"Some people look down on manual workers. But if you car breaks down at night in the middle of nowhere, the man from the AA is the most important person in your universe."
Likewise, when our washing machine and oven broke down at the same time, we greeted the appliance repair man with more deference than we would the Queen.
The Queen trained as a mechanic in the war. If she turned up to fix your car after aforesaid breakdown does that make her more important than the most important person in the universe?
She's 90 odd and unless you're driving a Standard 12 Tilly she isn't going to be much fucking use.
Reading Polybius. Cannae's about to happen. So if you think things are bad now, at least you're not in the Roman army marching merrily towards Hannibal.
Bright and sunny again this morning, but the sun is one of the few bright spots. Ms Cyclefree more or less suggests we're in a situation where the only prospect of a change of government is a palace revolution, similar to that which we saw in 2019, when Johnson took over and drove a coach and horses through the established Parliamentary processes. She's right, of course, that the old Labour support structure has crumbled; I've always felt that the 1944 Education Act had a lot to do with that. John Prescott and his brother do, I think, exemplify the situation. Two reasonably able lads, but John failed the 11+ and found his place in the world through the trade union movement. His brother passed and has led a quiet, 'responsible' life, not needing to prove himself. What we haven't yet got in the UK is proper representation for the thousands of people who've found zero hours contracts, or 'self employment' as the options to feed their families. No-one seems to care about them. Why are food banks necessary. Why, in a modern European state is there such a poor safety net for those who, perhaps from no fault of their own fall out of the system? More to the point, why are those who do fall through maligned as scourgers and treated nearly as badly as their ancestors were under the Poor Laws?
Universal Credit is many things but it is not the workhouse.
Italy, Spain and most of Eastern Europe of course have no non contributory unemployment benefits at all unlike us
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
I'm with you. I have no intention of showing a "passport" to go anywhere, except to cross an international border.
What makes an international border different?
Quite right Charles. Why shouldn't your party be able to make us show our papers if we want to enter Kent for example?
Good point, but all this stuff reads like inferior 1984 fanfic. No, a vaccine passport is not a gateway to internal barriers or a show us your papers society, any more than a driving licence credit card membership card mot certificate or railway ticket is. And the battle you think you are fighting is lost anyway, why on earth would a government be arsed with something as quaint as ID papers when it has phone tracking, credit card tracking and facial ID? I'm not saying those are good things, they are terrible, I am saying they exist. The police state has no more interest in ID papers than it has in breeding extra fast horses to overtake speeding motorists.
I chose Kent because the government have already introduced a law requiring truck drivers to show their papers to enter Kent. Yes it was a shambles that was dropped after 4 months. But they actually did it.
I have no objection in principle to an ID card that bundles together a driving license and passport that can be used to prove identity. I do have an objection to the government wanting to track my every move or require me to produce paperwork to move around my own country doing legal things.
"They haven't done that" I hear the Clown Apologists bleating. Yes they have. I need to apply for permission to send goods to NI, declare to government if I bring larger amounts of cash into NI, provide evidence of vaccinations and microchipping on a pet passport to take my dog to NI.
There is no longer a thin end of the wedge for this government. They're already doing it. Which is why the Covid Passport scheme is something that needs to be stopped. Because they won't stop there.
You keep harping on about Northern Ireland but when are you going to grasp that most British voters don't care about Northern Ireland?
NI is another land, that don't even get polled in British opinion polls and don't vote for British parties. If they have special arrangements that mean that bombs don't go off, and if those arrangements are conditional upon their local politicians wanting them to continue, then why should British voters who vote for British parties care?
That doesn't mean they're "not going to stop" and introduce things that piss off British voters.
Bright and sunny again this morning, but the sun is one of the few bright spots. Ms Cyclefree more or less suggests we're in a situation where the only prospect of a change of government is a palace revolution, similar to that which we saw in 2019, when Johnson took over and drove a coach and horses through the established Parliamentary processes. She's right, of course, that the old Labour support structure has crumbled; I've always felt that the 1944 Education Act had a lot to do with that. John Prescott and his brother do, I think, exemplify the situation. Two reasonably able lads, but John failed the 11+ and found his place in the world through the trade union movement. His brother passed and has led a quiet, 'responsible' life, not needing to prove himself. What we haven't yet got in the UK is proper representation for the thousands of people who've found zero hours contracts, or 'self employment' as the options to feed their families. No-one seems to care about them. Why are food banks necessary. Why, in a modern European state is there such a poor safety net for those who, perhaps from no fault of their own fall out of the system? More to the point, why are those who do fall through maligned as scourgers and treated nearly as badly as their ancestors were under the Poor Laws?
IMV education has a lot to do with this. I've told tis story before, but I knew two men from South Yorkshire who grew up in the late 70s. At school (different ones), they were both told that it was pointless educating them as they would both end up in the mines. Both did - although as surface workers. By the mid-1990s, both had been medicalled off after a couple of decades of work, if that. Both families were poor.
So far, so sh*t. They both had children. One had two: he and his wife were keen on education, and one child went to university, whilst the other works in a civil service job. The other man also had two kids; his daughter has AIUI never worked, and now has multiple kids, and is becoming a grandmother in her late thirties. A lovely lass, wit oodles of potential sitting unrealised.
Education has to be first and foremost in the national psyche. It won't help the current generations, but will help later ones. And it's not just a pointless mantra of 'education, education, education'. We all have to want to educate and inform our kids. Let them know that whilst they may never be the next Einstein, Gauss or Dickens, education and learning can have their own rewards.
We have a country where functional illiteracy and innumeracy rates have remains stubbornly around the 20% level for decades. This has to change.
Hugely true. This is the real tragedy of the "fuck education" policy of this government - instead of trying to transform the failings of the past it is doubling down. School failing? Slash its budget? Kids struggling? Let them starve? Parents not showing interest in education? Tell the the exams are too easy and the teachers are cheating them.
Literally the only way to lift people out of poverty long term is through education. It shouldn't matter that you grew up with nothing because the state will give you a top quality education and all the support you need to stick with it. Except that it doesn't do either. A starter for 10 is the crumbling school buildings in so many inner city schools. There had been a transformation in school facilities under Labour, axed without mercy by the Tories. Its back to the "why spend money on future criminals" mentality.
I don't think crumbling school buildings have that much to do with it. Certainly Blair's governments spent billions on school buildings and I don't think it improved standards at the bottom end that much.
It's parents and parenting - a societal problem. Education has to be central; schools help, but so many homes don't even have books in them. I'd like to see more funding go to adult literacy and numeracy - not middle-class writing courses, but giving adults who missed out the basic skills they need, so they can teach their kids in turn.
Realistically the state can't close the gap between those kids with parents who read with them at home and those that don't. It can try, but the gap is immense.
I agree. But we can try to help. When we had a little 'un, we got a new-baby pack from the council. Inside was a leaflet stating that if you did not have any books in the house, you could get some from these places. There were also two books ("My first book" and an Elmer the Elephant one). As middle-class parents, we were amazed at the concept of not having books in the house. As part of our preparations, we had ought some baby books (and nursery rhyme ones) before he was born.
So, how to help? If parents cannot read, encourage them to enrol on an adult literacy course. That leaflet and those free books were a great idea. Perhaps we could even do something online, like an interactive BBC Bedtime Story.
But we cannot continue the way we have been. In the long term, we need to get illiteracy and innumeracy for young adults (post-school) down to well below ten percent. From an economics POV, I guess that'll add a few percent onto GDP in the long term ?
Out of all stories on the front pages I have selected two.
Front of FT, Biden seeks to calm inflation fears, saying he is vigilant against rising prices. What does this vigilance mean in practice Joe. I have this increasing feeling this White House is making a catastrophic error that gets them hammered in 2024. You can’t just come to power and do what you want with economics, whatever long held plans you had, you have to work only with the landscape before you and the art of the possible. From this mistake not just 4 more years of Popular Trump, but 12 years straight.
Front of Daily Star, tomatoes have feelings too. Apart from that, predictable and boring front pages.
Everyone is against inflation in theory. But what is Biden going to do about it, in practical terms?
He could stop coming out with multi-trillion dollar stimulus packages one after another with an economy already rebounding.
Yes: the US is already booming.
Indeed. So what does Biden want to do? Add $4 trillion of gasoline to the fire.
Its utter madness. But there's no fiscally responsible party left in America.
I don't really blame the Democrats for this. Their last two presidents were fiscally responsible and all it did was add to the size of the next Republican's big tax cut for the top 10%.
There's a lot of truth in this: both Clinton and Obama ran very fiscally responsible administrations, largely because they were constrained by Republican Congress.
Funny how Republican Congresses were happy for Reagan, Bush and Trump to let rip.
The Democrats controlled the House of Representatives throughout the Reagan years and for half of the Trump years and the final 2 Dubya years (plus the Senate).
The Democrats controlled both the House and Senate for all of the Bush Snr years and Bush Snr ran a fiscally conservative administration, even raising the top rate of income tax from 28% to 31% to cut the deficit which annoyed his conservative base some of whom went to Buchanan and Perot in 1992 partly contributing to his defeat
The Tories are in the lead because the Opposition isn't credible. That's it in a nutshell. Starmer needs to have a very public fight with the left and be seen to have a major victory, like Kinnock did. Until then all the comments and threads in the world will alter nothing.
Starmer does not need to have a very public fight with anyone other than the Conservatives. Starmer needs to give voters a reason to vote Labour, not to split his own party.
We will have to disagree but I think you are very wrong. People don't trust Labour because of Corbyn and because of its pro brexit stance.. the left in the shape of Momentum are there in force behind the scenes as well as Corbyn.Voters know this. Hence the appaling showing in the polls.
I think this is right. Of course Lab needs to start opposing but take the sample size one. Of me. Lab could have all the brilliant policies in the world but I would not consider voting for them until and unless I knew the party was rid of its Corbyn faction.
Ok let's be fair. There of course can be some Corbynistas; there were still a few if not plenty of horrible Cons MPs when I voted for them. But they cannot be in any way relevant to the front bench or policy making.
Thank goodness none of those horrible Con mps are on the front bench or involved in policy making.
Oh they are. That is why I am no longer a member of the party.
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
I'm with you. I have no intention of showing a "passport" to go anywhere, except to cross an international border.
What makes an international border different?
Quite right Charles. Why shouldn't your party be able to make us show our papers if we want to enter Kent for example?
Good point, but all this stuff reads like inferior 1984 fanfic. No, a vaccine passport is not a gateway to internal barriers or a show us your papers society, any more than a driving licence credit card membership card mot certificate or railway ticket is. And the battle you think you are fighting is lost anyway, why on earth would a government be arsed with something as quaint as ID papers when it has phone tracking, credit card tracking and facial ID? I'm not saying those are good things, they are terrible, I am saying they exist. The police state has no more interest in ID papers than it has in breeding extra fast horses to overtake speeding motorists.
I chose Kent because the government have already introduced a law requiring truck drivers to show their papers to enter Kent. Yes it was a shambles that was dropped after 4 months. But they actually did it.
I have no objection in principle to an ID card that bundles together a driving license and passport that can be used to prove identity. I do have an objection to the government wanting to track my every move or require me to produce paperwork to move around my own country doing legal things.
"They haven't done that" I hear the Clown Apologists bleating. Yes they have. I need to apply for permission to send goods to NI, declare to government if I bring larger amounts of cash into NI, provide evidence of vaccinations and microchipping on a pet passport to take my dog to NI.
There is no longer a thin end of the wedge for this government. They're already doing it. Which is why the Covid Passport scheme is something that needs to be stopped. Because they won't stop there.
You keep harping on about Northern Ireland but when are you going to grasp that most British voters don't care about Northern Ireland?
NI is another land, that don't even get polled in British opinion polls and don't vote for British parties. If they have special arrangements that mean that bombs don't go off, and if those arrangements are conditional upon their local politicians wanting them to continue, then why should British voters who vote for British parties care?
That doesn't mean they're "not going to stop" and introduce things that piss off British voters.
Sounding dangerously like HYUFD there with the "governments act solely in the interest of those who vote for them" shtick. Caring about the Irish does not, I quite agree, come instinctively, but we are still obliged to do it.
The Tories are in the lead because the Opposition isn't credible. That's it in a nutshell. Starmer needs to have a very public fight with the left and be seen to have a major victory, like Kinnock did. Until then all the comments and threads in the world will alter nothing.
Starmer does not need to have a very public fight with anyone other than the Conservatives. Starmer needs to give voters a reason to vote Labour, not to split his own party.
Yes, rule number one of politics is that people do not vote for split parties. That was a problem for May in 2017, but not for the purged Johnsonite party of 2019. The odd backbencher opposed is tolerable, but widespread differences over major issues are not.
Starmer has to unify his party around a coherent vision that comprises more than "not the Tories". It was ten years after Kinnock purged Militant before Labour won power.
I think @Cyclefree makes valid points in the header, but none are deal-breakers. There are always core voters who would vote for a donkey in a party rosette, but that is never enough on its own.
Labour needs a clear and coherent vision of what it would look like in government, and a clear communicator of that vision. It has neither of those at the moment. I think SKS is a decent bloke and would probably run a good government, but that is not enough to get elected.
Blair was not just a great communicator (I saw him speak live in 1996 and he had real charisma then) but also had a ruthless back office spin machine that came out with punchy winning slogans and ideas.
Johnsons confused Populism is defeatable, but it does require Labour to get its act together. It just needs to figure out what being centre-left means in the modern world, and assemble that rainbow coalition within the party. I cannot see it happening at the next GE though. Labour are 8 years off regaining power.
This is right. There are different elements to governing and getting elected. The Big Choices (policy), trust and competence are three big ones.
At the moment there are central issues of Big Choices that Labour is unclear about. The UK union, medium and long term Brexit, social care, public finances.
Issues like Covid are less policy and more about general trust and competence, as no-one knows what the big policy should be in terms of divergent choices.
But Labour is not working well at any of the three. Not only do we not know the Brexit policy (which might be anything from 'rejoin' to 'pirate buccaneer UK') we don't really know if the left, the anti-semites, the 'never kissed Tory scum' tendency have been finally put back in their cave. And we don't know if they have a potential cabinet even as good as the present lot.
And, as a Labour majority alliance must involve the SNP, we must know but don't know where they stand on the UK.
To take a little test case: What is Labour's policy on the NI/GB/EU border/single market dilemma? I don't know. Does anyone?
No idea. What's government policy on the border issue? Resiling from the agreement it negotiated and signed and hoping something better will come along?
.....because we have the most moronic electorate in the world
Don't be ridiculous. There is America...
You're a LibDem, right? Far from power with such a disdain for the electorate. I'm sure if a moronic voter turns up at your hospital you wrestle with yourself as to whether to agree to treatment.
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
I'm with you. I have no intention of showing a "passport" to go anywhere, except to cross an international border.
What makes an international border different?
Quite right Charles. Why shouldn't your party be able to make us show our papers if we want to enter Kent for example?
Good point, but all this stuff reads like inferior 1984 fanfic. No, a vaccine passport is not a gateway to internal barriers or a show us your papers society, any more than a driving licence credit card membership card mot certificate or railway ticket is. And the battle you think you are fighting is lost anyway, why on earth would a government be arsed with something as quaint as ID papers when it has phone tracking, credit card tracking and facial ID? I'm not saying those are good things, they are terrible, I am saying they exist. The police state has no more interest in ID papers than it has in breeding extra fast horses to overtake speeding motorists.
I chose Kent because the government have already introduced a law requiring truck drivers to show their papers to enter Kent. Yes it was a shambles that was dropped after 4 months. But they actually did it.
I have no objection in principle to an ID card that bundles together a driving license and passport that can be used to prove identity. I do have an objection to the government wanting to track my every move or require me to produce paperwork to move around my own country doing legal things.
"They haven't done that" I hear the Clown Apologists bleating. Yes they have. I need to apply for permission to send goods to NI, declare to government if I bring larger amounts of cash into NI, provide evidence of vaccinations and microchipping on a pet passport to take my dog to NI.
There is no longer a thin end of the wedge for this government. They're already doing it. Which is why the Covid Passport scheme is something that needs to be stopped. Because they won't stop there.
You keep harping on about Northern Ireland but when are you going to grasp that most British voters don't care about Northern Ireland?
NI is another land, that don't even get polled in British opinion polls and don't vote for British parties. If they have special arrangements that mean that bombs don't go off, and if those arrangements are conditional upon their local politicians wanting them to continue, then why should British voters who vote for British parties care?
That doesn't mean they're "not going to stop" and introduce things that piss off British voters.
Sounding dangerously like HYUFD there with the "governments act solely in the interest of those who vote for them" shtick. Caring about the Irish does not, I quite agree, come instinctively, but we are still obliged to do it.
Not at all. Governments in a democracy realistically act in the interests of all who do vote for them and may vote for them.
The difference between what I'm saying and what HYUFD says is that HYUFD wants to tell those who could vote Tory, or have voted non-Tory [like myself] in the past to f**k off. What I'm saying is that the government needs to attract voters as well as help those who voted for them.
The problem with Northern Ireland is they've ostracised themselves by the way they vote. Not only do they contribute zero MPs to the government, they realistically can contribute zero MPs no matter the result of the next election.
That's not the case in Britain. Its only natural for governments in a democracy to respond to the wishes of voters. That's why we have democracy!
Bright and sunny again this morning, but the sun is one of the few bright spots. Ms Cyclefree more or less suggests we're in a situation where the only prospect of a change of government is a palace revolution, similar to that which we saw in 2019, when Johnson took over and drove a coach and horses through the established Parliamentary processes. She's right, of course, that the old Labour support structure has crumbled; I've always felt that the 1944 Education Act had a lot to do with that. John Prescott and his brother do, I think, exemplify the situation. Two reasonably able lads, but John failed the 11+ and found his place in the world through the trade union movement. His brother passed and has led a quiet, 'responsible' life, not needing to prove himself. What we haven't yet got in the UK is proper representation for the thousands of people who've found zero hours contracts, or 'self employment' as the options to feed their families. No-one seems to care about them. Why are food banks necessary. Why, in a modern European state is there such a poor safety net for those who, perhaps from no fault of their own fall out of the system? More to the point, why are those who do fall through maligned as scourgers and treated nearly as badly as their ancestors were under the Poor Laws?
IMV education has a lot to do with this. I've told tis story before, but I knew two men from South Yorkshire who grew up in the late 70s. At school (different ones), they were both told that it was pointless educating them as they would both end up in the mines. Both did - although as surface workers. By the mid-1990s, both had been medicalled off after a couple of decades of work, if that. Both families were poor.
So far, so sh*t. They both had children. One had two: he and his wife were keen on education, and one child went to university, whilst the other works in a civil service job. The other man also had two kids; his daughter has AIUI never worked, and now has multiple kids, and is becoming a grandmother in her late thirties. A lovely lass, wit oodles of potential sitting unrealised.
Education has to be first and foremost in the national psyche. It won't help the current generations, but will help later ones. And it's not just a pointless mantra of 'education, education, education'. We all have to want to educate and inform our kids. Let them know that whilst they may never be the next Einstein, Gauss or Dickens, education and learning can have their own rewards.
We have a country where functional illiteracy and innumeracy rates have remains stubbornly around the 20% level for decades. This has to change.
Hugely true. This is the real tragedy of the "fuck education" policy of this government - instead of trying to transform the failings of the past it is doubling down. School failing? Slash its budget? Kids struggling? Let them starve? Parents not showing interest in education? Tell the the exams are too easy and the teachers are cheating them.
Literally the only way to lift people out of poverty long term is through education. It shouldn't matter that you grew up with nothing because the state will give you a top quality education and all the support you need to stick with it. Except that it doesn't do either. A starter for 10 is the crumbling school buildings in so many inner city schools. There had been a transformation in school facilities under Labour, axed without mercy by the Tories. Its back to the "why spend money on future criminals" mentality.
I don't think crumbling school buildings have that much to do with it. Certainly Blair's governments spent billions on school buildings and I don't think it improved standards at the bottom end that much.
It's parents and parenting - a societal problem. Education has to be central; schools help, but so many homes don't even have books in them. I'd like to see more funding go to adult literacy and numeracy - not middle-class writing courses, but giving adults who missed out the basic skills they need, so they can teach their kids in turn.
Realistically the state can't close the gap between those kids with parents who read with them at home and those that don't. It can try, but the gap is immense.
Intervention at school age is already too late for children raised in a household without continual linguistic interaction. Famous study (contested by trendy types) of a word gap of 30 million words heard by the age of three between the haves and have nots. The period when the brain is at its most plastic.
By the time we begin rolling out free childcare in this country, the child’s economic potential is already largely set. So it is said by the authors, no amount of schooling can then raise this potential again, merely allow the fulfilment of the curtailed potential.
Hence the advice to sing to your baby and continually narrate what you are doing to them while looking them in the eye.
If we want to improve long term productivity, we need to find ways of financially supporting parents of very young children to remain outside the workplace for as long as possible after a child’s birth. Instead this government is fixated with providing bung after bung to the wrong end of the electoral demographic.
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
I'm with you. I have no intention of showing a "passport" to go anywhere, except to cross an international border.
What makes an international border different?
Quite right Charles. Why shouldn't your party be able to make us show our papers if we want to enter Kent for example?
Good point, but all this stuff reads like inferior 1984 fanfic. No, a vaccine passport is not a gateway to internal barriers or a show us your papers society, any more than a driving licence credit card membership card mot certificate or railway ticket is. And the battle you think you are fighting is lost anyway, why on earth would a government be arsed with something as quaint as ID papers when it has phone tracking, credit card tracking and facial ID? I'm not saying those are good things, they are terrible, I am saying they exist. The police state has no more interest in ID papers than it has in breeding extra fast horses to overtake speeding motorists.
I chose Kent because the government have already introduced a law requiring truck drivers to show their papers to enter Kent. Yes it was a shambles that was dropped after 4 months. But they actually did it.
I have no objection in principle to an ID card that bundles together a driving license and passport that can be used to prove identity. I do have an objection to the government wanting to track my every move or require me to produce paperwork to move around my own country doing legal things.
"They haven't done that" I hear the Clown Apologists bleating. Yes they have. I need to apply for permission to send goods to NI, declare to government if I bring larger amounts of cash into NI, provide evidence of vaccinations and microchipping on a pet passport to take my dog to NI.
There is no longer a thin end of the wedge for this government. They're already doing it. Which is why the Covid Passport scheme is something that needs to be stopped. Because they won't stop there.
You keep harping on about Northern Ireland but when are you going to grasp that most British voters don't care about Northern Ireland?
NI is another land, that don't even get polled in British opinion polls and don't vote for British parties. If they have special arrangements that mean that bombs don't go off, and if those arrangements are conditional upon their local politicians wanting them to continue, then why should British voters who vote for British parties care?
That doesn't mean they're "not going to stop" and introduce things that piss off British voters.
Sounding dangerously like HYUFD there with the "governments act solely in the interest of those who vote for them" shtick. Caring about the Irish does not, I quite agree, come instinctively, but we are still obliged to do it.
That could be the biggest change in British politics over the past decade or so. It is assumed that a party with a majority need pay no heed to those who didn't vote for it. Of course politically it is accurate, but as a political philosophy it is I believe deeply flawed.
Most keenly observed of course with the EURef. The victors treated it like a GE whereby they didn't need to pay any attention to the losing side, whereas had they done, we might be in a better place than we are now.
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
I'm with you. I have no intention of showing a "passport" to go anywhere, except to cross an international border.
What makes an international border different?
Quite right Charles. Why shouldn't your party be able to make us show our papers if we want to enter Kent for example?
Good point, but all this stuff reads like inferior 1984 fanfic. No, a vaccine passport is not a gateway to internal barriers or a show us your papers society, any more than a driving licence credit card membership card mot certificate or railway ticket is. And the battle you think you are fighting is lost anyway, why on earth would a government be arsed with something as quaint as ID papers when it has phone tracking, credit card tracking and facial ID? I'm not saying those are good things, they are terrible, I am saying they exist. The police state has no more interest in ID papers than it has in breeding extra fast horses to overtake speeding motorists.
I chose Kent because the government have already introduced a law requiring truck drivers to show their papers to enter Kent. Yes it was a shambles that was dropped after 4 months. But they actually did it.
I have no objection in principle to an ID card that bundles together a driving license and passport that can be used to prove identity. I do have an objection to the government wanting to track my every move or require me to produce paperwork to move around my own country doing legal things.
"They haven't done that" I hear the Clown Apologists bleating. Yes they have. I need to apply for permission to send goods to NI, declare to government if I bring larger amounts of cash into NI, provide evidence of vaccinations and microchipping on a pet passport to take my dog to NI.
There is no longer a thin end of the wedge for this government. They're already doing it. Which is why the Covid Passport scheme is something that needs to be stopped. Because they won't stop there.
You keep harping on about Northern Ireland but when are you going to grasp that most British voters don't care about Northern Ireland?
NI is another land, that don't even get polled in British opinion polls and don't vote for British parties. If they have special arrangements that mean that bombs don't go off, and if those arrangements are conditional upon their local politicians wanting them to continue, then why should British voters who vote for British parties care?
That doesn't mean they're "not going to stop" and introduce things that piss off British voters.
I think you illustrate my point - "most English voters don't care about Britain that isn't England". The government of the United Kingdom - one of the Unionist Party especially - should care even if English voters do not.
The Tories are in the lead because the Opposition isn't credible. That's it in a nutshell. Starmer needs to have a very public fight with the left and be seen to have a major victory, like Kinnock did. Until then all the comments and threads in the world will alter nothing.
Starmer does not need to have a very public fight with anyone other than the Conservatives. Starmer needs to give voters a reason to vote Labour, not to split his own party.
Yes, rule number one of politics is that people do not vote for split parties. That was a problem for May in 2017, but not for the purged Johnsonite party of 2019. The odd backbencher opposed is tolerable, but widespread differences over major issues are not.
Starmer has to unify his party around a coherent vision that comprises more than "not the Tories". It was ten years after Kinnock purged Militant before Labour won power.
I think @Cyclefree makes valid points in the header, but none are deal-breakers. There are always core voters who would vote for a donkey in a party rosette, but that is never enough on its own.
Labour needs a clear and coherent vision of what it would look like in government, and a clear communicator of that vision. It has neither of those at the moment. I think SKS is a decent bloke and would probably run a good government, but that is not enough to get elected.
Blair was not just a great communicator (I saw him speak live in 1996 and he had real charisma then) but also had a ruthless back office spin machine that came out with punchy winning slogans and ideas.
Johnsons confused Populism is defeatable, but it does require Labour to get its act together. It just needs to figure out what being centre-left means in the modern world, and assemble that rainbow coalition within the party. I cannot see it happening at the next GE though. Labour are 8 years off regaining power.
This is right. There are different elements to governing and getting elected. The Big Choices (policy), trust and competence are three big ones.
At the moment there are central issues of Big Choices that Labour is unclear about. The UK union, medium and long term Brexit, social care, public finances.
Issues like Covid are less policy and more about general trust and competence, as no-one knows what the big policy should be in terms of divergent choices.
But Labour is not working well at any of the three. Not only do we not know the Brexit policy (which might be anything from 'rejoin' to 'pirate buccaneer UK') we don't really know if the left, the anti-semites, the 'never kissed Tory scum' tendency have been finally put back in their cave. And we don't know if they have a potential cabinet even as good as the present lot.
And, as a Labour majority alliance must involve the SNP, we must know but don't know where they stand on the UK.
To take a little test case: What is Labour's policy on the NI/GB/EU border/single market dilemma? I don't know. Does anyone?
In fairness, we do know where Labour stand on the UK: they are Unionists. Anas, Baillie, Murray et al have been quite clear on that point.
What is less clear is where SLab’s voters stand on the issue of the Union. It still looks like approx 40% of them are pro-independence, about 40% are hardline Unionists, and about 20% don’t care.
Throughout the U.K. Labour don’t fit in any effective pigeon holes. In Scotland their stance on the Union turns off a significant part of the “anti Tory” vote, in Northern England their remainerism similarly, in Southern England the residual whiff of Corbyn prevents them from making any headway however unpopular Johnson becomes even down here, leaving them with Wales. So I don’t think it’s fit for purpose anymore.
In the South where I am the LDs could certainly do well in the wealthier, more internationalist and socially liberal parts - I’m thinking places like Tonbridge Wells here in Kent, and Canterbury (if Rosie Duffield hadn’t already picked it off for Labour, but she is no Corbynite). That depends on there being no fear of an LD vote not letting in Corbyn or Corbyn lite.
Bright and sunny again this morning, but the sun is one of the few bright spots. Ms Cyclefree more or less suggests we're in a situation where the only prospect of a change of government is a palace revolution, similar to that which we saw in 2019, when Johnson took over and drove a coach and horses through the established Parliamentary processes. She's right, of course, that the old Labour support structure has crumbled; I've always felt that the 1944 Education Act had a lot to do with that. John Prescott and his brother do, I think, exemplify the situation. Two reasonably able lads, but John failed the 11+ and found his place in the world through the trade union movement. His brother passed and has led a quiet, 'responsible' life, not needing to prove himself. What we haven't yet got in the UK is proper representation for the thousands of people who've found zero hours contracts, or 'self employment' as the options to feed their families. No-one seems to care about them. Why are food banks necessary. Why, in a modern European state is there such a poor safety net for those who, perhaps from no fault of their own fall out of the system? More to the point, why are those who do fall through maligned as scourgers and treated nearly as badly as their ancestors were under the Poor Laws?
IMV education has a lot to do with this. I've told tis story before, but I knew two men from South Yorkshire who grew up in the late 70s. At school (different ones), they were both told that it was pointless educating them as they would both end up in the mines. Both did - although as surface workers. By the mid-1990s, both had been medicalled off after a couple of decades of work, if that. Both families were poor.
So far, so sh*t. They both had children. One had two: he and his wife were keen on education, and one child went to university, whilst the other works in a civil service job. The other man also had two kids; his daughter has AIUI never worked, and now has multiple kids, and is becoming a grandmother in her late thirties. A lovely lass, wit oodles of potential sitting unrealised.
Education has to be first and foremost in the national psyche. It won't help the current generations, but will help later ones. And it's not just a pointless mantra of 'education, education, education'. We all have to want to educate and inform our kids. Let them know that whilst they may never be the next Einstein, Gauss or Dickens, education and learning can have their own rewards.
We have a country where functional illiteracy and innumeracy rates have remains stubbornly around the 20% level for decades. This has to change.
Hugely true. This is the real tragedy of the "fuck education" policy of this government - instead of trying to transform the failings of the past it is doubling down. School failing? Slash its budget? Kids struggling? Let them starve? Parents not showing interest in education? Tell the the exams are too easy and the teachers are cheating them.
Literally the only way to lift people out of poverty long term is through education. It shouldn't matter that you grew up with nothing because the state will give you a top quality education and all the support you need to stick with it. Except that it doesn't do either. A starter for 10 is the crumbling school buildings in so many inner city schools. There had been a transformation in school facilities under Labour, axed without mercy by the Tories. Its back to the "why spend money on future criminals" mentality.
I don't think crumbling school buildings have that much to do with it. Certainly Blair's governments spent billions on school buildings and I don't think it improved standards at the bottom end that much.
It's parents and parenting - a societal problem. Education has to be central; schools help, but so many homes don't even have books in them. I'd like to see more funding go to adult literacy and numeracy - not middle-class writing courses, but giving adults who missed out the basic skills they need, so they can teach their kids in turn.
Realistically the state can't close the gap between those kids with parents who read with them at home and those that don't. It can try, but the gap is immense.
I agree. But we can try to help. When we had a little 'un, we got a new-baby pack from the council. Inside was a leaflet stating that if you did not have any books in the house, you could get some from these places. There were also two books ("My first book" and an Elmer the Elephant one). As middle-class parents, we were amazed at the concept of not having books in the house. As part of our preparations, we had ought some baby books (and nursery rhyme ones) before he was born.
So, how to help? If parents cannot read, encourage them to enrol on an adult literacy course. That leaflet and those free books were a great idea. Perhaps we could even do something online, like an interactive BBC Bedtime Story.
But we cannot continue the way we have been. In the long term, we need to get illiteracy and innumeracy for young adults (post-school) down to well below ten percent. From an economics POV, I guess that'll add a few percent onto GDP in the long term ?
Obviously I agree with everything you say as it is good for people to have basic skills as it would help their own lives a lot and may save the state some money. By the way, as an aside, we absolutely should teach kids about how betting works - how to convert odds (fractional and decimal) into percentages, how bookies win, etc. etc.
But I'm a bit sceptical about what it would do to our economy. I hate to say this, but I don't think there is much of a relationship between our wealth and literacy and numeracy rates. So long as enough kids do well and can fill the jobs that require a decent education, then the economy is what it is. Ultimately, there are only so many good jobs to go around.
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
The idea of penalising DB public sector schemes should be a non starter as it raises significant problems of fairness. I have been on a DB scheme having been in the public sector recently. It is nowhere near as good as the historic DB schemes that some of my older colleagues were on. If you add up the contributions vs the likely payments, whether I will do better than being on a contribution based scheme will simply depend on how long I live after retirement age. As far as I can work out it will be a bonanza if I live to 100 but a disaster if I die at 70. All in all it just seems like a pretty stupid system.
It's not. It averages the risk of you living to 100 with a sufficiently large pool of those who won't so that you have a guaranteed income for your remaining life, however long that proves to be. Defined contribution schemes mean that your beneficiaries may well get a lump sum of "unspent" pension money (provided you haven't bought an annuity with the capital) but also runs the risk that you run out of money before you die.
Those on higher incomes may well do better under the second option but for those on average incomes or below the first option is a very sensible sharing of risk. It is the premise on which our pensions industry is based.
Isnt this pooling of risk ultimately what the state pension is, though? It has risen to the point where it provides a decent basic income every month in retirement.
From my point of view it just didn't seem like a particularly good deal, paying hundreds of pounds every month in to a scheme which may never pay anything out if I die prematurely.
Above all, I had a sneaking suspicion that the money will never materialise because of political interference.
Not really because the State Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Those who delude themselves into thinking that they paid for it by paying NI conveniently ignore the fact that they elected governments who spent their contributions rather than saving them. They spent those contributions in part paying the previous generation's pensions for which no provision had been paid either. The State Pension is paid by the current workforce, not the previous one.
I was involved in a case a few years ago now with a fund manager who was accused of mis selling pensions to people encouraged to come out of a final salary scheme. Several things became apparent. For high net worth individuals pensions are largely an Inheritance tax dodge. There is no real intention of spending the pension fund, it is simply a tax free way of transferring large lump sums to the next generation.
Secondly, those who have the benefit of final salary indexed linked pensions have something genuinely platinum plated which requires exceptional performance to achieve in your own fund. Public sector employees who have the benefit of such schemes seriously underestimate what those rights are worth when comparing their package with a private sector fixed contribution equivalent. The current generation of pensioners are likely to be the richest ever. The rights they have been given simply cannot be funded in a normal working life.
Which leads me back to my original point - tax DB pension income at rates of 30% and 50%. It would be impossible to avoid and would raise significant money for social care primarily from the people who will need it.
It's morally justifiable. It's economically justifiable. It's political suicide and will never happen.
I really don't think it is morally justifiable. I agree it's political suicide.
(Disclosure - I have a tax-payer funded DB pension scheme from three years at the start of my career in the civil service. It was ridiculously generous still - I got in before changes were made - but 1/40th or whatever it was of the final salary is not a huge amount, I have accumulated much more in less generous pensions, so 30-50% tax on it would not horrify me personally, from a financial point of view).
The thing is, the generous public sector pensions were part of the deal, part of the reason people took jobs there and certainly a large part of the reason they stayed. They made it hard to leave. They made people stay without the need to raise salaries as much. Taxing them at 30-50% is fine if you also retrospectively tax, say, career bonuses for those in the private sector at 30-50% and employee healthcare schemes, share options etc etc (i.e. all other instances where people received non-salary perks that were part of the package).
You also should not raid privately funded DB schemes (I suspect you weren't including those anyway?). These have to, in theory, at least, fund themselves so the contributions are similar to a DC scheme that would offer similar benefits, albeit with greater certainty (much lower downside risk, but also no upside possibilities). Combined USS contribution rates at the moment are ~30% of salary - I've done back of the envelope calcs that suggest at average life expectancy I might get close to getting back what I put in (assuming, for simplicity, no inflation, but also no investment growth - a competently managed DC scheme should easily outstrip inflation, of course).
The Tories are in the lead because the Opposition isn't credible. That's it in a nutshell. Starmer needs to have a very public fight with the left and be seen to have a major victory, like Kinnock did. Until then all the comments and threads in the world will alter nothing.
Starmer does not need to have a very public fight with anyone other than the Conservatives. Starmer needs to give voters a reason to vote Labour, not to split his own party.
Yes, rule number one of politics is that people do not vote for split parties. That was a problem for May in 2017, but not for the purged Johnsonite party of 2019. The odd backbencher opposed is tolerable, but widespread differences over major issues are not.
Starmer has to unify his party around a coherent vision that comprises more than "not the Tories". It was ten years after Kinnock purged Militant before Labour won power.
I think @Cyclefree makes valid points in the header, but none are deal-breakers. There are always core voters who would vote for a donkey in a party rosette, but that is never enough on its own.
Labour needs a clear and coherent vision of what it would look like in government, and a clear communicator of that vision. It has neither of those at the moment. I think SKS is a decent bloke and would probably run a good government, but that is not enough to get elected.
Blair was not just a great communicator (I saw him speak live in 1996 and he had real charisma then) but also had a ruthless back office spin machine that came out with punchy winning slogans and ideas.
Johnsons confused Populism is defeatable, but it does require Labour to get its act together. It just needs to figure out what being centre-left means in the modern world, and assemble that rainbow coalition within the party. I cannot see it happening at the next GE though. Labour are 8 years off regaining power.
This is right. There are different elements to governing and getting elected. The Big Choices (policy), trust and competence are three big ones.
At the moment there are central issues of Big Choices that Labour is unclear about. The UK union, medium and long term Brexit, social care, public finances.
Issues like Covid are less policy and more about general trust and competence, as no-one knows what the big policy should be in terms of divergent choices.
But Labour is not working well at any of the three. Not only do we not know the Brexit policy (which might be anything from 'rejoin' to 'pirate buccaneer UK') we don't really know if the left, the anti-semites, the 'never kissed Tory scum' tendency have been finally put back in their cave. And we don't know if they have a potential cabinet even as good as the present lot.
And, as a Labour majority alliance must involve the SNP, we must know but don't know where they stand on the UK.
To take a little test case: What is Labour's policy on the NI/GB/EU border/single market dilemma? I don't know. Does anyone?
No idea. What's government policy on the border issue? Resiling from the agreement it negotiated and signed and hoping something better will come along?
A fair description. Or you could put it 'Having delivered the promised Brexit in the only possible way, and knowing it to be flawed, acknowledging that this first attempt could not work and trying to find a formula whereby the EU and RoI realise that UK, RoI and EU red lines all have to be relaxed to accommodate a unique problem'.
Not perfect but one step ahead of Labour's policy.
It actually amazes me that Labour - a party meant to be looking after the interests of the poorest of society - concentrates massively more on the top end of academic achievement - e.g. going to university, than at the bottom end, which really requires the attention and money.
ISTR they did try for a brief time in the late 1990s, but after that it became "50% to uni".
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
The idea of penalising DB public sector schemes should be a non starter as it raises significant problems of fairness. I have been on a DB scheme having been in the public sector recently. It is nowhere near as good as the historic DB schemes that some of my older colleagues were on. If you add up the contributions vs the likely payments, whether I will do better than being on a contribution based scheme will simply depend on how long I live after retirement age. As far as I can work out it will be a bonanza if I live to 100 but a disaster if I die at 70. All in all it just seems like a pretty stupid system.
It's not. It averages the risk of you living to 100 with a sufficiently large pool of those who won't so that you have a guaranteed income for your remaining life, however long that proves to be. Defined contribution schemes mean that your beneficiaries may well get a lump sum of "unspent" pension money (provided you haven't bought an annuity with the capital) but also runs the risk that you run out of money before you die.
Those on higher incomes may well do better under the second option but for those on average incomes or below the first option is a very sensible sharing of risk. It is the premise on which our pensions industry is based.
Isnt this pooling of risk ultimately what the state pension is, though? It has risen to the point where it provides a decent basic income every month in retirement.
From my point of view it just didn't seem like a particularly good deal, paying hundreds of pounds every month in to a scheme which may never pay anything out if I die prematurely.
Above all, I had a sneaking suspicion that the money will never materialise because of political interference.
Not really because the State Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Those who delude themselves into thinking that they paid for it by paying NI conveniently ignore the fact that they elected governments who spent their contributions rather than saving them. They spent those contributions in part paying the previous generation's pensions for which no provision had been paid either. The State Pension is paid by the current workforce, not the previous one.
I was involved in a case a few years ago now with a fund manager who was accused of mis selling pensions to people encouraged to come out of a final salary scheme. Several things became apparent. For high net worth individuals pensions are largely an Inheritance tax dodge. There is no real intention of spending the pension fund, it is simply a tax free way of transferring large lump sums to the next generation.
Secondly, those who have the benefit of final salary indexed linked pensions have something genuinely platinum plated which requires exceptional performance to achieve in your own fund. Public sector employees who have the benefit of such schemes seriously underestimate what those rights are worth when comparing their package with a private sector fixed contribution equivalent. The current generation of pensioners are likely to be the richest ever. The rights they have been given simply cannot be funded in a normal working life.
Which leads me back to my original point - tax DB pension income at rates of 30% and 50%. It would be impossible to avoid and would raise significant money for social care primarily from the people who will need it.
It's morally justifiable. It's economically justifiable. It's political suicide and will never happen.
I really don't think it is morally justifiable. I agree it's political suicide.
(Disclosure - I have a tax-payer funded DB pension scheme from three years at the start of my career in the civil service. It was ridiculously generous still - I got in before changes were made - but 1/40th or whatever it was of the final salary is not a huge amount, I have accumulated much more in less generous pensions, so 30-50% tax on it would not horrify me personally, from a financial point of view).
The thing is, the generous public sector pensions were part of the deal, part of the reason people took jobs there and certainly a large part of the reason they stayed. They made it hard to leave. They made people stay without the need to raise salaries as much. Taxing them at 30-50% is fine if you also retrospectively tax, say, career bonuses for those in the private sector at 30-50% and employee healthcare schemes, share options etc etc (i.e. all other instances where people received non-salary perks that were part of the package).
You also should not raid privately funded DB schemes (I suspect you weren't including those anyway?). These have to, in theory, at least, fund themselves so the contributions are similar to a DC scheme that would offer similar benefits, albeit with greater certainty (much lower downside risk, but also no upside possibilities). Combined USS contribution rates at the moment are ~30% of salary - I've done back of the envelope calcs that suggest at average life expectancy I might get close to getting back what I put in (assuming, for simplicity, no inflation, but also no investment growth - a competently managed DC scheme should easily outstrip inflation, of course).
Every significant tax increase or big tax change is political suicide. Every group can say it was part of the deal as they understood it. We need to raise taxes, particularly if we dont want immigration to change our demographic age curve.
Only when enough people agree on the above can we start a sensible discussion about what tax changes are least unfair.
"Some people look down on manual workers. But if you car breaks down at night in the middle of nowhere, the man from the AA is the most important person in your universe."
Likewise, when our washing machine and oven broke down at the same time, we greeted the appliance repair man with more deference than we would the Queen.
The Queen trained as a mechanic in the war. If she turned up to fix your car after aforesaid breakdown does that make her more important than the most important person in the universe?
She's 90 odd and unless you're driving a Standard 12 Tilly she isn't going to be much fucking use.
Judging by tweets this am from likes of Steve Swinford and Times Radio, there is a split in government.
Business departments are telling companies that being pinged and isolating is only guidance, whereas Johnson and co at the top are telling people they must do it unless a worker who is exempted (e.g. NHS critical staff).
.....because we have the most moronic electorate in the world
Don't be ridiculous. There is America...
Again, slightly harsh, but...
It's a natural human instinct to overvalue the needs of self and now, as opposed to other and the future. Makes some evolutionary sense; others might not have my genes and my future won't happen if I don't survive the now. It's a less helpful instinct now, because we're in a world where survival isn't really an issue. We don't have to gorge on all the food available, because we can be confident of more food tomorrow. But we still do, with the consequences we see around us.
That instinct feeds through to politics, of course it does. So the electorate (and that includes me) reward politicians who bring forward the consumption and put off the taxation. That happens everywhere. But the US and UK do seem more prone to it than other nations. Whether that's because of a national character failing, the FPTP electoral system, or just bad luck (natural selection can select for dumb things, like peacock's tails), I don't know.
But it is a failing of the civic discourse in the UK, and one it would be good to fix. Because it's the root cause of chronic problems like pensions, social care, housing and so on.
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
I'm with you. I have no intention of showing a "passport" to go anywhere, except to cross an international border.
What makes an international border different?
Quite right Charles. Why shouldn't your party be able to make us show our papers if we want to enter Kent for example?
Good point, but all this stuff reads like inferior 1984 fanfic. No, a vaccine passport is not a gateway to internal barriers or a show us your papers society, any more than a driving licence credit card membership card mot certificate or railway ticket is. And the battle you think you are fighting is lost anyway, why on earth would a government be arsed with something as quaint as ID papers when it has phone tracking, credit card tracking and facial ID? I'm not saying those are good things, they are terrible, I am saying they exist. The police state has no more interest in ID papers than it has in breeding extra fast horses to overtake speeding motorists.
I chose Kent because the government have already introduced a law requiring truck drivers to show their papers to enter Kent. Yes it was a shambles that was dropped after 4 months. But they actually did it.
I have no objection in principle to an ID card that bundles together a driving license and passport that can be used to prove identity. I do have an objection to the government wanting to track my every move or require me to produce paperwork to move around my own country doing legal things.
"They haven't done that" I hear the Clown Apologists bleating. Yes they have. I need to apply for permission to send goods to NI, declare to government if I bring larger amounts of cash into NI, provide evidence of vaccinations and microchipping on a pet passport to take my dog to NI.
There is no longer a thin end of the wedge for this government. They're already doing it. Which is why the Covid Passport scheme is something that needs to be stopped. Because they won't stop there.
You keep harping on about Northern Ireland but when are you going to grasp that most British voters don't care about Northern Ireland?
NI is another land, that don't even get polled in British opinion polls and don't vote for British parties. If they have special arrangements that mean that bombs don't go off, and if those arrangements are conditional upon their local politicians wanting them to continue, then why should British voters who vote for British parties care?
That doesn't mean they're "not going to stop" and introduce things that piss off British voters.
Sounding dangerously like HYUFD there with the "governments act solely in the interest of those who vote for them" shtick. Caring about the Irish does not, I quite agree, come instinctively, but we are still obliged to do it.
That could be the biggest change in British politics over the past decade or so. It is assumed that a party with a majority need pay no heed to those who didn't vote for it. Of course politically it is accurate, but as a political philosophy it is I believe deeply flawed.
Most keenly observed of course with the EURef. The victors treated it like a GE whereby they didn't need to pay any attention to the losing side, whereas had they done, we might be in a better place than we are now.
Not quite. The Tories have only made progress in WWC seats by paying attention to people who traditionally didn't vote for them. Also, if you look at the very long term, the Tories almost never suggest that those who don't vote for them are morally or politically somehow defective or sub optimal. This is a very stark contrast with the 'Please, Tory vermin who I would never kiss, vote for the candidate who thinks you are scum'.
As someone who votes Labour in local elections (voting personally for people I know and respect), this is one of the greatest obstacles, entirely self-created, to voting for them in a GE.
Judging by tweets this am from likes of Steve Swinford and Times Radio, there is a split in government.
Business departments are telling companies that being pinged and isolating is only guidance, whereas Johnson and co at the top are telling people they must do it unless a worker who is exempted (e.g. NHS critical staff).
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
The idea of penalising DB public sector schemes should be a non starter as it raises significant problems of fairness. I have been on a DB scheme having been in the public sector recently. It is nowhere near as good as the historic DB schemes that some of my older colleagues were on. If you add up the contributions vs the likely payments, whether I will do better than being on a contribution based scheme will simply depend on how long I live after retirement age. As far as I can work out it will be a bonanza if I live to 100 but a disaster if I die at 70. All in all it just seems like a pretty stupid system.
It's not. It averages the risk of you living to 100 with a sufficiently large pool of those who won't so that you have a guaranteed income for your remaining life, however long that proves to be. Defined contribution schemes mean that your beneficiaries may well get a lump sum of "unspent" pension money (provided you haven't bought an annuity with the capital) but also runs the risk that you run out of money before you die.
Those on higher incomes may well do better under the second option but for those on average incomes or below the first option is a very sensible sharing of risk. It is the premise on which our pensions industry is based.
Isnt this pooling of risk ultimately what the state pension is, though? It has risen to the point where it provides a decent basic income every month in retirement.
From my point of view it just didn't seem like a particularly good deal, paying hundreds of pounds every month in to a scheme which may never pay anything out if I die prematurely.
Above all, I had a sneaking suspicion that the money will never materialise because of political interference.
Not really because the State Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Those who delude themselves into thinking that they paid for it by paying NI conveniently ignore the fact that they elected governments who spent their contributions rather than saving them. They spent those contributions in part paying the previous generation's pensions for which no provision had been paid either. The State Pension is paid by the current workforce, not the previous one.
I was involved in a case a few years ago now with a fund manager who was accused of mis selling pensions to people encouraged to come out of a final salary scheme. Several things became apparent. For high net worth individuals pensions are largely an Inheritance tax dodge. There is no real intention of spending the pension fund, it is simply a tax free way of transferring large lump sums to the next generation.
Secondly, those who have the benefit of final salary indexed linked pensions have something genuinely platinum plated which requires exceptional performance to achieve in your own fund. Public sector employees who have the benefit of such schemes seriously underestimate what those rights are worth when comparing their package with a private sector fixed contribution equivalent. The current generation of pensioners are likely to be the richest ever. The rights they have been given simply cannot be funded in a normal working life.
Which leads me back to my original point - tax DB pension income at rates of 30% and 50%. It would be impossible to avoid and would raise significant money for social care primarily from the people who will need it.
It's morally justifiable. It's economically justifiable. It's political suicide and will never happen.
I really don't think it is morally justifiable. I agree it's political suicide.
(Disclosure - I have a tax-payer funded DB pension scheme from three years at the start of my career in the civil service. It was ridiculously generous still - I got in before changes were made - but 1/40th or whatever it was of the final salary is not a huge amount, I have accumulated much more in less generous pensions, so 30-50% tax on it would not horrify me personally, from a financial point of view).
The thing is, the generous public sector pensions were part of the deal, part of the reason people took jobs there and certainly a large part of the reason they stayed. They made it hard to leave. They made people stay without the need to raise salaries as much. Taxing them at 30-50% is fine if you also retrospectively tax, say, career bonuses for those in the private sector at 30-50% and employee healthcare schemes, share options etc etc (i.e. all other instances where people received non-salary perks that were part of the package).
You also should not raid privately funded DB schemes (I suspect you weren't including those anyway?). These have to, in theory, at least, fund themselves so the contributions are similar to a DC scheme that would offer similar benefits, albeit with greater certainty (much lower downside risk, but also no upside possibilities). Combined USS contribution rates at the moment are ~30% of salary - I've done back of the envelope calcs that suggest at average life expectancy I might get close to getting back what I put in (assuming, for simplicity, no inflation, but also no investment growth - a competently managed DC scheme should easily outstrip inflation, of course).
Every significant tax increase or big tax change is political suicide. Every group can say it was part of the deal as they understood it. We need to raise taxes, particularly if we dont immigration to change our demographic age curve.
Only when enough people agree on the above can we start a sensible discussion about what tax changes are least unfair.
I've no moral proble with screwing everyone over equally. Hence I'm happy if the idea was to retrospectively tax all non-salary employment benefits for everyone.
Would it be fair, instead, to retrospectively tax everyone who had a company car before, say 1990? Didn't company cars used to be a real tax loophole?
Bright and sunny again this morning, but the sun is one of the few bright spots. Ms Cyclefree more or less suggests we're in a situation where the only prospect of a change of government is a palace revolution, similar to that which we saw in 2019, when Johnson took over and drove a coach and horses through the established Parliamentary processes. She's right, of course, that the old Labour support structure has crumbled; I've always felt that the 1944 Education Act had a lot to do with that. John Prescott and his brother do, I think, exemplify the situation. Two reasonably able lads, but John failed the 11+ and found his place in the world through the trade union movement. His brother passed and has led a quiet, 'responsible' life, not needing to prove himself. What we haven't yet got in the UK is proper representation for the thousands of people who've found zero hours contracts, or 'self employment' as the options to feed their families. No-one seems to care about them. Why are food banks necessary. Why, in a modern European state is there such a poor safety net for those who, perhaps from no fault of their own fall out of the system? More to the point, why are those who do fall through maligned as scourgers and treated nearly as badly as their ancestors were under the Poor Laws?
IMV education has a lot to do with this. I've told tis story before, but I knew two men from South Yorkshire who grew up in the late 70s. At school (different ones), they were both told that it was pointless educating them as they would both end up in the mines. Both did - although as surface workers. By the mid-1990s, both had been medicalled off after a couple of decades of work, if that. Both families were poor.
So far, so sh*t. They both had children. One had two: he and his wife were keen on education, and one child went to university, whilst the other works in a civil service job. The other man also had two kids; his daughter has AIUI never worked, and now has multiple kids, and is becoming a grandmother in her late thirties. A lovely lass, wit oodles of potential sitting unrealised.
Education has to be first and foremost in the national psyche. It won't help the current generations, but will help later ones. And it's not just a pointless mantra of 'education, education, education'. We all have to want to educate and inform our kids. Let them know that whilst they may never be the next Einstein, Gauss or Dickens, education and learning can have their own rewards.
We have a country where functional illiteracy and innumeracy rates have remains stubbornly around the 20% level for decades. This has to change.
Hugely true. This is the real tragedy of the "fuck education" policy of this government - instead of trying to transform the failings of the past it is doubling down. School failing? Slash its budget? Kids struggling? Let them starve? Parents not showing interest in education? Tell the the exams are too easy and the teachers are cheating them.
Literally the only way to lift people out of poverty long term is through education. It shouldn't matter that you grew up with nothing because the state will give you a top quality education and all the support you need to stick with it. Except that it doesn't do either. A starter for 10 is the crumbling school buildings in so many inner city schools. There had been a transformation in school facilities under Labour, axed without mercy by the Tories. Its back to the "why spend money on future criminals" mentality.
I don't think crumbling school buildings have that much to do with it. Certainly Blair's governments spent billions on school buildings and I don't think it improved standards at the bottom end that much.
It's parents and parenting - a societal problem. Education has to be central; schools help, but so many homes don't even have books in them. I'd like to see more funding go to adult literacy and numeracy - not middle-class writing courses, but giving adults who missed out the basic skills they need, so they can teach their kids in turn.
Realistically the state can't close the gap between those kids with parents who read with them at home and those that don't. It can try, but the gap is immense.
I agree. But we can try to help. When we had a little 'un, we got a new-baby pack from the council. Inside was a leaflet stating that if you did not have any books in the house, you could get some from these places. There were also two books ("My first book" and an Elmer the Elephant one). As middle-class parents, we were amazed at the concept of not having books in the house. As part of our preparations, we had ought some baby books (and nursery rhyme ones) before he was born.
So, how to help? If parents cannot read, encourage them to enrol on an adult literacy course. That leaflet and those free books were a great idea. Perhaps we could even do something online, like an interactive BBC Bedtime Story.
But we cannot continue the way we have been. In the long term, we need to get illiteracy and innumeracy for young adults (post-school) down to well below ten percent.
Do you listen to the news on BBC Radio 4? Hardly two minutes goes by without a newsreader scanning what he's reading wrong because he doesn't have the required level of familiarity with grammar. And these are people who are professionally employed to read fairly simple material out loud.
Ministers have written to major manufacturers emphasising that staff are not legally obliged to isolate if pinged by app
Lord Grimstone, investment minister, told one large employer that app was only an ‘advisory tool’ and that people were not under any ‘legal duty’
So does the government think Boris & Rishi do not need to self-isolate the day after they decided they did need to self-isolate after they'd previously decided they did not need to self-isolate? Glad they've cleared that up.
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
The idea of penalising DB public sector schemes should be a non starter as it raises significant problems of fairness. I have been on a DB scheme having been in the public sector recently. It is nowhere near as good as the historic DB schemes that some of my older colleagues were on. If you add up the contributions vs the likely payments, whether I will do better than being on a contribution based scheme will simply depend on how long I live after retirement age. As far as I can work out it will be a bonanza if I live to 100 but a disaster if I die at 70. All in all it just seems like a pretty stupid system.
It's not. It averages the risk of you living to 100 with a sufficiently large pool of those who won't so that you have a guaranteed income for your remaining life, however long that proves to be. Defined contribution schemes mean that your beneficiaries may well get a lump sum of "unspent" pension money (provided you haven't bought an annuity with the capital) but also runs the risk that you run out of money before you die.
Those on higher incomes may well do better under the second option but for those on average incomes or below the first option is a very sensible sharing of risk. It is the premise on which our pensions industry is based.
Isnt this pooling of risk ultimately what the state pension is, though? It has risen to the point where it provides a decent basic income every month in retirement.
From my point of view it just didn't seem like a particularly good deal, paying hundreds of pounds every month in to a scheme which may never pay anything out if I die prematurely.
Above all, I had a sneaking suspicion that the money will never materialise because of political interference.
Not really because the State Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Those who delude themselves into thinking that they paid for it by paying NI conveniently ignore the fact that they elected governments who spent their contributions rather than saving them. They spent those contributions in part paying the previous generation's pensions for which no provision had been paid either. The State Pension is paid by the current workforce, not the previous one.
I was involved in a case a few years ago now with a fund manager who was accused of mis selling pensions to people encouraged to come out of a final salary scheme. Several things became apparent. For high net worth individuals pensions are largely an Inheritance tax dodge. There is no real intention of spending the pension fund, it is simply a tax free way of transferring large lump sums to the next generation.
Secondly, those who have the benefit of final salary indexed linked pensions have something genuinely platinum plated which requires exceptional performance to achieve in your own fund. Public sector employees who have the benefit of such schemes seriously underestimate what those rights are worth when comparing their package with a private sector fixed contribution equivalent. The current generation of pensioners are likely to be the richest ever. The rights they have been given simply cannot be funded in a normal working life.
Which leads me back to my original point - tax DB pension income at rates of 30% and 50%. It would be impossible to avoid and would raise significant money for social care primarily from the people who will need it.
It's morally justifiable. It's economically justifiable. It's political suicide and will never happen.
I really don't think it is morally justifiable. I agree it's political suicide.
(Disclosure - I have a tax-payer funded DB pension scheme from three years at the start of my career in the civil service. It was ridiculously generous still - I got in before changes were made - but 1/40th or whatever it was of the final salary is not a huge amount, I have accumulated much more in less generous pensions, so 30-50% tax on it would not horrify me personally, from a financial point of view).
The thing is, the generous public sector pensions were part of the deal, part of the reason people took jobs there and certainly a large part of the reason they stayed. They made it hard to leave. They made people stay without the need to raise salaries as much. Taxing them at 30-50% is fine if you also retrospectively tax, say, career bonuses for those in the private sector at 30-50% and employee healthcare schemes, share options etc etc (i.e. all other instances where people received non-salary perks that were part of the package).
You also should not raid privately funded DB schemes (I suspect you weren't including those anyway?). These have to, in theory, at least, fund themselves so the contributions are similar to a DC scheme that would offer similar benefits, albeit with greater certainty (much lower downside risk, but also no upside possibilities). Combined USS contribution rates at the moment are ~30% of salary - I've done back of the envelope calcs that suggest at average life expectancy I might get close to getting back what I put in (assuming, for simplicity, no inflation, but also no investment growth - a competently managed DC scheme should easily outstrip inflation, of course).
Every significant tax increase or big tax change is political suicide. Every group can say it was part of the deal as they understood it. We need to raise taxes, particularly if we dont immigration to change our demographic age curve.
Only when enough people agree on the above can we start a sensible discussion about what tax changes are least unfair.
I've no moral proble with screwing everyone over equally. Hence I'm happy if the idea was to retrospectively tax all non-salary employment benefits for everyone.
Would it be fair, instead, to retrospectively tax everyone who had a company car before, say 1990? Didn't company cars used to be a real tax loophole?
The reality is it is not possible to screw everyone over equally. And anyway should those struggling be screwed over as much as those who have benefited from ultra low inflation and indeed covid economics? Should we try and restore where people were in 2019 or 2007?
Nothing is going to be fair to everyone from every perspective. As a society that is understood and broadly accepted for existing structures of tax and rules, yet we really struggle to grasp that it must be the same for future changes as well. Our job is to find something pragmatic and not too unfair, not something that is fair. The search for unicorns just leads to dither and ongoing delay.
Bright and sunny again this morning, but the sun is one of the few bright spots. Ms Cyclefree more or less suggests we're in a situation where the only prospect of a change of government is a palace revolution, similar to that which we saw in 2019, when Johnson took over and drove a coach and horses through the established Parliamentary processes. She's right, of course, that the old Labour support structure has crumbled; I've always felt that the 1944 Education Act had a lot to do with that. John Prescott and his brother do, I think, exemplify the situation. Two reasonably able lads, but John failed the 11+ and found his place in the world through the trade union movement. His brother passed and has led a quiet, 'responsible' life, not needing to prove himself. What we haven't yet got in the UK is proper representation for the thousands of people who've found zero hours contracts, or 'self employment' as the options to feed their families. No-one seems to care about them. Why are food banks necessary. Why, in a modern European state is there such a poor safety net for those who, perhaps from no fault of their own fall out of the system? More to the point, why are those who do fall through maligned as scourgers and treated nearly as badly as their ancestors were under the Poor Laws?
IMV education has a lot to do with this. I've told tis story before, but I knew two men from South Yorkshire who grew up in the late 70s. At school (different ones), they were both told that it was pointless educating them as they would both end up in the mines. Both did - although as surface workers. By the mid-1990s, both had been medicalled off after a couple of decades of work, if that. Both families were poor.
So far, so sh*t. They both had children. One had two: he and his wife were keen on education, and one child went to university, whilst the other works in a civil service job. The other man also had two kids; his daughter has AIUI never worked, and now has multiple kids, and is becoming a grandmother in her late thirties. A lovely lass, wit oodles of potential sitting unrealised.
Education has to be first and foremost in the national psyche. It won't help the current generations, but will help later ones. And it's not just a pointless mantra of 'education, education, education'. We all have to want to educate and inform our kids. Let them know that whilst they may never be the next Einstein, Gauss or Dickens, education and learning can have their own rewards.
We have a country where functional illiteracy and innumeracy rates have remains stubbornly around the 20% level for decades. This has to change.
Hugely true. This is the real tragedy of the "fuck education" policy of this government - instead of trying to transform the failings of the past it is doubling down. School failing? Slash its budget? Kids struggling? Let them starve? Parents not showing interest in education? Tell the the exams are too easy and the teachers are cheating them.
Literally the only way to lift people out of poverty long term is through education. It shouldn't matter that you grew up with nothing because the state will give you a top quality education and all the support you need to stick with it. Except that it doesn't do either. A starter for 10 is the crumbling school buildings in so many inner city schools. There had been a transformation in school facilities under Labour, axed without mercy by the Tories. Its back to the "why spend money on future criminals" mentality.
I don't think crumbling school buildings have that much to do with it. Certainly Blair's governments spent billions on school buildings and I don't think it improved standards at the bottom end that much.
It's parents and parenting - a societal problem. Education has to be central; schools help, but so many homes don't even have books in them. I'd like to see more funding go to adult literacy and numeracy - not middle-class writing courses, but giving adults who missed out the basic skills they need, so they can teach their kids in turn.
Realistically the state can't close the gap between those kids with parents who read with them at home and those that don't. It can try, but the gap is immense.
I agree. But we can try to help. When we had a little 'un, we got a new-baby pack from the council. Inside was a leaflet stating that if you did not have any books in the house, you could get some from these places. There were also two books ("My first book" and an Elmer the Elephant one). As middle-class parents, we were amazed at the concept of not having books in the house. As part of our preparations, we had ought some baby books (and nursery rhyme ones) before he was born.
So, how to help? If parents cannot read, encourage them to enrol on an adult literacy course. That leaflet and those free books were a great idea. Perhaps we could even do something online, like an interactive BBC Bedtime Story.
But we cannot continue the way we have been. In the long term, we need to get illiteracy and innumeracy for young adults (post-school) down to well below ten percent.
Do you listen to the news on BBC Radio 4? Hardly two minutes goes by without a newsreader scanning what he's reading wrong because he doesn't have the required level of familiarity with grammar. And these are people who are professionally employed to read fairly simple material out loud.
Yes. Regional accents good, bad grammar bad. Ditching RP should not mean abandoning good speech.
"Some people look down on manual workers. But if you car breaks down at night in the middle of nowhere, the man from the AA is the most important person in your universe."
Likewise, when our washing machine and oven broke down at the same time, we greeted the appliance repair man with more deference than we would the Queen.
The Queen trained as a mechanic in the war. If she turned up to fix your car after aforesaid breakdown does that make her more important than the most important person in the universe?
She's 90 odd and unless you're driving a Standard 12 Tilly she isn't going to be much fucking use.
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
But treating pensions as deferred income, for the purposes of taxation, has been pretty universal. With some limits, to be sure, but whether the DB employer has to put a lot of (untaxed) cash in to deliver the (taxed) benefits down the line, or whether a DC employer matches (untaxed) contributions now to deliver (taxed) benefits down the line, is pretty much the same thing from the point of view of tax. The DB was just a more generous employer offer; DC employers are free to do the same (within the annual allowance) if they want.
They should probably update the AA calculations regarding DB entitlement, though.
--AS
I don't disagree with any of that (how can I as it is factually correct), but invariably the employer contribution to the DB scheme is much bigger so providing the employee with a bigger benefit. In addition there is likely a tax benefit as the marginal tax rate is likely higher in employment than retirement plus there is the tax free lump sum. Applies to DC as well but the employer contribution is likely much lower.
The employer may well still be contributing to the DB pension after retirement.
I thought that for private companies, at retirement the DB pension is provided by buying an annuity from the pension fund. No further liability from the employer for that employee after retirement.
I think most don't, or at least the big ones don't. It's too expensive. They keep the funds invested and pay pensions out of the returns. The regulator puts a lot of pressure on them to de-risk the investment and match at least some of the liabilities with indexed gilts of appropriate duration (negative yields making this also very expensive), but their only obligation is to show that the fund is sufficient for future liabilities.
Things change if the scheme is closed to new members, and I don't know much about that situation.
--AS
The same for closed to new members again from personal experience. You obviously know your stuff in this area @AlwaysSinging Is this what you do? In my case it's bitter experience.
Judging by tweets this am from likes of Steve Swinford and Times Radio, there is a split in government.
Business departments are telling companies that being pinged and isolating is only guidance, whereas Johnson and co at the top are telling people they must do it unless a worker who is exempted (e.g. NHS critical staff).
What a f*cking mess.
There's been plenty of PBers deleting the app so here's a question:
How many workers have still got the app and how many non-workers have still got the app ?
If its the former then perhaps its because they're not averse to having a week off work 'isolating' in the lovely weather.
Ministers have written to major manufacturers emphasising that staff are not legally obliged to isolate if pinged by app
Lord Grimstone, investment minister, told one large employer that app was only an ‘advisory tool’ and that people were not under any ‘legal duty’
So does the government think Boris & Rishi do not need to self-isolate the day after they decided they did need to self-isolate after they'd previously decided they did not need to self-isolate? Glad they've cleared that up.
No because they were contacted by NHS Test and Trace which is law. The app is guidance only.
A SCANDAL on a UK train running from England to Scotland, but not on a bus in Aberdeen:
Enforced social distancing measures have been lifted on First Buses in the city, meaning that for the first time in 16 months you can sit wherever you like on a bus.
A potential neat solution ot the pensionsers/NI problem would be to make them subject to the 2% band that kicks in at about £50k, thus only affecting the wealthiest. Wouldn't raise much but would be good politics.
Excellent header, CycleFree. A question that interests me a lot, too.
Not a lot for Starmer to work with in that list. He can't for example get Brexit more done. Meanwhile he offers government that is honest, competent and decent. Whether he would actually deliver is another matter, but the typical Conservative voter doesn't seem interested in any of that. Not sure where he, or an alternative, would go from here.
Ministers have written to major manufacturers emphasising that staff are not legally obliged to isolate if pinged by app
Lord Grimstone, investment minister, told one large employer that app was only an ‘advisory tool’ and that people were not under any ‘legal duty’
So does the government think Boris & Rishi do not need to self-isolate the day after they decided they did need to self-isolate after they'd previously decided they did not need to self-isolate? Glad they've cleared that up.
The government doesn't think they need to isolate as they are both in a trial for testing every day rather than isolation, having been selected at random.
Sadly, for them the public backlash over this revelation meant they had to leave the trial after two hours and join the rest of us in Pingdom.
On @Cyclefree piece, which is very good - all good points.
But, for me, I am still left utterly bewildered that a government is such a mess, making so many mistakes every single day, switching policies on what seems an hourly basis has been given a total free pass by the public. No sign of mid term blues and an opposition pick up the polls.
Have we ever seen such a situation in recent times? Did even Thatch not have mid term blues?
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
I'm with you. I have no intention of showing a "passport" to go anywhere, except to cross an international border.
What makes an international border different?
Quite right Charles. Why shouldn't your party be able to make us show our papers if we want to enter Kent for example?
Good point, but all this stuff reads like inferior 1984 fanfic. No, a vaccine passport is not a gateway to internal barriers or a show us your papers society, any more than a driving licence credit card membership card mot certificate or railway ticket is. And the battle you think you are fighting is lost anyway, why on earth would a government be arsed with something as quaint as ID papers when it has phone tracking, credit card tracking and facial ID? I'm not saying those are good things, they are terrible, I am saying they exist. The police state has no more interest in ID papers than it has in breeding extra fast horses to overtake speeding motorists.
I chose Kent because the government have already introduced a law requiring truck drivers to show their papers to enter Kent. Yes it was a shambles that was dropped after 4 months. But they actually did it.
I have no objection in principle to an ID card that bundles together a driving license and passport that can be used to prove identity. I do have an objection to the government wanting to track my every move or require me to produce paperwork to move around my own country doing legal things.
"They haven't done that" I hear the Clown Apologists bleating. Yes they have. I need to apply for permission to send goods to NI, declare to government if I bring larger amounts of cash into NI, provide evidence of vaccinations and microchipping on a pet passport to take my dog to NI.
There is no longer a thin end of the wedge for this government. They're already doing it. Which is why the Covid Passport scheme is something that needs to be stopped. Because they won't stop there.
You keep harping on about Northern Ireland but when are you going to grasp that most British voters don't care about Northern Ireland?
NI is another land, that don't even get polled in British opinion polls and don't vote for British parties. If they have special arrangements that mean that bombs don't go off, and if those arrangements are conditional upon their local politicians wanting them to continue, then why should British voters who vote for British parties care?
That doesn't mean they're "not going to stop" and introduce things that piss off British voters.
Sounding dangerously like HYUFD there with the "governments act solely in the interest of those who vote for them" shtick. Caring about the Irish does not, I quite agree, come instinctively, but we are still obliged to do it.
Not at all. Governments in a democracy realistically act in the interests of all who do vote for them and may vote for them.
The difference between what I'm saying and what HYUFD says is that HYUFD wants to tell those who could vote Tory, or have voted non-Tory [like myself] in the past to f**k off. What I'm saying is that the government needs to attract voters as well as help those who voted for them.
The problem with Northern Ireland is they've ostracised themselves by the way they vote. Not only do they contribute zero MPs to the government, they realistically can contribute zero MPs no matter the result of the next election.
That's not the case in Britain. Its only natural for governments in a democracy to respond to the wishes of voters. That's why we have democracy!
They govern for everybody, or have no business being in politics.
Excellent header, CycleFree. A question that interests me a lot, too.
Not a lot for Starmer to work with in that list. He can't for example get Brexit more done. Meanwhile he offers government that is honest, competent and decent. Whether he would actually deliver is another matter, but the typical Conservative voter doesn't seem interested in any of that. Not sure where he, or an alternative, would go from here.
Yup. Once the Great British Public decide that they do want government that is honest, competent and decent, Starmer makes a lot of sense. He's not perfect, but he's broadly in the zone. And until the GBP do decide that's what they want, there's not much the opposition can do except Keep Buggering On. As Dorothy Parker put it
Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.
The Standard asks the questions that matter about yesterday's demo. Lucky online trolls don't affect British voters!!
Videos from the protest have been shared online by several discredited conspiracy theorist and far-right Twitter accounts.
Despite the signs and placards promoting various unfounded conspiracy theories, it is unclear what has prompted an anti-lockdown demonstration on the day lockdown ended in the UK.
However, a number of protestors appear to be registering their opposition to the Covid vaccine, which has saved millions of lives across the globe.
GB News viewers will have seen: "A woman shouted “Nazi paedo protector w****rs” at the camera as reporter Tom Harwood was trying to describe the violent scenes to Mr Farage back in the studio."
Judging by tweets this am from likes of Steve Swinford and Times Radio, there is a split in government.
Business departments are telling companies that being pinged and isolating is only guidance, whereas Johnson and co at the top are telling people they must do it unless a worker who is exempted (e.g. NHS critical staff).
What a f*cking mess.
The use of the word "exemption" which is all over the press is rubbish messaging although to be fair I'm not sure that either Boris Johnson or Nadhim Zahawi have used it. Not spreading the lergy is supposed to be primarily a social duty, in the same sense that if your hobby is throwing tomahawks you obviously shouldn't do it near a children's playground, or anywhere else where you might endanger people, without any concept of "exemption" putting in an appearance.
The practice of exemption is also rubbish. The country's defences must be utterly shitty if food would run out and hospitals stop being able to cope owing to such a minuscule amount of slack among lorry drivers and nurses. Imagine if there were a real crisis or a war or something.
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
The idea of penalising DB public sector schemes should be a non starter as it raises significant problems of fairness. I have been on a DB scheme having been in the public sector recently. It is nowhere near as good as the historic DB schemes that some of my older colleagues were on. If you add up the contributions vs the likely payments, whether I will do better than being on a contribution based scheme will simply depend on how long I live after retirement age. As far as I can work out it will be a bonanza if I live to 100 but a disaster if I die at 70. All in all it just seems like a pretty stupid system.
It's not. It averages the risk of you living to 100 with a sufficiently large pool of those who won't so that you have a guaranteed income for your remaining life, however long that proves to be. Defined contribution schemes mean that your beneficiaries may well get a lump sum of "unspent" pension money (provided you haven't bought an annuity with the capital) but also runs the risk that you run out of money before you die.
Those on higher incomes may well do better under the second option but for those on average incomes or below the first option is a very sensible sharing of risk. It is the premise on which our pensions industry is based.
Isnt this pooling of risk ultimately what the state pension is, though? It has risen to the point where it provides a decent basic income every month in retirement.
From my point of view it just didn't seem like a particularly good deal, paying hundreds of pounds every month in to a scheme which may never pay anything out if I die prematurely.
Above all, I had a sneaking suspicion that the money will never materialise because of political interference.
Not really because the State Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Those who delude themselves into thinking that they paid for it by paying NI conveniently ignore the fact that they elected governments who spent their contributions rather than saving them. They spent those contributions in part paying the previous generation's pensions for which no provision had been paid either. The State Pension is paid by the current workforce, not the previous one.
I was involved in a case a few years ago now with a fund manager who was accused of mis selling pensions to people encouraged to come out of a final salary scheme. Several things became apparent. For high net worth individuals pensions are largely an Inheritance tax dodge. There is no real intention of spending the pension fund, it is simply a tax free way of transferring large lump sums to the next generation.
Secondly, those who have the benefit of final salary indexed linked pensions have something genuinely platinum plated which requires exceptional performance to achieve in your own fund. Public sector employees who have the benefit of such schemes seriously underestimate what those rights are worth when comparing their package with a private sector fixed contribution equivalent. The current generation of pensioners are likely to be the richest ever. The rights they have been given simply cannot be funded in a normal working life.
Which leads me back to my original point - tax DB pension income at rates of 30% and 50%. It would be impossible to avoid and would raise significant money for social care primarily from the people who will need it.
It's morally justifiable. It's economically justifiable. It's political suicide and will never happen.
I really don't think it is morally justifiable. I agree it's political suicide.
(Disclosure - I have a tax-payer funded DB pension scheme from three years at the start of my career in the civil service. It was ridiculously generous still - I got in before changes were made - but 1/40th or whatever it was of the final salary is not a huge amount, I have accumulated much more in less generous pensions, so 30-50% tax on it would not horrify me personally, from a financial point of view).
The thing is, the generous public sector pensions were part of the deal, part of the reason people took jobs there and certainly a large part of the reason they stayed. They made it hard to leave. They made people stay without the need to raise salaries as much. Taxing them at 30-50% is fine if you also retrospectively tax, say, career bonuses for those in the private sector at 30-50% and employee healthcare schemes, share options etc etc (i.e. all other instances where people received non-salary perks that were part of the package).
You also should not raid privately funded DB schemes (I suspect you weren't including those anyway?). These have to, in theory, at least, fund themselves so the contributions are similar to a DC scheme that would offer similar benefits, albeit with greater certainty (much lower downside risk, but also no upside possibilities). Combined USS contribution rates at the moment are ~30% of salary - I've done back of the envelope calcs that suggest at average life expectancy I might get close to getting back what I put in (assuming, for simplicity, no inflation, but also no investment growth - a competently managed DC scheme should easily outstrip inflation, of course).
I would not go as far as Max on this but I would certainly incorporate NI into IT so that it is paid on all earnings, pensions and dividends at the same rates.
A potential neat solution ot the pensionsers/NI problem would be to make them subject to the 2% band that kicks in at about £50k, thus only affecting the wealthiest. Wouldn't raise much but would be good politics.
I haven't seen the details, but I don't see how it is other than short term sticking plaster to cover Johnson's arse.
How is 1% on NI going to raise the billions that are needed for social care unless most of the costs are still borne by the people in care and their families? The NI will help fix some of the most urgent local government social care finance crisis but that's it imho.
Bright and sunny again this morning, but the sun is one of the few bright spots. Ms Cyclefree more or less suggests we're in a situation where the only prospect of a change of government is a palace revolution, similar to that which we saw in 2019, when Johnson took over and drove a coach and horses through the established Parliamentary processes. She's right, of course, that the old Labour support structure has crumbled; I've always felt that the 1944 Education Act had a lot to do with that. John Prescott and his brother do, I think, exemplify the situation. Two reasonably able lads, but John failed the 11+ and found his place in the world through the trade union movement. His brother passed and has led a quiet, 'responsible' life, not needing to prove himself. What we haven't yet got in the UK is proper representation for the thousands of people who've found zero hours contracts, or 'self employment' as the options to feed their families. No-one seems to care about them. Why are food banks necessary. Why, in a modern European state is there such a poor safety net for those who, perhaps from no fault of their own fall out of the system? More to the point, why are those who do fall through maligned as scourgers and treated nearly as badly as their ancestors were under the Poor Laws?
IMV education has a lot to do with this. I've told tis story before, but I knew two men from South Yorkshire who grew up in the late 70s. At school (different ones), they were both told that it was pointless educating them as they would both end up in the mines. Both did - although as surface workers. By the mid-1990s, both had been medicalled off after a couple of decades of work, if that. Both families were poor.
So far, so sh*t. They both had children. One had two: he and his wife were keen on education, and one child went to university, whilst the other works in a civil service job. The other man also had two kids; his daughter has AIUI never worked, and now has multiple kids, and is becoming a grandmother in her late thirties. A lovely lass, wit oodles of potential sitting unrealised.
Education has to be first and foremost in the national psyche. It won't help the current generations, but will help later ones. And it's not just a pointless mantra of 'education, education, education'. We all have to want to educate and inform our kids. Let them know that whilst they may never be the next Einstein, Gauss or Dickens, education and learning can have their own rewards.
We have a country where functional illiteracy and innumeracy rates have remains stubbornly around the 20% level for decades. This has to change.
Hugely true. This is the real tragedy of the "fuck education" policy of this government - instead of trying to transform the failings of the past it is doubling down. School failing? Slash its budget? Kids struggling? Let them starve? Parents not showing interest in education? Tell the the exams are too easy and the teachers are cheating them.
Literally the only way to lift people out of poverty long term is through education. It shouldn't matter that you grew up with nothing because the state will give you a top quality education and all the support you need to stick with it. Except that it doesn't do either. A starter for 10 is the crumbling school buildings in so many inner city schools. There had been a transformation in school facilities under Labour, axed without mercy by the Tories. Its back to the "why spend money on future criminals" mentality.
I don't think crumbling school buildings have that much to do with it. Certainly Blair's governments spent billions on school buildings and I don't think it improved standards at the bottom end that much.
It's parents and parenting - a societal problem. Education has to be central; schools help, but so many homes don't even have books in them. I'd like to see more funding go to adult literacy and numeracy - not middle-class writing courses, but giving adults who missed out the basic skills they need, so they can teach their kids in turn.
Realistically the state can't close the gap between those kids with parents who read with them at home and those that don't. It can try, but the gap is immense.
I agree. But we can try to help. When we had a little 'un, we got a new-baby pack from the council. Inside was a leaflet stating that if you did not have any books in the house, you could get some from these places. There were also two books ("My first book" and an Elmer the Elephant one). As middle-class parents, we were amazed at the concept of not having books in the house. As part of our preparations, we had ought some baby books (and nursery rhyme ones) before he was born.
So, how to help? If parents cannot read, encourage them to enrol on an adult literacy course. That leaflet and those free books were a great idea. Perhaps we could even do something online, like an interactive BBC Bedtime Story.
But we cannot continue the way we have been. In the long term, we need to get illiteracy and innumeracy for young adults (post-school) down to well below ten percent.
Do you listen to the news on BBC Radio 4? Hardly two minutes goes by without a newsreader scanning what he's reading wrong because he doesn't have the required level of familiarity with grammar. And these are people who are professionally employed to read fairly simple material out loud.
Yes. Regional accents good, bad grammar bad. Ditching RP should not mean abandoning good speech.
There is a newish contingent of female only commentators on R4 news with strong regional accents. They appear to have been told to spin out their pieces beyond essential newsworthy information and to exaggerate their accents. Some of them have also been given license to present as if they are 'comedians' with wry pauses and emphases, e.g. one Jessica Parker. Enough. Disgruntled of Morningside.
Every significant tax increase or big tax change is political suicide. Every group can say it was part of the deal as they understood it. We need to raise taxes, particularly if we dont want immigration to change our demographic age curve.
Only when enough people agree on the above can we start a sensible discussion about what tax changes are least unfair.
There are quite a few tax increases which are popular. But they are unpopular with the wealthy and powerful.
It's notable that just 11% of conservative voters say "total wealth should not be taxed", a majority are fine with a wealth tax above 2m.
Removing the ludicrous higher rate pensions relief would also save billions and I suspect would not prove that unpopular (apparently 74% don't understand pensions relief or even know it exists!).
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
I'm with you. I have no intention of showing a "passport" to go anywhere, except to cross an international border.
What makes an international border different?
Quite right Charles. Why shouldn't your party be able to make us show our papers if we want to enter Kent for example?
Good point, but all this stuff reads like inferior 1984 fanfic. No, a vaccine passport is not a gateway to internal barriers or a show us your papers society, any more than a driving licence credit card membership card mot certificate or railway ticket is. And the battle you think you are fighting is lost anyway, why on earth would a government be arsed with something as quaint as ID papers when it has phone tracking, credit card tracking and facial ID? I'm not saying those are good things, they are terrible, I am saying they exist. The police state has no more interest in ID papers than it has in breeding extra fast horses to overtake speeding motorists.
I chose Kent because the government have already introduced a law requiring truck drivers to show their papers to enter Kent. Yes it was a shambles that was dropped after 4 months. But they actually did it.
I have no objection in principle to an ID card that bundles together a driving license and passport that can be used to prove identity. I do have an objection to the government wanting to track my every move or require me to produce paperwork to move around my own country doing legal things.
"They haven't done that" I hear the Clown Apologists bleating. Yes they have. I need to apply for permission to send goods to NI, declare to government if I bring larger amounts of cash into NI, provide evidence of vaccinations and microchipping on a pet passport to take my dog to NI.
There is no longer a thin end of the wedge for this government. They're already doing it. Which is why the Covid Passport scheme is something that needs to be stopped. Because they won't stop there.
You keep harping on about Northern Ireland but when are you going to grasp that most British voters don't care about Northern Ireland?
NI is another land, that don't even get polled in British opinion polls and don't vote for British parties. If they have special arrangements that mean that bombs don't go off, and if those arrangements are conditional upon their local politicians wanting them to continue, then why should British voters who vote for British parties care?
That doesn't mean they're "not going to stop" and introduce things that piss off British voters.
Sounding dangerously like HYUFD there with the "governments act solely in the interest of those who vote for them" shtick. Caring about the Irish does not, I quite agree, come instinctively, but we are still obliged to do it.
That could be the biggest change in British politics over the past decade or so. It is assumed that a party with a majority need pay no heed to those who didn't vote for it. Of course politically it is accurate, but as a political philosophy it is I believe deeply flawed.
Most keenly observed of course with the EURef. The victors treated it like a GE whereby they didn't need to pay any attention to the losing side, whereas had they done, we might be in a better place than we are now.
Not quite. The Tories have only made progress in WWC seats by paying attention to people who traditionally didn't vote for them. Also, if you look at the very long term, the Tories almost never suggest that those who don't vote for them are morally or politically somehow defective or sub optimal. This is a very stark contrast with the 'Please, Tory vermin who I would never kiss, vote for the candidate who thinks you are scum'.
As someone who votes Labour in local elections (voting personally for people I know and respect), this is one of the greatest obstacles, entirely self-created, to voting for them in a GE.
That's to get their vote. They don't pay attention once in power to those that didn't vote for them.
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
I'm with you. I have no intention of showing a "passport" to go anywhere, except to cross an international border.
What makes an international border different?
Quite right Charles. Why shouldn't your party be able to make us show our papers if we want to enter Kent for example?
Good point, but all this stuff reads like inferior 1984 fanfic. No, a vaccine passport is not a gateway to internal barriers or a show us your papers society, any more than a driving licence credit card membership card mot certificate or railway ticket is. And the battle you think you are fighting is lost anyway, why on earth would a government be arsed with something as quaint as ID papers when it has phone tracking, credit card tracking and facial ID? I'm not saying those are good things, they are terrible, I am saying they exist. The police state has no more interest in ID papers than it has in breeding extra fast horses to overtake speeding motorists.
I chose Kent because the government have already introduced a law requiring truck drivers to show their papers to enter Kent. Yes it was a shambles that was dropped after 4 months. But they actually did it.
I have no objection in principle to an ID card that bundles together a driving license and passport that can be used to prove identity. I do have an objection to the government wanting to track my every move or require me to produce paperwork to move around my own country doing legal things.
"They haven't done that" I hear the Clown Apologists bleating. Yes they have. I need to apply for permission to send goods to NI, declare to government if I bring larger amounts of cash into NI, provide evidence of vaccinations and microchipping on a pet passport to take my dog to NI.
There is no longer a thin end of the wedge for this government. They're already doing it. Which is why the Covid Passport scheme is something that needs to be stopped. Because they won't stop there.
You keep harping on about Northern Ireland but when are you going to grasp that most British voters don't care about Northern Ireland?
NI is another land, that don't even get polled in British opinion polls and don't vote for British parties. If they have special arrangements that mean that bombs don't go off, and if those arrangements are conditional upon their local politicians wanting them to continue, then why should British voters who vote for British parties care?
That doesn't mean they're "not going to stop" and introduce things that piss off British voters.
Sounding dangerously like HYUFD there with the "governments act solely in the interest of those who vote for them" shtick. Caring about the Irish does not, I quite agree, come instinctively, but we are still obliged to do it.
Not at all. Governments in a democracy realistically act in the interests of all who do vote for them and may vote for them.
The difference between what I'm saying and what HYUFD says is that HYUFD wants to tell those who could vote Tory, or have voted non-Tory [like myself] in the past to f**k off. What I'm saying is that the government needs to attract voters as well as help those who voted for them.
The problem with Northern Ireland is they've ostracised themselves by the way they vote. Not only do they contribute zero MPs to the government, they realistically can contribute zero MPs no matter the result of the next election.
That's not the case in Britain. Its only natural for governments in a democracy to respond to the wishes of voters. That's why we have democracy!
Good govt should govern for all and not just their potential voters, but I do take you point as we are talking reality not theroy.
Re out discussion the other day on the merits of our democracy. I think you will agree that we both put forward equally valid arguments but differed in our opinion on the impact.. There was something on the news this morning supporting my view, although rather weakened by the fact it was from Cummings. Rather than being influenced by Starmer"s argument re the lockdown Boris was anti it and one reason was just to be opposite to Starmer. Ok only one point but supports my argument and opposes yours.
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
I'm with you. I have no intention of showing a "passport" to go anywhere, except to cross an international border.
What makes an international border different?
Quite right Charles. Why shouldn't your party be able to make us show our papers if we want to enter Kent for example?
Well actually if it was down to me I would have been in Schengen so no, I would rather not have to show a passport at all. But we never were, and voted to take back (keep?) control, and border policies are also set by other countries over which I have no say.
Judging by tweets this am from likes of Steve Swinford and Times Radio, there is a split in government.
Business departments are telling companies that being pinged and isolating is only guidance, whereas Johnson and co at the top are telling people they must do it unless a worker who is exempted (e.g. NHS critical staff).
What a f*cking mess.
App is guidance only. NHS test and trace is law.
Imagine that is the cause of confusion.
I must confess that if I was pinged by the App the first thing I would do is have a PCR test. And if that was negative I would be very reluctant to self isolate (being double vaxxed) unless I too started to feel unwell after the test. My understanding is that I would only be legally obliged to if contacted by T&T. But who knows any more? Its beyond an average lawyer like me to work out.
Every significant tax increase or big tax change is political suicide. Every group can say it was part of the deal as they understood it. We need to raise taxes, particularly if we dont want immigration to change our demographic age curve.
Only when enough people agree on the above can we start a sensible discussion about what tax changes are least unfair.
There are quite a few tax increases which are popular. But they are unpopular with the wealthy and powerful.
It's notable that just 11% of conservative voters say "total wealth should not be taxed", a majority are fine with a wealth tax above 2m.
Removing the ludicrous higher rate pensions relief would also save billions and I suspect would not prove that unpopular (apparently 74% don't understand pensions relief or even know it exists!).
Every significant tax increase or big tax change is political suicide. Every group can say it was part of the deal as they understood it. We need to raise taxes, particularly if we dont want immigration to change our demographic age curve.
Only when enough people agree on the above can we start a sensible discussion about what tax changes are least unfair.
There are quite a few tax increases which are popular. But they are unpopular with the wealthy and powerful.
It's notable that just 11% of conservative voters say "total wealth should not be taxed", a majority are fine with a wealth tax above 2m.
Removing the ludicrous higher rate pensions relief would also save billions and I suspect would not prove that unpopular (apparently 74% don't understand pensions relief or even know it exists!).
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
The idea of penalising DB public sector schemes should be a non starter as it raises significant problems of fairness. I have been on a DB scheme having been in the public sector recently. It is nowhere near as good as the historic DB schemes that some of my older colleagues were on. If you add up the contributions vs the likely payments, whether I will do better than being on a contribution based scheme will simply depend on how long I live after retirement age. As far as I can work out it will be a bonanza if I live to 100 but a disaster if I die at 70. All in all it just seems like a pretty stupid system.
It's not. It averages the risk of you living to 100 with a sufficiently large pool of those who won't so that you have a guaranteed income for your remaining life, however long that proves to be. Defined contribution schemes mean that your beneficiaries may well get a lump sum of "unspent" pension money (provided you haven't bought an annuity with the capital) but also runs the risk that you run out of money before you die.
Those on higher incomes may well do better under the second option but for those on average incomes or below the first option is a very sensible sharing of risk. It is the premise on which our pensions industry is based.
Isnt this pooling of risk ultimately what the state pension is, though? It has risen to the point where it provides a decent basic income every month in retirement.
From my point of view it just didn't seem like a particularly good deal, paying hundreds of pounds every month in to a scheme which may never pay anything out if I die prematurely.
Above all, I had a sneaking suspicion that the money will never materialise because of political interference.
Not really because the State Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Those who delude themselves into thinking that they paid for it by paying NI conveniently ignore the fact that they elected governments who spent their contributions rather than saving them. They spent those contributions in part paying the previous generation's pensions for which no provision had been paid either. The State Pension is paid by the current workforce, not the previous one.
I was involved in a case a few years ago now with a fund manager who was accused of mis selling pensions to people encouraged to come out of a final salary scheme. Several things became apparent. For high net worth individuals pensions are largely an Inheritance tax dodge. There is no real intention of spending the pension fund, it is simply a tax free way of transferring large lump sums to the next generation.
Secondly, those who have the benefit of final salary indexed linked pensions have something genuinely platinum plated which requires exceptional performance to achieve in your own fund. Public sector employees who have the benefit of such schemes seriously underestimate what those rights are worth when comparing their package with a private sector fixed contribution equivalent. The current generation of pensioners are likely to be the richest ever. The rights they have been given simply cannot be funded in a normal working life.
Which leads me back to my original point - tax DB pension income at rates of 30% and 50%. It would be impossible to avoid and would raise significant money for social care primarily from the people who will need it.
It's morally justifiable. It's economically justifiable. It's political suicide and will never happen.
I really don't think it is morally justifiable. I agree it's political suicide.
(Disclosure - I have a tax-payer funded DB pension scheme from three years at the start of my career in the civil service. It was ridiculously generous still - I got in before changes were made - but 1/40th or whatever it was of the final salary is not a huge amount, I have accumulated much more in less generous pensions, so 30-50% tax on it would not horrify me personally, from a financial point of view).
The thing is, the generous public sector pensions were part of the deal, part of the reason people took jobs there and certainly a large part of the reason they stayed. They made it hard to leave. They made people stay without the need to raise salaries as much. Taxing them at 30-50% is fine if you also retrospectively tax, say, career bonuses for those in the private sector at 30-50% and employee healthcare schemes, share options etc etc (i.e. all other instances where people received non-salary perks that were part of the package).
You also should not raid privately funded DB schemes (I suspect you weren't including those anyway?). These have to, in theory, at least, fund themselves so the contributions are similar to a DC scheme that would offer similar benefits, albeit with greater certainty (much lower downside risk, but also no upside possibilities). Combined USS contribution rates at the moment are ~30% of salary - I've done back of the envelope calcs that suggest at average life expectancy I might get close to getting back what I put in (assuming, for simplicity, no inflation, but also no investment growth - a competently managed DC scheme should easily outstrip inflation, of course).
Every significant tax increase or big tax change is political suicide. Every group can say it was part of the deal as they understood it. We need to raise taxes, particularly if we dont immigration to change our demographic age curve.
Only when enough people agree on the above can we start a sensible discussion about what tax changes are least unfair.
I've no moral proble with screwing everyone over equally. Hence I'm happy if the idea was to retrospectively tax all non-salary employment benefits for everyone.
Would it be fair, instead, to retrospectively tax everyone who had a company car before, say 1990? Didn't company cars used to be a real tax loophole?
The reality is it is not possible to screw everyone over equally. And anyway should those struggling be screwed over as much as those who have benefited from ultra low inflation and indeed covid economics? Should we try and restore where people were in 2019 or 2007?
Nothing is going to be fair to everyone from every perspective. As a society that is understood and broadly accepted for existing structures of tax and rules, yet we really struggle to grasp that it must be the same for future changes as well. Our job is to find something pragmatic and not too unfair, not something that is fair. The search for unicorns just leads to dither and ongoing delay.
No, I agree that those struggling should be protected. Look at tax changes on income, wealth, NI. What I don't think is particularly fair is preferentially targeting people by source of income/wealth, although I accept there will alsoways be winners and losers. Say person A has a great pension, person B instead built up a large property portfolio and lives off the rental income. If both have similar income/wealth then I'd like both to pay similar. Raid the DB pensions or screw the landlords is an easy answer, but as you say it actually needs a much bigger discussion about what is fair.
Judging by tweets this am from likes of Steve Swinford and Times Radio, there is a split in government.
Business departments are telling companies that being pinged and isolating is only guidance, whereas Johnson and co at the top are telling people they must do it unless a worker who is exempted (e.g. NHS critical staff).
What a f*cking mess.
App is guidance only. NHS test and trace is law.
Imagine that is the cause of confusion.
I must confess that if I was pinged by the App the first thing I would do is have a PCR test. And if that was negative I would be very reluctant to self isolate (being double vaxxed) unless I too started to feel unwell after the test. My understanding is that I would only be legally obliged to if contacted by T&T. But who knows any more? Its beyond an average lawyer like me to work out.
In England that is correct, and I would do the same. Not sure if it is different in Scotland.
Bright and sunny again this morning, but the sun is one of the few bright spots. Ms Cyclefree more or less suggests we're in a situation where the only prospect of a change of government is a palace revolution, similar to that which we saw in 2019, when Johnson took over and drove a coach and horses through the established Parliamentary processes. She's right, of course, that the old Labour support structure has crumbled; I've always felt that the 1944 Education Act had a lot to do with that. John Prescott and his brother do, I think, exemplify the situation. Two reasonably able lads, but John failed the 11+ and found his place in the world through the trade union movement. His brother passed and has led a quiet, 'responsible' life, not needing to prove himself. What we haven't yet got in the UK is proper representation for the thousands of people who've found zero hours contracts, or 'self employment' as the options to feed their families. No-one seems to care about them. Why are food banks necessary. Why, in a modern European state is there such a poor safety net for those who, perhaps from no fault of their own fall out of the system? More to the point, why are those who do fall through maligned as scourgers and treated nearly as badly as their ancestors were under the Poor Laws?
IMV education has a lot to do with this. I've told tis story before, but I knew two men from South Yorkshire who grew up in the late 70s. At school (different ones), they were both told that it was pointless educating them as they would both end up in the mines. Both did - although as surface workers. By the mid-1990s, both had been medicalled off after a couple of decades of work, if that. Both families were poor.
So far, so sh*t. They both had children. One had two: he and his wife were keen on education, and one child went to university, whilst the other works in a civil service job. The other man also had two kids; his daughter has AIUI never worked, and now has multiple kids, and is becoming a grandmother in her late thirties. A lovely lass, wit oodles of potential sitting unrealised.
Education has to be first and foremost in the national psyche. It won't help the current generations, but will help later ones. And it's not just a pointless mantra of 'education, education, education'. We all have to want to educate and inform our kids. Let them know that whilst they may never be the next Einstein, Gauss or Dickens, education and learning can have their own rewards.
We have a country where functional illiteracy and innumeracy rates have remains stubbornly around the 20% level for decades. This has to change.
Hugely true. This is the real tragedy of the "fuck education" policy of this government - instead of trying to transform the failings of the past it is doubling down. School failing? Slash its budget? Kids struggling? Let them starve? Parents not showing interest in education? Tell the the exams are too easy and the teachers are cheating them.
Literally the only way to lift people out of poverty long term is through education. It shouldn't matter that you grew up with nothing because the state will give you a top quality education and all the support you need to stick with it. Except that it doesn't do either. A starter for 10 is the crumbling school buildings in so many inner city schools. There had been a transformation in school facilities under Labour, axed without mercy by the Tories. Its back to the "why spend money on future criminals" mentality.
I don't think crumbling school buildings have that much to do with it. Certainly Blair's governments spent billions on school buildings and I don't think it improved standards at the bottom end that much.
It's parents and parenting - a societal problem. Education has to be central; schools help, but so many homes don't even have books in them. I'd like to see more funding go to adult literacy and numeracy - not middle-class writing courses, but giving adults who missed out the basic skills they need, so they can teach their kids in turn.
Realistically the state can't close the gap between those kids with parents who read with them at home and those that don't. It can try, but the gap is immense.
I agree. But we can try to help. When we had a little 'un, we got a new-baby pack from the council. Inside was a leaflet stating that if you did not have any books in the house, you could get some from these places. There were also two books ("My first book" and an Elmer the Elephant one). As middle-class parents, we were amazed at the concept of not having books in the house. As part of our preparations, we had ought some baby books (and nursery rhyme ones) before he was born.
So, how to help? If parents cannot read, encourage them to enrol on an adult literacy course. That leaflet and those free books were a great idea. Perhaps we could even do something online, like an interactive BBC Bedtime Story.
But we cannot continue the way we have been. In the long term, we need to get illiteracy and innumeracy for young adults (post-school) down to well below ten percent. From an economics POV, I guess that'll add a few percent onto GDP in the long term ?
Granddaughter Two was born in Thailand. Her parents, one Thai, one not, had a similar pack, in Thai or course, from the Thaksin government, plus a leaflet explaining the vaccination programme and a toy designed to encourage eye-hand co-ordination. Apparently that was a standard procedure.
By the time her sisters arrived, in the same hospital, Thaksin was out and the pack had been discontinued.
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
I'm with you. I have no intention of showing a "passport" to go anywhere, except to cross an international border.
What makes an international border different?
Quite right Charles. Why shouldn't your party be able to make us show our papers if we want to enter Kent for example?
Good point, but all this stuff reads like inferior 1984 fanfic. No, a vaccine passport is not a gateway to internal barriers or a show us your papers society, any more than a driving licence credit card membership card mot certificate or railway ticket is. And the battle you think you are fighting is lost anyway, why on earth would a government be arsed with something as quaint as ID papers when it has phone tracking, credit card tracking and facial ID? I'm not saying those are good things, they are terrible, I am saying they exist. The police state has no more interest in ID papers than it has in breeding extra fast horses to overtake speeding motorists.
I chose Kent because the government have already introduced a law requiring truck drivers to show their papers to enter Kent. Yes it was a shambles that was dropped after 4 months. But they actually did it.
I have no objection in principle to an ID card that bundles together a driving license and passport that can be used to prove identity. I do have an objection to the government wanting to track my every move or require me to produce paperwork to move around my own country doing legal things.
"They haven't done that" I hear the Clown Apologists bleating. Yes they have. I need to apply for permission to send goods to NI, declare to government if I bring larger amounts of cash into NI, provide evidence of vaccinations and microchipping on a pet passport to take my dog to NI.
There is no longer a thin end of the wedge for this government. They're already doing it. Which is why the Covid Passport scheme is something that needs to be stopped. Because they won't stop there.
You keep harping on about Northern Ireland but when are you going to grasp that most British voters don't care about Northern Ireland?
NI is another land, that don't even get polled in British opinion polls and don't vote for British parties. If they have special arrangements that mean that bombs don't go off, and if those arrangements are conditional upon their local politicians wanting them to continue, then why should British voters who vote for British parties care?
That doesn't mean they're "not going to stop" and introduce things that piss off British voters.
Sounding dangerously like HYUFD there with the "governments act solely in the interest of those who vote for them" shtick. Caring about the Irish does not, I quite agree, come instinctively, but we are still obliged to do it.
Not at all. Governments in a democracy realistically act in the interests of all who do vote for them and may vote for them.
The difference between what I'm saying and what HYUFD says is that HYUFD wants to tell those who could vote Tory, or have voted non-Tory [like myself] in the past to f**k off. What I'm saying is that the government needs to attract voters as well as help those who voted for them.
The problem with Northern Ireland is they've ostracised themselves by the way they vote. Not only do they contribute zero MPs to the government, they realistically can contribute zero MPs no matter the result of the next election.
That's not the case in Britain. Its only natural for governments in a democracy to respond to the wishes of voters. That's why we have democracy!
It was only because of DUP support in 2017 the Tories stayed in power.
Now Corbyn has gone and Starmer has said he opposes a united Ireland and there is a border in the Irish Sea there is no guarantee the DUP will support the Tories again if there is hung parliament after the next general election
To take a little test case: What is Labour's policy on the NI/GB/EU border/single market dilemma? I don't know. Does anyone?
I believe the Labour Party supports aligning to SM standards, which largely resolves the Irish border issue, and helps at Dover too.
Yes, that's right. We favour pragmatic cooperation over standards on which Britain largely agrees with the EU anyway, in order to solve these issues, over the theoretical sovreignty of being able to reduce standards on something, which nobody admits to wanting to do. What (just as a matter of interest) is your view of that, algarkirk?
The downside, to be frank, is that it makes it harder to waive standards in order to get a US trade deal - for example, if we decided we wanted to let in chlorinated chicken after all. But a US deal appears to have receded into the distance as Biden's fast-track authority has expired.
The fact that you didn't know illustrates the problems of opposition. "Shadow Trade Minister explains what Labour would do about standard alignment if elected in 2023" has zero chance of media coverage, and it's not very sexy for a local leaflet either. On the other handm we can't reeasonably expect you to write to Starmer to find out. So how (failing PB as the Source of All Wisdom) do we make a clear and sensible policy on a fairly technical subject actually known?
Every significant tax increase or big tax change is political suicide. Every group can say it was part of the deal as they understood it. We need to raise taxes, particularly if we dont want immigration to change our demographic age curve.
Only when enough people agree on the above can we start a sensible discussion about what tax changes are least unfair.
There are quite a few tax increases which are popular. But they are unpopular with the wealthy and powerful.
It's notable that just 11% of conservative voters say "total wealth should not be taxed", a majority are fine with a wealth tax above 2m.
Removing the ludicrous higher rate pensions relief would also save billions and I suspect would not prove that unpopular (apparently 74% don't understand pensions relief or even know it exists!).
Basically for the average Brit, tax rises are fine as long as it is only the rich paying them not them
And laws are fine as long as they are for other people.
I suspect the British aren't uniquely awful in this respect.
Not quite the same thing, most Brits don't murder or steal, however they do want to keep most of their own money and not give most of it to the government
Ha. With Labour still being as it is and the idiot in Number 10, I might end up voting Lib Dem. Gosh.
I really despise ID cards and vaccine passports.
"Illiberal and incoherent" are just boo words, though. There's a libertarian case in favour of some versions of vaccine certs. I positively want to go to venues which insist on vaccine certs. If there are venues which positively want to insist on them, why should authority come between us?
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
I'm with you. I have no intention of showing a "passport" to go anywhere, except to cross an international border.
What makes an international border different?
Quite right Charles. Why shouldn't your party be able to make us show our papers if we want to enter Kent for example?
Good point, but all this stuff reads like inferior 1984 fanfic. No, a vaccine passport is not a gateway to internal barriers or a show us your papers society, any more than a driving licence credit card membership card mot certificate or railway ticket is. And the battle you think you are fighting is lost anyway, why on earth would a government be arsed with something as quaint as ID papers when it has phone tracking, credit card tracking and facial ID? I'm not saying those are good things, they are terrible, I am saying they exist. The police state has no more interest in ID papers than it has in breeding extra fast horses to overtake speeding motorists.
I chose Kent because the government have already introduced a law requiring truck drivers to show their papers to enter Kent. Yes it was a shambles that was dropped after 4 months. But they actually did it.
I have no objection in principle to an ID card that bundles together a driving license and passport that can be used to prove identity. I do have an objection to the government wanting to track my every move or require me to produce paperwork to move around my own country doing legal things.
"They haven't done that" I hear the Clown Apologists bleating. Yes they have. I need to apply for permission to send goods to NI, declare to government if I bring larger amounts of cash into NI, provide evidence of vaccinations and microchipping on a pet passport to take my dog to NI.
There is no longer a thin end of the wedge for this government. They're already doing it. Which is why the Covid Passport scheme is something that needs to be stopped. Because they won't stop there.
You keep harping on about Northern Ireland but when are you going to grasp that most British voters don't care about Northern Ireland?
NI is another land, that don't even get polled in British opinion polls and don't vote for British parties. If they have special arrangements that mean that bombs don't go off, and if those arrangements are conditional upon their local politicians wanting them to continue, then why should British voters who vote for British parties care?
That doesn't mean they're "not going to stop" and introduce things that piss off British voters.
Sounding dangerously like HYUFD there with the "governments act solely in the interest of those who vote for them" shtick. Caring about the Irish does not, I quite agree, come instinctively, but we are still obliged to do it.
Not at all. Governments in a democracy realistically act in the interests of all who do vote for them and may vote for them.
The difference between what I'm saying and what HYUFD says is that HYUFD wants to tell those who could vote Tory, or have voted non-Tory [like myself] in the past to f**k off. What I'm saying is that the government needs to attract voters as well as help those who voted for them.
The problem with Northern Ireland is they've ostracised themselves by the way they vote. Not only do they contribute zero MPs to the government, they realistically can contribute zero MPs no matter the result of the next election.
That's not the case in Britain. Its only natural for governments in a democracy to respond to the wishes of voters. That's why we have democracy!
It was only because of DUP support in 2017 the Tories stayed in power.
Now Corbyn has gone and Starmer has said he opposes a united Ireland and there is a border in the Irish Sea there is no guarantee the DUP will support the Tories again if there is hung parliament after the next general election
A feature of DUP-dom is a long memory. I think the chances of the Tories being trusted again among that Party are slightly lower than zero.
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
I'm with you. I have no intention of showing a "passport" to go anywhere, except to cross an international border.
What makes an international border different?
Quite right Charles. Why shouldn't your party be able to make us show our papers if we want to enter Kent for example?
Good point, but all this stuff reads like inferior 1984 fanfic. No, a vaccine passport is not a gateway to internal barriers or a show us your papers society, any more than a driving licence credit card membership card mot certificate or railway ticket is. And the battle you think you are fighting is lost anyway, why on earth would a government be arsed with something as quaint as ID papers when it has phone tracking, credit card tracking and facial ID? I'm not saying those are good things, they are terrible, I am saying they exist. The police state has no more interest in ID papers than it has in breeding extra fast horses to overtake speeding motorists.
I chose Kent because the government have already introduced a law requiring truck drivers to show their papers to enter Kent. Yes it was a shambles that was dropped after 4 months. But they actually did it.
I have no objection in principle to an ID card that bundles together a driving license and passport that can be used to prove identity. I do have an objection to the government wanting to track my every move or require me to produce paperwork to move around my own country doing legal things.
"They haven't done that" I hear the Clown Apologists bleating. Yes they have. I need to apply for permission to send goods to NI, declare to government if I bring larger amounts of cash into NI, provide evidence of vaccinations and microchipping on a pet passport to take my dog to NI.
There is no longer a thin end of the wedge for this government. They're already doing it. Which is why the Covid Passport scheme is something that needs to be stopped. Because they won't stop there.
You keep harping on about Northern Ireland but when are you going to grasp that most British voters don't care about Northern Ireland?
NI is another land, that don't even get polled in British opinion polls and don't vote for British parties. If they have special arrangements that mean that bombs don't go off, and if those arrangements are conditional upon their local politicians wanting them to continue, then why should British voters who vote for British parties care?
That doesn't mean they're "not going to stop" and introduce things that piss off British voters.
Sounding dangerously like HYUFD there with the "governments act solely in the interest of those who vote for them" shtick. Caring about the Irish does not, I quite agree, come instinctively, but we are still obliged to do it.
Not at all. Governments in a democracy realistically act in the interests of all who do vote for them and may vote for them.
The difference between what I'm saying and what HYUFD says is that HYUFD wants to tell those who could vote Tory, or have voted non-Tory [like myself] in the past to f**k off. What I'm saying is that the government needs to attract voters as well as help those who voted for them.
The problem with Northern Ireland is they've ostracised themselves by the way they vote. Not only do they contribute zero MPs to the government, they realistically can contribute zero MPs no matter the result of the next election.
That's not the case in Britain. Its only natural for governments in a democracy to respond to the wishes of voters. That's why we have democracy!
They govern for everybody, or have no business being in politics.
No postwar government, Labour or Tory, has ever put forward policies everybody agrees with all the time.
Yes you govern for everybody in the sense of keeping law and order but otherwise Tory and Labour governments govern for their base and voters first, ie Labour governments spend more on the public sector and tax the rich more and are more socially liberal and open to more immigration, Tory governments spend less, tax less, are generally more socially conservative and in favour of tighter immigration controls.
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
I'm with you. I have no intention of showing a "passport" to go anywhere, except to cross an international border.
What makes an international border different?
Quite right Charles. Why shouldn't your party be able to make us show our papers if we want to enter Kent for example?
Good point, but all this stuff reads like inferior 1984 fanfic. No, a vaccine passport is not a gateway to internal barriers or a show us your papers society, any more than a driving licence credit card membership card mot certificate or railway ticket is. And the battle you think you are fighting is lost anyway, why on earth would a government be arsed with something as quaint as ID papers when it has phone tracking, credit card tracking and facial ID? I'm not saying those are good things, they are terrible, I am saying they exist. The police state has no more interest in ID papers than it has in breeding extra fast horses to overtake speeding motorists.
I chose Kent because the government have already introduced a law requiring truck drivers to show their papers to enter Kent. Yes it was a shambles that was dropped after 4 months. But they actually did it.
I have no objection in principle to an ID card that bundles together a driving license and passport that can be used to prove identity. I do have an objection to the government wanting to track my every move or require me to produce paperwork to move around my own country doing legal things.
"They haven't done that" I hear the Clown Apologists bleating. Yes they have. I need to apply for permission to send goods to NI, declare to government if I bring larger amounts of cash into NI, provide evidence of vaccinations and microchipping on a pet passport to take my dog to NI.
There is no longer a thin end of the wedge for this government. They're already doing it. Which is why the Covid Passport scheme is something that needs to be stopped. Because they won't stop there.
You keep harping on about Northern Ireland but when are you going to grasp that most British voters don't care about Northern Ireland?
NI is another land, that don't even get polled in British opinion polls and don't vote for British parties. If they have special arrangements that mean that bombs don't go off, and if those arrangements are conditional upon their local politicians wanting them to continue, then why should British voters who vote for British parties care?
That doesn't mean they're "not going to stop" and introduce things that piss off British voters.
Sounding dangerously like HYUFD there with the "governments act solely in the interest of those who vote for them" shtick. Caring about the Irish does not, I quite agree, come instinctively, but we are still obliged to do it.
Not at all. Governments in a democracy realistically act in the interests of all who do vote for them and may vote for them.
The difference between what I'm saying and what HYUFD says is that HYUFD wants to tell those who could vote Tory, or have voted non-Tory [like myself] in the past to f**k off. What I'm saying is that the government needs to attract voters as well as help those who voted for them.
The problem with Northern Ireland is they've ostracised themselves by the way they vote. Not only do they contribute zero MPs to the government, they realistically can contribute zero MPs no matter the result of the next election.
That's not the case in Britain. Its only natural for governments in a democracy to respond to the wishes of voters. That's why we have democracy!
It was only because of DUP support in 2017 the Tories stayed in power.
Now Corbyn has gone and Starmer has said he opposes a united Ireland and there is a border in the Irish Sea there is no guarantee the DUP will support the Tories again if there is hung parliament after the next general election
A feature of DUP-dom is a long memory. I think the chances of the Tories being trusted again among that Party are slightly lower than zero.
It would certainly be ironic if Boris won most seats in a hung parliament and the DUP again held the balance of power but Starmer became PM because Donaldson and his MPs abstained and refused to support Boris.
However I can see the DUP enabling Starmer to become PM, who has made clear he is a Unionist, in a way they never could have enabled Corbyn to become PM. Plus of course Starmer would align GB more closely to the single market and customs union largely removing the Irish Sea border anyway
To take a little test case: What is Labour's policy on the NI/GB/EU border/single market dilemma? I don't know. Does anyone?
I believe the Labour Party supports aligning to SM standards, which largely resolves the Irish border issue, and helps at Dover too.
Yes, that's right. We favour pragmatic cooperation over standards on which Britain largely agrees with the EU anyway, in order to solve these issues, over the theoretical sovreignty of being able to reduce standards on something, which nobody admits to wanting to do. What (just as a matter of interest) is your view of that, algarkirk?
The downside, to be frank, is that it makes it harder to waive standards in order to get a US trade deal - for example, if we decided we wanted to let in chlorinated chicken after all. But a US deal appears to have receded into the distance as Biden's fast-track authority has expired.
The fact that you didn't know illustrates the problems of opposition. "Shadow Trade Minister explains what Labour would do about standard alignment if elected in 2023" has zero chance of media coverage, and it's not very sexy for a local leaflet either. On the other handm we can't reeasonably expect you to write to Starmer to find out. So how (failing PB as the Source of All Wisdom) do we make a clear and sensible policy on a fairly technical subject actually known?
Thanks for the question and for the policy. I would favour pragmatic cooperation over standards. I wonder whether everyone would agree with that, only have different views over whose red lines are pragmatically flexible.
On thread - really, really good article by @Cyclefree .
I'm particularly intrigued with 'Boris isn't perfect, but doesn't pretend to be'. I think this is a useful insight. The electorate can forgive a lot of failings in politicians if those politicians didn't claim those virtues in the first place. I always like the example of Alan Johnson, who was unusually comfortable to answer a question with 'I don't know'. Conversely, the most ire is reserved for those politicians who fail to meet the standards they set themselves (Matt Hancock).
To Labour's problems, something @ManchesterKurt said yesterday set me thinking. He was talking about the smoking ban - how the protestations beforehand led to nothing and that we all now accept smoke-free pubs. Now, I think Kurt is from the same part of Manchester as me (same road, IIRC) - and it's true that from our point of view, in middle-class suburban south Manchester, pubs and bars have got better and better over the past 15 years - bad ones have closed and good ones have opened. But if you live in somewhere less fashionable, you have only seen closures - basic but functional pubs, working mens clubs and social clubs have disappeared from the scene. Though we non-smoking middle classes don't see it, the smoking ban caused a tremendous amount of disillusionment with Labour among its traditional support. (John Reid got this, even if the party's middle class base did not). Moreover, Labour is a communitarian party: it's ethos can only thrive in a country where people view themselves communally. Take that away, and the case for communitariansim becomes harder. In fact, I bet you could map net closure of licensed premises and that it would correspond almost exactly to those places where the Labour vote has fallen the furthest in the past fifteen years.
Mr. Z, this is about a blanket imposition across the board, by the state.
It's not a small number of private businesses adopting a particular stance.
Mr. Palmer, that's a valid view although it's worth noting the EU has recently degraded its own stance on animal feed (I forget the particulars, unfortunately, but a week or two ago it was deemed ok to feed livestock some variety of meat that was previously forbidden).
Standards can go down as well as up, and it's a little one-eyed to suggest that the UK might lower standards but the EU never would.
Everton can confirm it has suspended a First-Team player pending a police investigation. The Club will continue to support the authorities with their inquiries and will not be making any further statement at this time.
To take a little test case: What is Labour's policy on the NI/GB/EU border/single market dilemma? I don't know. Does anyone?
I believe the Labour Party supports aligning to SM standards, which largely resolves the Irish border issue, and helps at Dover too.
Yes, that's right. We favour pragmatic cooperation over standards on which Britain largely agrees with the EU anyway, in order to solve these issues, over the theoretical sovreignty of being able to reduce standards on something, which nobody admits to wanting to do. What (just as a matter of interest) is your view of that, algarkirk?
The downside, to be frank, is that it makes it harder to waive standards in order to get a US trade deal - for example, if we decided we wanted to let in chlorinated chicken after all. But a US deal appears to have receded into the distance as Biden's fast-track authority has expired.
The fact that you didn't know illustrates the problems of opposition. "Shadow Trade Minister explains what Labour would do about standard alignment if elected in 2023" has zero chance of media coverage, and it's not very sexy for a local leaflet either. On the other handm we can't reeasonably expect you to write to Starmer to find out. So how (failing PB as the Source of All Wisdom) do we make a clear and sensible policy on a fairly technical subject actually known?
I think that the traditional way is a speech or a "white paper" setting out what you would do.
The standards one is tricky. The most obvious pressure point is going to come in the City where the Bank and FCA have made it clear that they will update regulations as required and are not willing to wait for the ECB or other EU regulators to follow suit. I can readily see scenarios where the UK wants higher standards for live animals than prevail on the continent too.
It would be completely stupid for us to dealign from the EU for the sake of it and it would inevitably make trade more difficult but it would be wrong to assume that our direction of travel would necessarily be towards lower regulatory standards.
The number of excess deaths in India during the Covid-19 pandemic could be 10 times higher than the official death toll, according to a study that estimates that between 3 million and 4.7 million more people died than would be expected between January 2020 and June 2021.
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
I'm with you. I have no intention of showing a "passport" to go anywhere, except to cross an international border.
What makes an international border different?
Quite right Charles. Why shouldn't your party be able to make us show our papers if we want to enter Kent for example?
Good point, but all this stuff reads like inferior 1984 fanfic. No, a vaccine passport is not a gateway to internal barriers or a show us your papers society, any more than a driving licence credit card membership card mot certificate or railway ticket is. And the battle you think you are fighting is lost anyway, why on earth would a government be arsed with something as quaint as ID papers when it has phone tracking, credit card tracking and facial ID? I'm not saying those are good things, they are terrible, I am saying they exist. The police state has no more interest in ID papers than it has in breeding extra fast horses to overtake speeding motorists.
I chose Kent because the government have already introduced a law requiring truck drivers to show their papers to enter Kent. Yes it was a shambles that was dropped after 4 months. But they actually did it.
I have no objection in principle to an ID card that bundles together a driving license and passport that can be used to prove identity. I do have an objection to the government wanting to track my every move or require me to produce paperwork to move around my own country doing legal things.
"They haven't done that" I hear the Clown Apologists bleating. Yes they have. I need to apply for permission to send goods to NI, declare to government if I bring larger amounts of cash into NI, provide evidence of vaccinations and microchipping on a pet passport to take my dog to NI.
There is no longer a thin end of the wedge for this government. They're already doing it. Which is why the Covid Passport scheme is something that needs to be stopped. Because they won't stop there.
You keep harping on about Northern Ireland but when are you going to grasp that most British voters don't care about Northern Ireland?
NI is another land, that don't even get polled in British opinion polls and don't vote for British parties. If they have special arrangements that mean that bombs don't go off, and if those arrangements are conditional upon their local politicians wanting them to continue, then why should British voters who vote for British parties care?
That doesn't mean they're "not going to stop" and introduce things that piss off British voters.
Sounding dangerously like HYUFD there with the "governments act solely in the interest of those who vote for them" shtick. Caring about the Irish does not, I quite agree, come instinctively, but we are still obliged to do it.
Not at all. Governments in a democracy realistically act in the interests of all who do vote for them and may vote for them.
The difference between what I'm saying and what HYUFD says is that HYUFD wants to tell those who could vote Tory, or have voted non-Tory [like myself] in the past to f**k off. What I'm saying is that the government needs to attract voters as well as help those who voted for them.
The problem with Northern Ireland is they've ostracised themselves by the way they vote. Not only do they contribute zero MPs to the government, they realistically can contribute zero MPs no matter the result of the next election.
That's not the case in Britain. Its only natural for governments in a democracy to respond to the wishes of voters. That's why we have democracy!
It was only because of DUP support in 2017 the Tories stayed in power.
Now Corbyn has gone and Starmer has said he opposes a united Ireland and there is a border in the Irish Sea there is no guarantee the DUP will support the Tories again if there is hung parliament after the next general election
A feature of DUP-dom is a long memory. I think the chances of the Tories being trusted again among that Party are slightly lower than zero.
It would certainly be ironic if Boris won most seats in a hung parliament and the DUP again held the balance of power but Starmer became PM because Donaldson and his MPs abstained and refused to support Boris.
However I can see the DUP enabling Starmer to become PM, who has made clear he is a Unionist, in a way they never could have enabled Corbyn to become PM. Plus of course Starmer would align GB more closely to the single market and customs union largely removing the Irish Sea border anyway
TBH, I can't see any of the minor parties being prepared to keep a Johnson-led Tory Government in power.
Apart from any other consideration (and there are many) Feb 74 would apply; whoever did or didn't 'win' the election, the Tories lost.
This must be one of the easiest questions ever asked.
Because poll respondents have the wisdom of crowds and the collective desire to gain entertainment from watching the left writhe in flummoxed confused enraged confounded dismay, to see the sensitive flowers on the left emotionally challenged.
The wisdom of crowds does satire very well, and it seems like a just reward for sitting on line tapping out responses to endless polls and surveys. .
Excellent header, CycleFree. A question that interests me a lot, too.
Not a lot for Starmer to work with in that list. He can't for example get Brexit more done. Meanwhile he offers government that is honest, competent and decent. Whether he would actually deliver is another matter, but the typical Conservative voter doesn't seem interested in any of that. Not sure where he, or an alternative, would go from here.
The traducing of the 'typical Conservative voter' is the centre left's problem, not their solution. Like everyone else they are choosing between sub-optimal alternatives. Voters for centrist parties all care equally.
On @Cyclefree piece, which is very good - all good points.
But, for me, I am still left utterly bewildered that a government is such a mess, making so many mistakes every single day, switching policies on what seems an hourly basis has been given a total free pass by the public. No sign of mid term blues and an opposition pick up the polls.
Have we ever seen such a situation in recent times? Did even Thatch not have mid term blues?
She was doing unpopular (but the right) things. Did she not say that if you're not behind mid-term, you're doing something wrong? Obviously COVID is rather different to normal times, but I'd say if the government doesn't turn off the taps over the next few months, they are very much doing something wrong.
To take a little test case: What is Labour's policy on the NI/GB/EU border/single market dilemma? I don't know. Does anyone?
I believe the Labour Party supports aligning to SM standards, which largely resolves the Irish border issue, and helps at Dover too.
Yes, that's right. We favour pragmatic cooperation over standards on which Britain largely agrees with the EU anyway, in order to solve these issues, over the theoretical sovreignty of being able to reduce standards on something, which nobody admits to wanting to do. What (just as a matter of interest) is your view of that, algarkirk?
The downside, to be frank, is that it makes it harder to waive standards in order to get a US trade deal - for example, if we decided we wanted to let in chlorinated chicken after all. But a US deal appears to have receded into the distance as Biden's fast-track authority has expired.
The fact that you didn't know illustrates the problems of opposition. "Shadow Trade Minister explains what Labour would do about standard alignment if elected in 2023" has zero chance of media coverage, and it's not very sexy for a local leaflet either. On the other handm we can't reeasonably expect you to write to Starmer to find out. So how (failing PB as the Source of All Wisdom) do we make a clear and sensible policy on a fairly technical subject actually known?
Thanks for the question and for the policy. I would favour pragmatic cooperation over standards. I wonder whether everyone would agree with that, only have different views over whose red lines are pragmatically flexible.
To be precise, pragmatism in this case means that we continue to maintain the same standards that we have now (and, the difficult bit, agree to upgrade standards if the EU later decides to do so - e.g. to require all new cars to have a fire extinguisher, to take a random example of national difference that I came across in a translation - it might be an EU standard one day). To object, one has to either (a) identify an EU standard that we should like to fall below (e.g. in order to get a trade deal) or (b) object in principle to maintaining high standards even if we will want them in practice.
The prize, if one does accept the idea, is that the Northern Irish problem simply vanishes. The privince is in the single market, and it has goods to the same standard, so all talk of border posts and suchlike becomes irrelevant. I do understand that the idea of accepting any future improvement in standards is a bit uncomfortable from rhe Brexit viewpoint, but fighting in the last ditch for the right to lower standards seems perverse.
It is, at least, a genuine difference, about which there is absolutely no knowledge of debate in the wider public.
Mr. Thompson, didn't the DUP and Conservatives form a confidence and supply arrangement in the Parliament preceding the current one?
Sort of, when the Conservatives actually did have a majority in Britain.
And looking back at the 2017-19 Parliament what do you think of that as a Parliament? Was the Government of the day able to govern with a stable majority and confidence to pass its bills? I don't think so.
Realistically the day after the confidence and supply arrangement was passed the government was still a minority government, incapable of having any confidence to pass its bills.
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
I'm with you. I have no intention of showing a "passport" to go anywhere, except to cross an international border.
What makes an international border different?
Quite right Charles. Why shouldn't your party be able to make us show our papers if we want to enter Kent for example?
Good point, but all this stuff reads like inferior 1984 fanfic. No, a vaccine passport is not a gateway to internal barriers or a show us your papers society, any more than a driving licence credit card membership card mot certificate or railway ticket is. And the battle you think you are fighting is lost anyway, why on earth would a government be arsed with something as quaint as ID papers when it has phone tracking, credit card tracking and facial ID? I'm not saying those are good things, they are terrible, I am saying they exist. The police state has no more interest in ID papers than it has in breeding extra fast horses to overtake speeding motorists.
I chose Kent because the government have already introduced a law requiring truck drivers to show their papers to enter Kent. Yes it was a shambles that was dropped after 4 months. But they actually did it.
I have no objection in principle to an ID card that bundles together a driving license and passport that can be used to prove identity. I do have an objection to the government wanting to track my every move or require me to produce paperwork to move around my own country doing legal things.
"They haven't done that" I hear the Clown Apologists bleating. Yes they have. I need to apply for permission to send goods to NI, declare to government if I bring larger amounts of cash into NI, provide evidence of vaccinations and microchipping on a pet passport to take my dog to NI.
There is no longer a thin end of the wedge for this government. They're already doing it. Which is why the Covid Passport scheme is something that needs to be stopped. Because they won't stop there.
You keep harping on about Northern Ireland but when are you going to grasp that most British voters don't care about Northern Ireland?
NI is another land, that don't even get polled in British opinion polls and don't vote for British parties. If they have special arrangements that mean that bombs don't go off, and if those arrangements are conditional upon their local politicians wanting them to continue, then why should British voters who vote for British parties care?
That doesn't mean they're "not going to stop" and introduce things that piss off British voters.
Sounding dangerously like HYUFD there with the "governments act solely in the interest of those who vote for them" shtick. Caring about the Irish does not, I quite agree, come instinctively, but we are still obliged to do it.
Not at all. Governments in a democracy realistically act in the interests of all who do vote for them and may vote for them.
The difference between what I'm saying and what HYUFD says is that HYUFD wants to tell those who could vote Tory, or have voted non-Tory [like myself] in the past to f**k off. What I'm saying is that the government needs to attract voters as well as help those who voted for them.
The problem with Northern Ireland is they've ostracised themselves by the way they vote. Not only do they contribute zero MPs to the government, they realistically can contribute zero MPs no matter the result of the next election.
That's not the case in Britain. Its only natural for governments in a democracy to respond to the wishes of voters. That's why we have democracy!
Good govt should govern for all and not just their potential voters, but I do take you point as we are talking reality not theroy.
Re out discussion the other day on the merits of our democracy. I think you will agree that we both put forward equally valid arguments but differed in our opinion on the impact.. There was something on the news this morning supporting my view, although rather weakened by the fact it was from Cummings. Rather than being influenced by Starmer"s argument re the lockdown Boris was anti it and one reason was just to be opposite to Starmer. Ok only one point but supports my argument and opposes yours.
Except reality is that despite the claims by Cummings actually Boris did end up going with a second lockdown, despite not wanting to - and yes Starmer did add to the pressure to do so; even though Starmer's proposed 'firebreak' was a terrible idea that utterly failed where it was tried in Wales as a fortnight is not long enough to suppress the virus.
So that's a point in my argument and opposes yours. Boris found he had to go with what was needed despite his antipathy towards Starmer, not because of co-operation between Starmer and Boris. Co-operation between government and opposition isn't what is needed.
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
In her case the contributions were made from 1970 and then managed as part of the third best performing fund in the UK from 1970-1999…
So the contributions were not unusually large as they have become in recent years
The idea of penalising DB public sector schemes should be a non starter as it raises significant problems of fairness. I have been on a DB scheme having been in the public sector recently. It is nowhere near as good as the historic DB schemes that some of my older colleagues were on. If you add up the contributions vs the likely payments, whether I will do better than being on a contribution based scheme will simply depend on how long I live after retirement age. As far as I can work out it will be a bonanza if I live to 100 but a disaster if I die at 70. All in all it just seems like a pretty stupid system.
It's not. It averages the risk of you living to 100 with a sufficiently large pool of those who won't so that you have a guaranteed income for your remaining life, however long that proves to be. Defined contribution schemes mean that your beneficiaries may well get a lump sum of "unspent" pension money (provided you haven't bought an annuity with the capital) but also runs the risk that you run out of money before you die.
Those on higher incomes may well do better under the second option but for those on average incomes or below the first option is a very sensible sharing of risk. It is the premise on which our pensions industry is based.
Isnt this pooling of risk ultimately what the state pension is, though? It has risen to the point where it provides a decent basic income every month in retirement.
From my point of view it just didn't seem like a particularly good deal, paying hundreds of pounds every month in to a scheme which may never pay anything out if I die prematurely.
Above all, I had a sneaking suspicion that the money will never materialise because of political interference.
Not really because the State Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Those who delude themselves into thinking that they paid for it by paying NI conveniently ignore the fact that they elected governments who spent their contributions rather than saving them. They spent those contributions in part paying the previous generation's pensions for which no provision had been paid either. The State Pension is paid by the current workforce, not the previous one.
I was involved in a case a few years ago now with a fund manager who was accused of mis selling pensions to people encouraged to come out of a final salary scheme. Several things became apparent. For high net worth individuals pensions are largely an Inheritance tax dodge. There is no real intention of spending the pension fund, it is simply a tax free way of transferring large lump sums to the next generation.
Secondly, those who have the benefit of final salary indexed linked pensions have something genuinely platinum plated which requires exceptional performance to achieve in your own fund. Public sector employees who have the benefit of such schemes seriously underestimate what those rights are worth when comparing their package with a private sector fixed contribution equivalent. The current generation of pensioners are likely to be the richest ever. The rights they have been given simply cannot be funded in a normal working life.
Which leads me back to my original point - tax DB pension income at rates of 30% and 50%. It would be impossible to avoid and would raise significant money for social care primarily from the people who will need it.
It's morally justifiable. It's economically justifiable. It's political suicide and will never happen.
I really don't think it is morally justifiable. I agree it's political suicide.
(Disclosure - I have a tax-payer funded DB pension scheme from three years at the start of my career in the civil service. It was ridiculously generous still - I got in before changes were made - but 1/40th or whatever it was of the final salary is not a huge amount, I have accumulated much more in less generous pensions, so 30-50% tax on it would not horrify me personally, from a financial point of view).
The thing is, the generous public sector pensions were part of the deal, part of the reason people took jobs there and certainly a large part of the reason they stayed. They made it hard to leave. They made people stay without the need to raise salaries as much. Taxing them at 30-50% is fine if you also retrospectively tax, say, career bonuses for those in the private sector at 30-50% and employee healthcare schemes, share options etc etc (i.e. all other instances where people received non-salary perks that were part of the package).
You also should not raid privately funded DB schemes (I suspect you weren't including those anyway?). These have to, in theory, at least, fund themselves so the contributions are similar to a DC scheme that would offer similar benefits, albeit with greater certainty (much lower downside risk, but also no upside possibilities). Combined USS contribution rates at the moment are ~30% of salary - I've done back of the envelope calcs that suggest at average life expectancy I might get close to getting back what I put in (assuming, for simplicity, no inflation, but also no investment growth - a competently managed DC scheme should easily outstrip inflation, of course).
You're missing the point. Social care needs to be paid for and it needs to not be paid for by working age people. We have a class of very wealthy pensioners sitting on massive DB schemes that pay them an annual income in the higher rate bracket and they also receive the state pension in addition plus probably income from investments and property wealth.
It is morally right that those who can pay the most towards their own care costs should do so. Working age people are already highly taxed.
My wife and I are planning to have kids in the very near future and the costs are legitimately frightening. We sat down with my sister to figure it all out over the weekend and came away shit scared and we're both on high incomes. I can't imagine what it's like for lower and middle income people to be clobbered with yet another tax because the selfish old don't want to pay for their own social care costs.
The number of excess deaths in India during the Covid-19 pandemic could be 10 times higher than the official death toll, according to a study that estimates that between 3 million and 4.7 million more people died than would be expected between January 2020 and June 2021.
That'd put India at around 3000/million deaths for the pandemic, which is far more believable than their frankly farcical 297 deaths/million which is clearly a total fiction given cremations were tricky.
The Tories are in the lead because the Opposition isn't credible. That's it in a nutshell. Starmer needs to have a very public fight with the left and be seen to have a major victory, like Kinnock did. Until then all the comments and threads in the world will alter nothing.
Starmer does not need to have a very public fight with anyone other than the Conservatives. Starmer needs to give voters a reason to vote Labour, not to split his own party.
Yes, rule number one of politics is that people do not vote for split parties. That was a problem for May in 2017, but not for the purged Johnsonite party of 2019. The odd backbencher opposed is tolerable, but widespread differences over major issues are not.
Starmer has to unify his party around a coherent vision that comprises more than "not the Tories". It was ten years after Kinnock purged Militant before Labour won power.
I think @Cyclefree makes valid points in the header, but none are deal-breakers. There are always core voters who would vote for a donkey in a party rosette, but that is never enough on its own.
Labour needs a clear and coherent vision of what it would look like in government, and a clear communicator of that vision. It has neither of those at the moment. I think SKS is a decent bloke and would probably run a good government, but that is not enough to get elected.
Blair was not just a great communicator (I saw him speak live in 1996 and he had real charisma then) but also had a ruthless back office spin machine that came out with punchy winning slogans and ideas.
Johnsons confused Populism is defeatable, but it does require Labour to get its act together. It just needs to figure out what being centre-left means in the modern world, and assemble that rainbow coalition within the party. I cannot see it happening at the next GE though. Labour are 8 years off regaining power.
This is right. There are different elements to governing and getting elected. The Big Choices (policy), trust and competence are three big ones.
At the moment there are central issues of Big Choices that Labour is unclear about. The UK union, medium and long term Brexit, social care, public finances.
Issues like Covid are less policy and more about general trust and competence, as no-one knows what the big policy should be in terms of divergent choices.
But Labour is not working well at any of the three. Not only do we not know the Brexit policy (which might be anything from 'rejoin' to 'pirate buccaneer UK') we don't really know if the left, the anti-semites, the 'never kissed Tory scum' tendency have been finally put back in their cave. And we don't know if they have a potential cabinet even as good as the present lot.
And, as a Labour majority alliance must involve the SNP, we must know but don't know where they stand on the UK.
To take a little test case: What is Labour's policy on the NI/GB/EU border/single market dilemma? I don't know. Does anyone?
In fairness, we do know where Labour stand on the UK: they are Unionists. Anas, Baillie, Murray et al have been quite clear on that point.
What is less clear is where SLab’s voters stand on the issue of the Union. It still looks like approx 40% of them are pro-independence, about 40% are hardline Unionists, and about 20% don’t care.
Throughout the U.K. Labour don’t fit in any effective pigeon holes. In Scotland their stance on the Union turns off a significant part of the “anti Tory” vote, in Northern England their remainerism similarly, in Southern England the residual whiff of Corbyn prevents them from making any headway however unpopular Johnson becomes even down here, leaving them with Wales. So I don’t think it’s fit for purpose anymore.
In the South where I am the LDs could certainly do well in the wealthier, more internationalist and socially liberal parts - I’m thinking places like Tonbridge Wells here in Kent, and Canterbury (if Rosie Duffield hadn’t already picked it off for Labour, but she is no Corbynite). That depends on there being no fear of an LD vote not letting in Corbyn or Corbyn lite.
T U nbridge Wells. T O nbridge is a separate town nearby.
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
But treating pensions as deferred income, for the purposes of taxation, has been pretty universal. With some limits, to be sure, but whether the DB employer has to put a lot of (untaxed) cash in to deliver the (taxed) benefits down the line, or whether a DC employer matches (untaxed) contributions now to deliver (taxed) benefits down the line, is pretty much the same thing from the point of view of tax. The DB was just a more generous employer offer; DC employers are free to do the same (within the annual allowance) if they want.
They should probably update the AA calculations regarding DB entitlement, though.
--AS
I don't disagree with any of that (how can I as it is factually correct), but invariably the employer contribution to the DB scheme is much bigger so providing the employee with a bigger benefit. In addition there is likely a tax benefit as the marginal tax rate is likely higher in employment than retirement plus there is the tax free lump sum. Applies to DC as well but the employer contribution is likely much lower.
The employer may well still be contributing to the DB pension after retirement.
I thought that for private companies, at retirement the DB pension is provided by buying an annuity from the pension fund. No further liability from the employer for that employee after retirement.
I think most don't, or at least the big ones don't. It's too expensive. They keep the funds invested and pay pensions out of the returns. The regulator puts a lot of pressure on them to de-risk the investment and match at least some of the liabilities with indexed gilts of appropriate duration (negative yields making this also very expensive), but their only obligation is to show that the fund is sufficient for future liabilities.
Things change if the scheme is closed to new members, and I don't know much about that situation.
--AS
The same for closed to new members again from personal experience. You obviously know your stuff in this area @AlwaysSinging Is this what you do? In my case it's bitter experience.
(Just popping in before attempting some productive work, honest!)
Bitter experience for me too. I'm an academic, and effectively my institution's lead on USS. Due to conflict of interest I've had to step back from that, though, now that benefit "reform" is being discussed.
Comments
Italy, Spain and most of Eastern Europe of course have no non contributory unemployment benefits at all unlike us
NI is another land, that don't even get polled in British opinion polls and don't vote for British parties. If they have special arrangements that mean that bombs don't go off, and if those arrangements are conditional upon their local politicians wanting them to continue, then why should British voters who vote for British parties care?
That doesn't mean they're "not going to stop" and introduce things that piss off British voters.
So, how to help? If parents cannot read, encourage them to enrol on an adult literacy course. That leaflet and those free books were a great idea. Perhaps we could even do something online, like an interactive BBC Bedtime Story.
But we cannot continue the way we have been. In the long term, we need to get illiteracy and innumeracy for young adults (post-school) down to well below ten percent. From an economics POV, I guess that'll add a few percent onto GDP in the long term ?
The Democrats controlled both the House and Senate for all of the Bush Snr years and Bush Snr ran a fiscally conservative administration, even raising the top rate of income tax from 28% to 31% to cut the deficit which annoyed his conservative base some of whom went to Buchanan and Perot in 1992 partly contributing to his defeat
https://metro.co.uk/2021/07/16/andrew-neil-says-gb-news-has-great-future-amid-viewing-figures-drop-14942750/
The difference between what I'm saying and what HYUFD says is that HYUFD wants to tell those who could vote Tory, or have voted non-Tory [like myself] in the past to f**k off. What I'm saying is that the government needs to attract voters as well as help those who voted for them.
The problem with Northern Ireland is they've ostracised themselves by the way they vote. Not only do they contribute zero MPs to the government, they realistically can contribute zero MPs no matter the result of the next election.
That's not the case in Britain. Its only natural for governments in a democracy to respond to the wishes of voters. That's why we have democracy!
Intervention at school age is already too late for children raised in a household without continual linguistic interaction. Famous study (contested by trendy types) of a word gap of 30 million words heard by the age of three between the haves and have nots. The period when the brain is at its most plastic.
By the time we begin rolling out free childcare in this country, the child’s economic potential is already largely set. So it is said by the authors, no amount of schooling can then raise this potential again, merely allow the fulfilment of the curtailed potential.
Hence the advice to sing to your baby and continually narrate what you are doing to them while looking them in the eye.
If we want to improve long term productivity, we need to find ways of financially supporting parents of very young children to remain outside the workplace for as long as possible after a child’s birth. Instead this government is fixated with providing bung after bung to the wrong end of the electoral demographic.
Most keenly observed of course with the EURef. The victors treated it like a GE whereby they didn't need to pay any attention to the losing side, whereas had they done, we might be in a better place than we are now.
In the South where I am the LDs could certainly do well in the wealthier, more internationalist and socially liberal parts - I’m thinking places like Tonbridge Wells here in Kent, and Canterbury (if Rosie Duffield hadn’t already picked it off for Labour, but she is no Corbynite). That depends on there being no fear of an LD vote not letting in Corbyn or Corbyn lite.
But I'm a bit sceptical about what it would do to our economy. I hate to say this, but I don't think there is much of a relationship between our wealth and literacy and numeracy rates. So long as enough kids do well and can fill the jobs that require a decent education, then the economy is what it is. Ultimately, there are only so many good jobs to go around.
(Disclosure - I have a tax-payer funded DB pension scheme from three years at the start of my career in the civil service. It was ridiculously generous still - I got in before changes were made - but 1/40th or whatever it was of the final salary is not a huge amount, I have accumulated much more in less generous pensions, so 30-50% tax on it would not horrify me personally, from a financial point of view).
The thing is, the generous public sector pensions were part of the deal, part of the reason people took jobs there and certainly a large part of the reason they stayed. They made it hard to leave. They made people stay without the need to raise salaries as much. Taxing them at 30-50% is fine if you also retrospectively tax, say, career bonuses for those in the private sector at 30-50% and employee healthcare schemes, share options etc etc (i.e. all other instances where people received non-salary perks that were part of the package).
You also should not raid privately funded DB schemes (I suspect you weren't including those anyway?). These have to, in theory, at least, fund themselves so the contributions are similar to a DC scheme that would offer similar benefits, albeit with greater certainty (much lower downside risk, but also no upside possibilities). Combined USS contribution rates at the moment are ~30% of salary - I've done back of the envelope calcs that suggest at average life expectancy I might get close to getting back what I put in (assuming, for simplicity, no inflation, but also no investment growth - a competently managed DC scheme should easily outstrip inflation, of course).
Not perfect but one step ahead of Labour's policy.
ISTR they did try for a brief time in the late 1990s, but after that it became "50% to uni".
Only when enough people agree on the above can we start a sensible discussion about what tax changes are least unfair.
'Where is one's OBD-11 port?'
Business departments are telling companies that being pinged and isolating is only guidance, whereas Johnson and co at the top are telling people they must do it unless a worker who is exempted (e.g. NHS critical staff).
What a f*cking mess.
It's a natural human instinct to overvalue the needs of self and now, as opposed to other and the future. Makes some evolutionary sense; others might not have my genes and my future won't happen if I don't survive the now. It's a less helpful instinct now, because we're in a world where survival isn't really an issue. We don't have to gorge on all the food available, because we can be confident of more food tomorrow. But we still do, with the consequences we see around us.
That instinct feeds through to politics, of course it does. So the electorate (and that includes me) reward politicians who bring forward the consumption and put off the taxation. That happens everywhere. But the US and UK do seem more prone to it than other nations. Whether that's because of a national character failing, the FPTP electoral system, or just bad luck (natural selection can select for dumb things, like peacock's tails), I don't know.
But it is a failing of the civic discourse in the UK, and one it would be good to fix. Because it's the root cause of chronic problems like pensions, social care, housing and so on.
@Steven_Swinford
Exclusive:
Ministers have written to major manufacturers emphasising that staff are not legally obliged to isolate if pinged by app
Lord Grimstone, investment minister, told one large employer that app was only an ‘advisory tool’ and that people were not under any ‘legal duty’
As someone who votes Labour in local elections (voting personally for people I know and respect), this is one of the greatest obstacles, entirely self-created, to voting for them in a GE.
Imagine that is the cause of confusion.
Would it be fair, instead, to retrospectively tax everyone who had a company car before, say 1990? Didn't company cars used to be a real tax loophole?
Nothing is going to be fair to everyone from every perspective. As a society that is understood and broadly accepted for existing structures of tax and rules, yet we really struggle to grasp that it must be the same for future changes as well. Our job is to find something pragmatic and not too unfair, not something that is fair. The search for unicorns just leads to dither and ongoing delay.
How many workers have still got the app and how many non-workers have still got the app ?
If its the former then perhaps its because they're not averse to having a week off work 'isolating' in the lovely weather.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/19/no-promises-plenty-threats-tonights-presser-showed-desperation/
Enforced social distancing measures have been lifted on First Buses in the city, meaning that for the first time in 16 months you can sit wherever you like on a bus.
https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/aberdeen/3312064/a-route-to-recovery-first-bus-scrap-enforced-social-distancing-on-buses/
Not a lot for Starmer to work with in that list. He can't for example get Brexit more done. Meanwhile he offers government that is honest, competent and decent. Whether he would actually deliver is another matter, but the typical Conservative voter doesn't seem interested in any of that. Not sure where he, or an alternative, would go from here.
Sadly, for them the public backlash over this revelation meant they had to leave the trial after two hours and join the rest of us in Pingdom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFWs8T1Jc74
Already has 46k views which I believe is rather more than the channel gets.
But, for me, I am still left utterly bewildered that a government is such a mess, making so many mistakes every single day, switching policies on what seems an hourly basis has been given a total free pass by the public. No sign of mid term blues and an opposition pick up the polls.
Have we ever seen such a situation in recent times? Did even Thatch not have mid term blues?
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
Videos from the protest have been shared online by several discredited conspiracy theorist and far-right Twitter accounts.
Despite the signs and placards promoting various unfounded conspiracy theories, it is unclear what has prompted an anti-lockdown demonstration on the day lockdown ended in the UK.
However, a number of protestors appear to be registering their opposition to the Covid vaccine, which has saved millions of lives across the globe.
Unsurprisingly, some banners and flags are seen being waved in support of the long debunked ‘QAnon’ conspiracy theory and cult, which falsely claims celebrities and politicians drink the blood of children as part of a global paedophile ring.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/parliament-square-antivaccination-protesters-police-clash-b946520.html
GB News viewers will have seen: "A woman shouted “Nazi paedo protector w****rs” at the camera as reporter Tom Harwood was trying to describe the violent scenes to Mr Farage back in the studio."
The practice of exemption is also rubbish. The country's defences must be utterly shitty if food would run out and hospitals stop being able to cope owing to such a minuscule amount of slack among lorry drivers and nurses. Imagine if there were a real crisis or a war or something.
How is 1% on NI going to raise the billions that are needed for social care unless most of the costs are still borne by the people in care and their families? The NI will help fix some of the most urgent local government social care finance crisis but that's it imho.
Disgruntled of Morningside.
It's notable that just 11% of conservative voters say "total wealth should not be taxed", a majority are fine with a wealth tax above 2m.
Removing the ludicrous higher rate pensions relief would also save billions and I suspect would not prove that unpopular (apparently 74% don't understand pensions relief or even know it exists!).
https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/britons-support-paying-more-tax-fund-public-services-most-popular-being-new-net-wealth-tax
Re out discussion the other day on the merits of our democracy. I think you will agree that we both put forward equally valid arguments but differed in our opinion on the impact.. There was something on the news this morning supporting my view, although rather weakened by the fact it was from Cummings. Rather than being influenced by Starmer"s argument re the lockdown Boris was anti it and one reason was just to be opposite to Starmer. Ok only one point but supports my argument and opposes yours.
It's notable that just 11% of conservative voters say "total wealth should not be taxed", a majority are fine with a wealth tax above 2m.
Removing the ludicrous higher rate pensions relief would also save billions and I suspect would not prove that unpopular (apparently 74% don't understand pensions relief or even know it exists!).
https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/britons-support-paying-more-tax-fund-public-services-most-popular-being-new-net-wealth-tax
Basically for the average Brit, tax rises are fine as long as it is only the rich paying them not them
And laws are fine as long as they are for other people.
I suspect the British aren't uniquely awful in this respect.
https://twitter.com/LaylaMoran/status/1417220847878692869
Ha. With Labour still being as it is and the idiot in Number 10, I might end up voting Lib Dem. Gosh.
I really despise ID cards and vaccine passports.
By the time her sisters arrived, in the same hospital, Thaksin was out and the pack had been discontinued.
Now Corbyn has gone and Starmer has said he opposes a united Ireland and there is a border in the Irish Sea there is no guarantee the DUP will support the Tories again if there is hung parliament after the next general election
The downside, to be frank, is that it makes it harder to waive standards in order to get a US trade deal - for example, if we decided we wanted to let in chlorinated chicken after all. But a US deal appears to have receded into the distance as Biden's fast-track authority has expired.
The fact that you didn't know illustrates the problems of opposition. "Shadow Trade Minister explains what Labour would do about standard alignment if elected in 2023" has zero chance of media coverage, and it's not very sexy for a local leaflet either. On the other handm we can't reeasonably expect you to write to Starmer to find out. So how (failing PB as the Source of All Wisdom) do we make a clear and sensible policy on a fairly technical subject actually known?
I suspect the British aren't uniquely awful in this respect.
Not quite the same thing, most Brits don't murder or steal, however they do want to keep most of their own money and not give most of it to the government
The people have spoken.. the bastards eh.....
Do.you have the right to vote here ?....if you do,
you do realise you have classed yourself as moronic...
Yes you govern for everybody in the sense of keeping law and order but otherwise Tory and Labour governments govern for their base and voters first, ie Labour governments spend more on the public sector and tax the rich more and are more socially liberal and open to more immigration, Tory governments spend less, tax less, are generally more socially conservative and in favour of tighter immigration controls.
They had to capitalise "ENGLISH" just to emphasise what the story is really about.
They aren't even trying to hide their hatred anymore.
https://twitter.com/AgentP22/status/1417235877181497344?s=20
Difficult to know what that'll do to the big mans ratings.
My guess is not much. Unless it's a rhyming couplet his supporters don't seem to notice
However I can see the DUP enabling Starmer to become PM, who has made clear he is a Unionist, in a way they never could have enabled Corbyn to become PM. Plus of course Starmer would align GB more closely to the single market and customs union largely removing the Irish Sea border anyway
I'm particularly intrigued with 'Boris isn't perfect, but doesn't pretend to be'. I think this is a useful insight. The electorate can forgive a lot of failings in politicians if those politicians didn't claim those virtues in the first place. I always like the example of Alan Johnson, who was unusually comfortable to answer a question with 'I don't know'. Conversely, the most ire is reserved for those politicians who fail to meet the standards they set themselves (Matt Hancock).
To Labour's problems, something @ManchesterKurt said yesterday set me thinking. He was talking about the smoking ban - how the protestations beforehand led to nothing and that we all now accept smoke-free pubs. Now, I think Kurt is from the same part of Manchester as me (same road, IIRC) - and it's true that from our point of view, in middle-class suburban south Manchester, pubs and bars have got better and better over the past 15 years - bad ones have closed and good ones have opened. But if you live in somewhere less fashionable, you have only seen closures - basic but functional pubs, working mens clubs and social clubs have disappeared from the scene. Though we non-smoking middle classes don't see it, the smoking ban caused a tremendous amount of disillusionment with Labour among its traditional support. (John Reid got this, even if the party's middle class base did not). Moreover, Labour is a communitarian party: it's ethos can only thrive in a country where people view themselves communally. Take that away, and the case for communitariansim becomes harder. In fact, I bet you could map net closure of licensed premises and that it would correspond almost exactly to those places where the Labour vote has fallen the furthest in the past fifteen years.
It's not a small number of private businesses adopting a particular stance.
Mr. Palmer, that's a valid view although it's worth noting the EU has recently degraded its own stance on animal feed (I forget the particulars, unfortunately, but a week or two ago it was deemed ok to feed livestock some variety of meat that was previously forbidden).
Standards can go down as well as up, and it's a little one-eyed to suggest that the UK might lower standards but the EU never would.
Why would they confirm more than gender and age? What relevance is the other information except to titillate?
The standards one is tricky. The most obvious pressure point is going to come in the City where the Bank and FCA have made it clear that they will update regulations as required and are not willing to wait for the ECB or other EU regulators to follow suit. I can readily see scenarios where the UK wants higher standards for live animals than prevail on the continent too.
It would be completely stupid for us to dealign from the EU for the sake of it and it would inevitably make trade more difficult but it would be wrong to assume that our direction of travel would necessarily be towards lower regulatory standards.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/20/india-excess-deaths-during-covid-could-be-10-times-official-toll
Apart from any other consideration (and there are many) Feb 74 would apply; whoever did or didn't 'win' the election, the Tories lost.
This must be one of the easiest questions ever asked.
Because poll respondents have the wisdom of crowds and the collective desire to gain entertainment from watching the left writhe in flummoxed confused enraged confounded dismay, to see the sensitive flowers on the left emotionally challenged.
The wisdom of crowds does satire very well, and it seems like a just reward for sitting on line tapping out responses to endless polls and surveys. .
The prize, if one does accept the idea, is that the Northern Irish problem simply vanishes. The privince is in the single market, and it has goods to the same standard, so all talk of border posts and suchlike becomes irrelevant. I do understand that the idea of accepting any future improvement in standards is a bit uncomfortable from rhe Brexit viewpoint, but fighting in the last ditch for the right to lower standards seems perverse.
It is, at least, a genuine difference, about which there is absolutely no knowledge of debate in the wider public.
And looking back at the 2017-19 Parliament what do you think of that as a Parliament? Was the Government of the day able to govern with a stable majority and confidence to pass its bills? I don't think so.
Realistically the day after the confidence and supply arrangement was passed the government was still a minority government, incapable of having any confidence to pass its bills. Except reality is that despite the claims by Cummings actually Boris did end up going with a second lockdown, despite not wanting to - and yes Starmer did add to the pressure to do so; even though Starmer's proposed 'firebreak' was a terrible idea that utterly failed where it was tried in Wales as a fortnight is not long enough to suppress the virus.
So that's a point in my argument and opposes yours. Boris found he had to go with what was needed despite his antipathy towards Starmer, not because of co-operation between Starmer and Boris. Co-operation between government and opposition isn't what is needed.
It is morally right that those who can pay the most towards their own care costs should do so. Working age people are already highly taxed.
My wife and I are planning to have kids in the very near future and the costs are legitimately frightening. We sat down with my sister to figure it all out over the weekend and came away shit scared and we're both on high incomes. I can't imagine what it's like for lower and middle income people to be clobbered with yet another tax because the selfish old don't want to pay for their own social care costs.
https://www.cityam.com/teesside-freeport/
No idea if it is effective or not but Ben Houchen is certainly good at promoting things.
What persecution are refugees facing in France/the EU?
Should we be bombing them to seek regime change in your eyes?
Bitter experience for me too. I'm an academic, and effectively my institution's lead on USS. Due to conflict of interest I've had to step back from that, though, now that benefit "reform" is being discussed.
--AS