I always click through to read the replies like a sucker, I just can't resist. Unfortunately, the sheer stupidity of the people on Twitter who agree with him trigger me.
I think we've reached the bottom in terms of cases now, with ~1m tests per day even the false positive rate (especially LFTs) will account for a fair number of those positive results. Honestly, I know it sounds complacent but it's probably starting to become time to think about ramping down this extremely expensive testing programme to ca. 250k per day and then down to 100k per day a few months after the reopening with the ability to scale up quickly. Right now we're simply throwing money away testing people who have no symptoms and have no need to be tested.
Not yet.
We need to pilot through the March and April reopenings first (particularly reviewing the data from schools and universities) and start getting 1st shots in the bulk of the rest of the population.
Steady as she goes.
Yes, I did say it's probably time to think about it, not actually do it. I'd suggest in 5-6 weeks if we're still ploughing £1bn per week into testing it is probably £1bn per week wasted that could have paid for frontline NHS staff to get a proper pay rise.
That's fair enough.
I do wonder at what point the NHS bankrupts the nation. The staff probably need a 2-3% paylift each year (and I bet staffing costs are 65-80% of the budget) and then you have people living longer each year, more conditions becoming treatable and requiring treatment, and drugs becoming more expensive, plus the wider infrastructure of estates and machinery and IT needing upgrading.
It's very easy to see why it needs 4-5% extra each and every year just to stand still.
At some point that dog is going to bark.
Yes, it is definitely something that needs to be addressed. I think NI on pension income is probably a good way out of it, especially consider that it is older people who are much more likely to need NHS services. I don't think Rishi has the cojones though. Maybe after 2024 with some tricky wording in the manifesto similar to how the fiscal drag approach doesn't break the pledge not to raise the "rates" of income tax, NI or VAT.
Just abolish NI and roll it into Income Tax, charged to everyone. Whole thing is overly complicated. Abolish triple lock, which is mathematically certain to bankrupt the nation at some point. And give EVERYONE the state pension depending on years of residency rather than years worked. Job done. The biggest disappointment after 10-years of "Tory" government is that the tax code is more not less complicated than when they started.
When you think about it, it's pretty unsurprising. One the infectivity and transmission front, if flu was analogous to the bully in secondary school, covid is analogous to Mike Tyson. We've tooled up to face Iron Mike and beaten him back. That school bully, faced with the same flurry of blows, would have been utterly mullered without us even noticing him.
I took a look at the flu surveillance data and there were still a very small handful of influenza admissions to hospital (checked via sampling), but it looks like the number was too small to result in any measurable deaths.
And, as the world's various immune systems get exposed to it through infection and vaccination, Covid will over time come to resemble late stage Tyson, losing to Danny Williams and appearing in The Hangover.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Rich kids will tend to do well. Supported kids will tend to do well. Poor unsupported kids are stuffed, and may drag down other kids in their classes. That is why people will pay school fees - to try to get their kids to an environment with less disruption, better results and hence more chance of a better career and social advantage.
Imagine that you increased state education spending to the same level per head as the private schools. Would outcomes improve? For some kids, yes - but for many no. That is because the underlying factors that cause the poor outcomes lie outside the school gates. That is the real problem - society used to value education as a primary route out of poverty. It doesn't any more. You won't get better outcomes unless parents who currently view schools as child-sitting services value and support their kid's education more. That is a lot harder to do than building new shiny schools or attacking private schools.
Totally agree with almost all these points. And of course you are a teacher, I seem to recall, so you will know more than me about what happens in a school. I have many teachers in my family but I've never been one myself. And, I say again, I'm not claiming what I propose will solve everything. There are tons of factors relevant to a child's performance and some of them, let's face it, are not even solvable at all. Also, you imply it's easy to attack private schools and build new state schools. I don't accept that. I don't think it's easy at all. To replace what we have with an egalitarian system would be an almighty project fraught with risk. It's also not easy to blog about it all day. I'm cream crackered now.
John McCauley, director of the World Health Organization's collaborating center in London told the Times that the collapse in numbers was "unprecedented."
But while this might be good news overall, some scientists who are developing a vaccine for next year's flu season are struggling because of the few samples they now have to work on.
"It's a nightmare to work out what comes next," said McCauley. "If you have flu away for a year, then immunity will have waned. It could come back worse."
Experts have previously said that flu rates have been lower this year due to ongoing lockdown restrictions and social distancing measures.
That's why I continue to harbour the suspicion that, at a minimum, we may still not have seen the back of masks by the end of the year.
If the Covid vaccination program continues to progress as expected then I think we can have a reasonable expectation that nearly all the restrictions will go on June 21st as trailed. However - I can see masks either being retained, or coming back into force come the Autumn, on public transport and possibly in some other settings.
I expect that the scientific advisors will be afraid of a two-pronged attack from flu and Covid next Winter, and the Government will probably decide that it needs to do at least something (or be seen doing something, at any rate) to reduce the scale of the usual NHS Winter Crisis.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Rich kids will tend to do well. Supported kids will tend to do well. Poor unsupported kids are stuffed, and may drag down other kids in their classes. That is why people will pay school fees - to try to get their kids to an environment with less disruption, better results and hence more chance of a better career and social advantage.
Imagine that you increased state education spending to the same level per head as the private schools. Would outcomes improve? For some kids, yes - but for many no. That is because the underlying factors that cause the poor outcomes lie outside the school gates. That is the real problem - society used to value education as a primary route out of poverty. It doesn't any more. You won't get better outcomes unless parents who currently view schools as child-sitting services value and support their kid's education more. That is a lot harder to do than building new shiny schools or attacking private schools.
There didn't use to be disruption in any schools when there was more discipline. So therefore it must be true that weakening discipline has had the most detrimental effect on the poor unsupported kids you talk about.
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
You have lost me there, William. That sounds like a comment from somebody not comprehending the first thing about what we're discussing.
"Reducing the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, and promoting a society with less privilege of class, race and gender."
"Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful."
How are these sentiments even remotely similar?
Because, like UvdL, your ideology predisposes you to prefer an outcome in which all fail equally, as long as you can avoid the intolerable prospect of some succeeding unequally.
Nope. It's leveling up. Real leveling up as opposed to the bullshit Johnson soundbite variety. If I didn't believe it was I wouldn't argue for it.
And given you're (wrongly) telling me what I think, I'll return the favour and smear you.
You, and most other true bluers, know full well a truly egalitarian education system would level up in a meaningful and radical way and this is precisely why you're so vehemently opposed to it.
You want to perpetuate our crassly unequal society just exactly as is. You like it this way. The only use you have for working class people is to play them for suckers.
The last sentence sums up Labours approach to the working class
Yep - a reluctance to play them for suckers even though it costs votes.
Nope the exact opposite - and unluckily for Labour the people who used to vote for them are cottoning on.
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
You have lost me there, William. That sounds like a comment from somebody not comprehending the first thing about what we're discussing.
"Reducing the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, and promoting a society with less privilege of class, race and gender."
"Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful."
How are these sentiments even remotely similar?
Because, like UvdL, your ideology predisposes you to prefer an outcome in which all fail equally, as long as you can avoid the intolerable prospect of some succeeding unequally.
Nope. It's leveling up. Real leveling up as opposed to the bullshit Johnson soundbite variety. If I didn't believe it was I wouldn't argue for it.
And given you're (wrongly) telling me what I think, I'll return the favour and smear you.
You, and most other true bluers, know full well a truly egalitarian education system would level up in a meaningful and radical way and this is precisely why you're so vehemently opposed to it.
You want to perpetuate our crassly unequal society just exactly as is. You like it this way. The only use you have for working class people is to play them for suckers.
It seems you have correctly deduced that I am, for the most part, a fan of the status quo. What gave it away?
As for the 'working class people' for whom you are so nobly sticking up from the safety of our erstwhile mutual manor, no one has treated them with greater contempt than the so-called Labour Party, which is probably why so few of them still support it. But I'm sure calling them suckers will have them flocking back to the red team in no time.
I disagree for the reasons previously stated. To refrain from playing people for suckers is to treat them with respect.
And I know you (probably) don't really want to piss all over the working class. But as I said, that was smear for smear. Because I don't really want to drag everyone down to achieve a more equal society.
Anyone tells me that's what I want is going to get insulted right back.
John McCauley, director of the World Health Organization's collaborating center in London told the Times that the collapse in numbers was "unprecedented."
But while this might be good news overall, some scientists who are developing a vaccine for next year's flu season are struggling because of the few samples they now have to work on.
"It's a nightmare to work out what comes next," said McCauley. "If you have flu away for a year, then immunity will have waned. It could come back worse."
Experts have previously said that flu rates have been lower this year due to ongoing lockdown restrictions and social distancing measures.
That's why I continue to harbour the suspicion that, at a minimum, we may still not have seen the back of masks by the end of the year.
If the Covid vaccination program continues to progress as expected then I think we can have a reasonable expectation that nearly all the restrictions will go on June 21st as trailed. However - I can see masks either being retained, or coming back into force come the Autumn, on public transport and possibly in some other settings.
I expect that the scientific advisors will be afraid of a two-pronged attack from flu and Covid next Winter, and the Government will probably decide that it needs to do at least something (or be seen doing something, at any rate) to reduce the scale of the usual NHS Winter Crisis.
It's the same argument once again. The best way to protect the population against flu is through most people having it, but the more vulnerable members of the population may not survive it. There's no way round that problem.
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
You have lost me there, William. That sounds like a comment from somebody not comprehending the first thing about what we're discussing.
"Reducing the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, and promoting a society with less privilege of class, race and gender."
"Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful."
How are these sentiments even remotely similar?
Because, like UvdL, your ideology predisposes you to prefer an outcome in which all fail equally, as long as you can avoid the intolerable prospect of some succeeding unequally.
Nope. It's leveling up. Real leveling up as opposed to the bullshit Johnson soundbite variety. If I didn't believe it was I wouldn't argue for it.
And given you're (wrongly) telling me what I think, I'll return the favour and smear you.
You, and most other true bluers, know full well a truly egalitarian education system would level up in a meaningful and radical way and this is precisely why you're so vehemently opposed to it.
You want to perpetuate our crassly unequal society just exactly as is. You like it this way. The only use you have for working class people is to play them for suckers.
One of the interesting things about AZ and J&J is that they are both moderately effective at first... But that effectiveness builds and builds and builds.
Which is odd for the face of a goat grafted onto a donkey, isn't it?
I think we've reached the bottom in terms of cases now, with ~1m tests per day even the false positive rate (especially LFTs) will account for a fair number of those positive results. Honestly, I know it sounds complacent but it's probably starting to become time to think about ramping down this extremely expensive testing programme to ca. 250k per day and then down to 100k per day a few months after the reopening with the ability to scale up quickly. Right now we're simply throwing money away testing people who have no symptoms and have no need to be tested.
Not yet.
We need to pilot through the March and April reopenings first (particularly reviewing the data from schools and universities) and start getting 1st shots in the bulk of the rest of the population.
Steady as she goes.
Yes, I did say it's probably time to think about it, not actually do it. I'd suggest in 5-6 weeks if we're still ploughing £1bn per week into testing it is probably £1bn per week wasted that could have paid for frontline NHS staff to get a proper pay rise.
That's fair enough.
I do wonder at what point the NHS bankrupts the nation. The staff probably need a 2-3% paylift each year (and I bet staffing costs are 65-80% of the budget) and then you have people living longer each year, more conditions becoming treatable and requiring treatment, and drugs becoming more expensive, plus the wider infrastructure of estates and machinery and IT needing upgrading.
It's very easy to see why it needs 4-5% extra each and every year just to stand still.
At some point that dog is going to bark.
Hard to tell, but paying for it is going to require some hard measures. Probably means that today's twentysomethings aren't going to be drawing the state pension until they're 75, and more is going to have to be done about obesity. If that juggernaut can't be turned around by any other means then massive sin taxes on high energy density foods are going to have to be considered before too much longer.
And yes, that would be nannying, but one of the consequences of having healthcare provided by the taxpayer is that taxpayers will then feel the right to criticise other peoples' crap life choices. We've all be expected to sit and rot at home for the better part of a year to protect the NHS and save lives, which kind of puts a bit of encouragement to do more exercise and eat less rubbish into perspective.
Average daily death rate over the past week down to 220. Day rates for the next two days could be down to double figures.
Patient admissions down to 811 last Monday.
We just have to pray that schools opening up on Monday don't bugger up that speed of travel.
I will relax when daily fatality rates get into double figures. Hopefully by month end.
However I try and rationalise it hundreds dying a day still seems serious to me.
The Government is now on the record as saying it wants to get Covid to a place where it is as serious as flu. On average flu kills about 10,000 people a year, mostly in winter obviously, but averaged out across the year that’s 27 people per day, crudely let’s say 50 per day September to March. Still a ways to go to be round that level but we are getting there.
That's a good point, Doug.
I think we're buying long-term acceptance of c.30-50 extra deaths from Covid per day over the pre pandemic norm.
Unfortunately, and rather coldly, that's probably the right thing to do.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Abolishing private schools wouldn't abolish elite schools which is the point you always fail to realise.
The very rich will send their kids to elite schools abroad. The fairly rich will buy up housing around good schools and squeeze the poor out then make donations to the school to fund things. They would also set up groups where they band together and hire private tutors outside of school time so their kids could still mix.
All you will in effect do is create elite comprehensives where only the well off can afford to live. Currently we have good grammars and comprehensives where they still have a percentage of the poor in the catchement. You would reduce that percentage to zero and condemn all poor kids to failing state schools.
The problem with your ideology and the solutions you propose as always is it fails to account for human nature and those wealthy enough to send their kids to private schools will always get round what you claim and inequality will be even more entrenched.
You're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and also making absurdist projections about what would happen with housing moves. I mean, c'mon. Get a grip. The basic model I favour is all kids go to their local school, and this is accompanied by heavy differential investment in the less advantaged areas. No way does that condemn all poor kids to crap schools. Quite the opposite. Does it solve everything? Course not. Will some schools always be better than others due to a whole range of factors (including catchment areas). Yep. But will it make a serious dent in the correlation between life prospects and family background? Yes, it will. It's blindingly obvious that it will.
I totally accept that others don't share my values on this. That's fine. It doesn't make me a better person or anything. But that there IS a trade-off here between the right of folk to spend their money as they see fit and equal opportunities in education (and thus in wider society), this is simply not a matter of debate. It's a stone cold fact. It's all about what you consider most important. You can't just dodge the whole issue with platitudes and nitpicking.
No I am not letting perfect be the enemy of good. I genuinely believe your proposals will lead to even less life chances for people like me. Rich people will make sure there kids goto schools with the same sort of people and they will makes sure those schools have lots of funding regardless of whether its a state school or not. It already happens with those that cant quite afford private schools and to claim it won't happen if blind ideology with no more reference to reality than a unicorn
You are simply shrugging and tossing the issue into the "too hard" basket. We're talking about all kids going to their local school and the funding of schools in poorer areas being much higher than in richer areas. There is no way jose that can give a LESS equal playing field than we have today. Your vision of a tsunami of devious house moves, and back door nudge and a wink private funding, plus a mass decamp abroad of the affluent middle class is utterly ludicrous. Good free-of-charge schools for everyone on their doorstep. Expensive? Yes. Politically fraught? Yes. But doomed to failure? No. And certainly not for the reasons you postulate.
Average daily death rate over the past week down to 220. Day rates for the next two days could be down to double figures.
Patient admissions down to 811 last Monday.
We just have to pray that schools opening up on Monday don't bugger up that speed of travel.
I will relax when daily fatality rates get into double figures. Hopefully by month end.
However I try and rationalise it hundreds dying a day still seems serious to me.
The Government is now on the record as saying it wants to get Covid to a place where it is as serious as flu. On average flu kills about 10,000 people a year, mostly in winter obviously, but averaged out across the year that’s 27 people per day, crudely let’s say 50 per day September to March. Still a ways to go to be round that level but we are getting there.
That's a good point, Doug.
I think we're buying long-term acceptance of c.30-50 extra deaths from Covid per day over the pre pandemic norm.
Unfortunately, and rather coldly, that's probably the right thing to do.
Don't forget that COVID and flu are competing for the same deaths, it's not certain that COVID will result in a definite permanent rise in deaths as it could come with a reduction in annual flu deaths.
John McCauley, director of the World Health Organization's collaborating center in London told the Times that the collapse in numbers was "unprecedented."
But while this might be good news overall, some scientists who are developing a vaccine for next year's flu season are struggling because of the few samples they now have to work on.
"It's a nightmare to work out what comes next," said McCauley. "If you have flu away for a year, then immunity will have waned. It could come back worse."
Experts have previously said that flu rates have been lower this year due to ongoing lockdown restrictions and social distancing measures.
That's why I continue to harbour the suspicion that, at a minimum, we may still not have seen the back of masks by the end of the year.
If the Covid vaccination program continues to progress as expected then I think we can have a reasonable expectation that nearly all the restrictions will go on June 21st as trailed. However - I can see masks either being retained, or coming back into force come the Autumn, on public transport and possibly in some other settings.
I expect that the scientific advisors will be afraid of a two-pronged attack from flu and Covid next Winter, and the Government will probably decide that it needs to do at least something (or be seen doing something, at any rate) to reduce the scale of the usual NHS Winter Crisis.
From what we've learned about the effectiveness of various NPIs, I suspect that IF they decide to impose anything next winter, it would be: - Masks in certain situations - Controlled access to gatherings of 1000+ (ie rapid testing 20-minute tests)
Nothing more. The control of 1000+ gatherings knocks R down by about a third all on its own. And has a minimal effect on life in comparison to all the other restrictions.
Average daily death rate over the past week down to 220. Day rates for the next two days could be down to double figures.
Patient admissions down to 811 last Monday.
We just have to pray that schools opening up on Monday don't bugger up that speed of travel.
I will relax when daily fatality rates get into double figures. Hopefully by month end.
However I try and rationalise it hundreds dying a day still seems serious to me.
The Government is now on the record as saying it wants to get Covid to a place where it is as serious as flu. On average flu kills about 10,000 people a year, mostly in winter obviously, but averaged out across the year that’s 27 people per day, crudely let’s say 50 per day September to March. Still a ways to go to be round that level but we are getting there.
That's a good point, Doug.
I think we're buying long-term acceptance of c.30-50 extra deaths from Covid per day over the pre pandemic norm.
Unfortunately, and rather coldly, that's probably the right thing to do.
Don't forget that COVID and flu are competing for the same deaths, it's not certain that COVID will result in a definite permanent rise in deaths as it could come with a reduction in annual flu deaths.
Unless the flu mutates into something as nasty as the 1918 pandemic was, Covid has a much wider potential pool.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Abolishing private schools wouldn't abolish elite schools which is the point you always fail to realise.
The very rich will send their kids to elite schools abroad. The fairly rich will buy up housing around good schools and squeeze the poor out then make donations to the school to fund things. They would also set up groups where they band together and hire private tutors outside of school time so their kids could still mix.
All you will in effect do is create elite comprehensives where only the well off can afford to live. Currently we have good grammars and comprehensives where they still have a percentage of the poor in the catchement. You would reduce that percentage to zero and condemn all poor kids to failing state schools.
The problem with your ideology and the solutions you propose as always is it fails to account for human nature and those wealthy enough to send their kids to private schools will always get round what you claim and inequality will be even more entrenched.
You're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and also making absurdist projections about what would happen with housing moves. I mean, c'mon. Get a grip. The basic model I favour is all kids go to their local school, and this is accompanied by heavy differential investment in the less advantaged areas. No way does that condemn all poor kids to crap schools. Quite the opposite. Does it solve everything? Course not. Will some schools always be better than others due to a whole range of factors (including catchment areas). Yep. But will it make a serious dent in the correlation between life prospects and family background? Yes, it will. It's blindingly obvious that it will.
I totally accept that others don't share my values on this. That's fine. It doesn't make me a better person or anything. But that there IS a trade-off here between the right of folk to spend their money as they see fit and equal opportunities in education (and thus in wider society), this is simply not a matter of debate. It's a stone cold fact. It's all about what you consider most important. You can't just dodge the whole issue with platitudes and nitpicking.
No I am not letting perfect be the enemy of good. I genuinely believe your proposals will lead to even less life chances for people like me. Rich people will make sure there kids goto schools with the same sort of people and they will makes sure those schools have lots of funding regardless of whether its a state school or not. It already happens with those that cant quite afford private schools and to claim it won't happen if blind ideology with no more reference to reality than a unicorn
You are simply shrugging and tossing the issue into the "too hard" basket. We're talking about all kids going to their local school and the funding of schools in poorer areas being much higher than in richer areas. There is no way jose that can give a LESS equal playing field than we have today. Your vision of a tsunami of devious house moves, and back door nudge and a wink private funding, plus a mass decamp abroad of the affluent middle class is utterly ludicrous. Good free-of-charge schools for everyone on their doorstep. Expensive? Yes. Politically fraught? Yes. But doomed to failure? No. And certainly not for the reasons you postulate.
Utterly ludicrous apart from that is what already happens...those wealthy enough send their kids to private schools. Many from abroad that are wealthy send their children to schools here.Those not quite wealthy enough buy up homes in the catchement areas of good schools and make them even better by donating.
My view has back up from what already happens in reality. Your view is the what if fantasy. So yes doomed to failure.
All your idea does is to create more of the second class that buy up houses in good school area's and that will mean less poor people able to live in such catchement areas
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
You have lost me there, William. That sounds like a comment from somebody not comprehending the first thing about what we're discussing.
"Reducing the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, and promoting a society with less privilege of class, race and gender."
"Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful."
How are these sentiments even remotely similar?
Because, like UvdL, your ideology predisposes you to prefer an outcome in which all fail equally, as long as you can avoid the intolerable prospect of some succeeding unequally.
Nope. It's leveling up. Real leveling up as opposed to the bullshit Johnson soundbite variety. If I didn't believe it was I wouldn't argue for it.
And given you're (wrongly) telling me what I think, I'll return the favour and smear you.
You, and most other true bluers, know full well a truly egalitarian education system would level up in a meaningful and radical way and this is precisely why you're so vehemently opposed to it.
You want to perpetuate our crassly unequal society just exactly as is. You like it this way. The only use you have for working class people is to play them for suckers.
It seems you have correctly deduced that I am, for the most part, a fan of the status quo. What gave it away?
As for the 'working class people' for whom you are so nobly sticking up from the safety of our erstwhile mutual manor, no one has treated them with greater contempt than the so-called Labour Party, which is probably why so few of them still support it. But I'm sure calling them suckers will have them flocking back to the red team in no time.
I disagree for the reasons previously stated. To refrain from playing people for suckers is to treat them with respect.
And I know you (probably) don't really want to piss all over the working class. But as I said, that was smear for smear. Because I don't really want to drag everyone down to achieve a more equal society.
Anyone tells me that's what I want is going to get insulted right back.
We're probably doomed to mutual incomprehension because for me there's almost no policy that symbolizes 'dragging everyone down to achieve a more equal society' more than the abolition of private education, so I thought I was taking you at your word.
One of the interesting things about AZ and J&J is that they are both moderately effective at first... But that effectiveness builds and builds and builds.
Which is odd for the face of a goat grafted onto a donkey, isn't it?
John McCauley, director of the World Health Organization's collaborating center in London told the Times that the collapse in numbers was "unprecedented."
But while this might be good news overall, some scientists who are developing a vaccine for next year's flu season are struggling because of the few samples they now have to work on.
"It's a nightmare to work out what comes next," said McCauley. "If you have flu away for a year, then immunity will have waned. It could come back worse."
Experts have previously said that flu rates have been lower this year due to ongoing lockdown restrictions and social distancing measures.
That's why I continue to harbour the suspicion that, at a minimum, we may still not have seen the back of masks by the end of the year.
If the Covid vaccination program continues to progress as expected then I think we can have a reasonable expectation that nearly all the restrictions will go on June 21st as trailed. However - I can see masks either being retained, or coming back into force come the Autumn, on public transport and possibly in some other settings.
I expect that the scientific advisors will be afraid of a two-pronged attack from flu and Covid next Winter, and the Government will probably decide that it needs to do at least something (or be seen doing something, at any rate) to reduce the scale of the usual NHS Winter Crisis.
It's the same argument once again. The best way to protect the population against flu is through most people having it, but the more vulnerable members of the population may not survive it. There's no way round that problem.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?
That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,
The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?
I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.
Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.
Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?
That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,
The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?
I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.
Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.
Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
But that is the whole message of the left "The system is stacked against you because you didnt go to the right school and your parents aren't wealthy and no matter how hard you work".....this is the whole basis of why you want to abolish private schools
I think we've reached the bottom in terms of cases now, with ~1m tests per day even the false positive rate (especially LFTs) will account for a fair number of those positive results. Honestly, I know it sounds complacent but it's probably starting to become time to think about ramping down this extremely expensive testing programme to ca. 250k per day and then down to 100k per day a few months after the reopening with the ability to scale up quickly. Right now we're simply throwing money away testing people who have no symptoms and have no need to be tested.
Not yet.
We need to pilot through the March and April reopenings first (particularly reviewing the data from schools and universities) and start getting 1st shots in the bulk of the rest of the population.
Steady as she goes.
Yes, I did say it's probably time to think about it, not actually do it. I'd suggest in 5-6 weeks if we're still ploughing £1bn per week into testing it is probably £1bn per week wasted that could have paid for frontline NHS staff to get a proper pay rise.
That's fair enough.
I do wonder at what point the NHS bankrupts the nation. The staff probably need a 2-3% paylift each year (and I bet staffing costs are 65-80% of the budget) and then you have people living longer each year, more conditions becoming treatable and requiring treatment, and drugs becoming more expensive, plus the wider infrastructure of estates and machinery and IT needing upgrading.
It's very easy to see why it needs 4-5% extra each and every year just to stand still.
At some point that dog is going to bark.
The NHS is at the crossroads of a couple of different issues:
1. As you say, people are living longer. And the older you are, the more medical costs per year are (I think it's a 10x difference between a 20 year old and a 75 year old). So, people living longer, on average, means greater healthcare costs.
2. You also have the issue of the inverting population pyramid. Fewer 20 to 40 year olds, who pay into the tax base but don't need expensive healthcare, and more 70+ year olds who take out pensions and need that NHS.
3. Healthcare costs also seem to inexorably rise. You have new treatments and technologies, and people want to be looked after and to live longer.
I did some work on this for a piece I wrote a few years back (called The Discontented) and it showed that pensions and healthcare had risen from 34% of the UK government budget back at the turn of the century, to around 50% now.
Unless you can turn the tide of pensions and healthcare spending, then austerity for all other parts of government is essentially a given.
There would never have been a better time to abolish the triple lock.
I would like to see the Government look at a much more radical review of tax and benefits. Set a minimum income level, sufficient to live on without needing benefits or charity. £16,200 per year would equate to a 35 hour week at the living wage. Set that as the personal allowance. Receive a rebate if your income is less. Pay tax if your income is more. Combine tax and NI for a basic rate of 32%. Same rate for self-employed. Income based on earned and unearned income (dividends and Capital Gains) at the same rate. Higher tax rates of 52% and 57%, so no upper limit on NI contributions. Don’t know what the net cost would be. A job for a think tank, maybe?
Why should the taxpayer subsidise low paying companies? If you want to improve people's standards of living in that way then increase the minimum wage to a level where someone working a standard week is earning whatever you consider to be the living wage level. If companies cannot afford to operate whilst paying their employees a basic living wage and paying their taxes under normal operating circumstances then they do not deserve to be in business.
UBI or anything like it is merely the taxpayer subsidising the profits of companies.
No it is not. For two childless adults working full-time the minimum wage already does reach that threshold. No subsidies to any company at all.
The issue that needs to be fixed though is that if people aren't working we don't tell them "go get a job then" and let them and their children end up on the streets or starving to death if they don't. They get benefits to ensure that they have enough to survive.
So then the difference between someone not working and someone who is working full time is not the difference in income the working person earns because there is a corresponding loss of benefits to go with that.
Between loss of benefits, NIC and income tax the state can be reclaiming 90% of someone's income.
Not a penny of this goes to the company.
Rubbish. If it is the unemployed or those unable to work we are talking about then they get money from the Government already. You can debate about increasing that amount but that has nothing to do with a UBI. And yes, if companies pay less than a living wage and the Government is expected to make up the difference as it is having to do now then it is absolutely the case that you are subsidising the companies. If they are, as you foolishly claim, already paying that amount then there is no need for UBI anyway.
Sorry but you don't understand the issue so are talking rubbish it seems. Yes the minimum wage already today covers basic minimum income required for two adults working full-time with no children. Anyone in that situation is NOT entitled to any benefits.
However not everyone is in that situation. Some people work part-time. Some people don't work. Some people have lots of kids that the state has said it will help pay for.
That is where the benefits bill goes. Not to couples working full-time in secure even if minimum wage jobs.
The problem is if someone on benefits today works sixteen hours per week then they're "taxed" 90% on every pound after that 16 hours. What would you do if facing a marginal tax rate of 90%?
A UBI would smooth the transition from not working, to working part time, to working full time encouraging people to work more. Because currently they're not.
You are way out of date. That is no longer the case. Under Universal Credit the loss is 63p in the pound not 90p. And that is not even on the full amount. The first £292 of earnings per month is exempted so does not count towards reductions in UC. (£512 if you have to find your own accommodation).
If you are earning minimum wage working 17 hours a week you earn £593 a month. If you have to find your own accommodation your allowance is £512.
That means the reduction in UC you will receive is 63% of £81 or £51 in the month.
UC for a single person over 25 is £409 a month. That means if they work 17 hours a week and earn £593 a month then their UC drops to £358 a month.
That is a total income of £951 a month. They pay no tax on that as they are under the £12,500 limit and they pay no NI as they earn less than £183 a week.
By the way I am not in any way defending these levels of support. Living on such low incomes is definitely living on the edge. But your claim about losing 90% when you work more than 16 hours a week is simply untrue.
63p in the pound from UC withdrawal alone.
That comes ON TOP OF not instead of being required to pay National Insurance and Income Tax if past those thresholds.
It is very possible to be paying Income Tax, National Insurance and losing UC all simultaneously which comes close to 90% not 63% which is a ridiculous position to be in.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?
That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
It does for children who can benefit from them. And for other children, what's the point?
I think the real objection to this is not that it's small, it's that it might cream the best talent from the state sector, so that the brightest children don't serve as role models to their less gifted peers.
But there will be room only for a small fraction of the bright and poor kids who could benefit. Most places will be taken by kids, whether bright or not so bright, from families who can afford the fees.
And yes, I can see the downside you mention too. That's another reason I favour the comprehensive model.
Unless the flu mutates into something as nasty as the 1918 pandemic was, Covid has a much wider potential pool.
I thought Covid was going to become the dominant virus and supplant the influenza virus. My limited knowledge of virology tells me there is a hierarchy among viruses as well.
For a man being so comprehensively silenced, Lozza seems to pop up in my Google feed an awful lot.
He can fight Brian Rose for the "populist" vote - all 1% of it.
I've decided to vote for the Lib Dem, not sure who I should stick in as my second preference, any recommendations?
Shaun Bailey. Awful. Sadiq Khan. Useless. Brian Rose. Dreadful. Laurence Fox. Tedious. The Green. Despite being very environmentally minded, I loathe the Greens.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?
That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,
The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?
I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.
Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.
Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
But that is the whole message of the left "The system is stacked against you because you didnt go to the right school and your parents aren't wealthy and no matter how hard you work".....this is the whole basis of why you want to abolish private schools
Not treating profit-seeking private businesses as charities would be a start.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?
That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,
The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?
I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.
Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.
Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.
You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....
And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
For a man being so comprehensively silenced, Lozza seems to pop up in my Google feed an awful lot.
He can fight Brian Rose for the "populist" vote - all 1% of it.
I've decided to vote for the Lib Dem, not sure who I should stick in as my second preference, any recommendations?
Shaun Bailey. Awful. Sadiq Khan. Useless. Brian Rose. Dreadful. Laurence Fox. Tedious. The Green. Despite being very environmentally minded, I loathe the Greens.
I may simply not vote.
I'm basically in the same boat. Not a single candidate is worth my vote, I'm only voting for the Lib Dem because she seems to be inoffensive and is quite pretty.
I do hope this isn't going to lead to an annual flu lockdown.
Flu and covid are quite different in terms of pressure on hospitals. Flu is shorter, and sharper, killing generally by secondary bacterial pneumonia. It is a shorter condition to treat, whatever the outcome it is over in days. A covid admission is usually for weeks, and more intense.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?
That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,
The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?
I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.
Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.
Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
But that is the whole message of the left "The system is stacked against you because you didnt go to the right school and your parents aren't wealthy and no matter how hard you work".....this is the whole basis of why you want to abolish private schools
Not treating profit-seeking private businesses as charities would be a start.
That though is a completely different argument to wanting to abolish them full stop
Average daily death rate over the past week down to 220. Day rates for the next two days could be down to double figures.
Patient admissions down to 811 last Monday.
We just have to pray that schools opening up on Monday don't bugger up that speed of travel.
I will relax when daily fatality rates get into double figures. Hopefully by month end.
However I try and rationalise it hundreds dying a day still seems serious to me.
The Government is now on the record as saying it wants to get Covid to a place where it is as serious as flu. On average flu kills about 10,000 people a year, mostly in winter obviously, but averaged out across the year that’s 27 people per day, crudely let’s say 50 per day September to March. Still a ways to go to be round that level but we are getting there.
That's a good point, Doug.
I think we're buying long-term acceptance of c.30-50 extra deaths from Covid per day over the pre pandemic norm.
Unfortunately, and rather coldly, that's probably the right thing to do.
Don't forget that COVID and flu are competing for the same deaths, it's not certain that COVID will result in a definite permanent rise in deaths as it could come with a reduction in annual flu deaths.
Another good point.
There will be an increase, because Covid is more aggressive, but it won't be purely additive and there will be an overlap.
For a man being so comprehensively silenced, Lozza seems to pop up in my Google feed an awful lot.
He can fight Brian Rose for the "populist" vote - all 1% of it.
I've decided to vote for the Lib Dem, not sure who I should stick in as my second preference, any recommendations?
Shaun Bailey. Awful. Sadiq Khan. Useless. Brian Rose. Dreadful. Laurence Fox. Tedious. The Green. Despite being very environmentally minded, I loathe the Greens.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?
That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,
The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?
I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.
Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.
Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.
You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....
And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
Also becoming a problem for older workers who grew up in a time before 50% went to uni. Especially if the cv's get passed through hr before being handed on to those deciding which of the short list to interview
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?
That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,
The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?
I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.
Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.
Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.
You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....
And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.
Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
Looking at the updated vaccinations data for Newham.
There are 28,408 people over 65 in the Borough of which 20,162 have had a first vaccination which is about 71%.
Among those aged 16-64, we have 318,647 of which 35,448 have received a first vaccination which is just over 11%.
Overall, that's 55,610 out of 347,055 which is 16% so an advance on 14% last week and better than Tower Hamlets but I suspect that's not saying much.
I can't confirm if the 8,000 or so over-65s in Newham who haven't been vaccinated have been contacted -if so, that's a refusal rate of near 30% which is worrying.
For a man being so comprehensively silenced, Lozza seems to pop up in my Google feed an awful lot.
He can fight Brian Rose for the "populist" vote - all 1% of it.
I've decided to vote for the Lib Dem, not sure who I should stick in as my second preference, any recommendations?
Shaun Bailey. Awful. Sadiq Khan. Useless. Brian Rose. Dreadful. Laurence Fox. Tedious. The Green. Despite being very environmentally minded, I loathe the Greens.
I may simply not vote.
I went clubbing with Shaun Bailey at Tory conference in Birmingham in 2008 (please don't ask me why, I don't remember) but my main conclusion was he was friendly, laddish, a ladies man, but aside from his laudable stuff on social work with youths had absolutely nothing to him.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Lets be honest about it.
We don't.
We don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, education or lifetime learning and training in general.
That's so much better. You are baulking at the linguistic and logical contortions required to argue with a straight face that our private schools fetish is in any sense compatible with equal opportunities in education. This saves much time and dignity. Hats off, Riccardo.
You can't have equality of opportunity in education, not because of money but because of parents. My son went to a grammar. The only two of his year to do so. The reason he passed his 11 plus when so many others didn't was because he got encouraged to read and learn by both myself and his mother. Most of his friends parents couldn't see the point, they didn't encourage their kids to do either. I met those parents so I know what I am talking about. They all took the view working hard doesn't matter because we are poor so will never be allowed to get on. Your point of view in fact. Strangely the only other one of his year that passed was his best friend who used to come round our house most days and got equally encouraged by us.
Yours is the ideology of "Its not my fault its the systems so there is no point bothering". Yes you can work hard and not make it I do not deny that but on the other hand if you don't even try you are going to fail. This is why I hate your ideology so much....you encourage the "There is no point even trying" attitude
Good point (about the impact of parents) but you again misunderstand me. I'll be getting the idea it's deliberate if it carries on. I know (!) that equal opportunities is impossible. For the reasons you say, and many many others. We're talking about how they can be improved. Just because something worthwhile is impossible to achieve fully doesn't mean it shouldn't be achieved partially, does it?
And I can't for the life of me see how you've managed to glean from anything I've written on this topic that I wish to discourage kids from trying to do well in school. That is just a nonsense thing to say. It's like you're just thrashing around in some inchoate dislike of "the left". I don't know where you've got that from but kindly stop projecting it onto me.
Its not I think you want to discourage kids. What I am saying is your attitude does discourage kids, may not be your intent but its true.
The left has always been this way "Doesn't matter if you work hard you won't get anywhere because of class, inherited wealth etc" . Then you wonder why so many take that to heart and just give up. Then later in life they are "It's not my fault I didn't do better the odds were stacked against me".
Sorry if you don't see constantly telling people that they have no chance discourages them then you know very little about human nature
You're confusing what makes a good motivational pep talk to individuals with a macro analysis of what feeds inequality. Wishing to create a system that is not so rigged against poor kids does not translate to telling them it's not worth trying.
If we flip that around perhaps you will see how absurd it is. In order to get the best out of poor kids do we have to pretend that the system is totally fair and drop all plans to reform it?
Average daily death rate over the past week down to 220. Day rates for the next two days could be down to double figures.
Patient admissions down to 811 last Monday.
We just have to pray that schools opening up on Monday don't bugger up that speed of travel.
I will relax when daily fatality rates get into double figures. Hopefully by month end.
However I try and rationalise it hundreds dying a day still seems serious to me.
The Government is now on the record as saying it wants to get Covid to a place where it is as serious as flu. On average flu kills about 10,000 people a year, mostly in winter obviously, but averaged out across the year that’s 27 people per day, crudely let’s say 50 per day September to March. Still a ways to go to be round that level but we are getting there.
That's a good point, Doug.
I think we're buying long-term acceptance of c.30-50 extra deaths from Covid per day over the pre pandemic norm.
Unfortunately, and rather coldly, that's probably the right thing to do.
Don't forget that COVID and flu are competing for the same deaths, it's not certain that COVID will result in a definite permanent rise in deaths as it could come with a reduction in annual flu deaths.
Unless the flu mutates into something as nasty as the 1918 pandemic was, Covid has a much wider potential pool.
Post vaccination and two/three waves later that won’t be as true as it has been for the last two winters. I reckon by December, globally, we will have vaccinated two or three billion people. Additionally there is a huge pool of immunity from prior infection. It’s not inconceivable that half of humanity will, by then, have some immunity when in late 2019/early 2020 none had.
While immunity to coronaviruses fades, some people who recovered from SARS 17 years ago have been found to have “rip roaring” (the words of the Imperial College article I read, not mine) T-Cell responses even after all that time, and recent papers I have read say that similar exposure should be similarly protective from this specific virus. So it will come back but we will be far better prepared. That’s what happened to the “Spanish Flu”. H1N1 is still around and rears its ugly head every so often but never as virulently as before.
Disney have that on tons of films now. Mentioned earlier in the thread it's on the 1990s Aladdin now too.
If putting a disclaimer before a film then putting the entire film up as originally filmed and unaltered makes all these silly arguments go away then I think it's a good compromise. Just ignore the disclaimer, I certainly don't read it every time.
I think we've reached the bottom in terms of cases now, with ~1m tests per day even the false positive rate (especially LFTs) will account for a fair number of those positive results. Honestly, I know it sounds complacent but it's probably starting to become time to think about ramping down this extremely expensive testing programme to ca. 250k per day and then down to 100k per day a few months after the reopening with the ability to scale up quickly. Right now we're simply throwing money away testing people who have no symptoms and have no need to be tested.
Not yet.
We need to pilot through the March and April reopenings first (particularly reviewing the data from schools and universities) and start getting 1st shots in the bulk of the rest of the population.
Steady as she goes.
Yes, I did say it's probably time to think about it, not actually do it. I'd suggest in 5-6 weeks if we're still ploughing £1bn per week into testing it is probably £1bn per week wasted that could have paid for frontline NHS staff to get a proper pay rise.
That's fair enough.
I do wonder at what point the NHS bankrupts the nation. The staff probably need a 2-3% paylift each year (and I bet staffing costs are 65-80% of the budget) and then you have people living longer each year, more conditions becoming treatable and requiring treatment, and drugs becoming more expensive, plus the wider infrastructure of estates and machinery and IT needing upgrading.
It's very easy to see why it needs 4-5% extra each and every year just to stand still.
At some point that dog is going to bark.
The NHS is at the crossroads of a couple of different issues:
1. As you say, people are living longer. And the older you are, the more medical costs per year are (I think it's a 10x difference between a 20 year old and a 75 year old). So, people living longer, on average, means greater healthcare costs.
2. You also have the issue of the inverting population pyramid. Fewer 20 to 40 year olds, who pay into the tax base but don't need expensive healthcare, and more 70+ year olds who take out pensions and need that NHS.
3. Healthcare costs also seem to inexorably rise. You have new treatments and technologies, and people want to be looked after and to live longer.
I did some work on this for a piece I wrote a few years back (called The Discontented) and it showed that pensions and healthcare had risen from 34% of the UK government budget back at the turn of the century, to around 50% now.
Unless you can turn the tide of pensions and healthcare spending, then austerity for all other parts of government is essentially a given.
Well put.
The only solution I can see is basically that people have to work longer and continue paying the same taxes working age people do.
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
You have lost me there, William. That sounds like a comment from somebody not comprehending the first thing about what we're discussing.
"Reducing the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, and promoting a society with less privilege of class, race and gender."
"Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful."
How are these sentiments even remotely similar?
Because, like UvdL, your ideology predisposes you to prefer an outcome in which all fail equally, as long as you can avoid the intolerable prospect of some succeeding unequally.
Nope. It's leveling up. Real leveling up as opposed to the bullshit Johnson soundbite variety. If I didn't believe it was I wouldn't argue for it.
And given you're (wrongly) telling me what I think, I'll return the favour and smear you.
You, and most other true bluers, know full well a truly egalitarian education system would level up in a meaningful and radical way and this is precisely why you're so vehemently opposed to it.
You want to perpetuate our crassly unequal society just exactly as is. You like it this way. The only use you have for working class people is to play them for suckers.
The last sentence sums up Labours approach to the working class
Yep - a reluctance to play them for suckers even though it costs votes.
Bollocks the left have been the bootheel on the neck of the working class for decades. See my explanation of why its your attitude that keeps poor kids down.
The left need an underclass to harvest votes from, shame you mislaid them now they wised up
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?
That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,
The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?
I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.
Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.
Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.
You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....
And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.
Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
Yes - I've been handed people who got a 2.1 in Drink, Drugs & Drama + a "Conversion" MSc in IT. Who can't actually code, but hey, they have a degree.
Many of the IT contractors I worked with in the 90s and early 2000s were from non-credentialed backgrounds.
I remember a bunch of SAP experts - had their own little office where they regaled each other with stories of how they were spending their money. One was buying up the Welsh village he came from, house by house.... About half of them were ex-BT engineers, IIRC.
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
You have lost me there, William. That sounds like a comment from somebody not comprehending the first thing about what we're discussing.
"Reducing the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, and promoting a society with less privilege of class, race and gender."
"Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful."
How are these sentiments even remotely similar?
Because, like UvdL, your ideology predisposes you to prefer an outcome in which all fail equally, as long as you can avoid the intolerable prospect of some succeeding unequally.
Nope. It's leveling up. Real leveling up as opposed to the bullshit Johnson soundbite variety. If I didn't believe it was I wouldn't argue for it.
And given you're (wrongly) telling me what I think, I'll return the favour and smear you.
You, and most other true bluers, know full well a truly egalitarian education system would level up in a meaningful and radical way and this is precisely why you're so vehemently opposed to it.
You want to perpetuate our crassly unequal society just exactly as is. You like it this way. The only use you have for working class people is to play them for suckers.
The last sentence sums up Labours approach to the working class
Yep - a reluctance to play them for suckers even though it costs votes.
Nope the exact opposite - and unluckily for Labour the people who used to vote for them are cottoning on.
Let's see if they are "leveled up" by this Tory government. I bet the opposite happens.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Abolishing private schools wouldn't abolish elite schools which is the point you always fail to realise.
The very rich will send their kids to elite schools abroad. The fairly rich will buy up housing around good schools and squeeze the poor out then make donations to the school to fund things. They would also set up groups where they band together and hire private tutors outside of school time so their kids could still mix.
All you will in effect do is create elite comprehensives where only the well off can afford to live. Currently we have good grammars and comprehensives where they still have a percentage of the poor in the catchement. You would reduce that percentage to zero and condemn all poor kids to failing state schools.
The problem with your ideology and the solutions you propose as always is it fails to account for human nature and those wealthy enough to send their kids to private schools will always get round what you claim and inequality will be even more entrenched.
You're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and also making absurdist projections about what would happen with housing moves. I mean, c'mon. Get a grip. The basic model I favour is all kids go to their local school, and this is accompanied by heavy differential investment in the less advantaged areas. No way does that condemn all poor kids to crap schools. Quite the opposite. Does it solve everything? Course not. Will some schools always be better than others due to a whole range of factors (including catchment areas). Yep. But will it make a serious dent in the correlation between life prospects and family background? Yes, it will. It's blindingly obvious that it will.
I totally accept that others don't share my values on this. That's fine. It doesn't make me a better person or anything. But that there IS a trade-off here between the right of folk to spend their money as they see fit and equal opportunities in education (and thus in wider society), this is simply not a matter of debate. It's a stone cold fact. It's all about what you consider most important. You can't just dodge the whole issue with platitudes and nitpicking.
No I am not letting perfect be the enemy of good. I genuinely believe your proposals will lead to even less life chances for people like me. Rich people will make sure there kids goto schools with the same sort of people and they will makes sure those schools have lots of funding regardless of whether its a state school or not. It already happens with those that cant quite afford private schools and to claim it won't happen if blind ideology with no more reference to reality than a unicorn
You are simply shrugging and tossing the issue into the "too hard" basket. We're talking about all kids going to their local school and the funding of schools in poorer areas being much higher than in richer areas. There is no way jose that can give a LESS equal playing field than we have today. Your vision of a tsunami of devious house moves, and back door nudge and a wink private funding, plus a mass decamp abroad of the affluent middle class is utterly ludicrous. Good free-of-charge schools for everyone on their doorstep. Expensive? Yes. Politically fraught? Yes. But doomed to failure? No. And certainly not for the reasons you postulate.
Utterly ludicrous apart from that is what already happens...those wealthy enough send their kids to private schools. Many from abroad that are wealthy send their children to schools here.Those not quite wealthy enough buy up homes in the catchement areas of good schools and make them even better by donating.
My view has back up from what already happens in reality. Your view is the what if fantasy. So yes doomed to failure.
All your idea does is to create more of the second class that buy up houses in good school area's and that will mean less poor people able to live in such catchement areas
That it happens now does not mean it will in future happen to such a greater extent as to more than wipe out the more level playing field created by a 100% comprehensive model.
I'm putting this in the same distinctly rocky boat as "the left want to keep people down so as to harvest their votes".
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?
That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,
The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?
I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.
Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.
Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
But that is the whole message of the left "The system is stacked against you because you didnt go to the right school and your parents aren't wealthy and no matter how hard you work".....this is the whole basis of why you want to abolish private schools
The message is that the system needs reform. This doesn't translate to sitting disadvantaged kids down and telling them not to bother.
There would never have been a better time to abolish the triple lock.
I would like to see the Government look at a much more radical review of tax and benefits. Set a minimum income level, sufficient to live on without needing benefits or charity. £16,200 per year would equate to a 35 hour week at the living wage. Set that as the personal allowance. Receive a rebate if your income is less. Pay tax if your income is more. Combine tax and NI for a basic rate of 32%. Same rate for self-employed. Income based on earned and unearned income (dividends and Capital Gains) at the same rate. Higher tax rates of 52% and 57%, so no upper limit on NI contributions. Don’t know what the net cost would be. A job for a think tank, maybe?
Why should the taxpayer subsidise low paying companies? If you want to improve people's standards of living in that way then increase the minimum wage to a level where someone working a standard week is earning whatever you consider to be the living wage level. If companies cannot afford to operate whilst paying their employees a basic living wage and paying their taxes under normal operating circumstances then they do not deserve to be in business.
UBI or anything like it is merely the taxpayer subsidising the profits of companies.
No it is not. For two childless adults working full-time the minimum wage already does reach that threshold. No subsidies to any company at all.
The issue that needs to be fixed though is that if people aren't working we don't tell them "go get a job then" and let them and their children end up on the streets or starving to death if they don't. They get benefits to ensure that they have enough to survive.
So then the difference between someone not working and someone who is working full time is not the difference in income the working person earns because there is a corresponding loss of benefits to go with that.
Between loss of benefits, NIC and income tax the state can be reclaiming 90% of someone's income.
Not a penny of this goes to the company.
Rubbish. If it is the unemployed or those unable to work we are talking about then they get money from the Government already. You can debate about increasing that amount but that has nothing to do with a UBI. And yes, if companies pay less than a living wage and the Government is expected to make up the difference as it is having to do now then it is absolutely the case that you are subsidising the companies. If they are, as you foolishly claim, already paying that amount then there is no need for UBI anyway.
Sorry but you don't understand the issue so are talking rubbish it seems. Yes the minimum wage already today covers basic minimum income required for two adults working full-time with no children. Anyone in that situation is NOT entitled to any benefits.
However not everyone is in that situation. Some people work part-time. Some people don't work. Some people have lots of kids that the state has said it will help pay for.
That is where the benefits bill goes. Not to couples working full-time in secure even if minimum wage jobs.
The problem is if someone on benefits today works sixteen hours per week then they're "taxed" 90% on every pound after that 16 hours. What would you do if facing a marginal tax rate of 90%?
A UBI would smooth the transition from not working, to working part time, to working full time encouraging people to work more. Because currently they're not.
You are way out of date. That is no longer the case. Under Universal Credit the loss is 63p in the pound not 90p. And that is not even on the full amount. The first £292 of earnings per month is exempted so does not count towards reductions in UC. (£512 if you have to find your own accommodation).
If you are earning minimum wage working 17 hours a week you earn £593 a month. If you have to find your own accommodation your allowance is £512.
That means the reduction in UC you will receive is 63% of £81 or £51 in the month.
UC for a single person over 25 is £409 a month. That means if they work 17 hours a week and earn £593 a month then their UC drops to £358 a month.
That is a total income of £951 a month. They pay no tax on that as they are under the £12,500 limit and they pay no NI as they earn less than £183 a week.
By the way I am not in any way defending these levels of support. Living on such low incomes is definitely living on the edge. But your claim about losing 90% when you work more than 16 hours a week is simply untrue.
63p in the pound from UC withdrawal alone.
That comes ON TOP OF not instead of being required to pay National Insurance and Income Tax if past those thresholds.
It is very possible to be paying Income Tax, National Insurance and losing UC all simultaneously which comes close to 90% not 63% which is a ridiculous position to be in.
By the time you get to the point where you would have to pay NI and Tax you are well beyond the point at which you would be worried about the small difference in the UC. And NI and IC are only charged on the difference in earnings above that point, not on UC. So your point is...well pointless. Admit it you just got it wrong.
It’s an increase. It may be a real terms decrease (I don’t know) but that not what the tweet says
I'm also quite convinced that no-one gives a shit about the "wasted" money on PPE acquisition. Basic issue is that we pursued all routes to ensure we didn't have a PPE shortage. We didn't, because we took a portfolio approach that got us through. Some were brilliant, some didn't deliver as they should. Overall, we got by. Massive "Phew!!".
That portfolio approach is the same one that has got us the vaccine delivery. If none of the vaccines had worked, would you have raised a stink about wasted money, Labour? If some had worked, some not - we would have got by and the idea would still have been the right thing to do. That it looks like nearly all will have come in is a brilliant result - it does not invalidate the portfolio approach.
Unless Labour are going to bitch we bought too many vaccines?
I've mentioned I've spoken to the people who do the focus groups and polling.
It is something that has been brought up persistently by the voters.
They don't mind it was wasted because there was a pandemic on, what seems to annoy the voters that it appears the contracts were awarded to people and companies not experienced in PPE but who also had links and donations to the Tory party.
As the focus groups and voters have told the pollsters they think one of the reasons why the vaccines have been a success is that the money went to experienced companies and organisations who had no links to the Tory party.
“But the vaccines...” will be the Tory line on everything for the rest of this year. I expect it to lose most of its force around the time of the 2022 budget.
I do hope this isn't going to lead to an annual flu lockdown.
I doubt it. It should, and perhaps will encourage more effective sick leave policies.
And there is the hope of a ‘universal’ flu vaccine. Probably a couple of years off, but there are various promising efforts in very early stage trials.
Comments
But while this might be good news overall, some scientists who are developing a vaccine for next year's flu season are struggling because of the few samples they now have to work on.
"It's a nightmare to work out what comes next," said McCauley. "If you have flu away for a year, then immunity will have waned. It could come back worse."
Experts have previously said that flu rates have been lower this year due to ongoing lockdown restrictions and social distancing measures.
That's why I continue to harbour the suspicion that, at a minimum, we may still not have seen the back of masks by the end of the year.
If the Covid vaccination program continues to progress as expected then I think we can have a reasonable expectation that nearly all the restrictions will go on June 21st as trailed. However - I can see masks either being retained, or coming back into force come the Autumn, on public transport and possibly in some other settings.
I expect that the scientific advisors will be afraid of a two-pronged attack from flu and Covid next Winter, and the Government will probably decide that it needs to do at least something (or be seen doing something, at any rate) to reduce the scale of the usual NHS Winter Crisis.
And I know you (probably) don't really want to piss all over the working class. But as I said, that was smear for smear. Because I don't really want to drag everyone down to achieve a more equal society.
Anyone tells me that's what I want is going to get insulted right back.
From case data
From hospital admissions
"Lord Sumption: civil disobedience has begun
The retired Supreme Court justice believes we have no moral obligation to obey the law
By Freddie Sayers"
https://unherd.com/2021/03/lord-sumption-civil-disobedience-has-begun/
I think we're buying long-term acceptance of c.30-50 extra deaths from Covid per day over the pre pandemic norm.
Unfortunately, and rather coldly, that's probably the right thing to do.
- Masks in certain situations
- Controlled access to gatherings of 1000+ (ie rapid testing 20-minute tests)
Nothing more. The control of 1000+ gatherings knocks R down by about a third all on its own. And has a minimal effect on life in comparison to all the other restrictions.
My view has back up from what already happens in reality. Your view is the what if fantasy. So yes doomed to failure.
All your idea does is to create more of the second class that buy up houses in good school area's and that will mean less poor people able to live in such catchement areas
Smart work by the cancel boys and girls people at Google.
But anyway, peace for now
I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.
Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.
Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
Drakeford back to outcast status.
1. As you say, people are living longer. And the older you are, the more medical costs per year are (I think it's a 10x difference between a 20 year old and a 75 year old). So, people living longer, on average, means greater healthcare costs.
2. You also have the issue of the inverting population pyramid. Fewer 20 to 40 year olds, who pay into the tax base but don't need expensive healthcare, and more 70+ year olds who take out pensions and need that NHS.
3. Healthcare costs also seem to inexorably rise. You have new treatments and technologies, and people want to be looked after and to live longer.
I did some work on this for a piece I wrote a few years back (called The Discontented) and it showed that pensions and healthcare had risen from 34% of the UK government budget back at the turn of the century, to around 50% now.
Unless you can turn the tide of pensions and healthcare spending, then austerity for all other parts of government is essentially a given.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/woke-warning-beloved-childrens-cartoon-beyond-joke/
That comes ON TOP OF not instead of being required to pay National Insurance and Income Tax if past those thresholds.
It is very possible to be paying Income Tax, National Insurance and losing UC all simultaneously which comes close to 90% not 63% which is a ridiculous position to be in.
Can you just imagine the luvvie outrage at one of their number becoming Mayor of London.
And yes, I can see the downside you mention too. That's another reason I favour the comprehensive model.
Sadiq Khan. Useless.
Brian Rose. Dreadful.
Laurence Fox. Tedious.
The Green. Despite being very environmentally minded, I loathe the Greens.
I may simply not vote.
You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....
And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
There will be an increase, because Covid is more aggressive, but it won't be purely additive and there will be an overlap.
Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
Newham vaccination data at the MOSA level -
From my full spreadsheet at
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PiwcgjB3SjLoLaWNczmLAeNN-engqnPa/view?usp=sharing
He had fairly good moves, mind.
If we flip that around perhaps you will see how absurd it is. In order to get the best out of poor kids do we have to pretend that the system is totally fair and drop all plans to reform it?
See? It's a nonsense, isn't it?
C'mon.
While immunity to coronaviruses fades, some people who recovered from SARS 17 years ago have been found to have “rip roaring” (the words of the Imperial College article I read, not mine) T-Cell responses even after all that time, and recent papers I have read say that similar exposure should be similarly protective from this specific virus. So it will come back but we will be far better prepared. That’s what happened to the “Spanish Flu”. H1N1 is still around and rears its ugly head every so often but never as virulently as before.
If putting a disclaimer before a film then putting the entire film up as originally filmed and unaltered makes all these silly arguments go away then I think it's a good compromise. Just ignore the disclaimer, I certainly don't read it every time.
The only solution I can see is basically that people have to work longer and continue paying the same taxes working age people do.
Many of the IT contractors I worked with in the 90s and early 2000s were from non-credentialed backgrounds.
I remember a bunch of SAP experts - had their own little office where they regaled each other with stories of how they were spending their money. One was buying up the Welsh village he came from, house by house.... About half of them were ex-BT engineers, IIRC.
I'm putting this in the same distinctly rocky boat as "the left want to keep people down so as to harvest their votes".
I expect it to lose most of its force around the time of the 2022 budget.
It should, and perhaps will encourage more effective sick leave policies.
And there is the hope of a ‘universal’ flu vaccine. Probably a couple of years off, but there are various promising efforts in very early stage trials.