People again talking about infection rates and cases.
Doesn't matter. It's hospitalisations and deaths.
Infection rates and cases gets us to July in lockdown.
It took several months for the message to get across that covid 19 wasnt like the flu.
Sadly it may take another few months for the message to get across that post vaccination covid 19 is a bit like the flu or even a cold if the data on serious illness and death holds up.
My friend who developed symptoms a day or so after his (first) vaccination ten days ago has died. And very few of us have had their second injection. We are by no means out of the wood yet.
That’s very sad and I am sorry for your loss. You have the knowledge and training to know that your friend couldn’t have had time to develop immunity from the injection. I think the evidence will hold that single jab plus 3 weeks does confer at least some protection. Sadly for some they will fall ill before that happens.
That is of course, quite right, and thanks, too, to those who have sympathised. The point I was trying to make is that vaccination in itself isn't the whole of the answer, and that we need to reach a state of 'herd immunity', which will take some time. Opening up, in the sense of returning to what it was like socially in 2019, shouldn't happen for while.
Herd immunity won't be achievable until young adults and little ones are vaccinated, but by vaccinating the most vulnerable first a much bigger reopening should be possible very soon.
You don’t mention the impact of natural infection. Down here in Kent and in London there is, I am virtually certain, a degree of population immunity amongst the most exposed sections of the workforce. Not total herd immunity by any stretch but vaccination puts us closer. Family friends of ours, whole family had symptoms (all fine now), save for their 5 year old. Naive to think he didn’t get it but those young immune systems...
The Plan will talk about Stages. Not tiers or levels as they have been used before.
Stage 1 (8 March) - primary schools open, secondary schools maybe 15 March with enhanced testing. Limited social meeting outside allowed.
Stage 2 (29 March) - non essential retail opens.
Stage 3 (26 April) - pubs restaurants and hotels open. Inside and out. Maximum of two households mixing. Contact details required, mandatory table service, masks when moving around. No curfew or substantial meal. Domestic holidays allowed including going to holiday homes. One metre plus social distancing in operation.
Stage 4 (31 May) - opening of outdoor sporting areas with capacity restricted eg cricket.
Later (1 September) - subject to vaccine progress, return to near normal domestically.
It has even been suggested that several very senior figures at the DfE are fed up with homeschooling their own less than pleasant children
What is becoming quite clear is that one of the worse outcomes for children would be to find themselves as one of your pupils.
Well, we’re even mate, because I’ve found myself feeling really sorry for any poor sod who served under your command given how unpleasant and selfish you’ve shown yourself to be.
Selfish. From the teacher who doesn't want to spend an extra few days helping his pupils.
Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of my army career I've mentioned none of it. You meanwhile have told us a lot about how you approach the teaching profession.
You're in the wrong job.
As I have repeatedly told you, I have spent many extra days helping people. And I have worked in extension lessons, after school and in holidays, doing just that.
So that makes you a liar as well as a fool.
What I object to is having it imposed by diktat to protect the careers of your fellow thick poshos.
When you apologise for lying to me and about me, I’ll engage with you again.
Until then - fuck off.
OH NO. NOT ENGAGING.
I'll manage.
Flounce all you want, petal. You didn't want to go the extra mile because Union/DfE whatever. You have to live with that, not me. Oh and your pupils, heaven help them. I hope you don't think too many of them are less than pleasant also.
You really are an arse of the highest order.
As with a lot of people here I suspect were you asked by your employer to drop a planned holiday you would be telling them where to go.
Actually you are probably someone who would thank them for the opportunity while you wife started divorce proceedings.
People again talking about infection rates and cases.
Doesn't matter. It's hospitalisations and deaths.
Infection rates and cases gets us to July in lockdown.
It took several months for the message to get across that covid 19 wasnt like the flu.
Sadly it may take another few months for the message to get across that post vaccination covid 19 is a bit like the flu or even a cold if the data on serious illness and death holds up.
My friend who developed symptoms a day or so after his (first) vaccination ten days ago has died. And very few of us have had their second injection. We are by no means out of the wood yet.
That’s very sad and I am sorry for your loss. You have the knowledge and training to know that your friend couldn’t have had time to develop immunity from the injection. I think the evidence will hold that single jab plus 3 weeks does confer at least some protection. Sadly for some they will fall ill before that happens.
That is of course, quite right, and thanks, too, to those who have sympathised. The point I was trying to make is that vaccination in itself isn't the whole of the answer, and that we need to reach a state of 'herd immunity', which will take some time. Opening up, in the sense of returning to what it was like socially in 2019, shouldn't happen for while.
Herd immunity won't be achievable until young adults and little ones are vaccinated, but by vaccinating the most vulnerable first a much bigger reopening should be possible very soon.
You don’t mention the impact of natural infection. Down here in Kent and in London there is, I am virtually certain, a degree of population immunity amongst the most exposed sections of the workforce. Not total herd immunity by any stretch but vaccination puts us closer. Family friends of ours, whole family had symptoms (all fine now), save for their 5 year old. Naive to think he didn’t get it but those young immune systems...
I hope and indeed assume you mean, ‘they all had symptoms save for their 5 year old’ rather than ‘they are all fine now, save for their five year old.’
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
With regards to pubs, govt support and outdoor opening not being viable. When the time comes and we are ready for outdoor opening, why not continue govt support as is, but also allow outdoor opening without impacting that support? Sure there will be a few winners, but not enough to compensate for their losses the last year, and outdoor socialising places will be important for society as a whole.
Come late March/early April, people are going to start to meet outside and regularly.
It seems a no-brainer to put that under some control and to see some revenue from it.
People again talking about infection rates and cases.
Doesn't matter. It's hospitalisations and deaths.
Infection rates and cases gets us to July in lockdown.
It took several months for the message to get across that covid 19 wasnt like the flu.
Sadly it may take another few months for the message to get across that post vaccination covid 19 is a bit like the flu or even a cold if the data on serious illness and death holds up.
My friend who developed symptoms a day or so after his (first) vaccination ten days ago has died. And very few of us have had their second injection. We are by no means out of the wood yet.
That’s very sad and I am sorry for your loss. You have the knowledge and training to know that your friend couldn’t have had time to develop immunity from the injection. I think the evidence will hold that single jab plus 3 weeks does confer at least some protection. Sadly for some they will fall ill before that happens.
That is of course, quite right, and thanks, too, to those who have sympathised. The point I was trying to make is that vaccination in itself isn't the whole of the answer, and that we need to reach a state of 'herd immunity', which will take some time. Opening up, in the sense of returning to what it was like socially in 2019, shouldn't happen for while.
Herd immunity won't be achievable until young adults and little ones are vaccinated, but by vaccinating the most vulnerable first a much bigger reopening should be possible very soon.
You don’t mention the impact of natural infection. Down here in Kent and in London there is, I am virtually certain, a degree of population immunity amongst the most exposed sections of the workforce. Not total herd immunity by any stretch but vaccination puts us closer. Family friends of ours, whole family had symptoms (all fine now), save for their 5 year old. Naive to think he didn’t get it but those young immune systems...
I hope and indeed assume you mean, ‘they all had symptoms save for their 5 year old’ rather than ‘they are all fine now, save for their five year old.’
Last summer, most of the cafes near me started selling beers in mid-June. Lovely days spent sat reading a book, out in the sun, couple of Peronis and a small bite to eat. I want that summer back, tbf tbh.
People again talking about infection rates and cases.
Doesn't matter. It's hospitalisations and deaths.
Infection rates and cases gets us to July in lockdown.
It took several months for the message to get across that covid 19 wasnt like the flu.
Sadly it may take another few months for the message to get across that post vaccination covid 19 is a bit like the flu or even a cold if the data on serious illness and death holds up.
My friend who developed symptoms a day or so after his (first) vaccination ten days ago has died. And very few of us have had their second injection. We are by no means out of the wood yet.
That’s very sad and I am sorry for your loss. You have the knowledge and training to know that your friend couldn’t have had time to develop immunity from the injection. I think the evidence will hold that single jab plus 3 weeks does confer at least some protection. Sadly for some they will fall ill before that happens.
That is of course, quite right, and thanks, too, to those who have sympathised. The point I was trying to make is that vaccination in itself isn't the whole of the answer, and that we need to reach a state of 'herd immunity', which will take some time. Opening up, in the sense of returning to what it was like socially in 2019, shouldn't happen for while.
Herd immunity won't be achievable until young adults and little ones are vaccinated, but by vaccinating the most vulnerable first a much bigger reopening should be possible very soon.
You don’t mention the impact of natural infection. Down here in Kent and in London there is, I am virtually certain, a degree of population immunity amongst the most exposed sections of the workforce. Not total herd immunity by any stretch but vaccination puts us closer. Family friends of ours, whole family had symptoms (all fine now), save for their 5 year old. Naive to think he didn’t get it but those young immune systems...
I hope and indeed assume you mean, ‘they all had symptoms save for their 5 year old’ rather than ‘they are all fine now, save for their five year old.’
Grammatically that's correct isn't it? Since the all fine now element was in closed parentheses, so the symptoms leads through to the save for the five year old?
People again talking about infection rates and cases.
Doesn't matter. It's hospitalisations and deaths.
Infection rates and cases gets us to July in lockdown.
It took several months for the message to get across that covid 19 wasnt like the flu.
Sadly it may take another few months for the message to get across that post vaccination covid 19 is a bit like the flu or even a cold if the data on serious illness and death holds up.
My friend who developed symptoms a day or so after his (first) vaccination ten days ago has died. And very few of us have had their second injection. We are by no means out of the wood yet.
That’s very sad and I am sorry for your loss. You have the knowledge and training to know that your friend couldn’t have had time to develop immunity from the injection. I think the evidence will hold that single jab plus 3 weeks does confer at least some protection. Sadly for some they will fall ill before that happens.
That is of course, quite right, and thanks, too, to those who have sympathised. The point I was trying to make is that vaccination in itself isn't the whole of the answer, and that we need to reach a state of 'herd immunity', which will take some time. Opening up, in the sense of returning to what it was like socially in 2019, shouldn't happen for while.
Herd immunity won't be achievable until young adults and little ones are vaccinated, but by vaccinating the most vulnerable first a much bigger reopening should be possible very soon.
You don’t mention the impact of natural infection. Down here in Kent and in London there is, I am virtually certain, a degree of population immunity amongst the most exposed sections of the workforce. Not total herd immunity by any stretch but vaccination puts us closer. Family friends of ours, whole family had symptoms (all fine now), save for their 5 year old. Naive to think he didn’t get it but those young immune systems...
I hope and indeed assume you mean, ‘they all had symptoms save for their 5 year old’ rather than ‘they are all fine now, save for their five year old.’
Grammatically that's correct isn't it? Since the all fine now element was in closed parentheses, so the symptoms leads through to the save for the five year old?
The Plan will talk about Stages. Not tiers or levels as they have been used before.
Stage 1 (8 March) - primary schools open, secondary schools maybe 15 March with enhanced testing. Limited social meeting outside allowed.
Stage 2 (29 March) - non essential retail opens.
Stage 3 (26 April) - pubs restaurants and hotels open. Inside and out. Maximum of two households mixing. Contact details required, mandatory table service, masks when moving around. No curfew or substantial meal. Domestic holidays allowed including going to holiday homes. One metre plus social distancing in operation.
Stage 4 (31 May) - opening of outdoor sporting areas with capacity restricted eg cricket.
Later (1 September) - subject to vaccine progress, return to near normal domestically.
It has even been suggested that several very senior figures at the DfE are fed up with homeschooling their own less than pleasant children
What is becoming quite clear is that one of the worse outcomes for children would be to find themselves as one of your pupils.
Well, we’re even mate, because I’ve found myself feeling really sorry for any poor sod who served under your command given how unpleasant and selfish you’ve shown yourself to be.
Selfish. From the teacher who doesn't want to spend an extra few days helping his pupils.
Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of my army career I've mentioned none of it. You meanwhile have told us a lot about how you approach the teaching profession.
You're in the wrong job.
As I have repeatedly told you, I have spent many extra days helping people. And I have worked in extension lessons, after school and in holidays, doing just that.
So that makes you a liar as well as a fool.
What I object to is having it imposed by diktat to protect the careers of your fellow thick poshos.
When you apologise for lying to me and about me, I’ll engage with you again.
Until then - fuck off.
OH NO. NOT ENGAGING.
I'll manage.
Flounce all you want, petal. You didn't want to go the extra mile because Union/DfE whatever. You have to live with that, not me. Oh and your pupils, heaven help them. I hope you don't think too many of them are less than pleasant also.
You really are an arse of the highest order.
As with a lot of people here I suspect were you asked by your employer to drop a planned holiday you would be telling them where to go.
Actually you are probably someone who would thank them for the opportunity while you wife started divorce proceedings.
Thank you for your contribution.
I am not a teacher. A teacher has imo a special duty to his or her charges. I would not work for my employer for free because there aren't several dozen children relying on me for their education and development in this, the most peculiar of times. But for a teacher that is different.
Where you, and evidently ydoer3rfahwer go wrong is in conflating working for The Man (which I do) and working in education at the sharp end.
He would far rather it seems be working for The Man, when all his barbs would be relevant.
Plus he labelled the children of some DfE officials (whom he doesn't know, I'll wager) "less than pleasant". The children, not the DfE officials. He is 100% in the wrong job.
As I'm sure he would admit if he were to engage with me.
The Plan will talk about Stages. Not tiers or levels as they have been used before.
Stage 1 (8 March) - primary schools open, secondary schools maybe 15 March with enhanced testing. Limited social meeting outside allowed.
Stage 2 (29 March) - non essential retail opens.
Stage 3 (26 April) - pubs restaurants and hotels open. Inside and out. Maximum of two households mixing. Contact details required, mandatory table service, masks when moving around. No curfew or substantial meal. Domestic holidays allowed including going to holiday homes. One metre plus social distancing in operation.
Stage 4 (31 May) - opening of outdoor sporting areas with capacity restricted eg cricket.
Later (1 September) - subject to vaccine progress, return to near normal domestically.
It has even been suggested that several very senior figures at the DfE are fed up with homeschooling their own less than pleasant children
What is becoming quite clear is that one of the worse outcomes for children would be to find themselves as one of your pupils.
Well, we’re even mate, because I’ve found myself feeling really sorry for any poor sod who served under your command given how unpleasant and selfish you’ve shown yourself to be.
Selfish. From the teacher who doesn't want to spend an extra few days helping his pupils.
Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of my army career I've mentioned none of it. You meanwhile have told us a lot about how you approach the teaching profession.
You're in the wrong job.
As I have repeatedly told you, I have spent many extra days helping people. And I have worked in extension lessons, after school and in holidays, doing just that.
So that makes you a liar as well as a fool.
What I object to is having it imposed by diktat to protect the careers of your fellow thick poshos.
When you apologise for lying to me and about me, I’ll engage with you again.
Until then - fuck off.
OH NO. NOT ENGAGING.
I'll manage.
Flounce all you want, petal. You didn't want to go the extra mile because Union/DfE whatever. You have to live with that, not me. Oh and your pupils, heaven help them. I hope you don't think too many of them are less than pleasant also.
You really are an arse of the highest order.
As with a lot of people here I suspect were you asked by your employer to drop a planned holiday you would be telling them where to go.
Actually you are probably someone who would thank them for the opportunity while you wife started divorce proceedings.
To clarify:
As I have said several times, I have been doing extra sessions after school for catch-up, plus I’m open to going in to summer school (if I’m paid and given control over which weeks I work, but the trust I work for has made it clear I would be) and I have also volunteered for extra shifts in school to keep the pressure off members of staff with young families.
The issue with cancelling school holidays is threefold:
1) It implies nothing of value has happened with home learning. Which may be true, of course, but then begs the question, why are we putting ourselves through it at all? Why not just rotate things so we have holidays now and then cut time later?
2) Teachers cannot take any sort of break while schools are in session. Unlike, say, an office worker, who books annual leave whenever. So on the proposals as put forward, teachers would have no break at all between last Christmas and next Christmas. This is partly an an issue because - teaching being rather a draining job - it would lead to physical collapse, and also because the summer holidays are when we plan all our lessons and design resources for the following year so we can devote time to teaching and marking when the term starts.
3) It would mean tearing up all teacher contracts and writing new ones at the whim of a government that has shown itself to be completely untrustworthy and actually malicious.
So it really is a total non-starter.
And yet this is what we get - bullying, lies and abuse.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
Since it took Churchill's 1950s Conservative government two more years to end sugar rationing, perhaps things were a bit more complicated than you make out.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
The new Attlee space - spend public money, reform society, support the NHS, solid defence, economic intervention, independence in NATO, keep interest rates low, flag, patriotism, never heard of wokeness - is going to be heavily contested by the Conservative party.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
It meant they had to spend foreign currency buying food rather than buying luxuries. Or indeed, raw cotton (American wheat or American cotton? Not an easy choice tbf).
It is all very confusing when you consider there's Starz available on Amazon.
Star Plus (another Asian channel) is also owned by the House of Mouse.
That's what I thought, Star seems to turn the House of Mouse offering into a more well rounded Netflix style one. A fair few of the shows being advertised, like HIMYM, are on Netflix already so I'm curious how that will work whether they'll stay on both.
A lot of those are 'historical' rights which Netflix will lose. One reason why HBO Max hasn't launched in Europe for example.
People again talking about infection rates and cases.
Doesn't matter. It's hospitalisations and deaths.
Infection rates and cases gets us to July in lockdown.
It took several months for the message to get across that covid 19 wasnt like the flu.
Sadly it may take another few months for the message to get across that post vaccination covid 19 is a bit like the flu or even a cold if the data on serious illness and death holds up.
My friend who developed symptoms a day or so after his (first) vaccination ten days ago has died. And very few of us have had their second injection. We are by no means out of the wood yet.
That’s very sad and I am sorry for your loss. You have the knowledge and training to know that your friend couldn’t have had time to develop immunity from the injection. I think the evidence will hold that single jab plus 3 weeks does confer at least some protection. Sadly for some they will fall ill before that happens.
That is of course, quite right, and thanks, too, to those who have sympathised. The point I was trying to make is that vaccination in itself isn't the whole of the answer, and that we need to reach a state of 'herd immunity', which will take some time. Opening up, in the sense of returning to what it was like socially in 2019, shouldn't happen for while.
Herd immunity won't be achievable until young adults and little ones are vaccinated, but by vaccinating the most vulnerable first a much bigger reopening should be possible very soon.
You don’t mention the impact of natural infection. Down here in Kent and in London there is, I am virtually certain, a degree of population immunity amongst the most exposed sections of the workforce. Not total herd immunity by any stretch but vaccination puts us closer. Family friends of ours, whole family had symptoms (all fine now), save for their 5 year old. Naive to think he didn’t get it but those young immune systems...
I hope and indeed assume you mean, ‘they all had symptoms save for their 5 year old’ rather than ‘they are all fine now, save for their five year old.’
Yeah. I blame a state education 😉
Well, everyone else does
Except of course, doesn’t work for those who were privately educated.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
Since it took Churchill's 1950s Conservative government two more years to end sugar rationing, perhaps things were a bit more complicated than you make out.
The Times is indicating that Gove maybe becoming Home Secretary.
Boris Johnson has stripped Michael Gove of his role overseeing Britain’s future relationship with Europe and replaced him with Lord Frost, who negotiated last year’s Brexit trade deal.
In a move that opponents claimed amounted to a “sidelining” of Gove, Downing Street said that Frost would have a seat in cabinet and take responsibility for dealings with Brussels.
He will take Gove’s job as UK chairman of the withdrawal agreement joint committee. Based in the Cabinet Office, Frost will be responsible for talks on easing trade restrictions between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Downing Street said that he would also be in charge of dealing with post-Brexit trade problems as well as overseeing domestic reform to “maximise” the opportunities of having left the EU.
Brexit was key to Gove’s brief as Cabinet Office minister. He chaired the Brexit operations committee, which is now likely to fall to Frost, 55. Gove will continue to be in charge of civil service reform and liaising with the devolved administrations. The prime minister has put him in charge of a committee to address NHS waiting times, backlogs in the courts and other effects of the pandemic on public services.
One source suggested that Johnson’s decision had not thrilled Gove, 53, who this week was made interim chairman of the partnership council due to oversee operation of the Brexit trade deal.
It has also caused unease among officials in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office because Frost’s new role includes “co-ordinating relations” with the 27 EU states.
A senior government source said that it made sense to have one minister in charge of all elements of Britain’s relationship with the EU. “I’m sure Michael is not thrilled by this but Lord Frost has the expertise having negotiated the trade deal in the first place and it makes sense for one person to oversee the whole relationship,” they said.
Another source suggested that the move would be followed by a reshuffle this year in which Gove would move to a department such as the Home Office or the Department of Health: “I think there is an understanding that Michael is going to get another big job.”
An opponent of Gove added: “Gove would get a grip on the Home Office, which Boris needs. And it’s a department where things go wrong, so it may help ease him out of the cabinet too.”
Other insiders saw the appointment as a sign of Gove’s waning influence in Downing Street. “Fundamentally his relationship with Boris is still scarred by the 2016 leadership election,” a source said. “The PM just doesn’t trust him.” This is denied by Gove’s allies.
In defence of Gove (not something I say often) I think he would actually be quite a good fit at the Home Office. He is both hard working and determined. Once he has set his mind to something, he carries it through regardless of the consequences, and goodness knows the Home Office could do with some of that.
The trick always was to make sure he set his mind to the right thing, which is where he went tragically wrong at education.
Gove is a depressingly rare talent in UK politics. He is clever, a clear thinker, no respecter of institutions and open to new ideas, especially his own. Of course he doesn't always get it right but it is something to be cherished compared with the managers elsewhere who toe the departmental line from the off since they are incapable of original thought.
Boris really doesn't have anyone like him. Wherever Gove is put there will be change, controversy and attention. What Boris needs to do is think which part of government he wants that for the most. Its a big call because it is entirely possible that this might well shape the second half of his premiership every bit as much as Brexit did the first half.
If it were me I'd put Gove in charge of post Brexit regulatory form and our new industrial and economic strategy.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
The Times is indicating that Gove maybe becoming Home Secretary.
Boris Johnson has stripped Michael Gove of his role overseeing Britain’s future relationship with Europe and replaced him with Lord Frost, who negotiated last year’s Brexit trade deal.
In a move that opponents claimed amounted to a “sidelining” of Gove, Downing Street said that Frost would have a seat in cabinet and take responsibility for dealings with Brussels.
He will take Gove’s job as UK chairman of the withdrawal agreement joint committee. Based in the Cabinet Office, Frost will be responsible for talks on easing trade restrictions between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Downing Street said that he would also be in charge of dealing with post-Brexit trade problems as well as overseeing domestic reform to “maximise” the opportunities of having left the EU.
Brexit was key to Gove’s brief as Cabinet Office minister. He chaired the Brexit operations committee, which is now likely to fall to Frost, 55. Gove will continue to be in charge of civil service reform and liaising with the devolved administrations. The prime minister has put him in charge of a committee to address NHS waiting times, backlogs in the courts and other effects of the pandemic on public services.
One source suggested that Johnson’s decision had not thrilled Gove, 53, who this week was made interim chairman of the partnership council due to oversee operation of the Brexit trade deal.
It has also caused unease among officials in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office because Frost’s new role includes “co-ordinating relations” with the 27 EU states.
A senior government source said that it made sense to have one minister in charge of all elements of Britain’s relationship with the EU. “I’m sure Michael is not thrilled by this but Lord Frost has the expertise having negotiated the trade deal in the first place and it makes sense for one person to oversee the whole relationship,” they said.
Another source suggested that the move would be followed by a reshuffle this year in which Gove would move to a department such as the Home Office or the Department of Health: “I think there is an understanding that Michael is going to get another big job.”
An opponent of Gove added: “Gove would get a grip on the Home Office, which Boris needs. And it’s a department where things go wrong, so it may help ease him out of the cabinet too.”
Other insiders saw the appointment as a sign of Gove’s waning influence in Downing Street. “Fundamentally his relationship with Boris is still scarred by the 2016 leadership election,” a source said. “The PM just doesn’t trust him.” This is denied by Gove’s allies.
In defence of Gove (not something I say often) I think he would actually be quite a good fit at the Home Office. He is both hard working and determined. Once he has set his mind to something, he carries it through regardless of the consequences, and goodness knows the Home Office could do with some of that.
The trick always was to make sure he set his mind to the right thing, which is where he went tragically wrong at education.
Gove is a depressingly rare talent in UK politics. He is clever, a clear thinker, no respecter of institutions and open to new ideas, especially his own. Of course he doesn't always get it right but it is something to be cherished compared with the managers elsewhere who toe the departmental line from the off since they are incapable of original thought.
Boris really doesn't have anyone like him. Wherever Gove is put there will be change, controversy and attention. What Boris needs to do is think which part of government he wants that for the most. Its a big call because it is entirely possible that this might well shape the second half of his premiership every bit as much as Brexit did the first half.
If it were me I'd put Gove in charge of post Brexit regulatory form and our new industrial and economic strategy.
I think the Home Office is a waste.
You actually work on major infrastructure projects, of course.
Do you think putting Gove in charge of just infrastructure renewal is a starter or not? Kind of linked to the ‘industrial and economic strategy’ you refer to? Good idea or not?
Admittedly, doesn’t matter what any of us think as it’s not our decision, but it would be good to hear an insider’s view.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Thanks for the reminder re: your second paragraph.
The French and Germans pitched a 4 year plan for Marshall Aid, a Treasury (I think) Civil Servant wrote an Oxbridge essay (or maybe, who knows, two?). That looks familar.
In summary, the Government of the day overestimated Britain's role as a World Superpower and underestimated the need to invest in industrial modernisation. That looks scarily familar.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Attlee helped found NATO, develop our nuclear deterrent and modernise the RAF with a jet bomber force, so he was certainly responsible with defence and foreign policy.
But, and I'm shocked I'm about to say this, we were spending too much on defence overall with garrisons of 10,000 men all over the world - everywhere - and trying to be a superpower sans money and increasingly sans empire.
That was a mistake.
I think the 1935 India Act was a missed opportunity; India should have been given full dominion status. There would have been no partition. It then would likely have actively participated in WW2 as an ally of the UK as all the other dominions did.
India would then probably have moved to be a republic by the 1950s or 1960s, but slowly and steadily. There would still have been a risk of tension and conflict between Muslim and Hindu areas - a very real one - but at least a constitutional and federal framework within which to debate them.
Is it worth reminding people that even before Covid most teachers leaving the profession left for jobs that paid them less than teaching does. From memory the typical pay cut for a teacher willingly leaving the profession is £5k.
And that's for qualified teachers with experience, a lot of people leave during training.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Pension Figures From China's Hubei Spark Doubts Over Virus Deaths
Chinese government figures showing the absence of more than 150,000 elderly people from the list of those given state subsidy payments in the first quarter of 2020 could point to a far greater COVID-19-linked death toll than previously reported in the country, analysts told RFA.
Data released by the civil affairs department in the central province of Hubei, where the coronavirus pandemic first emerged in December 2019, showed that around 150,000 names had "disappeared" from the list of recipients in the first three months of 2020, as COVID-19 tore through the provincial capital Wuhan and surrounding areas, sparking a provincial lockdown.
The subsidy is a payment handed out to people over 80 across the province who are experiencing financial hardship.
Transparency campaigner Liu Jun, who has previously suggested that the true death toll from the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic could be several times higher than the 4,636 reported by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), said the figure suggested a very high death toll.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
Since it took Churchill's 1950s Conservative government two more years to end sugar rationing, perhaps things were a bit more complicated than you make out.
Churchill's 1951 government, like Heath's, was often more left-wing than its Labour predecessors. Two disgraceful episodes, because their leaders lacked the courage to face down powerful domestic interest groups.
Is it worth reminding people that even before Covid most teachers leaving the profession left for jobs that paid them less than teaching does. From memory the typical pay cut for a teacher willingly leaving the profession is £5k.
And that's for qualified teachers with experience, a lot of people leave during training.
Not forgetting that very few pensions are as good as the TPS as well. Certainly none in the private sector.
Is it worth reminding people that even before Covid most teachers leaving the profession left for jobs that paid them less than teaching does. From memory the typical pay cut for a teacher willingly leaving the profession is £5k.
And that's for qualified teachers with experience, a lot of people leave during training.
Exactly. They realise that it requires dedication, and sacrifices, over and above that of other professions. And hence can't or don't want to hack it.
I find myself in the extraordinary position of agreeing more with the PM than with many/most on here. People keep talking about dates. I thought that there was general agreement (with the PM) that the easing of restrictions should be governed by data (especially deaths and hospitalisations) rather than dates.
And yet, here we are, with large numbers of (lagged) deaths still occurring, and significant hospitalisations, still going on about "must be by the end of April" etc. The impact of vaccinations should feed into the data, not the date, for loosening restrictions.
If you stick to the 'data not dates' message, gradual reopening could be any time between about a month from now and three months, surely? Maybe once deaths are down to less than 100 a day on average, and hospitalisations are way down, restrictions can be eased. That could be in March, or April/May/June. Surely we can't repeat the error of promulgating another wave by opening too soon?
The Plan will talk about Stages. Not tiers or levels as they have been used before.
Stage 1 (8 March) - primary schools open, secondary schools maybe 15 March with enhanced testing. Limited social meeting outside allowed.
Stage 2 (29 March) - non essential retail opens.
Stage 3 (26 April) - pubs restaurants and hotels open. Inside and out. Maximum of two households mixing. Contact details required, mandatory table service, masks when moving around. No curfew or substantial meal. Domestic holidays allowed including going to holiday homes. One metre plus social distancing in operation.
Stage 4 (31 May) - opening of outdoor sporting areas with capacity restricted eg cricket.
Later (1 September) - subject to vaccine progress, return to near normal domestically.
It has even been suggested that several very senior figures at the DfE are fed up with homeschooling their own less than pleasant children
What is becoming quite clear is that one of the worse outcomes for children would be to find themselves as one of your pupils.
Well, we’re even mate, because I’ve found myself feeling really sorry for any poor sod who served under your command given how unpleasant and selfish you’ve shown yourself to be.
Selfish. From the teacher who doesn't want to spend an extra few days helping his pupils.
Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of my army career I've mentioned none of it. You meanwhile have told us a lot about how you approach the teaching profession.
You're in the wrong job.
As I have repeatedly told you, I have spent many extra days helping people. And I have worked in extension lessons, after school and in holidays, doing just that.
So that makes you a liar as well as a fool.
What I object to is having it imposed by diktat to protect the careers of your fellow thick poshos.
When you apologise for lying to me and about me, I’ll engage with you again.
Until then - fuck off.
OH NO. NOT ENGAGING.
I'll manage.
Flounce all you want, petal. You didn't want to go the extra mile because Union/DfE whatever. You have to live with that, not me. Oh and your pupils, heaven help them. I hope you don't think too many of them are less than pleasant also.
You really are an arse of the highest order.
As with a lot of people here I suspect were you asked by your employer to drop a planned holiday you would be telling them where to go.
Actually you are probably someone who would thank them for the opportunity while you wife started divorce proceedings.
Thank you for your contribution.
I am not a teacher. A teacher has imo a special duty to his or her charges. I would not work for my employer for free because there aren't several dozen children relying on me for their education and development in this, the most peculiar of times. But for a teacher that is different.
Where you, and evidently ydoer3rfahwer go wrong is in conflating working for The Man (which I do) and working in education at the sharp end.
He would far rather it seems be working for The Man, when all his barbs would be relevant.
Plus he labelled the children of some DfE officials (whom he doesn't know, I'll wager) "less than pleasant". The children, not the DfE officials. He is 100% in the wrong job.
As I'm sure he would admit if he were to engage with me.
So you think we should work for free?
Actually most teachers I know have done that when on trips outside of school hours: we don’t get paid extra for those even if they are at the weekend or during the holidays.
But you seem to be under the huge misapprehension that we are not working during lockdown when in fact what we are doing involves more work than usual. You also seem to forget that we have no choice at all as to when we can take our holidays, so removing the only time this year when we could realistically get away would lead to more teachers than usual deciding that the job was not for them.
And that I think brings me to my main point: in an earlier post you described teaching as a vocation. If we tried to staff schools only with those prepared to put everything on the line for the children, to sacrifice anything for the greater good, then we would have class sizes of about three hundred rather than thirty. The average time that a teacher spends teaching after qualification is about five years at the moment. Start arbitrarily messing around with the one good perk of the job, particularly without any compensation in the form of pay, at that time will reduce significantly.
Trying to staff something on the basis that you can hire saints is not a good strategy.
The Times is indicating that Gove maybe becoming Home Secretary.
Boris Johnson has stripped Michael Gove of his role overseeing Britain’s future relationship with Europe and replaced him with Lord Frost, who negotiated last year’s Brexit trade deal.
In a move that opponents claimed amounted to a “sidelining” of Gove, Downing Street said that Frost would have a seat in cabinet and take responsibility for dealings with Brussels.
He will take Gove’s job as UK chairman of the withdrawal agreement joint committee. Based in the Cabinet Office, Frost will be responsible for talks on easing trade restrictions between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Downing Street said that he would also be in charge of dealing with post-Brexit trade problems as well as overseeing domestic reform to “maximise” the opportunities of having left the EU.
Brexit was key to Gove’s brief as Cabinet Office minister. He chaired the Brexit operations committee, which is now likely to fall to Frost, 55. Gove will continue to be in charge of civil service reform and liaising with the devolved administrations. The prime minister has put him in charge of a committee to address NHS waiting times, backlogs in the courts and other effects of the pandemic on public services.
One source suggested that Johnson’s decision had not thrilled Gove, 53, who this week was made interim chairman of the partnership council due to oversee operation of the Brexit trade deal.
It has also caused unease among officials in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office because Frost’s new role includes “co-ordinating relations” with the 27 EU states.
A senior government source said that it made sense to have one minister in charge of all elements of Britain’s relationship with the EU. “I’m sure Michael is not thrilled by this but Lord Frost has the expertise having negotiated the trade deal in the first place and it makes sense for one person to oversee the whole relationship,” they said.
Another source suggested that the move would be followed by a reshuffle this year in which Gove would move to a department such as the Home Office or the Department of Health: “I think there is an understanding that Michael is going to get another big job.”
An opponent of Gove added: “Gove would get a grip on the Home Office, which Boris needs. And it’s a department where things go wrong, so it may help ease him out of the cabinet too.”
Other insiders saw the appointment as a sign of Gove’s waning influence in Downing Street. “Fundamentally his relationship with Boris is still scarred by the 2016 leadership election,” a source said. “The PM just doesn’t trust him.” This is denied by Gove’s allies.
In defence of Gove (not something I say often) I think he would actually be quite a good fit at the Home Office. He is both hard working and determined. Once he has set his mind to something, he carries it through regardless of the consequences, and goodness knows the Home Office could do with some of that.
The trick always was to make sure he set his mind to the right thing, which is where he went tragically wrong at education.
Gove is a depressingly rare talent in UK politics. He is clever, a clear thinker, no respecter of institutions and open to new ideas, especially his own. Of course he doesn't always get it right but it is something to be cherished compared with the managers elsewhere who toe the departmental line from the off since they are incapable of original thought.
Boris really doesn't have anyone like him. Wherever Gove is put there will be change, controversy and attention. What Boris needs to do is think which part of government he wants that for the most. Its a big call because it is entirely possible that this might well shape the second half of his premiership every bit as much as Brexit did the first half.
If it were me I'd put Gove in charge of post Brexit regulatory form and our new industrial and economic strategy.
I think the Home Office is a waste.
You actually work on major infrastructure projects, of course.
Do you think putting Gove in charge of just infrastructure renewal is a starter or not? Kind of linked to the ‘industrial and economic strategy’ you refer to? Good idea or not?
Admittedly, doesn’t matter what any of us think as it’s not our decision, but it would be good to hear an insider’s view.
It would be a starter. The biggest problem (and benefit, of course) we have from large infrastructure projects is that we are a democracy and we have very high safety and regulatory standards.
Sure, we could build four times as fast like China do but there'd be no democracy at all (you'd just be told to suck it up and arrested or worse if you got in the way) and the less said about their safety and environmental record the better.
I don't think Brits would really want that. We just like to whinge.
The Plan will talk about Stages. Not tiers or levels as they have been used before.
Stage 1 (8 March) - primary schools open, secondary schools maybe 15 March with enhanced testing. Limited social meeting outside allowed.
Stage 2 (29 March) - non essential retail opens.
Stage 3 (26 April) - pubs restaurants and hotels open. Inside and out. Maximum of two households mixing. Contact details required, mandatory table service, masks when moving around. No curfew or substantial meal. Domestic holidays allowed including going to holiday homes. One metre plus social distancing in operation.
Stage 4 (31 May) - opening of outdoor sporting areas with capacity restricted eg cricket.
Later (1 September) - subject to vaccine progress, return to near normal domestically.
It has even been suggested that several very senior figures at the DfE are fed up with homeschooling their own less than pleasant children
What is becoming quite clear is that one of the worse outcomes for children would be to find themselves as one of your pupils.
Well, we’re even mate, because I’ve found myself feeling really sorry for any poor sod who served under your command given how unpleasant and selfish you’ve shown yourself to be.
Selfish. From the teacher who doesn't want to spend an extra few days helping his pupils.
Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of my army career I've mentioned none of it. You meanwhile have told us a lot about how you approach the teaching profession.
You're in the wrong job.
As I have repeatedly told you, I have spent many extra days helping people. And I have worked in extension lessons, after school and in holidays, doing just that.
So that makes you a liar as well as a fool.
What I object to is having it imposed by diktat to protect the careers of your fellow thick poshos.
When you apologise for lying to me and about me, I’ll engage with you again.
Until then - fuck off.
OH NO. NOT ENGAGING.
I'll manage.
Flounce all you want, petal. You didn't want to go the extra mile because Union/DfE whatever. You have to live with that, not me. Oh and your pupils, heaven help them. I hope you don't think too many of them are less than pleasant also.
You really are an arse of the highest order.
As with a lot of people here I suspect were you asked by your employer to drop a planned holiday you would be telling them where to go.
Actually you are probably someone who would thank them for the opportunity while you wife started divorce proceedings.
Thank you for your contribution.
I am not a teacher. A teacher has imo a special duty to his or her charges. I would not work for my employer for free because there aren't several dozen children relying on me for their education and development in this, the most peculiar of times. But for a teacher that is different.
Where you, and evidently ydoer3rfahwer go wrong is in conflating working for The Man (which I do) and working in education at the sharp end.
He would far rather it seems be working for The Man, when all his barbs would be relevant.
Plus he labelled the children of some DfE officials (whom he doesn't know, I'll wager) "less than pleasant". The children, not the DfE officials. He is 100% in the wrong job.
As I'm sure he would admit if he were to engage with me.
I jokingly said that maybe teachers should take an oath on becoming one same as doctors do. I'm not sure there is the same level of commitment for teachers and I'm also not sure they get paid enough for such an attitude to hold. Simply, we as a society don't value teachers very much and this is the result. I think the fault is ours.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
I love how we assume such things (removal of the Gold Standard and fixed exchange rates) were obvious and easy decisions as sit here 70 years later with 50 years of experience of what happened after we ditched those restraints.
It really wasn't such a clear cut choice then as the consequences were at the time completely unknown.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Attlee helped found NATO, develop our nuclear deterrent and modernise the RAF with a jet bomber force, so he was certainly responsible with defence and foreign policy.
But, and I'm shocked I'm about to say this, we were spending too much on defence overall with garrisons of 10,000 men all over the world - everywhere - and trying to be a superpower sans money and increasingly sans empire.
That was a mistake.
I think the 1935 India Act was a missed opportunity; India should have been given full dominion status. There would have been no partition. It then would likely have actively participated in WW2 as an ally of the UK as all the other dominions did.
India would then probably have moved to be a republic by the 1950s or 1960s, but slowly and steadily. There would still have been a risk of tension and conflict between Muslim and Hindu areas - a very real one - but at least a constitutional and federal framework within which to debate them.
Given the geopolitical situation with Russia at the end of WW2 getting rid of those troops might not have been a good thing.
Maybe a mistake with how things turned out sure, but thats sounding a bit like Starmer in terms of hindsight.
I'm sure many people though an armed conflict with Russia would have been highly likely, and you might want to kept troop numbers high.
The Plan will talk about Stages. Not tiers or levels as they have been used before.
Stage 1 (8 March) - primary schools open, secondary schools maybe 15 March with enhanced testing. Limited social meeting outside allowed.
Stage 2 (29 March) - non essential retail opens.
Stage 3 (26 April) - pubs restaurants and hotels open. Inside and out. Maximum of two households mixing. Contact details required, mandatory table service, masks when moving around. No curfew or substantial meal. Domestic holidays allowed including going to holiday homes. One metre plus social distancing in operation.
Stage 4 (31 May) - opening of outdoor sporting areas with capacity restricted eg cricket.
Later (1 September) - subject to vaccine progress, return to near normal domestically.
It has even been suggested that several very senior figures at the DfE are fed up with homeschooling their own less than pleasant children
What is becoming quite clear is that one of the worse outcomes for children would be to find themselves as one of your pupils.
Well, we’re even mate, because I’ve found myself feeling really sorry for any poor sod who served under your command given how unpleasant and selfish you’ve shown yourself to be.
Selfish. From the teacher who doesn't want to spend an extra few days helping his pupils.
Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of my army career I've mentioned none of it. You meanwhile have told us a lot about how you approach the teaching profession.
You're in the wrong job.
As I have repeatedly told you, I have spent many extra days helping people. And I have worked in extension lessons, after school and in holidays, doing just that.
So that makes you a liar as well as a fool.
What I object to is having it imposed by diktat to protect the careers of your fellow thick poshos.
When you apologise for lying to me and about me, I’ll engage with you again.
Until then - fuck off.
OH NO. NOT ENGAGING.
I'll manage.
Flounce all you want, petal. You didn't want to go the extra mile because Union/DfE whatever. You have to live with that, not me. Oh and your pupils, heaven help them. I hope you don't think too many of them are less than pleasant also.
You really are an arse of the highest order.
As with a lot of people here I suspect were you asked by your employer to drop a planned holiday you would be telling them where to go.
Actually you are probably someone who would thank them for the opportunity while you wife started divorce proceedings.
Thank you for your contribution.
I am not a teacher. A teacher has imo a special duty to his or her charges. I would not work for my employer for free because there aren't several dozen children relying on me for their education and development in this, the most peculiar of times. But for a teacher that is different.
Where you, and evidently ydoer3rfahwer go wrong is in conflating working for The Man (which I do) and working in education at the sharp end.
He would far rather it seems be working for The Man, when all his barbs would be relevant.
Plus he labelled the children of some DfE officials (whom he doesn't know, I'll wager) "less than pleasant". The children, not the DfE officials. He is 100% in the wrong job.
As I'm sure he would admit if he were to engage with me.
So you think we should work for free?
Actually most teachers I know have done that when on trips outside of school hours: we don’t get paid extra for those even if they are at the weekend or during the holidays.
But you seem to be under the huge misapprehension that we are not working during lockdown when in fact what we are doing involves more work than usual. You also seem to forget that we have no choice at all as to when we can take our holidays, so removing the only time this year when we could realistically get away would lead to more teachers than usual deciding that the job was not for them.
And that I think brings me to my main point: in an earlier post you described teaching as a vocation. If we tried to staff schools only with those prepared to put everything on the line for the children, to sacrifice anything for the greater good, then we would have class sizes of about three hundred rather than thirty. The average time that a teacher spends teaching after qualification is about five years at the moment. Start arbitrarily messing around with the one good perk of the job, particularly without any compensation in the form of pay, at that time will reduce significantly.
Trying to staff something on the basis that you can hire saints is not a good strategy.
I wouldn’t bother arguing. He’s just an idiot. He wants others to make sacrifices so he can feel good about himself. That’s why he would have been a dud officer (well, that and his lack of integrity).
Unfortunately, he’s an idiot who speaks for a wide range of ill-informed opinion among his fellow Daily Mail readers. And there is the hub of the problem.
Is it worth reminding people that even before Covid most teachers leaving the profession left for jobs that paid them less than teaching does. From memory the typical pay cut for a teacher willingly leaving the profession is £5k.
And that's for qualified teachers with experience, a lot of people leave during training.
Overseas British private schools 'receiving dozens of applications for every vacancy'.
The Plan will talk about Stages. Not tiers or levels as they have been used before.
Stage 1 (8 March) - primary schools open, secondary schools maybe 15 March with enhanced testing. Limited social meeting outside allowed.
Stage 2 (29 March) - non essential retail opens.
Stage 3 (26 April) - pubs restaurants and hotels open. Inside and out. Maximum of two households mixing. Contact details required, mandatory table service, masks when moving around. No curfew or substantial meal. Domestic holidays allowed including going to holiday homes. One metre plus social distancing in operation.
Stage 4 (31 May) - opening of outdoor sporting areas with capacity restricted eg cricket.
Later (1 September) - subject to vaccine progress, return to near normal domestically.
It has even been suggested that several very senior figures at the DfE are fed up with homeschooling their own less than pleasant children
What is becoming quite clear is that one of the worse outcomes for children would be to find themselves as one of your pupils.
Well, we’re even mate, because I’ve found myself feeling really sorry for any poor sod who served under your command given how unpleasant and selfish you’ve shown yourself to be.
Selfish. From the teacher who doesn't want to spend an extra few days helping his pupils.
Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of my army career I've mentioned none of it. You meanwhile have told us a lot about how you approach the teaching profession.
You're in the wrong job.
As I have repeatedly told you, I have spent many extra days helping people. And I have worked in extension lessons, after school and in holidays, doing just that.
So that makes you a liar as well as a fool.
What I object to is having it imposed by diktat to protect the careers of your fellow thick poshos.
When you apologise for lying to me and about me, I’ll engage with you again.
Until then - fuck off.
OH NO. NOT ENGAGING.
I'll manage.
Flounce all you want, petal. You didn't want to go the extra mile because Union/DfE whatever. You have to live with that, not me. Oh and your pupils, heaven help them. I hope you don't think too many of them are less than pleasant also.
You really are an arse of the highest order.
As with a lot of people here I suspect were you asked by your employer to drop a planned holiday you would be telling them where to go.
Actually you are probably someone who would thank them for the opportunity while you wife started divorce proceedings.
Thank you for your contribution.
I am not a teacher. A teacher has imo a special duty to his or her charges. I would not work for my employer for free because there aren't several dozen children relying on me for their education and development in this, the most peculiar of times. But for a teacher that is different.
Where you, and evidently ydoer3rfahwer go wrong is in conflating working for The Man (which I do) and working in education at the sharp end.
He would far rather it seems be working for The Man, when all his barbs would be relevant.
Plus he labelled the children of some DfE officials (whom he doesn't know, I'll wager) "less than pleasant". The children, not the DfE officials. He is 100% in the wrong job.
As I'm sure he would admit if he were to engage with me.
I jokingly said that maybe teachers should take an oath on becoming one same as doctors do. I'm not sure there is the same level of commitment for teachers and I'm also not sure they get paid enough for such an attitude to hold. Simply, we as a society don't value teachers very much and this is the result. I think the fault is ours.
We do have professional standards, set by the DfE, which amount to the same thing as an oath. Although they are written by non-teachers and the profession is regulated by civil servants, unlike the GMC. That has drawbacks and advantages which I won’t bother going into as it’s a long essay.
I think however your last but one sentence is spot on.
Is it worth reminding people that even before Covid most teachers leaving the profession left for jobs that paid them less than teaching does. From memory the typical pay cut for a teacher willingly leaving the profession is £5k.
And that's for qualified teachers with experience, a lot of people leave during training.
Exactly. They realise that it requires dedication, and sacrifices, over and above that of other professions. And hence can't or don't want to hack it.
And thats when they have 13 weeks holiday that you think they don't deserve.
I repeat my comment of earlier - you are an arse who can see neither anyone elses viewpoint nor be bothered to think through the consequences of their own ideas to see how stupid they actually are.
The Times is indicating that Gove maybe becoming Home Secretary.
Boris Johnson has stripped Michael Gove of his role overseeing Britain’s future relationship with Europe and replaced him with Lord Frost, who negotiated last year’s Brexit trade deal.
In a move that opponents claimed amounted to a “sidelining” of Gove, Downing Street said that Frost would have a seat in cabinet and take responsibility for dealings with Brussels.
He will take Gove’s job as UK chairman of the withdrawal agreement joint committee. Based in the Cabinet Office, Frost will be responsible for talks on easing trade restrictions between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Downing Street said that he would also be in charge of dealing with post-Brexit trade problems as well as overseeing domestic reform to “maximise” the opportunities of having left the EU.
Brexit was key to Gove’s brief as Cabinet Office minister. He chaired the Brexit operations committee, which is now likely to fall to Frost, 55. Gove will continue to be in charge of civil service reform and liaising with the devolved administrations. The prime minister has put him in charge of a committee to address NHS waiting times, backlogs in the courts and other effects of the pandemic on public services.
One source suggested that Johnson’s decision had not thrilled Gove, 53, who this week was made interim chairman of the partnership council due to oversee operation of the Brexit trade deal.
It has also caused unease among officials in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office because Frost’s new role includes “co-ordinating relations” with the 27 EU states.
A senior government source said that it made sense to have one minister in charge of all elements of Britain’s relationship with the EU. “I’m sure Michael is not thrilled by this but Lord Frost has the expertise having negotiated the trade deal in the first place and it makes sense for one person to oversee the whole relationship,” they said.
Another source suggested that the move would be followed by a reshuffle this year in which Gove would move to a department such as the Home Office or the Department of Health: “I think there is an understanding that Michael is going to get another big job.”
An opponent of Gove added: “Gove would get a grip on the Home Office, which Boris needs. And it’s a department where things go wrong, so it may help ease him out of the cabinet too.”
Other insiders saw the appointment as a sign of Gove’s waning influence in Downing Street. “Fundamentally his relationship with Boris is still scarred by the 2016 leadership election,” a source said. “The PM just doesn’t trust him.” This is denied by Gove’s allies.
In defence of Gove (not something I say often) I think he would actually be quite a good fit at the Home Office. He is both hard working and determined. Once he has set his mind to something, he carries it through regardless of the consequences, and goodness knows the Home Office could do with some of that.
The trick always was to make sure he set his mind to the right thing, which is where he went tragically wrong at education.
Gove is a depressingly rare talent in UK politics. He is clever, a clear thinker, no respecter of institutions and open to new ideas, especially his own. Of course he doesn't always get it right but it is something to be cherished compared with the managers elsewhere who toe the departmental line from the off since they are incapable of original thought.
Boris really doesn't have anyone like him. Wherever Gove is put there will be change, controversy and attention. What Boris needs to do is think which part of government he wants that for the most. Its a big call because it is entirely possible that this might well shape the second half of his premiership every bit as much as Brexit did the first half.
If it were me I'd put Gove in charge of post Brexit regulatory form and our new industrial and economic strategy.
I think the Home Office is a waste.
Much as I dislike Gove, I think he is one of the few senior members of the government that is genuinely effective. The problem for Boris Johnson is that his own terrible lack of leadership skills will make him fear anyone that will shine, so he will not want Gove anywhere near anything that will enable him to do that
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Attlee helped found NATO, develop our nuclear deterrent and modernise the RAF with a jet bomber force, so he was certainly responsible with defence and foreign policy.
But, and I'm shocked I'm about to say this, we were spending too much on defence overall with garrisons of 10,000 men all over the world - everywhere - and trying to be a superpower sans money and increasingly sans empire.
That was a mistake.
I think the 1935 India Act was a missed opportunity; India should have been given full dominion status. There would have been no partition. It then would likely have actively participated in WW2 as an ally of the UK as all the other dominions did.
India would then probably have moved to be a republic by the 1950s or 1960s, but slowly and steadily. There would still have been a risk of tension and conflict between Muslim and Hindu areas - a very real one - but at least a constitutional and federal framework within which to debate them.
Given the geopolitical situation with Russia at the end of WW2 getting rid of those troops might not have been a good thing.
Maybe a mistake with how things turned out sure, but thats sounding a bit like Starmer in terms of hindsight.
I'm sure many people though an armed conflict with Russia would have been highly likely, and you might want to kept troop numbers high.
Troop numbers high enough to meet the threat of the Cold War, sure, but 1960s to 1970s size of 350-400k not late 1940s/ 1950s size of 800k-900k.
I'm talking about sizeable garrisons in minor outposts at coaling stations all over the world - Africa, minor Asia, South American, Caribbean etc. - which should have been localised and changed over earlier.
The Plan will talk about Stages. Not tiers or levels as they have been used before.
Stage 1 (8 March) - primary schools open, secondary schools maybe 15 March with enhanced testing. Limited social meeting outside allowed.
Stage 2 (29 March) - non essential retail opens.
Stage 3 (26 April) - pubs restaurants and hotels open. Inside and out. Maximum of two households mixing. Contact details required, mandatory table service, masks when moving around. No curfew or substantial meal. Domestic holidays allowed including going to holiday homes. One metre plus social distancing in operation.
Stage 4 (31 May) - opening of outdoor sporting areas with capacity restricted eg cricket.
Later (1 September) - subject to vaccine progress, return to near normal domestically.
It has even been suggested that several very senior figures at the DfE are fed up with homeschooling their own less than pleasant children
What is becoming quite clear is that one of the worse outcomes for children would be to find themselves as one of your pupils.
Well, we’re even mate, because I’ve found myself feeling really sorry for any poor sod who served under your command given how unpleasant and selfish you’ve shown yourself to be.
Selfish. From the teacher who doesn't want to spend an extra few days helping his pupils.
Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of my army career I've mentioned none of it. You meanwhile have told us a lot about how you approach the teaching profession.
You're in the wrong job.
As I have repeatedly told you, I have spent many extra days helping people. And I have worked in extension lessons, after school and in holidays, doing just that.
So that makes you a liar as well as a fool.
What I object to is having it imposed by diktat to protect the careers of your fellow thick poshos.
When you apologise for lying to me and about me, I’ll engage with you again.
Until then - fuck off.
OH NO. NOT ENGAGING.
I'll manage.
Flounce all you want, petal. You didn't want to go the extra mile because Union/DfE whatever. You have to live with that, not me. Oh and your pupils, heaven help them. I hope you don't think too many of them are less than pleasant also.
You really are an arse of the highest order.
As with a lot of people here I suspect were you asked by your employer to drop a planned holiday you would be telling them where to go.
Actually you are probably someone who would thank them for the opportunity while you wife started divorce proceedings.
Thank you for your contribution.
I am not a teacher. A teacher has imo a special duty to his or her charges. I would not work for my employer for free because there aren't several dozen children relying on me for their education and development in this, the most peculiar of times. But for a teacher that is different.
Where you, and evidently ydoer3rfahwer go wrong is in conflating working for The Man (which I do) and working in education at the sharp end.
He would far rather it seems be working for The Man, when all his barbs would be relevant.
Plus he labelled the children of some DfE officials (whom he doesn't know, I'll wager) "less than pleasant". The children, not the DfE officials. He is 100% in the wrong job.
As I'm sure he would admit if he were to engage with me.
I jokingly said that maybe teachers should take an oath on becoming one same as doctors do. I'm not sure there is the same level of commitment for teachers and I'm also not sure they get paid enough for such an attitude to hold. Simply, we as a society don't value teachers very much and this is the result. I think the fault is ours.
Possibly, but I also think it is the fault of the teaching unions. They make it appear more of a trade (TRADE union) and less of a profession and vocation. Teaching is one of the most important occupations. They hold the future.
People again talking about infection rates and cases.
Doesn't matter. It's hospitalisations and deaths.
Infection rates and cases gets us to July in lockdown.
It took several months for the message to get across that covid 19 wasnt like the flu.
Sadly it may take another few months for the message to get across that post vaccination covid 19 is a bit like the flu or even a cold if the data on serious illness and death holds up.
My friend who developed symptoms a day or so after his (first) vaccination ten days ago has died. And very few of us have had their second injection. We are by no means out of the wood yet.
These cases are particuarly tragic - like returning soldiers who die slow deaths from old wounds - it is why the slow vaccine rollout here in Spain makes me and many others so anxious. Frustrating as the country has everything in place for half a million doses a week - except for the doses themselves!
everything in place for half a million doses a week</>
Do you have some more info you can share? - not seen very much about preparations for mass vaccination in European countries, to date.
Is it worth reminding people that even before Covid most teachers leaving the profession left for jobs that paid them less than teaching does. From memory the typical pay cut for a teacher willingly leaving the profession is £5k.
And that's for qualified teachers with experience, a lot of people leave during training.
Overseas British private schools 'receiving dozens of applications for every vacancy'.
Giving Topping's viewpoint and that of other none teachers are you surprised? If you are single why would you wish to stay in the UK.
Teaching really is an impossible job this time around - because of the number of children in school most teachers are having to try to do both online and in person teaching at the same time and it's completely impossible.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I find myself in the extraordinary position of agreeing more with the PM than with many/most on here. People keep talking about dates. I thought that there was general agreement (with the PM) that the easing of restrictions should be governed by data (especially deaths and hospitalisations) rather than dates.
And yet, here we are, with large numbers of (lagged) deaths still occurring, and significant hospitalisations, still going on about "must be by the end of April" etc. The impact of vaccinations should feed into the data, not the date, for loosening restrictions.
If you stick to the 'data not dates' message, gradual reopening could be any time between about a month from now and three months, surely? Maybe once deaths are down to less than 100 a day on average, and hospitalisations are way down, restrictions can be eased. That could be in March, or April/May/June. Surely we can't repeat the error of promulgating another wave by opening too soon?
Data not dates is the wrong message sorry.
Data is lagged, massively lagged. It takes many weeks for someone who catches the infection to get sick, get hospitalised and die. People dying now are those who got sick, pre vaccination, ages ago.
We have the vaccine rollout. We have the dates on that. Add three weeks for the vaccine to be live and we are good to go.
If we wait for months for the data to become good, then give notice that in a few weeks we reopen, the problem will have long since been defeated and spring and summer will have been squandered for no good reason.
People again talking about infection rates and cases.
Doesn't matter. It's hospitalisations and deaths.
Infection rates and cases gets us to July in lockdown.
It took several months for the message to get across that covid 19 wasnt like the flu.
Sadly it may take another few months for the message to get across that post vaccination covid 19 is a bit like the flu or even a cold if the data on serious illness and death holds up.
My friend who developed symptoms a day or so after his (first) vaccination ten days ago has died. And very few of us have had their second injection. We are by no means out of the wood yet.
That’s very sad and I am sorry for your loss. You have the knowledge and training to know that your friend couldn’t have had time to develop immunity from the injection. I think the evidence will hold that single jab plus 3 weeks does confer at least some protection. Sadly for some they will fall ill before that happens.
That is of course, quite right, and thanks, too, to those who have sympathised. The point I was trying to make is that vaccination in itself isn't the whole of the answer, and that we need to reach a state of 'herd immunity', which will take some time. Opening up, in the sense of returning to what it was like socially in 2019, shouldn't happen for while.
Herd immunity won't be achievable until young adults and little ones are vaccinated, but by vaccinating the most vulnerable first a much bigger reopening should be possible very soon.
You don’t mention the impact of natural infection. Down here in Kent and in London there is, I am virtually certain, a degree of population immunity amongst the most exposed sections of the workforce. Not total herd immunity by any stretch but vaccination puts us closer. Family friends of ours, whole family had symptoms (all fine now), save for their 5 year old. Naive to think he didn’t get it but those young immune systems...
I hope and indeed assume you mean, ‘they all had symptoms save for their 5 year old’ rather than ‘they are all fine now, save for their five year old.’
Yeah. I blame a state education 😉
Well, everyone else does
Except of course, doesn’t work for those who were privately educated.
Some of us were both: I was at a state school up to 11.
Is it worth reminding people that even before Covid most teachers leaving the profession left for jobs that paid them less than teaching does. From memory the typical pay cut for a teacher willingly leaving the profession is £5k.
And that's for qualified teachers with experience, a lot of people leave during training.
Exactly. They realise that it requires dedication, and sacrifices, over and above that of other professions. And hence can't or don't want to hack it.
And thats when they have 13 weeks holiday that you think they don't deserve.
I repeat my comment of earlier - you are an arse who can see neither anyone elses viewpoint nor be bothered to think through the consequences of their own ideas to see how stupid they actually are.
I am just grateful that we have posters such as yourself who are able to highlight the failings of the rest of us.
Your addition to the actual discussion: zero.
But you seem to be enjoying yourself so crack on, pal.
Is it worth reminding people that even before Covid most teachers leaving the profession left for jobs that paid them less than teaching does. From memory the typical pay cut for a teacher willingly leaving the profession is £5k.
And that's for qualified teachers with experience, a lot of people leave during training.
Overseas British private schools 'receiving dozens of applications for every vacancy'.
Giving Topping's viewpoint and that of other none teachers are you surprised? If you are single why would you wish to stay in the UK.
Teaching really is an impossible job this time around - because of the number of children in school most teachers are having to try to do both online and in person teaching at the same time and it's completely impossible.
"completely impossible"
mmkay.
Edit: "other none [sic] teachers".
Oh god you're another one.
Three of you on PB, and on for quite some time, at 09.30 in the morning.
People again talking about infection rates and cases.
Doesn't matter. It's hospitalisations and deaths.
Infection rates and cases gets us to July in lockdown.
It took several months for the message to get across that covid 19 wasnt like the flu.
Sadly it may take another few months for the message to get across that post vaccination covid 19 is a bit like the flu or even a cold if the data on serious illness and death holds up.
My friend who developed symptoms a day or so after his (first) vaccination ten days ago has died. And very few of us have had their second injection. We are by no means out of the wood yet.
That’s very sad and I am sorry for your loss. You have the knowledge and training to know that your friend couldn’t have had time to develop immunity from the injection. I think the evidence will hold that single jab plus 3 weeks does confer at least some protection. Sadly for some they will fall ill before that happens.
That is of course, quite right, and thanks, too, to those who have sympathised. The point I was trying to make is that vaccination in itself isn't the whole of the answer, and that we need to reach a state of 'herd immunity', which will take some time. Opening up, in the sense of returning to what it was like socially in 2019, shouldn't happen for while.
Herd immunity won't be achievable until young adults and little ones are vaccinated, but by vaccinating the most vulnerable first a much bigger reopening should be possible very soon.
You don’t mention the impact of natural infection. Down here in Kent and in London there is, I am virtually certain, a degree of population immunity amongst the most exposed sections of the workforce. Not total herd immunity by any stretch but vaccination puts us closer. Family friends of ours, whole family had symptoms (all fine now), save for their 5 year old. Naive to think he didn’t get it but those young immune systems...
I hope and indeed assume you mean, ‘they all had symptoms save for their 5 year old’ rather than ‘they are all fine now, save for their five year old.’
Yeah. I blame a state education 😉
Well, everyone else does
Except of course, doesn’t work for those who were privately educated.
Some of us were both: I was at a state school up to 11.
Now you’re just complicating things. Typical physics teacher
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Attlee helped found NATO, develop our nuclear deterrent and modernise the RAF with a jet bomber force, so he was certainly responsible with defence and foreign policy.
But, and I'm shocked I'm about to say this, we were spending too much on defence overall with garrisons of 10,000 men all over the world - everywhere - and trying to be a superpower sans money and increasingly sans empire.
That was a mistake.
I think the 1935 India Act was a missed opportunity; India should have been given full dominion status. There would have been no partition. It then would likely have actively participated in WW2 as an ally of the UK as all the other dominions did.
India would then probably have moved to be a republic by the 1950s or 1960s, but slowly and steadily. There would still have been a risk of tension and conflict between Muslim and Hindu areas - a very real one - but at least a constitutional and federal framework within which to debate them.
Baldwin's need to appease Tory imperialists like Churchill made such a thing utterly impossible.
The Times is indicating that Gove maybe becoming Home Secretary.
Boris Johnson has stripped Michael Gove of his role overseeing Britain’s future relationship with Europe and replaced him with Lord Frost, who negotiated last year’s Brexit trade deal.
In a move that opponents claimed amounted to a “sidelining” of Gove, Downing Street said that Frost would have a seat in cabinet and take responsibility for dealings with Brussels.
He will take Gove’s job as UK chairman of the withdrawal agreement joint committee. Based in the Cabinet Office, Frost will be responsible for talks on easing trade restrictions between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Downing Street said that he would also be in charge of dealing with post-Brexit trade problems as well as overseeing domestic reform to “maximise” the opportunities of having left the EU.
Brexit was key to Gove’s brief as Cabinet Office minister. He chaired the Brexit operations committee, which is now likely to fall to Frost, 55. Gove will continue to be in charge of civil service reform and liaising with the devolved administrations. The prime minister has put him in charge of a committee to address NHS waiting times, backlogs in the courts and other effects of the pandemic on public services.
One source suggested that Johnson’s decision had not thrilled Gove, 53, who this week was made interim chairman of the partnership council due to oversee operation of the Brexit trade deal.
It has also caused unease among officials in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office because Frost’s new role includes “co-ordinating relations” with the 27 EU states.
A senior government source said that it made sense to have one minister in charge of all elements of Britain’s relationship with the EU. “I’m sure Michael is not thrilled by this but Lord Frost has the expertise having negotiated the trade deal in the first place and it makes sense for one person to oversee the whole relationship,” they said.
Another source suggested that the move would be followed by a reshuffle this year in which Gove would move to a department such as the Home Office or the Department of Health: “I think there is an understanding that Michael is going to get another big job.”
An opponent of Gove added: “Gove would get a grip on the Home Office, which Boris needs. And it’s a department where things go wrong, so it may help ease him out of the cabinet too.”
Other insiders saw the appointment as a sign of Gove’s waning influence in Downing Street. “Fundamentally his relationship with Boris is still scarred by the 2016 leadership election,” a source said. “The PM just doesn’t trust him.” This is denied by Gove’s allies.
In defence of Gove (not something I say often) I think he would actually be quite a good fit at the Home Office. He is both hard working and determined. Once he has set his mind to something, he carries it through regardless of the consequences, and goodness knows the Home Office could do with some of that.
The trick always was to make sure he set his mind to the right thing, which is where he went tragically wrong at education.
Gove is a depressingly rare talent in UK politics. He is clever, a clear thinker, no respecter of institutions and open to new ideas, especially his own. Of course he doesn't always get it right but it is something to be cherished compared with the managers elsewhere who toe the departmental line from the off since they are incapable of original thought.
Boris really doesn't have anyone like him. Wherever Gove is put there will be change, controversy and attention. What Boris needs to do is think which part of government he wants that for the most. Its a big call because it is entirely possible that this might well shape the second half of his premiership every bit as much as Brexit did the first half.
If it were me I'd put Gove in charge of post Brexit regulatory form and our new industrial and economic strategy.
I think the Home Office is a waste.
Much as I dislike Gove, I think he is one of the few senior members of the government that is genuinely effective. The problem for Boris Johnson is that his own terrible lack of leadership skills will make him fear anyone that will shine, so he will not want Gove anywhere near anything that will enable him to do that
It would be a demotion for him but I would like to see Gove back at DEFRA. He was admired if not liked by all sides in the farming industry and environmental pressure groups, listened to everyone apparently without preconception, was very effective at turning ideas into actions and was able to identify and highlight some of the serious problems facing our food production and land usage going forward. Some of his initiatives, particularly regarding soil degradation and biosphere collapse seem to have floundered since he was moved on. It would be good to see him back again in what is a much underrated and undervalued department.
The Mail (and others) do seem to be glossing over an important fact:
VACCINES DON'T WORK UNTIL THEY'RE GIVEN
And even then, you need to wait three weeks or so.
We have vaccines. We're rolling them out. About 10% of people are protected at the moment (dose+3 weeks). It'll take until April/May before we've dosed up enough people to ensure we don't get hospitals and ICUs ever flooded again.
Sort of like driving down out of the mountains onto the flat, safer area.
So pressing him into taking the brakes off before enough people are dosed means we'll be careening down an icy mountain road at ever-increasing speed before we come out onto the flat.
I mean - we can see the end of the road. Let's not crash now! Not again!
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
I love how we assume such things (removal of the Gold Standard and fixed exchange rates) were obvious and easy decisions as sit here 70 years later with 50 years of experience of what happened after we ditched those restraints.
It really wasn't such a clear cut choice then as the consequences were at the time completely unknown.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
That's a fair point.
But some people want to remake the mistakes of the past or rewrite history to say it wasn't a mistake. First step for learning from history is acknowledging mistakes etc
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
The discussion re Attlee and the 50s is very contemporary in one way. Quite recently the gap between Labour and Tory was, while incoherent, immense. (Jezza v May, Jezza v Boris and so on).
The discussion now is not how a wacky Labour party can fight the troops of JRM and Steve Baker; it is how can Labour find clear and popular water between them and an interventionist, NHS religionist, high borrow and spend Tory party.
This looks like a return to the 50s in a new way: Butskellism. Outside the extremes, neither of which matter at the moment, Christian Democrats/Social Democrats have taken over both major parties. Finding their real policy differences in substance is difficult not because SKS is hiding but because there aren't any.
Historically this is good news for moderates everywhere, but bad news for the LDs, as they have nothing fresh to offer and no chance of power.
I find myself in the extraordinary position of agreeing more with the PM than with many/most on here. People keep talking about dates. I thought that there was general agreement (with the PM) that the easing of restrictions should be governed by data (especially deaths and hospitalisations) rather than dates.
And yet, here we are, with large numbers of (lagged) deaths still occurring, and significant hospitalisations, still going on about "must be by the end of April" etc. The impact of vaccinations should feed into the data, not the date, for loosening restrictions.
If you stick to the 'data not dates' message, gradual reopening could be any time between about a month from now and three months, surely? Maybe once deaths are down to less than 100 a day on average, and hospitalisations are way down, restrictions can be eased. That could be in March, or April/May/June. Surely we can't repeat the error of promulgating another wave by opening too soon?
Data not dates is the wrong message sorry.
Data is lagged, massively lagged. It takes many weeks for someone who catches the infection to get sick, get hospitalised and die. People dying now are those who got sick, pre vaccination, ages ago.
We have the vaccine rollout. We have the dates on that. Add three weeks for the vaccine to be live and we are good to go.
If we wait for months for the data to become good, then give notice that in a few weeks we reopen, the problem will have long since been defeated and spring and summer will have been squandered for no good reason.
Thanks for telling me what I know, in your normal patronising fashion. Gosh, I never realised there was a long lag between infection and death..... Anyway, I don't agree with you. The data could well be fine in a few weeks; it's not now. The effects of vaccinations are also lagged; we shall see.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
Now, admittedly, some of that was because we had vast coal mines on UK soil and almost a million miners digging it out of the ground, whilst oil was still to some extent undeveloped globally and not wholly secure, but we'd switched the armed forces over decades earlier, road transport was already there and fast overtaking it and, from a manpower point of view, it was extremely inefficient: we had far too many men digging coal, and far too many men firing, driving, steaming, cleaning and operating low HP steam locomotives. There was also the lunacy of the British Railways 1950s modernisation plan which envisaged several massive marshalling yards for old-fashioned goods wagons all over the UK, which was happening just as lorry haulage was changing the nature of freight transport all over the UK. It probably led to us overshooting with Beeching in the 1960s, as we desperately and belatedly tried to staunch the wound and inject a bit of common sense into things (and he definitely did overdo it, and was about as open-minded as Bomber Harris).
We talk about why we were the sick man of Europe going into the 1960s and 1970s.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Is it worth reminding people that even before Covid most teachers leaving the profession left for jobs that paid them less than teaching does. From memory the typical pay cut for a teacher willingly leaving the profession is £5k.
And that's for qualified teachers with experience, a lot of people leave during training.
Overseas British private schools 'receiving dozens of applications for every vacancy'.
Giving Topping's viewpoint and that of other none teachers are you surprised? If you are single why would you wish to stay in the UK.
Teaching really is an impossible job this time around - because of the number of children in school most teachers are having to try to do both online and in person teaching at the same time and it's completely impossible.
"completely impossible"
mmkay.
Edit: "other none [sic] teachers".
Oh god you're another one.
Three of you on PB, and on for quite some time, at 09.30 in the morning.
I don't know about elsewhere, but in Romford, it's half term this week.
And the big picture is a really simple example of the free market at work. Schools can't retain staff, and in key subjects they can barely recruit. Something in the pay/conditions/vocation balance is broken. And whilst it's tempting to say that teachers should be more virtuous, there are nowhere near enough paragons to make that work.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
Now, admittedly, some of that was because we had vast coal mines on UK soil and almost a million miners digging it out of the ground, whilst oil was still to some extent undeveloped globally and not wholly secure, but we'd switched the armed forces over decades earlier, road transport was already there and fast overtaking it and, from a manpower point of view, it was extremely inefficient: we had far too many men digging coal, and far too many men firing, driving, steaming, cleaning and operating low HP steam locomotives. There was also the lunacy of the British Railways 1950s modernisation plan which envisaged several massive marshalling yards for old-fashioned goods wagons all over the UK, which was happening just as lorry haulage was changing the nature of freight transport all over the UK. It probably led to us overshooting with Beeching in the 1960s, as we desperately and belatedly tried to staunch the wound and inject a bit of common sense into things (and he definitely did overdo it, and was about as open-minded as Bomber Harris).
We talk about why we were the sick man of Europe going into the 1960s and 1970s.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Although I’m not disagreeing with many of your comments, I should point out on railways:
1) Steam power was intended as a stop-gap until the whole rail system was electrified, and given Diesel engines required both foreign sourced fuel and separate facilities, wasn’t therefore a ridiculous decision at the time;
2) The Rail modernisation plan was an initiative of the Churchill government, so it’s not really fair to link it to Attlee.
Although you could have pointed out that nationalisation brought a halt to electrification on the Southern network, plus led to the scrapping of the GWR’s ATP system.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
Is it worth reminding people that even before Covid most teachers leaving the profession left for jobs that paid them less than teaching does. From memory the typical pay cut for a teacher willingly leaving the profession is £5k.
And that's for qualified teachers with experience, a lot of people leave during training.
Overseas British private schools 'receiving dozens of applications for every vacancy'.
Giving Topping's viewpoint and that of other none teachers are you surprised? If you are single why would you wish to stay in the UK.
Teaching really is an impossible job this time around - because of the number of children in school most teachers are having to try to do both online and in person teaching at the same time and it's completely impossible.
"completely impossible"
mmkay.
Edit: "other none [sic] teachers".
Oh god you're another one.
Three of you on PB, and on for quite some time, at 09.30 in the morning.
I don't know about elsewhere, but in Romford, it's half term this week.
And the big picture is a really simple example of the free market at work. Schools can't retain staff, and in key subjects they can barely recruit. Something in the pay/conditions/vocation balance is broken. And whilst it's tempting to say that teachers should be more virtuous, there are nowhere near enough paragons to make that work.
Doubly difficult of course for teachers with families to work extra hours.
Is it worth reminding people that even before Covid most teachers leaving the profession left for jobs that paid them less than teaching does. From memory the typical pay cut for a teacher willingly leaving the profession is £5k.
And that's for qualified teachers with experience, a lot of people leave during training.
Overseas British private schools 'receiving dozens of applications for every vacancy'.
Giving Topping's viewpoint and that of other none teachers are you surprised? If you are single why would you wish to stay in the UK.
Teaching really is an impossible job this time around - because of the number of children in school most teachers are having to try to do both online and in person teaching at the same time and it's completely impossible.
"completely impossible"
mmkay.
Edit: "other none [sic] teachers".
Oh god you're another one.
Three of you on PB, and on for quite some time, at 09.30 in the morning.
I'm not a teacher - however I did some research to confirm my opinions weren't flawed before posting.
And I'm careful to identify those posters who actually do that so that I know who is worth paying attention to and who should really be treated as part of an uninformed mob.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Attlee helped found NATO, develop our nuclear deterrent and modernise the RAF with a jet bomber force, so he was certainly responsible with defence and foreign policy.
But, and I'm shocked I'm about to say this, we were spending too much on defence overall with garrisons of 10,000 men all over the world - everywhere - and trying to be a superpower sans money and increasingly sans empire.
That was a mistake.
I think the 1935 India Act was a missed opportunity; India should have been given full dominion status. There would have been no partition. It then would likely have actively participated in WW2 as an ally of the UK as all the other dominions did.
India would then probably have moved to be a republic by the 1950s or 1960s, but slowly and steadily. There would still have been a risk of tension and conflict between Muslim and Hindu areas - a very real one - but at least a constitutional and federal framework within which to debate them.
Baldwin's need to appease Tory imperialists like Churchill made such a thing utterly impossible.
Churchill was largely in the wilderness in those years, and broadly ignored.
The story of India is that it got each level of progressive self-government and reform about 20 years later than it should have done, when compared to the other dominions, and then only to about 60-70% of the level that it should have done.
I think had it moved on a similar trajectory to Australia and Canada, provincial and local self-government in the 1850s and 1860s, and broader home rule by the 1880s and 1890s, with full dominion status in the 1920s and 1930s, then we'd have had a much more positive long-term relationship over the last 60-70 years with India as a close ally throughout, which would have helped immeasurably with the Cold War, and it might be an influential member of a far more powerful "Six Eyes" today.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
I love how we assume such things (removal of the Gold Standard and fixed exchange rates) were obvious and easy decisions as sit here 70 years later with 50 years of experience of what happened after we ditched those restraints.
It really wasn't such a clear cut choice then as the consequences were at the time completely unknown.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
That's a fair point.
But some people want to remake the mistakes of the past or rewrite history to say it wasn't a mistake. First step for learning from history is acknowledging mistakes etc
First step for learning from history is making sure that the history you are trying to learn from is complete and accurate.
History is written by the winners so may gloss over and miss an awful lot of information that may be highly relevant.
And the winner could often by the winner due to circumstances that are rapidly hidden from the final history books.
On the lockdown surely the issue is to get back to the R number. Keeping it below 1 remains the key. Seems we've got it below 1 broadly, but not by much.
Getting kids back into school should have upward pressure on the R, whilst vaccination will have downwards pressure on the R.
I think Boris is playing this right. Eek out the lessening of restrictions so no chance of an uptick occurs. By April we will have a much much better idea of the situation, and we can accelerate opening up safely.
This has to be the last lockdown. Once things open, they can't close again, so you have to get it right, even if it means a few weeks of playing it too safe.
The Mail (and others) do seem to be glossing over an important fact:
VACCINES DON'T WORK UNTIL THEY'RE GIVEN
And even then, you need to wait three weeks or so.
We have vaccines. We're rolling them out. About 10% of people are protected at the moment (dose+3 weeks). It'll take until April/May before we've dosed up enough people to ensure we don't get hospitals and ICUs ever flooded again.
Sort of like driving down out of the mountains onto the flat, safer area.
So pressing him into taking the brakes off before enough people are dosed means we'll be careening down an icy mountain road at ever-increasing speed before we come out onto the flat.
I mean - we can see the end of the road. Let's not crash now! Not again!
You need to include the people who have had covid among those who are protected.
So more like 25% protected nationally and with significant local variations.
Though its a complicated equation with factors including people who have had covid getting vaccinated, people who have had covid losing their protection through time and new people getting infected.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
Now, admittedly, some of that was because we had vast coal mines on UK soil and almost a million miners digging it out of the ground, whilst oil was still to some extent undeveloped globally and not wholly secure, but we'd switched the armed forces over decades earlier, road transport was already there and fast overtaking it and, from a manpower point of view, it was extremely inefficient: we had far too many men digging coal, and far too many men firing, driving, steaming, cleaning and operating low HP steam locomotives. There was also the lunacy of the British Railways 1950s modernisation plan which envisaged several massive marshalling yards for old-fashioned goods wagons all over the UK, which was happening just as lorry haulage was changing the nature of freight transport all over the UK. It probably led to us overshooting with Beeching in the 1960s, as we desperately and belatedly tried to staunch the wound and inject a bit of common sense into things (and he definitely did overdo it, and was about as open-minded as Bomber Harris).
We talk about why we were the sick man of Europe going into the 1960s and 1970s.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
It isn't obvious that this has much to do with socialism, with the Conservatives in power during the 1950s. Clinging to the nostalgia of once having been a superpower and empire is closer to the mark; despite the loss of the latter we have never really got real about the former, the massive and pointless expenditure on Trident to this day being a case in point.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Attlee helped found NATO, develop our nuclear deterrent and modernise the RAF with a jet bomber force, so he was certainly responsible with defence and foreign policy.
But, and I'm shocked I'm about to say this, we were spending too much on defence overall with garrisons of 10,000 men all over the world - everywhere - and trying to be a superpower sans money and increasingly sans empire.
That was a mistake.
I think the 1935 India Act was a missed opportunity; India should have been given full dominion status. There would have been no partition. It then would likely have actively participated in WW2 as an ally of the UK as all the other dominions did.
India would then probably have moved to be a republic by the 1950s or 1960s, but slowly and steadily. There would still have been a risk of tension and conflict between Muslim and Hindu areas - a very real one - but at least a constitutional and federal framework within which to debate them.
Baldwin's need to appease Tory imperialists like Churchill made such a thing utterly impossible.
Churchill was largely in the wilderness in those years, and broadly ignored.
The story of India is that it got each level of progressive self-government and reform about 20 years later than it should have done, when compared to the other dominions, and then only to about 60-70% of the level that it should have done.
I think had it moved on a similar trajectory to Australia and Canada, provincial and local self-government in the 1850s and 1860s, and broader home rule by the 1880s and 1890s, with full dominion status in the 1920s and 1930s, then we'd have had a much more positive long-term relationship over the last 60-70 years with India as a close ally throughout, which would have helped immeasurably with the Cold War, and it might be an influential member of a far more powerful "Six Eyes" today.
See, also, Ireland.
It voted Tory / Liberal well into the 1860s, and even into the 1880s the only electorally successful Irish “nationalism” was loyal, unionist, and simply wanted to restore the Irish Parliament.
Is it worth reminding people that even before Covid most teachers leaving the profession left for jobs that paid them less than teaching does. From memory the typical pay cut for a teacher willingly leaving the profession is £5k.
And that's for qualified teachers with experience, a lot of people leave during training.
Overseas British private schools 'receiving dozens of applications for every vacancy'.
Giving Topping's viewpoint and that of other none teachers are you surprised? If you are single why would you wish to stay in the UK.
Teaching really is an impossible job this time around - because of the number of children in school most teachers are having to try to do both online and in person teaching at the same time and it's completely impossible.
"completely impossible"
mmkay.
Edit: "other none [sic] teachers".
Oh god you're another one.
Three of you on PB, and on for quite some time, at 09.30 in the morning.
I don't know about elsewhere, but in Romford, it's half term this week.
And the big picture is a really simple example of the free market at work. Schools can't retain staff, and in key subjects they can barely recruit. Something in the pay/conditions/vocation balance is broken. And whilst it's tempting to say that teachers should be more virtuous, there are nowhere near enough paragons to make that work.
Doubly difficult of course for teachers with families to work extra hours.
A significant number of teachers do the job because it fits in well with child care responsibilities. In fact we have a number of pupils who get a lift to school with their teacher parent(s).
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Attlee helped found NATO, develop our nuclear deterrent and modernise the RAF with a jet bomber force, so he was certainly responsible with defence and foreign policy.
But, and I'm shocked I'm about to say this, we were spending too much on defence overall with garrisons of 10,000 men all over the world - everywhere - and trying to be a superpower sans money and increasingly sans empire.
That was a mistake.
I think the 1935 India Act was a missed opportunity; India should have been given full dominion status. There would have been no partition. It then would likely have actively participated in WW2 as an ally of the UK as all the other dominions did.
India would then probably have moved to be a republic by the 1950s or 1960s, but slowly and steadily. There would still have been a risk of tension and conflict between Muslim and Hindu areas - a very real one - but at least a constitutional and federal framework within which to debate them.
Baldwin's need to appease Tory imperialists like Churchill made such a thing utterly impossible.
Churchill was largely in the wilderness in those years, and broadly ignored.
The story of India is that it got each level of progressive self-government and reform about 20 years later than it should have done, when compared to the other dominions, and then only to about 60-70% of the level that it should have done.
I think had it moved on a similar trajectory to Australia and Canada, provincial and local self-government in the 1850s and 1860s, and broader home rule by the 1880s and 1890s, with full dominion status in the 1920s and 1930s, then we'd have had a much more positive long-term relationship over the last 60-70 years with India as a close ally throughout, which would have helped immeasurably with the Cold War, and it might be an influential member of a far more powerful "Six Eyes" today.
India, or the various bits of it, had a very high degree of self-government before the East India Company showed up.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
Now, admittedly, some of that was because we had vast coal mines on UK soil and almost a million miners digging it out of the ground, whilst oil was still to some extent undeveloped globally and not wholly secure, but we'd switched the armed forces over decades earlier, road transport was already there and fast overtaking it and, from a manpower point of view, it was extremely inefficient: we had far too many men digging coal, and far too many men firing, driving, steaming, cleaning and operating low HP steam locomotives. There was also the lunacy of the British Railways 1950s modernisation plan which envisaged several massive marshalling yards for old-fashioned goods wagons all over the UK, which was happening just as lorry haulage was changing the nature of freight transport all over the UK. It probably led to us overshooting with Beeching in the 1960s, as we desperately and belatedly tried to staunch the wound and inject a bit of common sense into things (and he definitely did overdo it, and was about as open-minded as Bomber Harris).
We talk about why we were the sick man of Europe going into the 1960s and 1970s.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Although I’m not disagreeing with many of your comments, I should point out on railways:
1) Steam power was intended as a stop-gap until the whole rail system was electrified, and given Diesel engines required both foreign sourced fuel and separate facilities, wasn’t therefore a ridiculous decision at the time;
2) The Rail modernisation plan was an initiative of the Churchill government, so it’s not really fair to link it to Attlee.
Although you could have pointed out that nationalisation brought a halt to electrification on the Southern network, plus led to the scrapping of the GWR’s ATP system.
Yes, but I don't really buy that as lorries and cars were all using "foreign" fuel, as was the RAF, Royal Navy and Army. I don't see why rail traction (which would use a far lower volume) couldn't do the same. I suspect union and political issues had a lot to do with it.
You're right on the rail modernisation plan, but don't forget Attlee nationalised the railways leading up to it too - leading to its bureaucratic and unimaginative design - and failed to change the railways legal status as a common carrier, which had been called for since the 1930s and had severely handicapped it.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You think nobody seriously believes China is one of our biggest risks? 🤔
What do you think are our biggest risks ahead of China?
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
Now, admittedly, some of that was because we had vast coal mines on UK soil and almost a million miners digging it out of the ground, whilst oil was still to some extent undeveloped globally and not wholly secure, but we'd switched the armed forces over decades earlier, road transport was already there and fast overtaking it and, from a manpower point of view, it was extremely inefficient: we had far too many men digging coal, and far too many men firing, driving, steaming, cleaning and operating low HP steam locomotives. There was also the lunacy of the British Railways 1950s modernisation plan which envisaged several massive marshalling yards for old-fashioned goods wagons all over the UK, which was happening just as lorry haulage was changing the nature of freight transport all over the UK. It probably led to us overshooting with Beeching in the 1960s, as we desperately and belatedly tried to staunch the wound and inject a bit of common sense into things (and he definitely did overdo it, and was about as open-minded as Bomber Harris).
We talk about why we were the sick man of Europe going into the 1960s and 1970s.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
As I said before hindsight is a wonderful thing and trying to avoid Diesel made perfect sense given that at the time we needed to import it but we didn't need to import coal.
Beeching literally did what he was asked to do - yes he probably cut too much but the requirements created a criteria that left him with little choice. Especially as by then it was obvious that road was the future for both freight and public transport.
Surely we can't repeat the error of promulgating another wave by opening too soon?
I think it's likely tbh. The pressure on Johnson is enormous and we know he likes to keep people happy.
Plus... Starmer's opposition, the wider news media, really haven't catered to the large proportion of the population who have consistently wanted tougher restrictions throughout. Boris isn't hearing from those people.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
And it's not as though the Conservative opposition was particularly dedicated to investment, either. In a sense, both parties were mired in the past.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You think nobody seriously believes China is one of our biggest risks? 🤔
What do you think are our biggest risks ahead of China?
I told you a few days ago and you studiously ignored it.
1. Russia 2. The defence consequences of SINDY 3. Destabilisation in Middle East / NA.
China probably comes after that.
Our defence threats reflect geographic reality and the strength of trade, food and energy flows.
Is it worth reminding people that even before Covid most teachers leaving the profession left for jobs that paid them less than teaching does. From memory the typical pay cut for a teacher willingly leaving the profession is £5k.
And that's for qualified teachers with experience, a lot of people leave during training.
Overseas British private schools 'receiving dozens of applications for every vacancy'.
Giving Topping's viewpoint and that of other none teachers are you surprised? If you are single why would you wish to stay in the UK.
Teaching really is an impossible job this time around - because of the number of children in school most teachers are having to try to do both online and in person teaching at the same time and it's completely impossible.
"completely impossible"
mmkay.
Edit: "other none [sic] teachers".
Oh god you're another one.
Three of you on PB, and on for quite some time, at 09.30 in the morning.
I don't know about elsewhere, but in Romford, it's half term this week.
And the big picture is a really simple example of the free market at work. Schools can't retain staff, and in key subjects they can barely recruit. Something in the pay/conditions/vocation balance is broken. And whilst it's tempting to say that teachers should be more virtuous, there are nowhere near enough paragons to make that work.
Doubly difficult of course for teachers with families to work extra hours.
Yup- it's increasingly a job for the young and childless...
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
Now, admittedly, some of that was because we had vast coal mines on UK soil and almost a million miners digging it out of the ground, whilst oil was still to some extent undeveloped globally and not wholly secure, but we'd switched the armed forces over decades earlier, road transport was already there and fast overtaking it and, from a manpower point of view, it was extremely inefficient: we had far too many men digging coal, and far too many men firing, driving, steaming, cleaning and operating low HP steam locomotives. There was also the lunacy of the British Railways 1950s modernisation plan which envisaged several massive marshalling yards for old-fashioned goods wagons all over the UK, which was happening just as lorry haulage was changing the nature of freight transport all over the UK. It probably led to us overshooting with Beeching in the 1960s, as we desperately and belatedly tried to staunch the wound and inject a bit of common sense into things (and he definitely did overdo it, and was about as open-minded as Bomber Harris).
We talk about why we were the sick man of Europe going into the 1960s and 1970s.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Although I’m not disagreeing with many of your comments, I should point out on railways:
1) Steam power was intended as a stop-gap until the whole rail system was electrified, and given Diesel engines required both foreign sourced fuel and separate facilities, wasn’t therefore a ridiculous decision at the time;
2) The Rail modernisation plan was an initiative of the Churchill government, so it’s not really fair to link it to Attlee.
Although you could have pointed out that nationalisation brought a halt to electrification on the Southern network, plus led to the scrapping of the GWR’s ATP system.
Yes, but I don't really buy that as lorries and cars were all using "foreign" fuel, as was the RAF, Royal Navy and Army. I don't see why rail traction (which would use a far lower volume) couldn't do the same. I suspect union and political issues had a lot to do with it.
You're right on the rail modernisation plan, but don't forget Attlee nationalised the railways leading up to it too - leading to its bureaucratic and unimaginative design - and failed to change the railways legal status as a common carrier, which had been called for since the 1930s and had severely handicapped it.
Lorries using foreign fuel on roads was unavoidable and a low level decision.
Switching rail to diesel a very political decision - it was a Government level decision (thank to Nationalisation) that both screamed the end of electrification / modernisation and resulted in an increased balance of trade deficit.
Pension Figures From China's Hubei Spark Doubts Over Virus Deaths
Chinese government figures showing the absence of more than 150,000 elderly people from the list of those given state subsidy payments in the first quarter of 2020 could point to a far greater COVID-19-linked death toll than previously reported in the country, analysts told RFA.
Data released by the civil affairs department in the central province of Hubei, where the coronavirus pandemic first emerged in December 2019, showed that around 150,000 names had "disappeared" from the list of recipients in the first three months of 2020, as COVID-19 tore through the provincial capital Wuhan and surrounding areas, sparking a provincial lockdown.
The subsidy is a payment handed out to people over 80 across the province who are experiencing financial hardship.
Transparency campaigner Liu Jun, who has previously suggested that the true death toll from the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic could be several times higher than the 4,636 reported by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), said the figure suggested a very high death toll.
Surely we can't repeat the error of promulgating another wave by opening too soon?
I think it's likely tbh. The pressure on Johnson is enormous and we know he likes to keep people happy.
Plus... Starmer's opposition, the wider news media, really haven't catered to the large proportion of the population who have consistently wanted tougher restrictions throughout. Boris isn't hearing from those people.
All the pressure is from the other direction.
Continuing the status quo doesn't apply pressure - pressure only ever comes and is visible from those wanting change.
Go back a year and the only visible pressure was from those wanting things locked down. Leap forward to July and the pressure was to open things up again.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
Now, admittedly, some of that was because we had vast coal mines on UK soil and almost a million miners digging it out of the ground, whilst oil was still to some extent undeveloped globally and not wholly secure, but we'd switched the armed forces over decades earlier, road transport was already there and fast overtaking it and, from a manpower point of view, it was extremely inefficient: we had far too many men digging coal, and far too many men firing, driving, steaming, cleaning and operating low HP steam locomotives. There was also the lunacy of the British Railways 1950s modernisation plan which envisaged several massive marshalling yards for old-fashioned goods wagons all over the UK, which was happening just as lorry haulage was changing the nature of freight transport all over the UK. It probably led to us overshooting with Beeching in the 1960s, as we desperately and belatedly tried to staunch the wound and inject a bit of common sense into things (and he definitely did overdo it, and was about as open-minded as Bomber Harris).
We talk about why we were the sick man of Europe going into the 1960s and 1970s.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
It isn't obvious that this has much to do with socialism, with the Conservatives in power during the 1950s. Clinging to the nostalgia of once having been a superpower and empire is closer to the mark; despite the loss of the latter we have never really got real about the former, the massive and pointless expenditure on Trident to this day being a case in point.
It is obvious. Socialists were in power from 1945-1951 when most of those key decisions on nationalising the economy were made, and directing its investment. And don't forget, much as it might pain you to hear this, that Attlee got us into the Korean War and the Malaya Emergency and advocated a "new colonialism" in Africa, focussed on keeping African colonies as strategic Cold War assets while modernising their economies - they thus came under an increased degree of direct control from London. This didn't change until 1957-1958 with Macmillan took over. The best you could say is that Churchill/Eden represented an interregnum which didn't change very much, other than ending rationing and trying to be a bit more sensible on the economy, which is also true.
Attlee was instrumental in developing Britain's nuclear deterrent, and would be shocked to hear your views about Trident - although familiar with them from the left-wing of his party - as he saw it as a necessity to prevent nuclear blackmail, and level the playing field for the UK against other powers with massive and overwhelming conventional armed forces.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
The discussion re Attlee and the 50s is very contemporary in one way. Quite recently the gap between Labour and Tory was, while incoherent, immense. (Jezza v May, Jezza v Boris and so on).
The discussion now is not how a wacky Labour party can fight the troops of JRM and Steve Baker; it is how can Labour find clear and popular water between them and an interventionist, NHS religionist, high borrow and spend Tory party.
This looks like a return to the 50s in a new way: Butskellism. Outside the extremes, neither of which matter at the moment, Christian Democrats/Social Democrats have taken over both major parties. Finding their real policy differences in substance is difficult not because SKS is hiding but because there aren't any.
Historically this is good news for moderates everywhere, but bad news for the LDs, as they have nothing fresh to offer and no chance of power.
Some very good points. Over recent decades, competing political visions of how to manage the economy have been trashed, leaving us with a choice between alternative sets of technocratic micro managers, and politicians grasping for issues of identity and nationalism to present any sort of difference. Conservatives reach for the flag because little about anything else they are now doing is particularly conservative.
In particular, the GFC followed by the pandemic have destroyed the sort of deregulated small-state competition-for-everything model sometimes labelled neoliberal economics, and left us in a strange limbo-land of QE and ZIR where (provided the new economics doesn't collapse), borrowing and big government are a rational strategy, with the economy tending toward oligarchy. The tensions within the new model aren't particularly economic, but social, with the divergence between asset values and income entrenching forms of social immobility and inter-generational inequality that haven't been seen for a century.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You think nobody seriously believes China is one of our biggest risks? 🤔
What do you think are our biggest risks ahead of China?
I told you a few days ago and you studiously ignored it.
1. Russia 2. The defence consequences of SINDY 3. Destabilisation in Middle East / NA.
China probably comes after that.
Our defence threats reflect geographic reality and the strength of trade, food and energy flows.
Not flat earth fantasy.
You're in so far in de Nile you're walking like an Egyptian.
China are the world's number one long term threat - and as a country in the world they are our number one long term threat too.
Russia are piddly bit players. Russia to China is like England/the UK to the USA. Russia used to be a superpower, they're not anymore, they're just playing at it nowadays.
The consequences of Sindy need to be dealt with but we'll get over that one way or another, its not that consequential for dealing with our enemies.
The Middle East we're still dealing with but its not as significant as China.
China are the new evil empire, they're every bit as much a threat as the USSR was. If you deny that you're not big or clever, you're just showing how little attention you're paying.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Attlee helped found NATO, develop our nuclear deterrent and modernise the RAF with a jet bomber force, so he was certainly responsible with defence and foreign policy.
But, and I'm shocked I'm about to say this, we were spending too much on defence overall with garrisons of 10,000 men all over the world - everywhere - and trying to be a superpower sans money and increasingly sans empire.
That was a mistake.
I think the 1935 India Act was a missed opportunity; India should have been given full dominion status. There would have been no partition. It then would likely have actively participated in WW2 as an ally of the UK as all the other dominions did.
India would then probably have moved to be a republic by the 1950s or 1960s, but slowly and steadily. There would still have been a risk of tension and conflict between Muslim and Hindu areas - a very real one - but at least a constitutional and federal framework within which to debate them.
Baldwin's need to appease Tory imperialists like Churchill made such a thing utterly impossible.
Churchill was largely in the wilderness in those years, and broadly ignored.
The story of India is that it got each level of progressive self-government and reform about 20 years later than it should have done, when compared to the other dominions, and then only to about 60-70% of the level that it should have done.
I think had it moved on a similar trajectory to Australia and Canada, provincial and local self-government in the 1850s and 1860s, and broader home rule by the 1880s and 1890s, with full dominion status in the 1920s and 1930s, then we'd have had a much more positive long-term relationship over the last 60-70 years with India as a close ally throughout, which would have helped immeasurably with the Cold War, and it might be an influential member of a far more powerful "Six Eyes" today.
It is simplifying only slightly to say that Churchill was wrong about pretty much everything over his long political career, except the threat from the Nazis.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
Sending the CSG to the Western Pacific is bonkers on the face of it. It's going tie up about 40% of the available surface fleet for nearly a year. I have no idea what it's supposed to achieve other than trying to sell PoW to South Korea or Japan and windmilling a giant Union Jack emblazoned cock in the face of the Chicoms.
It's going to be a tough cruise are they are going there and back the long way as 1SL obviously doesn't fancy gambling with his career by putting the carrier in the Drake Passage.
Comments
Gave them jet engines that ended up shooting British pilots down.
With good things like that, who needs bad things.
As with a lot of people here I suspect were you asked by your employer to drop a planned holiday you would be telling them where to go.
Actually you are probably someone who would thank them for the opportunity while you wife started divorce proceedings.
It seems a no-brainer to put that under some control and to see some revenue from it.
I am not a teacher. A teacher has imo a special duty to his or her charges. I would not work for my employer for free because there aren't several dozen children relying on me for their education and development in this, the most peculiar of times. But for a teacher that is different.
Where you, and evidently ydoer3rfahwer go wrong is in conflating working for The Man (which I do) and working in education at the sharp end.
He would far rather it seems be working for The Man, when all his barbs would be relevant.
Plus he labelled the children of some DfE officials (whom he doesn't know, I'll wager) "less than pleasant". The children, not the DfE officials. He is 100% in the wrong job.
As I'm sure he would admit if he were to engage with me.
The only decent thing they did was the NHS but of course Churchill was calling for his own version of an NHS too so even that is redundant.
As I have said several times, I have been doing extra sessions after school for catch-up, plus I’m open to going in to summer school (if I’m paid and given control over which weeks I work, but the trust I work for has made it clear I would be) and I have also volunteered for extra shifts in school to keep the pressure off members of staff with young families.
The issue with cancelling school holidays is threefold:
1) It implies nothing of value has happened with home learning. Which may be true, of course, but then begs the question, why are we putting ourselves through it at all? Why not just rotate things so we have holidays now and then cut time later?
2) Teachers cannot take any sort of break while schools are in session. Unlike, say, an office worker, who books annual leave whenever. So on the proposals as put forward, teachers would have no break at all between last Christmas and next Christmas. This is partly an an issue because - teaching being rather a draining job - it would lead to physical collapse, and also because the summer holidays are when we plan all our lessons and design resources for the following year so we can devote time to teaching and marking when the term starts.
3) It would mean tearing up all teacher contracts and writing new ones at the whim of a government that has shown itself to be completely untrustworthy and actually malicious.
So it really is a total non-starter.
And yet this is what we get - bullying, lies and abuse.
No wonder so many just give up.
Tell @ydoethur he can have the cat.
I think we're getting to the nub of the matter here.
Except of course, doesn’t work for those who were privately educated.
I think the Home Office is a waste.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Do you think putting Gove in charge of just infrastructure renewal is a starter or not? Kind of linked to the ‘industrial and economic strategy’ you refer to? Good idea or not?
Admittedly, doesn’t matter what any of us think as it’s not our decision, but it would be good to hear an insider’s view.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
The French and Germans pitched a 4 year plan for Marshall Aid, a Treasury (I think) Civil Servant wrote an Oxbridge essay (or maybe, who knows, two?). That looks familar.
In summary, the Government of the day overestimated Britain's role as a World Superpower and underestimated the need to invest in industrial modernisation. That looks scarily familar.
But, and I'm shocked I'm about to say this, we were spending too much on defence overall with garrisons of 10,000 men all over the world - everywhere - and trying to be a superpower sans money and increasingly sans empire.
That was a mistake.
I think the 1935 India Act was a missed opportunity; India should have been given full dominion status. There would have been no partition. It then would likely have actively participated in WW2 as an ally of the UK as all the other dominions did.
India would then probably have moved to be a republic by the 1950s or 1960s, but slowly and steadily. There would still have been a risk of tension and conflict between Muslim and Hindu areas - a very real one - but at least a constitutional and federal framework within which to debate them.
And that's for qualified teachers with experience, a lot of people leave during training.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Pension Figures From China's Hubei Spark Doubts Over Virus Deaths
Chinese government figures showing the absence of more than 150,000 elderly people from the list of those given state subsidy payments in the first quarter of 2020 could point to a far greater COVID-19-linked death toll than previously reported in the country, analysts told RFA.
Data released by the civil affairs department in the central province of Hubei, where the coronavirus pandemic first emerged in December 2019, showed that around 150,000 names had "disappeared" from the list of recipients in the first three months of 2020, as COVID-19 tore through the provincial capital Wuhan and surrounding areas, sparking a provincial lockdown.
The subsidy is a payment handed out to people over 80 across the province who are experiencing financial hardship.
Transparency campaigner Liu Jun, who has previously suggested that the true death toll from the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic could be several times higher than the 4,636 reported by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), said the figure suggested a very high death toll.
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/doubts-02172021092531.html
And yet, here we are, with large numbers of (lagged) deaths still occurring, and significant hospitalisations, still going on about "must be by the end of April" etc. The impact of vaccinations should feed into the data, not the date, for loosening restrictions.
If you stick to the 'data not dates' message, gradual reopening could be any time between about a month from now and three months, surely? Maybe once deaths are down to less than 100 a day on average, and hospitalisations are way down, restrictions can be eased. That could be in March, or April/May/June. Surely we can't repeat the error of promulgating another wave by opening too soon?
Actually most teachers I know have done that when on trips outside of school hours: we don’t get paid extra for those even if they are at the weekend or during the holidays.
But you seem to be under the huge misapprehension that we are not working during lockdown when in fact what we are doing involves more work than usual. You also seem to forget that we have no choice at all as to when we can take our holidays, so removing the only time this year when we could realistically get away would lead to more teachers than usual deciding that the job was not for them.
And that I think brings me to my main point: in an earlier post you described teaching as a vocation. If we tried to staff schools only with those prepared to put everything on the line for the children, to sacrifice anything for the greater good, then we would have class sizes of about three hundred rather than thirty. The average time that a teacher spends teaching after qualification is about five years at the moment. Start arbitrarily messing around with the one good perk of the job, particularly without any compensation in the form of pay, at that time will reduce significantly.
Trying to staff something on the basis that you can hire saints is not a good strategy.
Sure, we could build four times as fast like China do but there'd be no democracy at all (you'd just be told to suck it up and arrested or worse if you got in the way) and the less said about their safety and environmental record the better.
I don't think Brits would really want that. We just like to whinge.
It really wasn't such a clear cut choice then as the consequences were at the time completely unknown.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Maybe a mistake with how things turned out sure, but thats sounding a bit like Starmer in terms of hindsight.
I'm sure many people though an armed conflict with Russia would have been highly likely, and you might want to kept troop numbers high.
Unfortunately, he’s an idiot who speaks for a wide range of ill-informed opinion among his fellow Daily Mail readers. And there is the hub of the problem.
https://www.thenationalnews.com/uae/education/dubai-s-private-schools-inundated-with-cvs-as-teachers-look-to-escape-home-lockdowns-1.1144419
I think however your last but one sentence is spot on.
I repeat my comment of earlier - you are an arse who can see neither anyone elses viewpoint nor be bothered to think through the consequences of their own ideas to see how stupid they actually are.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I'm talking about sizeable garrisons in minor outposts at coaling stations all over the world - Africa, minor Asia, South American, Caribbean etc. - which should have been localised and changed over earlier.
Do you have some more info you can share? - not seen very much about preparations for mass vaccination in European countries, to date.
Teaching really is an impossible job this time around - because of the number of children in school most teachers are having to try to do both online and in person teaching at the same time and it's completely impossible.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
Data is lagged, massively lagged. It takes many weeks for someone who catches the infection to get sick, get hospitalised and die. People dying now are those who got sick, pre vaccination, ages ago.
We have the vaccine rollout. We have the dates on that. Add three weeks for the vaccine to be live and we are good to go.
If we wait for months for the data to become good, then give notice that in a few weeks we reopen, the problem will have long since been defeated and spring and summer will have been squandered for no good reason.
Your addition to the actual discussion: zero.
But you seem to be enjoying yourself so crack on, pal.
mmkay.
Edit: "other none [sic] teachers".
Oh god you're another one.
Three of you on PB, and on for quite some time, at 09.30 in the morning.
Which would suggest that the people who will support a quick lifting of restrictions will be:
1) Those who have been vaccinated
2) Those who have had covid
3) The young
That must be about half the adult population already.
VACCINES DON'T WORK UNTIL THEY'RE GIVEN
And even then, you need to wait three weeks or so.
We have vaccines. We're rolling them out. About 10% of people are protected at the moment (dose+3 weeks). It'll take until April/May before we've dosed up enough people to ensure we don't get hospitals and ICUs ever flooded again.
Sort of like driving down out of the mountains onto the flat, safer area.
So pressing him into taking the brakes off before enough people are dosed means we'll be careening down an icy mountain road at ever-increasing speed before we come out onto the flat.
I mean - we can see the end of the road. Let's not crash now! Not again!
But some people want to remake the mistakes of the past or rewrite history to say it wasn't a mistake. First step for learning from history is acknowledging mistakes etc
The discussion now is not how a wacky Labour party can fight the troops of JRM and Steve Baker; it is how can Labour find clear and popular water between them and an interventionist, NHS religionist, high borrow and spend Tory party.
This looks like a return to the 50s in a new way: Butskellism. Outside the extremes, neither of which matter at the moment, Christian Democrats/Social Democrats have taken over both major parties. Finding their real policy differences in substance is difficult not because SKS is hiding but because there aren't any.
Historically this is good news for moderates everywhere, but bad news for the LDs, as they have nothing fresh to offer and no chance of power.
Good to see you disagreeing with the PM, though.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
Now, admittedly, some of that was because we had vast coal mines on UK soil and almost a million miners digging it out of the ground, whilst oil was still to some extent undeveloped globally and not wholly secure, but we'd switched the armed forces over decades earlier, road transport was already there and fast overtaking it and, from a manpower point of view, it was extremely inefficient: we had far too many men digging coal, and far too many men firing, driving, steaming, cleaning and operating low HP steam locomotives. There was also the lunacy of the British Railways 1950s modernisation plan which envisaged several massive marshalling yards for old-fashioned goods wagons all over the UK, which was happening just as lorry haulage was changing the nature of freight transport all over the UK. It probably led to us overshooting with Beeching in the 1960s, as we desperately and belatedly tried to staunch the wound and inject a bit of common sense into things (and he definitely did overdo it, and was about as open-minded as Bomber Harris).
We talk about why we were the sick man of Europe going into the 1960s and 1970s.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
And the big picture is a really simple example of the free market at work. Schools can't retain staff, and in key subjects they can barely recruit. Something in the pay/conditions/vocation balance is broken. And whilst it's tempting to say that teachers should be more virtuous, there are nowhere near enough paragons to make that work.
1) Steam power was intended as a stop-gap until the whole rail system was electrified, and given Diesel engines required both foreign sourced fuel and separate facilities, wasn’t therefore a ridiculous decision at the time;
2) The Rail modernisation plan was an initiative of the Churchill government, so it’s not really fair to link it to Attlee.
Although you could have pointed out that nationalisation brought a halt to electrification on the Southern network, plus led to the scrapping of the GWR’s ATP system.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
And I'm careful to identify those posters who actually do that so that I know who is worth paying attention to and who should really be treated as part of an uninformed mob.
The story of India is that it got each level of progressive self-government and reform about 20 years later than it should have done, when compared to the other dominions, and then only to about 60-70% of the level that it should have done.
I think had it moved on a similar trajectory to Australia and Canada, provincial and local self-government in the 1850s and 1860s, and broader home rule by the 1880s and 1890s, with full dominion status in the 1920s and 1930s, then we'd have had a much more positive long-term relationship over the last 60-70 years with India as a close ally throughout, which would have helped immeasurably with the Cold War, and it might be an influential member of a far more powerful "Six Eyes" today.
History is written by the winners so may gloss over and miss an awful lot of information that may be highly relevant.
And the winner could often by the winner due to circumstances that are rapidly hidden from the final history books.
Getting kids back into school should have upward pressure on the R, whilst vaccination will have downwards pressure on the R.
I think Boris is playing this right. Eek out the lessening of restrictions so no chance of an uptick occurs. By April we will have a much much better idea of the situation, and we can accelerate opening up safely.
This has to be the last lockdown. Once things open, they can't close again, so you have to get it right, even if it means a few weeks of playing it too safe.
So more like 25% protected nationally and with significant local variations.
Though its a complicated equation with factors including people who have had covid getting vaccinated, people who have had covid losing their protection through time and new people getting infected.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
It voted Tory / Liberal well into the 1860s, and even into the 1880s the only electorally successful Irish “nationalism” was loyal, unionist, and simply wanted to restore the Irish Parliament.
You're right on the rail modernisation plan, but don't forget Attlee nationalised the railways leading up to it too - leading to its bureaucratic and unimaginative design - and failed to change the railways legal status as a common carrier, which had been called for since the 1930s and had severely handicapped it.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
What do you think are our biggest risks ahead of China?
Beeching literally did what he was asked to do - yes he probably cut too much but the requirements created a criteria that left him with little choice. Especially as by then it was obvious that road was the future for both freight and public transport.
Plus... Starmer's opposition, the wider news media, really haven't catered to the large proportion of the population who have consistently wanted tougher restrictions throughout. Boris isn't hearing from those people.
All the pressure is from the other direction.
In a sense, both parties were mired in the past.
1. Russia
2. The defence consequences of SINDY
3. Destabilisation in Middle East / NA.
China probably comes after that.
Our defence threats reflect geographic reality and the strength of trade, food and energy flows.
Not flat earth fantasy.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/oecd-study-uk-teachers-britain-youngest-pay-salaries-countries-a9099216.html
Switching rail to diesel a very political decision - it was a Government level decision (thank to Nationalisation) that both screamed the end of electrification / modernisation and resulted in an increased balance of trade deficit.
Go back a year and the only visible pressure was from those wanting things locked down. Leap forward to July and the pressure was to open things up again.
Attlee was instrumental in developing Britain's nuclear deterrent, and would be shocked to hear your views about Trident - although familiar with them from the left-wing of his party - as he saw it as a necessity to prevent nuclear blackmail, and level the playing field for the UK against other powers with massive and overwhelming conventional armed forces.
In particular, the GFC followed by the pandemic have destroyed the sort of deregulated small-state competition-for-everything model sometimes labelled neoliberal economics, and left us in a strange limbo-land of QE and ZIR where (provided the new economics doesn't collapse), borrowing and big government are a rational strategy, with the economy tending toward oligarchy. The tensions within the new model aren't particularly economic, but social, with the divergence between asset values and income entrenching forms of social immobility and inter-generational inequality that haven't been seen for a century.
China are the world's number one long term threat - and as a country in the world they are our number one long term threat too.
Russia are piddly bit players. Russia to China is like England/the UK to the USA. Russia used to be a superpower, they're not anymore, they're just playing at it nowadays.
The consequences of Sindy need to be dealt with but we'll get over that one way or another, its not that consequential for dealing with our enemies.
The Middle East we're still dealing with but its not as significant as China.
China are the new evil empire, they're every bit as much a threat as the USSR was. If you deny that you're not big or clever, you're just showing how little attention you're paying.
It's going to be a tough cruise are they are going there and back the long way as 1SL obviously doesn't fancy gambling with his career by putting the carrier in the Drake Passage.