might be news to Miliband Minor, he was either conveniently forgetful, or was trying to imply a religious status somewhat at odds with his dietary preferences regarding pork products.
Incidentally, this is also a significant opportunity for Miliband to try and turn around his personal ratings. Not saying it can be a silver bullet, but it could make a difference.
I'll take the duty cut but if this turns out to be the case I'll be seriously worried that the likes of Mcbride are being leaked advance copies of the budget.
Incidentally, this is also a significant opportunity for Miliband to try and turn around his personal ratings. Not saying it can be a silver bullet, but it could make a difference.
Nah noone notices, or cares about the LOTO pot budget speech. Either the Gov't has a good budget or cocks it up.
Those numbers are simply shocking if true! What are you extrapolating the numbers to? I saw the coverage of a similar situation in Oxford, but nothing beyond that.
There have been "grooming gangs" in a number of towns and cities around the UK, including South London, Bradford and others.
The issue is that it is quite difficult to get hold of numbers - in part because a great many of the girls are very isolated from society already. The 1,400 number is Rotherham - if I understand correctly, and I may well not do, so please don't jump down my throat if I have misunderstood - was an extrapolation from 74 cases. The numbers Sean_F are using are the best guess we have, but there are an extrapolation from an extrapolation and therefore subject to even greater levels of uncertainty.
What can be taken as read, however, is that in a great many places, police and social services willfully ignored evidence of abuse - either because they did not find the girls plausible, or because they did not wish to be seen as racist.
Thank you, rcs1000. I had no idea there had been so many cases and am surprised I missed it. Would you have any articles, so I could read further? Many thanks.
I think that is genuinely the saddest thing I have heard this month.
Nor have I had bacon (which really depresses my friends)
I'm a good Muslim boy.
So should your Economically Dry But Not Banging On About Europe Or Gays Party miraculously rise to power, you will not be attempting the bacon sandwich test so beloved of the press and our current leaders (even those that alleged out of the other side of their mouth that they will be Britain's first Jewish Prime Minister).
I'll be avoiding that accident waiting to happen.
Though pigs will get me into trouble, when I pose the following question.
I'll take the duty cut but if this turns out to be the case I'll be seriously worried that the likes of Mcbride are being leaked advance copies of the budget.
I can't see it myself. Petrol has fallen massively over the past six months as the crude oil price cratered, shaving a few pence off the petrol price is hardly going to be noticed by comparison, and is going to cost a load of money. Much more likely to freeze the duty for a year or two I would think.
Those same pensioners would have been (rightly) more than compensated for such a loss by the triple lock on their pensions protecting them from the austerity the rest of public expenditure has gone through. If they've paid off their mortgage, they have also benefitted from continued house price rises improving their net worth. Given that, I would far prefer a few savers see modest returns (or even mild losses) over experiencing Eurozone-style deflation.
Good for you.
Let's see how ordinary pensioners feel about it, those that aren't financial whizzkids, don't want to move from their home,and can't justify paying financial advisors
They don't need to. Plenty of thoroughly boring high street financial institutions like building societies offer access to savings products linked to stock markets or the like. It's not difficult and people need to take some responsibility for their own lives and decisions.
Yes, but it is difficult to handle the capital risk at that sort of age (70s and up) when people ought to be moving out of shares and into more liquid assets anyway, so inflation/interest remains an issue. And those products can be difficult to sell quickly, especially for an elderly person without his own computer. I've just had to help out an elderly relative who held a non-trivial chunk of his savings in an asset trust's shares in an ISA - it turned out to be impossible to sell them immediately; one had to instruct the ISA company in writing and then wait till the following Monday for them to actually do it; and they wouldn't accept any other instructions such as 'do not sell if below xp'. We were lucky that the market didn't tank in the week or so we were waiting.
The sort of products I was meaning were more like capital-protected bonds, which have a variable return based on the stock market but which guarantee the investment back (presumably the risk to the seller is sold on through market instruments somehow), such as these:
Now, I grant you that you're locking your capital up for a fairly serious period of time in many of these, which won't be right for everyone and even for those who it is right in part, they'll no doubt want to keep some savings more liquid, but the basic premise stands that they can form part of a balanced savings portfolio for those with money put aside.
Ultimately, the whole question of savings usually comes back to the point that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. People complaining about the lack of high returns need to recognise that they will only *ever* exist if they come with high risk because there is simply nothing that can reliably produce them otherwise.
I think a lot of people who've been sexually abused just want to put it out of their minds, and don't want to relive their experiences in Court.
Rotherham has 260,000 people. The idea that 0.5% of that population have been sexually abused over the course of 15 years is not at all far-fetched.
One of the problems with Rotherham, Oxford and the like is that those who seek to question the numbers are seen as "deniers", who are seeking to sweep the issue under the carpet.I found myself in this position, when @Socrates or @SeanT suggested 2 million girls could have been abused, and I pointed out that 2m was equivalent to one-third of the girls who had passed through the 13-16 age group in the last decade - and that, therefore, the number was probably not particularly plausible.
Taking Rotherham, 0.5% of people abused in the town does not sound unlikely. But you do need to adjust the data - only half the people are girls. And only 20% of these will have been in the 13-16 age group at some point in the last 15 years. So, we're saying 5% of girls who were teenagers in the last 15 years were abused. Which is possible - and fairly horrendous.
As an aside, I thought the majority of people we know to have been abused were in care, and therefore particularly vulnerable. (And which, of course, makes the council even more culpable.)
That would be around 20% of all girls that had been teenagers in the last decade.
Which seems high.
Will have been some boys in the mix too.
Abuse comes in many forms. One in five does not seem that outlandish in a country that has always been extremely poor at protecting children from abusers, and at punishing abusers.
On the other hand it is totally in the self interest of the local labour MP to invent a figure in the process of trying to spread the blame around and absolve herself. Likewise these events occurred in labour constituencies, but surprisingly all the accusations against the 'privileged' against MPs are against tories. Pardon me if I wonder about the Daily Mirror in this respect.
I can think of one prominent Labour figure who faces accusations.
In general, the combination of ethnic gang culture/children in care/from broken homes, is most common in poorer areas. Those areas tend to vote Labour.
But, I'm sure that a good deal of child abuse takes place in some of the leafiest places.
If you want people to receive more in interest on their savings, then you are saying that borrowers (the government, people with mortgages, etc.) must pay more. There is no magic money tree: interest paid to savers is interest extracted from borrowers.
Who said anything about a magic money tree?
People generally (this is normal people) think that prudence should be rewarded and risk taking/spending what you haven't got and cant afford should not be.. this is why many OAPs have paid off hteir mortgages and have surplus funds in their bank accounts.. rather than being rewarded for their prudence they are, as you say, paying for younger generations to be irresponsible, greedy and live beyonf their means
Banks were bailed out for irresponsible trading, and now society is being encouraged to be irresponsible...mo "lessons learned"
So the magic money tree, you could say, is the old and prudent, and when they die out who will we borrow from at such good rates?
Several things:
1. Banks were not bailed out. Depositors were bailed out.
When RBS was bailed out, it was the small business who had their current account that was bailed out, and the OAP with their RBS savings account that was bailed out.
If RBS had been allowed to enter insolvency proceedings, then all their customers accounts would have needed to have been frozen - as happened with BCCI when it went belly up in 1991. That would have been economically devastating, and would almost certainly have led to a cascade of bank failures.
2. Imagine for a second that the government had said "let's reward prudence, we're going to run with a higher interest rate to benefit the prudent savers" then...
...the pound would have soared: at a time when interest rates were falling across the world, we would have raised ours and that would caused a flood of money to race into the UK, pushing the pound up and causing export orientated businesses to close
...the British government would have had to pay more to borrow, making our budget deficit worse, or causing us to have to increase taxes
...the flood of speculative money coming into Britain would almost certainly have caused nasty distortions to asset markets
...many homeowners and businesses would have gone bust as the cost of their interest payments would have remained the same as their incomes dwindled
It's not the government's job to "reward prudence" or anything else. The price of borrowing and saving should be set by people's willingness to defer or bring forward spending. Interest rates are prices like any other, and should be set by the free market.
If you want people to receive more in interest on their savings, then you are saying that borrowers (the government, people with mortgages, etc.) must pay more. There is no magic money tree: interest paid to savers is interest extracted from borrowers.
Who said anything about a magic money tree?
People generally (this is normal people) think that prudence should be rewarded and risk taking/spending what you haven't got and cant afford should not be.. this is why many OAPs have paid off hteir mortgages and have surplus funds in their bank accounts.. rather than being rewarded for their prudence they are, as you say, paying for younger generations to be irresponsible, greedy and live beyonf their means
Banks were bailed out for irresponsible trading, and now society is being encouraged to be irresponsible...mo "lessons learned"
So the magic money tree, you could say, is the old and prudent, and when they die out who will we borrow from at such good rates?
Several things:
Imagine for a second that the government had said "let's reward prudence, we're going to run with a higher interest rate to benefit the prudent savers"
It's not the government's job to "reward prudence" or anything else. The price of borrowing and saving should be set by people's willingness to defer or bring forward spending. Interest rates are prices like any other, and should be set by the free market.
Cash savings invested in the bank since 1990 would have grown more (substantially more) than stock investments. Not only that, there wouldn't have been 1% per annum in charges on the entire fund as a someone would pay on a tracker fund.
No they wouldn't. You are forgetting two things:
1. Interest payments from the bank are taxable. 2. Shares also pay dividends.
A FTSE-100 tracker with dividends reinvested (which is, of course, only subject to capital gains tax) would have grown at more than 7% a year (after charges), and a bank account would have grown at more like 2%. That means you would have had more than twice as much in savings at the end of the process if you'd bought the tarcker.
Guardian liveblog has Osborne raiding pensions in order to fund an increase in the NI threshold. Labour policy at the moment is to raid pensions to pay for a reduction in tuition fees, so raiding them first would put Labour in a bit of a pickle over that policy.
"FTSE tracker would have spanked that by some margin - as would other investments. Does Nelson want a higher interest rate just to suit unimaginative savers ?"
Not unimaginative, but realistic.
Over a few years, the FTSE will nearly always beat savings but that depends on your age. If you're 83, investing in shares is a gamble too far.
That reminds me of my favourite scene from the Simpsons ....
The school caretaker had turned into Freddie Kruger from 'Nightmare on Elm Street'. In the Simpson household, Bart is talking to Abe (Homer's dad).
Abe asks him. "So if you go to sleep you may not wake up in the morning?" "Yes," says Bart. "Welcome to my world," says Abe.
Mr. Me, raiding pensions might be courageous in the Yes, Minister sense of the word. Pissing off the cohort likeliest to vote shortly before an election would certainly not be cautious.
This is one of those occasions when the whole article needs to be read, since it is stuffed full of useful insights. To pick out two verdicts:
"The OBR’s initial economic forecast was honest but wrong, and badly so. The biggest error was to overestimate productivity growth. Failing to predict the eurozone crisis and energy price moves can be excused because they were impossible to forecast with any accuracy.
The failure to understand productivity should undermine anyone’s confidence that the current forecasts will be any more accurate for the next parliament."
"The chancellor says he has halved the deficit as a share of national income. That is true, but the record is far less impressive than he planned in 2010, so deficit reduction must be regarded as a failure.
The failure, however, came about because of excessive optimism about the strength of the UK economy, rather than the chancellor’s spending cuts and tax increases. There is little evidence it failed because of Mr Osborne’s plans for the public finances."
I can't actually think of a decent topic for him - NHS maybe ?
Cruddas/Sleaze/Donors
I bet Michael Green will get a mention
Future Tory leader.
Inside his head, he probably thinks he's got a chance.
Decent trading bet if you think about it, if he oversees Tories as largest party/remaining in government, he's going to be rewarded with a new major role.
Comments
Of course I agree with your final point (except I think correlating "middle class parent" and "engaged parent" is rather a sweeping statement) - any government that's serious about improving this situation has to think very long term about the causes of poor parenting and how to address them through education, access to childcare, dealing with low pay and underemployment... and so on. There's not a quick fix.
Nasty party are back... the ultimate wolves in gay green sheeps clothing
The issue is that it is quite difficult to get hold of numbers - in part because a great many of the girls are very isolated from society already. The 1,400 number is Rotherham - if I understand correctly, and I may well not do, so please don't jump down my throat if I have misunderstood - was an extrapolation from 74 cases. The numbers Sean_F are using are the best guess we have, but there are an extrapolation from an extrapolation and therefore subject to even greater levels of uncertainty.
What can be taken as read, however, is that in a great many places, police and social services willfully ignored evidence of abuse - either because they did not find the girls plausible, or because they did not wish to be seen as racist.
Please don't leave me
I always say how I don't need you
But it's always gonna come right back to this
Please, don't leave me
I forgot to say out loud how beautiful you really are to me
I cannot be without, you're my perfect little punching bag
And I need you, I'm sorry
Rachel Reeves a tory now is she?
Another point I would make is that a lot of people are investing money in individual constituencies based on these polls. We know there are outliers in the national polls but these are generally easy to spot. How can you spot outliers in the constituency polls if there is only 1 poll per constituency? Looking at the changes in Chester and Southampton this suggests there is either a very large house effect (if different pollsters were used 1st and 2nd time round) or either the 1st or 2nd poll is an outlier. My best guess looking at the results last time would be that the 1st Southampton and 2nd Chester polls are the outliers.
Regarding interest payments.
If you want people to receive more in interest on their savings, then you are saying that borrowers (the government, people with mortgages, etc.) must pay more. There is no magic money tree: interest paid to savers is interest extracted from borrowers.
Waitrose even do 'Black Pudding' Scotch Eggs.....
But like sausages, best not enquire as to provenance or manufacture.....
Next you'll tell me you don't know what a jennel is !
'JZ Rogers school was 30k pa..he doesn't want anyone else to have a good education outside of the state schools... along with Chukka and Tristram.. it is called hypocrisy..'
The same Roger that uses BUPA instead of the NHS.
Good Luck
"We'll have to wait and see what Ed Balls says"
Didn't she work for years in the treasury? Shouldn't she know that the LotO responds, not the shadow chancellor?
I've been without the internet for nearly 12 hours, it was scary.
Any more progress on the debates since last night, or are the Kippers & Ed still moaning like whores that Dave has played a blinder.
If only I had gone for the tax lay instead.
People generally (this is normal people) think that prudence should be rewarded and risk taking/spending what you haven't got and cant afford should not be.. this is why many OAPs have paid off hteir mortgages and have surplus funds in their bank accounts.. rather than being rewarded for their prudence they are, as you say, paying for younger generations to be irresponsible, greedy and live beyonf their means
Banks were bailed out for irresponsible trading, and now society is being encouraged to be irresponsible...mo "lessons learned"
So the magic money tree, you could say, is the old and prudent, and when they die out who will we borrow from at such good rates?
The only reason the PM salary is lower is that Gordon Brown cut it by £50k a few months before he was booted out. In any case it seems fine for a leader with a +40 rating to earn more than Dave with his -30 rating.
It also seems fair she should earn more than the PM after all she's about to be running the UK as well as Scotland.
@Unnamedinsider: George Osborne finally makes a popular cut #Budget2015
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CAXzTLvWwAAsc1v.jpg
There goes the Wetherspoons pint for Mr Pulpstar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w47BnyDYdQ
People get more prudent as they get older because they have more responsibilities, and less life left to sort out any screw ups. People get more conservative as they get older, when they have been mugged enough times by reality to see the problem with socialism. They are both dynamic equilibriums, some fall off, more are created, in both categories.
Or tripe. The most amusing Tripe Marketing Board on Twitter is very funny. It started life as a PR vehicle and took on a life of its own - I've no idea if the butchers that funded the original campaign are still coughing up - but it's still active more than a year later.
@TripeUK is their handle. @CleveleyNews and @StansaidAirport are other great ones.
Mr. Pulpstar, I had to google it, but it's just a synonym for ginnel.
Miss Plato, venison burgers are bloody delicious.
I'm a good Muslim boy.
Perhaps GO has more surprises.
Perhaps a Public Sector workers savings bond.
A cut in tax on blackpudding producers would also be popular
It is completely different to comparing ICM (phone, past vote weighting) with Populus (online, party ID weighting).
Mr. Eagles, cheers for posting that. I'd seen lots of the 'BLACK!' sketches, but never that one.
three polls in May 14, Aug 14 and Mar 15.
The first and third both have large numbers of extra Lab voters aged <35.
Students?
So the swing is pretty bogus in that it's seasonal?
Tories made some progress at 35-44, and at C2.
45+ stable.
Though pigs will get me into trouble, when I pose the following question.
"Is pork a verb?"
"Honey don't mention the tax"
It is not about prudence and risk.
The problem with the UK is that there is NO suitable long term investment vehicle.
The FTSE has only grown 300% since 1990.
The Dow has grown 900%.
Cash savings invested in the bank since 1990 would have grown more (substantially more) than stock investments. Not only that, there wouldn't have been 1% per annum in charges on the entire fund as a someone would pay on a tracker fund.
I rather liked that.
http://www.moneysupermarket.com/savings/structured-products/
Now, I grant you that you're locking your capital up for a fairly serious period of time in many of these, which won't be right for everyone and even for those who it is right in part, they'll no doubt want to keep some savings more liquid, but the basic premise stands that they can form part of a balanced savings portfolio for those with money put aside.
Ultimately, the whole question of savings usually comes back to the point that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. People complaining about the lack of high returns need to recognise that they will only *ever* exist if they come with high risk because there is simply nothing that can reliably produce them otherwise.
In general, the combination of ethnic gang culture/children in care/from broken homes, is most common in poorer areas. Those areas tend to vote Labour.
But, I'm sure that a good deal of child abuse takes place in some of the leafiest places.
Surprise!
Deficit of £7.5M last year more than double the previous year and worse than when Circle took over.
In special measures on clinical grounds unlike when Circle tookover.
Real success story.
1. Banks were not bailed out. Depositors were bailed out.
When RBS was bailed out, it was the small business who had their current account that was bailed out, and the OAP with their RBS savings account that was bailed out.
If RBS had been allowed to enter insolvency proceedings, then all their customers accounts would have needed to have been frozen - as happened with BCCI when it went belly up in 1991. That would have been economically devastating, and would almost certainly have led to a cascade of bank failures.
2. Imagine for a second that the government had said "let's reward prudence, we're going to run with a higher interest rate to benefit the prudent savers" then...
...the pound would have soared: at a time when interest rates were falling across the world, we would have raised ours and that would caused a flood of money to race into the UK, pushing the pound up and causing export orientated businesses to close
...the British government would have had to pay more to borrow, making our budget deficit worse, or causing us to have to increase taxes
...the flood of speculative money coming into Britain would almost certainly have caused nasty distortions to asset markets
...many homeowners and businesses would have gone bust as the cost of their interest payments would have remained the same as their incomes dwindled
It's not the government's job to "reward prudence" or anything else. The price of borrowing and saving should be set by people's willingness to defer or bring forward spending. Interest rates are prices like any other, and should be set by the free market.
I can't actually think of a decent topic for him - NHS maybe ?
We're going to rule the world.
If you want to lose money, this is a decent enough market for it. Stability might be value at 5s but I'm not playing.
1. Interest payments from the bank are taxable.
2. Shares also pay dividends.
A FTSE-100 tracker with dividends reinvested (which is, of course, only subject to capital gains tax) would have grown at more than 7% a year (after charges), and a bank account would have grown at more like 2%. That means you would have had more than twice as much in savings at the end of the process if you'd bought the tarcker.
@mattholehouse
Central Govt payroll today: 2.51 million. 2009: 2.5 million. 2001: 2.1 million. 1999: 1.9 million.
"FTSE tracker would have spanked that by some margin - as would other investments. Does Nelson want a higher interest rate just to suit unimaginative savers ?"
Not unimaginative, but realistic.
Over a few years, the FTSE will nearly always beat savings but that depends on your age. If you're 83, investing in shares is a gamble too far.
That reminds me of my favourite scene from the Simpsons ....
The school caretaker had turned into Freddie Kruger from 'Nightmare on Elm Street'. In the Simpson household, Bart is talking to Abe (Homer's dad).
Abe asks him. "So if you go to sleep you may not wake up in the morning?"
"Yes," says Bart.
"Welcome to my world," says Abe.
Mr. Eagles, what do you mean 'going to'?
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2da09f02-cbe3-11e4-aeb5-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=uk#axzz3UfaMaR6z
This is one of those occasions when the whole article needs to be read, since it is stuffed full of useful insights. To pick out two verdicts:
"The OBR’s initial economic forecast was honest but wrong, and badly so. The biggest error was to overestimate productivity growth. Failing to predict the eurozone crisis and energy price moves can be excused because they were impossible to forecast with any accuracy.
The failure to understand productivity should undermine anyone’s confidence that the current forecasts will be any more accurate for the next parliament."
"The chancellor says he has halved the deficit as a share of national income. That is true, but the record is far less impressive than he planned in 2010, so deficit reduction must be regarded as a failure.
The failure, however, came about because of excessive optimism about the strength of the UK economy, rather than the chancellor’s spending cuts and tax increases. There is little evidence it failed because of Mr Osborne’s plans for the public finances."
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13445