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.
Smoking and Brexit are the same issue. A proposal which Labour activists are convinced will do serious harm to Labour voters who must be too stupid to not think the same.
FWIW the smoking ban had to happen - whether traditional WWC Labour voters liked a smoke and a fag down the working men's club it was killing them. But if people want the freedom to do and think as they see fit they aren't going to reward you for stopping them and patronising them at the same time.
The Brexit battle was lost when both sides refused to compromise to the EFTA/EEA route. Positioning Brexit as "all the benefits of membership but we get to make the decisions and keep our money" could have been a vote winner. Instead we had absolutism - and yes I was one of the absolutists. A mistake.
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.
Thanks, I live in the TN postcode area in Kent, it was an autocorrect typo.
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.
Which raises my other minor quibble with Cyclefree's piece - the 'embracing the right'. Because it's very difficult to pin down exactly what the government is doing which is right wing. On tax and spend, it is to the left of any government since Wilson. On immigration, the criticisms have all been too much, rather than too little - both on the channel crossings and on closing the borders to control coronavirus. It's hard to make a convincing case that this is a right wing government. It's certainly doesn't seem to be to the right of the electorate on any meaningful measure. I kind of know what's being got at, but... The government have been breathtakingly authoritarian in their use of restrictions intended to control coronavirus (although again, possibly not as authoritarian as the electorate would like). But when the main opposition parties have been urging them to be more authoritarian, again, it's difficult to make the case that this is a government of the right.
Dunno about the British electorate, but the Express obviously thinks their readers are moronic.
And why not? As apparently people aren't paying attention to Clown stupidity, why not feed that stupidity? The National up here and the Express down there are the dumbest newspapers possible.
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. .
Sir
I read your post four times and found myself in flummoxed confused enraged confounded dismay that I couldn't understand a word of it.
Yours
Emotionally Challenged Sensitive flower of the Left
Here's some "real world" data regarding the AZ vaccine effectiveness against various VOC's, including Beta. It remains a shame the amount of crap AZ gets given these results.
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?
I'm less bothered about a voluntary way of proving vaccine status. Then you can go to a venue that requires it, and I will go somewhere else. Johnson is making it mandatory for certain types of venue (and then watch the scope creep).
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.
I'm unsure 'there are only so many good jobs to go around' is true. Say 18% of people are functionally illiterate. Of those, there are a few who, for various reasons, will always find literacy an issue. So let's say 15% of people are illiterate. That does not mean they cannot contribute to society; they can hold down jobs, fake things, get others to sign leaving cards, etc. But they will never reach their potential.
Amongst that 15% there will be people who, if they were literate, could do greater things. Perhaps even great things. A few might start up businesses that employ people. Perhaps amongst them is the next Gates, Bezos, or Sarah Gilbert. They might start companies that employ thousands.
If they're illiterate or innumerate, they won't. From a more right-wing point of view, many will be burdens on the taxpayers.
Reducing functional illiteracy and innumeracy makes sense from a moral, societal and economic point of view. The main reasons that it's not being tackled are that it's hard, and the rewards are a decade or more in the future.
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.
Mrs Thatcher was VERY unpopular mid-term. But by the time she got to the 1983 election she had regained the Falklands and the alternative was Michael Foot. By the time she got to the 1987 election the economy was considerably stronger and the alternative was Neil Kinnock. And, in both elections, the SDP/Libs did a lot more damage to Labour than the Conservatives.
I don't think you can usefully compare the current period with the Thatcher period.
No idea if it is effective or not but Ben Houchen is certainly good at promoting things.
Houchen is the front man. Before Houchen the Teeside Tory PR machine was already amazing. Their best operator was this young chap, now promoted off to Spad for Kwazi Kwarteng: https://twitter.com/cameronbrownuk?lang=en
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.
Tory governments spend less and tax less? Which Tory governments? Not this one. Nor the one before, whose Chancellor boasted Britain's tax take was at an all-time high. One of the remarkable achievements of the Thatcher government was to persuade people that only income tax mattered. Nor did Tory governments reduce immigration, since even non-EU immigration, not covered by EU FOM, rose.
But maybe that is the point. Despite what it does, voters remember what the Conservative Party says.
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".
Blair’s 50% to uni was one of his most idiotic policies.
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.
They will have a different set of (lower cost) solutions.
Just been to the shops without a mask for the first time since they were mandated about a year ago (actually started wearing them voluntarily before they were mandated).
It was so refreshing, especially in this heat, to be walking around a fairly quiet air conditioned supermarket without a mask blocking nose and mouth and able to breathe properly while shopping for the first time in so long.
On the way in, there was a sign asking people to please wear the mask (rather than saying it was mandated) which I disregarded; I'd guess looking at people that about 60% of shoppers were still wearing masks, but only about 20% of staff were still wearing them. I'm curious to see how those ratios change in the coming weeks.
Here's some "real world" data regarding the AZ vaccine effectiveness against various VOC's, including Beta. It remains a shame the amount of crap AZ gets given these results.
The last table is good news for all the vaccines. It's also reassuring to have the PHE numbers confirmed by another country's health body. I wonder whether Israel is seeing the early stages of fading efficacy and will need to run a booster programme in August.
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".
Blair’s 50% to uni was one of his most idiotic policies.
I generally agree. It was aspirational but arbitrary and meaningless, and had some nasty consequences.
Having said that; the girl that I mentioned below (the daughter of a miner) probably got to go to university because of it. I therefore cannot say it was totally bad.
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.
Mrs Thatcher was VERY unpopular mid-term. But by the time she got to the 1983 election she had regained the Falklands and the alternative was Michael Foot. By the time she got to the 1987 election the economy was considerably stronger and the alternative was Neil Kinnock. And, in both elections, the SDP/Libs did a lot more damage to Labour than the Conservatives.
I don't think you can usefully compare the current period with the Thatcher period.
The evidence seems to be that the SDP/Libs actually did more damage to the Tories than Labour. Most Alliance voters told surveys they'd prefer a Thatcher led Tory government than a Labour one in a forced choice.
Had it not been for the Alliance, its possible that Labour would have been hammered even more rather than less.
Just been to the shops without a mask for the first time since they were mandated about a year ago (actually started wearing them voluntarily before they were mandated).
It was so refreshing, especially in this heat, to be walking around a fairly quiet air conditioned supermarket without a mask blocking nose and mouth and able to breathe properly while shopping for the first time in so long.
On the way in, there was a sign asking people to please wear the mask (rather than saying it was mandated) which I disregarded; I'd guess looking at people that about 60% of shoppers were still wearing masks, but only about 20% of staff were still wearing them. I'm curious to see how those ratios change in the coming weeks.
I ordered a pint at the bar in the Blue Anchor last night, maskless. I did ask the bartender whether I should wear a mask. "Up to you sir" he said.
Already has 46k views which I believe is rather more than the channel gets.
What a shock, he’s banging on about ‘migrants’ in the channel. He means refugees fleeing persecution but that’s a different story.
430 yesterday. Priti is obviously incapable of fixing so if Farage starts banging on about Johnson might have to find somebody who can. This issue is definitely something the slack jawed morons of the Blue Wall give a massive fuck about.
Some of you will remember that last week I did some rough and ready calculations using the weekly death stats trying to work out what the average life lost due to COVID might be. I said that the last seven weeks were about 2,000 deaths below the average pre-COVID and assumed that this was a decent guide for the wake of COVID.
Well, the figures for the week ending 9 July have just been published:
And guess what, a big spike in deaths. Here are the number of deaths for Week 27 (week ending around 3 to 9 July):
2010: 8,627 2011: 8,705 2012: 8,909 2013: 8,790 2014: 8,763 2015: 9,205 2016: 9,138 2017: 9,263 2018: 9,258 2019: 9,062 2020: 9,140 (of which 532 were recorded as COVID) 2021: 9,752 (of which 183 were recorded as COVID)
COVID deaths went up (was averaging around 100 for the previous seven weeks), but that's not a huge factor. The previous two weeks in 2021 recorded 8,690 and 8,808 deaths, so that 9,752 deaths is an 11% increase.
Obviously there will be noise in a dataset like this, but this is the first time that non-COVID deaths have been well above average (excluding bank holidays) since last September. It will be interesting to see if this is a one off or the start of a trend (the current hot weather will probably show up in two weeks time).
EDIT: I'm assuming that we're not seeing a big under-count for COVID related deaths. The 183 (England and Wales) is pretty close to what worldometers has for the UK for the week ending 9 July.
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.
People, including the UK government, misunderstand regulation. They see it as a cost and therefore the less regulation you have the lower the cost and the more options you have. In fact, it is compliance that is key, not the regulation that drives it. Compliance enables you to do things you want to do and which you are otherwise unable to do, in particular to operate in a territory or to sell to it. Compliance has costs, but these are the costs of doing business, like marketing or production. In general businesses and organisations seek to maximise compliance, not minimise regulation.
In this context, the best thing the UK government can do is make its regulation compliant for the EU. That enables a market of 30 countries with one set of compliance rather than one. It also makes the UK a massively more attractive investment destination, given that companies will be compliant with EU regs anyway. Also largely deals with the Irish Sea border issue
But you are only compliant if the other party says you are. Which introduces issues of rule-taking, being at the whim of a larger more powerful party and not "taking control".
They're not. They're "punishing" the lunatic Israeli settlers. Well, "punished" is a strong word...
I must admit I hold Ben and Jerry's in the same level of contempt as Starbucks and Apple. Overpriced tat, sold more on image than any genuine advantage to the consumer.
Already has 46k views which I believe is rather more than the channel gets.
What a shock, he’s banging on about ‘migrants’ in the channel. He means refugees fleeing persecution but that’s a different story.
The channel connects the UK to France/the EU.
What persecution are refugees facing in France/the EU?
Should we be bombing them to seek regime change in your eyes?
Lol. Do you also wear a beret and go ‘ooh betty, the cats done a whoopsie”
No.
But speaking of beret wearers, these poor desperate souls fleeing France across the Channel - why are they fleeing France?
Mainly because the French treat them like shit. They steal their belongings and their shelters. They dump them in the middle of nowhere. They break up families randomly and enjoy some physical violence too. Being a refugee in France is no joke.
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".
Blair’s 50% to uni was one of his most idiotic policies.
Certainly it is only really those who go to Russell Group universities and particularly those who study STEM subjects and subjects like law and medicine who see any real increase in their earnings potential compared to what they had after A Levels.
For most of the rest they would be better off doing an apprenticeship and for the bottom end the focus should be ensuring they left school with basis literacy and numeracy
Here's some "real world" data regarding the AZ vaccine effectiveness against various VOC's, including Beta. It remains a shame the amount of crap AZ gets given these results.
The last table is good news for all the vaccines. It's also reassuring to have the PHE numbers confirmed by another country's health body. I wonder whether Israel is seeing the early stages of fading efficacy and will need to run a booster programme in August.
Hm. I'm not persuaded that constraining Palestinians' ability to purchase Ben & Jerry's ice cream constitutes a significant punishment for those beleaguered people.
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.
Yes but wealthy pensioners already pay for their own Social Care, at least until they are down to their last £26 000. The problem of funding SC is for poorer pensioners, and the problem from the government perspective is that people want to receive windfall inheritances rather than pay for their own social care.
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.
Research topic for a politics or history student?
Locally many of the sort of people one would expect to vote Labour drink in the Conservative Club; why. Because the beer is cheaper. I don't know whether it makes a difference to anyone's vote, but it's a sort of drip, drip, drip. And not just the taps.
Some of you will remember that last week I did some rough and ready calculations using the weekly death stats trying to work out what the average life lost due to COVID might be. I said that the last seven weeks were about 2,000 deaths below the average pre-COVID and assumed that this was a decent guide for the wake of COVID.
Well, the figures for the week ending 9 July have just been published:
And guess what, a big spike in deaths. Here are the number of deaths for Week 27 (week ending around 3 to 9 July):
2010: 8,627 2011: 8,705 2012: 8,909 2013: 8,790 2014: 8,763 2015: 9,205 2016: 9,138 2017: 9,263 2018: 9,258 2019: 9,062 2020: 9,140 (of which 532 were recorded as COVID) 2021: 9,752 (of which 183 were recorded as COVID)
COVID deaths went up (was averaging around 100 for the previous seven weeks), but that's not a huge factor. The previous two weeks in 2021 recorded 8,690 and 8,808 deaths, so that 9,752 deaths is an 11% increase.
Obviously there will be noise in a dataset like this, but this is the first time that non-COVID deaths have been well above average (excluding bank holidays) since last September. It will be interesting to see if this is a one off or the start of a trend (the current hot weather will probably show up in two weeks time).
From the ONS commentary:
Of all deaths registered in Week 27 in England, 1.9% mentioned COVID-19 on the death certificate.
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.
Tory governments spend less and tax less? Which Tory governments? Not this one. Nor the one before, whose Chancellor boasted Britain's tax take was at an all-time high. One of the remarkable achievements of the Thatcher government was to persuade people that only income tax mattered. Nor did Tory governments reduce immigration, since even non-EU immigration, not covered by EU FOM, rose.
But maybe that is the point. Despite what it does, voters remember what the Conservative Party says.
In 1979 at the end of the Wilson and Callaghan Labour government spending as a percentage of gdp was 38.5% (reaching a high of 44% in 1975 under Wilson) which fell to 32.5% by the end of the Thatcher and Major years.
By the end of the Blair Brown years in 2010 spending as a percentage of gdp had reached 43.1% which had fallen to 39% by 2019 after 9 years of Tory rule (albeit Boris has gone on a bit of a spending spree since than).
Thatcher also cut the top rate of income tax from almost 90% to 40% when she left office, Cameron cut it from 50% to 45% and raised the IHT threshold to £1 million.
EU net immigration to the UK has fallen 36% since Brexit
Already has 46k views which I believe is rather more than the channel gets.
What a shock, he’s banging on about ‘migrants’ in the channel. He means refugees fleeing persecution but that’s a different story.
The channel connects the UK to France/the EU.
What persecution are refugees facing in France/the EU?
Should we be bombing them to seek regime change in your eyes?
Lol. Do you also wear a beret and go ‘ooh betty, the cats done a whoopsie”
No.
But speaking of beret wearers, these poor desperate souls fleeing France across the Channel - why are they fleeing France?
Hostile climate for refugees in France. Non-contributory benefits in the UK. English language and existing social capital in the UK as second order issues.
Already has 46k views which I believe is rather more than the channel gets.
What a shock, he’s banging on about ‘migrants’ in the channel. He means refugees fleeing persecution but that’s a different story.
The channel connects the UK to France/the EU.
What persecution are refugees facing in France/the EU?
Should we be bombing them to seek regime change in your eyes?
Lol. Do you also wear a beret and go ‘ooh betty, the cats done a whoopsie”
No.
But speaking of beret wearers, these poor desperate souls fleeing France across the Channel - why are they fleeing France?
Hostile climate for refugees in France. Non-contributory benefits in the UK. English language and existing social capital in the UK as second order issues.
It's not complicated.
France also has non-contributory benefits, it is Italy which doesn't
Dunno about the British electorate, but the Express obviously thinks their readers are moronic.
And why not? As apparently people aren't paying attention to Clown stupidity, why not feed that stupidity? The National up here and the Express down there are the dumbest newspapers possible.
If you look at comments on the weather in the Express, they are in Fahrenheit. Every one else (outside the US) uses Centigrade
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.
I agree entirely that those who can pay the most should do so - and I support more uniform redistibution in tax etc from the wealthy old (which is not all) to the younger, rather than the ad-hoc system now that depends on whether you have well-off parents. But why raid only those with DB pensions? Some with DB pensions are wealthy/very welathy on it (my father in law, for example, who thinks he should pay more tax). Some on DB pensions will not be wealthy, they should not be targeted just because the pension is DB.
As for kids, good luck It will change your life completely, but it's well worth it. We went from having more money than we could spend to doing ok (well, we have spare each month still, so we're comfortable, I guess). There are costs, for sure, but you'll also (likely) not have the time to spend the money you spend now. We eat out little, holiday mostly in the UK while the kids are small, don't spend so much on hobbies, but that's driven more by practical concerns than money (eating out is a bit of a faff with small kids, flights are not that much fun with small kids and you have to take a lot of stuff, if you've got as much time for hobbies after kids then you're probably doing it wrong!) but while we've spent large amounts on having children (clothing, food, bigger car, bigger house) we've also saved large amounts elsewhere. Our income is lower as only I work at present, but, ignoring commuting costs, which have fallen, our expenditure is not much different pre- and post- children.
If you want to do everything you used to do and pay for lots of childcare to enable that then it will cost a lot more. But you may find you have other, better things to do with children that cost a lot less.
Already has 46k views which I believe is rather more than the channel gets.
What a shock, he’s banging on about ‘migrants’ in the channel. He means refugees fleeing persecution but that’s a different story.
The channel connects the UK to France/the EU.
What persecution are refugees facing in France/the EU?
Should we be bombing them to seek regime change in your eyes?
Lol. Do you also wear a beret and go ‘ooh betty, the cats done a whoopsie”
No.
But speaking of beret wearers, these poor desperate souls fleeing France across the Channel - why are they fleeing France?
Hostile climate for refugees in France. Non-contributory benefits in the UK. English language and existing social capital in the UK as second order issues.
It's not complicated.
Hostile climate for refugees in France is a terrible issue that pressure should be put on the French to address surely?
Benefits are not a refugee issue. If people want access to Britain's benefits that's economic migration and they're free to apply for a visa.
English language etc again is a reason to apply for a visa, not about being a refugee.
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".
Blair’s 50% to uni was one of his most idiotic policies.
Well, it is the case that similar number go to uni in most of our competitors. Even higher in some like South Korea. I don't think Britons are thicker than other nations.
The problem is more the poor quality of many undergraduate degrees rather than the need for a highly educated workforce.
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.
Yes but wealthy pensioners already pay for their own Social Care, at least until they are down to their last £26 000. The problem of funding SC is for poorer pensioners, and the problem from the government perspective is that people want to receive windfall inheritances rather than pay for their own social care.
And DB pensions are an asset class that aren't inheritable, it's a win/win.
Scottish Government forced to apologise to vaccine manufacturers over deployment plan fiasco
Ministers were forced to write letters of apology to the managing directors of Pfizer and AstraZeneca after publishing commercially sensitive information around Covid-19 vaccine supply, The Scotsman can reveal......
.....Nicola Sturgeon said she was not “convinced” by the arguments put forward by the UK Government, later describing Boris Johnson’s government of having thrown a “hissy fit” over the publication as a briefing war around the number of vaccines being supplied to the Scottish Government erupted.
They're not. They're "punishing" the lunatic Israeli settlers. Well, "punished" is a strong word...
I must admit I hold Ben and Jerry's in the same level of contempt as Starbucks and Apple. Overpriced tat, sold more on image than any genuine advantage to the consumer.
(Awaits incoming from TSE...)
Ben and Jerry's made children's food acceptable to adults. We should acknowledge that.
Starbucks' coffee is better than instant. Apple hardware and the Apple software ecosystem are better than the alternatives. They might still be overpriced, of course. It's the old story. Add a pound's worth of value and charge a tenner.
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".
Blair’s 50% to uni was one of his most idiotic policies.
Well, it is the case that similar number go to uni in most of our competitors. Even higher in some like South Korea. I don't think Britons are thicker than other nations.
The problem is more the poor quality of many undergraduate degrees rather than the need for a highly educated workforce.
Already has 46k views which I believe is rather more than the channel gets.
What a shock, he’s banging on about ‘migrants’ in the channel. He means refugees fleeing persecution but that’s a different story.
The channel connects the UK to France/the EU.
What persecution are refugees facing in France/the EU?
Should we be bombing them to seek regime change in your eyes?
Lol. Do you also wear a beret and go ‘ooh betty, the cats done a whoopsie”
No.
But speaking of beret wearers, these poor desperate souls fleeing France across the Channel - why are they fleeing France?
Mainly because the French treat them like shit. They steal their belongings and their shelters. They dump them in the middle of nowhere. They break up families randomly and enjoy some physical violence too. Being a refugee in France is no joke.
The international refugee crisis is a massive problem for the west and can only be fixed via cooperation. The starter for 10 is spend money on international development to make their home countries less shitty and dangerous. Followed by close cooperation at regional level to distribute refugees more evenly to create less local problems.
The UK of course wants none of that. The forrin can do one. "Why can't they settle in France" or "They have to settle in the first safe country" is simply unsustainable - remember the refugee crisis on Lesbos, the first safe place many arrived at?
When people make those statements what they want is zero refugees. Only people arriving here direct from their unsafe country by air could claim - which is basically none at all.
"Global Britain" is either part of the international community, playing our role in this crisis, or we are not. Farage and his supporters want the Global Community to give all that we want whilst we give nothing that they want. For the refugees that means no boats coming from France and if the French won't take them back and they drown then thats the Frogs fault for not stopping them leaving.
People, including the UK government, misunderstand regulation. They see it as a cost and therefore the less regulation you have the lower the cost and the more options you have. In fact, it is compliance that is key, not the regulation that drives it. Compliance enables you to do things you want to do and which you are otherwise unable to do, in particular to operate in a territory or to sell to it. Compliance has costs, but these are the costs of doing business, like marketing or production. In general businesses and organisations seek to maximise compliance, not minimise regulation.
In this context, the best thing the UK government can do is make its regulation compliant for the EU. That enables a market of 30 countries with one set of compliance rather than one. It also makes the UK a massively more attractive investment destination, given that companies will be compliant with EU regs anyway. Also largely deals with the Irish Sea border issue
But you are only compliant if the other party says you are. Which introduces issues of rule-taking, being at the whim of a larger more powerful party and not "taking control".
Agreed. I worked for many years in the largest pharma multinational, and remember the CEO saying that when deciding where to invest, the level of regulation wasn't a key issue - what companies need is clear regulation that doesn't keep changing. To take my random example of having a fire extinguisher in cars, Honda really won't care whether this is required or not as the marginal cost will be trivial, but they'd like a standard rule so they can manufacture accordingly, What's irritating for manufacturers is having lots of different rules - in Britain the device must be size X and painted green, in Belgium it must be size Y and painted red.
Of course there are standards which actually matter, but a lot of the benefit is simply agreeing to work with the same ones.
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".
Blair’s 50% to uni was one of his most idiotic policies.
Certainly it is only really those who go to Russell Group universities and particularly those who study STEM subjects and subjects like law and medicine who see any real increase in their earnings potential compared to what they had after A Levels.
For most of the rest they would be better off doing an apprenticeship and for the bottom end the focus should be ensuring they left school with basis literacy and numeracy
So you support a huge increase in directed cash to the poorest schools and direct support for the most deprived children?
You can't say you support literacy and numeracy whilst supporting policies which directly reduce attainment.
Already has 46k views which I believe is rather more than the channel gets.
What a shock, he’s banging on about ‘migrants’ in the channel. He means refugees fleeing persecution but that’s a different story.
The channel connects the UK to France/the EU.
What persecution are refugees facing in France/the EU?
Should we be bombing them to seek regime change in your eyes?
Lol. Do you also wear a beret and go ‘ooh betty, the cats done a whoopsie”
No.
But speaking of beret wearers, these poor desperate souls fleeing France across the Channel - why are they fleeing France?
Mainly because the French treat them like shit. They steal their belongings and their shelters. They dump them in the middle of nowhere. They break up families randomly and enjoy some physical violence too. Being a refugee in France is no joke.
The international refugee crisis is a massive problem for the west and can only be fixed via cooperation. The starter for 10 is spend money on international development to make their home countries less shitty and dangerous. Followed by close cooperation at regional level to distribute refugees more evenly to create less local problems.
The UK of course wants none of that. The forrin can do one. "Why can't they settle in France" or "They have to settle in the first safe country" is simply unsustainable - remember the refugee crisis on Lesbos, the first safe place many arrived at?
When people make those statements what they want is zero refugees. Only people arriving here direct from their unsafe country by air could claim - which is basically none at all.
"Global Britain" is either part of the international community, playing our role in this crisis, or we are not. Farage and his supporters want the Global Community to give all that we want whilst we give nothing that they want. For the refugees that means no boats coming from France and if the French won't take them back and they drown then thats the Frogs fault for not stopping them leaving.
David Cameron had the right solution years ago which is to take genuine refugees from organised camps direct from frontline areas like Turkey.
Not have a Darwinian "if you can get here without drowning then we'll take you" survival of the fittest race to get here.
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.
Kids are not especially expensive. You will find that half their clothes are hand me downs from friends and family. The government provides some help with childcare costs. They don't need expensive toys or accessories. The main investment you need to make is to give them your time. You will save a lot of money by not going out for the first few years, anyway.
Already has 46k views which I believe is rather more than the channel gets.
What a shock, he’s banging on about ‘migrants’ in the channel. He means refugees fleeing persecution but that’s a different story.
The channel connects the UK to France/the EU.
What persecution are refugees facing in France/the EU?
Should we be bombing them to seek regime change in your eyes?
Lol. Do you also wear a beret and go ‘ooh betty, the cats done a whoopsie”
No.
But speaking of beret wearers, these poor desperate souls fleeing France across the Channel - why are they fleeing France?
Mainly because the French treat them like shit. They steal their belongings and their shelters. They dump them in the middle of nowhere. They break up families randomly and enjoy some physical violence too. Being a refugee in France is no joke.
The international refugee crisis is a massive problem for the west and can only be fixed via cooperation. The starter for 10 is spend money on international development to make their home countries less shitty and dangerous. Followed by close cooperation at regional level to distribute refugees more evenly to create less local problems.
The UK of course wants none of that. The forrin can do one. "Why can't they settle in France" or "They have to settle in the first safe country" is simply unsustainable - remember the refugee crisis on Lesbos, the first safe place many arrived at?
When people make those statements what they want is zero refugees. Only people arriving here direct from their unsafe country by air could claim - which is basically none at all.
"Global Britain" is either part of the international community, playing our role in this crisis, or we are not. Farage and his supporters want the Global Community to give all that we want whilst we give nothing that they want. For the refugees that means no boats coming from France and if the French won't take them back and they drown then thats the Frogs fault for not stopping them leaving.
The collapse of Afghanistan is going to bring on a fresh exodus of refugees, which in turn will destabilise fragile neighbours.
Already has 46k views which I believe is rather more than the channel gets.
What a shock, he’s banging on about ‘migrants’ in the channel. He means refugees fleeing persecution but that’s a different story.
The channel connects the UK to France/the EU.
What persecution are refugees facing in France/the EU?
Should we be bombing them to seek regime change in your eyes?
Lol. Do you also wear a beret and go ‘ooh betty, the cats done a whoopsie”
No.
But speaking of beret wearers, these poor desperate souls fleeing France across the Channel - why are they fleeing France?
Hostile climate for refugees in France. Non-contributory benefits in the UK. English language and existing social capital in the UK as second order issues.
It's not complicated.
Hostile climate for refugees in France is a terrible issue that pressure should be put on the French to address surely?
Benefits are not a refugee issue. If people want access to Britain's benefits that's economic migration and they're free to apply for a visa.
English language etc again is a reason to apply for a visa, not about being a refugee.
All of that is irrelevant. You asked why they were leaving France. I told you. You might as well go and stand on a beach at Grande-Synthe and advise the assorted tatterdemalions to apply for visas instead of getting in an Aldi RIB.
What is relevant is the government's completely ineffective and incompetent response. Particularly if it becomes a staple feature of This Time with Nigel Farage.
Already has 46k views which I believe is rather more than the channel gets.
What a shock, he’s banging on about ‘migrants’ in the channel. He means refugees fleeing persecution but that’s a different story.
The channel connects the UK to France/the EU.
What persecution are refugees facing in France/the EU?
Should we be bombing them to seek regime change in your eyes?
Lol. Do you also wear a beret and go ‘ooh betty, the cats done a whoopsie”
No.
But speaking of beret wearers, these poor desperate souls fleeing France across the Channel - why are they fleeing France?
Mainly because the French treat them like shit. They steal their belongings and their shelters. They dump them in the middle of nowhere. They break up families randomly and enjoy some physical violence too. Being a refugee in France is no joke.
The international refugee crisis is a massive problem for the west and can only be fixed via cooperation. The starter for 10 is spend money on international development to make their home countries less shitty and dangerous. Followed by close cooperation at regional level to distribute refugees more evenly to create less local problems.
The UK of course wants none of that. The forrin can do one. "Why can't they settle in France" or "They have to settle in the first safe country" is simply unsustainable - remember the refugee crisis on Lesbos, the first safe place many arrived at?
When people make those statements what they want is zero refugees. Only people arriving here direct from their unsafe country by air could claim - which is basically none at all.
"Global Britain" is either part of the international community, playing our role in this crisis, or we are not. Farage and his supporters want the Global Community to give all that we want whilst we give nothing that they want. For the refugees that means no boats coming from France and if the French won't take them back and they drown then thats the Frogs fault for not stopping them leaving.
David Cameron had the right solution years ago which is to take genuine refugees from organised camps direct from frontline areas like Turkey.
Not have a Darwinian "if you can get here without drowning then we'll take you" survival of the fittest race to get here.
Indeed. So why don't we do that then? Oh year, because refugees are all fake and will simultaneously take all the jobs and all the benefits...
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".
Blair’s 50% to uni was one of his most idiotic policies.
Certainly it is only really those who go to Russell Group universities and particularly those who study STEM subjects and subjects like law and medicine who see any real increase in their earnings potential compared to what they had after A Levels.
For most of the rest they would be better off doing an apprenticeship and for the bottom end the focus should be ensuring they left school with basis literacy and numeracy
Up to a point, Lord Copper. First, it would probably be better if companies recruited without reference to a student's alma mater. Tech companies in the US found this.
Second, medicine used to be taught by apprenticeship and law often still is. Law might be a graduate profession but not one that demands a degree in law.
Third, STEM subjects are popular but often not for their main subjects but for peripheral skills. Dominic Cummings popularised hiring astrophysicists, not because they can discourse on whether Pluto is a planet but because they are used to taking vast quantities of data from telescopes and shoving it through Python, Pandas and Jupyter notebooks, all of which can probably be taught in a week.
As it is, universities are often finishing schools. Want to get a BBC comedy series? Cambridge. Fancy running the country? Oxford. And so on.
But channeling my inner Michael Gove, perhaps there is more to life than money and education is a public good in and of itself. I'd like to think so.
Already has 46k views which I believe is rather more than the channel gets.
What a shock, he’s banging on about ‘migrants’ in the channel. He means refugees fleeing persecution but that’s a different story.
The channel connects the UK to France/the EU.
What persecution are refugees facing in France/the EU?
Should we be bombing them to seek regime change in your eyes?
Lol. Do you also wear a beret and go ‘ooh betty, the cats done a whoopsie”
No.
But speaking of beret wearers, these poor desperate souls fleeing France across the Channel - why are they fleeing France?
Hostile climate for refugees in France. Non-contributory benefits in the UK. English language and existing social capital in the UK as second order issues.
It's not complicated.
Hostile climate for refugees in France is a terrible issue that pressure should be put on the French to address surely?
Benefits are not a refugee issue. If people want access to Britain's benefits that's economic migration and they're free to apply for a visa.
English language etc again is a reason to apply for a visa, not about being a refugee.
All of that is irrelevant. You asked why they were leaving France. I told you. You might as well go and stand on a beach at Grande-Synthe and advise the assorted tatterdemalions to apply for visas instead of getting in an Aldi RIB.
What is relevant is the government's completely ineffective and incompetent response. Particularly if it becomes a staple feature of This Time with Nigel Farage.
Well indeed.
The correct and humane solution is to immediately deport, without right to appeal, anyone who comes from France - while safely taking legitimate refugees from frontline countries.
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.
30 million is approximately the number is seconds in a year. As babies sleep most of the time and estimating a word a second that implies one group has been talked to almost continuously while awake and the other kept almost in silence.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I’d have to see a good reference to believe it (3 million would be much more plausible: is it a power of ten problem?)
Mr. Pioneers, you do omit the rather significant, and very good, move by the UK to allow Hong Kong citizens to come here. That's no small thing.
1. How many have actually come here so far? Not an issue for the public - given their disinterest in politics have they even noticed the announcement? 2. People like Chinese Food so they're not instinctively against them unlike all these fake afghan children who are all 34 and get a free house and golf lessons 3. Lets see the response when HK British start arriving in large numbers
Dunno about the British electorate, but the Express obviously thinks their readers are moronic.
And why not? As apparently people aren't paying attention to Clown stupidity, why not feed that stupidity? The National up here and the Express down there are the dumbest newspapers possible.
If you look at comments on the weather in the Express, they are in Fahrenheit. Every one else (outside the US) uses Centigrade
Fahrenheit is the only pre-metric unit of measurement I can’t do despite my American spouse. I think in miles, metres (with the below exception) ounces, and degrees Celsius. I measure people’s height in feet and inches. The confusion of being born in the seventies.
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.
I agree entirely that those who can pay the most should do so - and I support more uniform redistibution in tax etc from the wealthy old (which is not all) to the younger, rather than the ad-hoc system now that depends on whether you have well-off parents. But why raid only those with DB pensions? Some with DB pensions are wealthy/very welathy on it (my father in law, for example, who thinks he should pay more tax). Some on DB pensions will not be wealthy, they should not be targeted just because the pension is DB.
As for kids, good luck It will change your life completely, but it's well worth it. We went from having more money than we could spend to doing ok (well, we have spare each month still, so we're comfortable, I guess). There are costs, for sure, but you'll also (likely) not have the time to spend the money you spend now. We eat out little, holiday mostly in the UK while the kids are small, don't spend so much on hobbies, but that's driven more by practical concerns than money (eating out is a bit of a faff with small kids, flights are not that much fun with small kids and you have to take a lot of stuff, if you've got as much time for hobbies after kids then you're probably doing it wrong!) but while we've spent large amounts on having children (clothing, food, bigger car, bigger house) we've also saved large amounts elsewhere. Our income is lower as only I work at present, but, ignoring commuting costs, which have fallen, our expenditure is not much different pre- and post- children.
If you want to do everything you used to do and pay for lots of childcare to enable that then it will cost a lot more. But you may find you have other, better things to do with children that cost a lot less.
Absolutely right. You do what you think is your best for your children and get told it's wrong, you worry and worry about their education, you have sleepless nights about where they are.
Then at one of the late (70's onwards) birthdays one or other of them stands up and makes a speech saying how wonderful you've been as a parent, and how much they owe to you.
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".
Blair’s 50% to uni was one of his most idiotic policies.
Certainly it is only really those who go to Russell Group universities and particularly those who study STEM subjects and subjects like law and medicine who see any real increase in their earnings potential compared to what they had after A Levels.
For most of the rest they would be better off doing an apprenticeship and for the bottom end the focus should be ensuring they left school with basis literacy and numeracy
Up to a point, Lord Copper. First, it would probably be better if companies recruited without reference to a student's alma mater. Tech companies in the US found this.
Second, medicine used to be taught by apprenticeship and law often still is. Law might be a graduate profession but not one that demands a degree in law.
Third, STEM subjects are popular but often not for their main subjects but for peripheral skills. Dominic Cummings popularised hiring astrophysicists, not because they can discourse on whether Pluto is a planet but because they are used to taking vast quantities of data from telescopes and shoving it through Python, Pandas and Jupyter notebooks, all of which can probably be taught in a week.
As it is, universities are often finishing schools. Want to get a BBC comedy series? Cambridge. Fancy running the country? Oxford. And so on.
But channeling my inner Michael Gove, perhaps there is more to life than money and education is a public good in and of itself. I'd like to think so.
In a democracy, poorly educated people can easily be fooled by lying politicians into making poor choices that directly reduce other people's quality of life. It is in everyone's interest to live in a society composed mostly of numerate, informed, sceptical and questioning citizens.
"He said removing the exemption for pensioners to pay national insurance would be unpopular and only raise half a billion pounds a year."
'Unpopular'. With Tory party members. Who will be voting for Ersatz Johnson (as the Kriegsmarine used to put such things) in a year or two.
Mollycoddling pensioners is the one thing that truly pisses me off about this current administration.
Shame on you , tax the whinging arses I say especially where both partners work, they should only get one tax allowance. Problems solved. Hard to believe the rich people on here who would beggar pensioners so they could get their grubby paws on even more money, pathetic cretins.
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".
Blair’s 50% to uni was one of his most idiotic policies.
Certainly it is only really those who go to Russell Group universities and particularly those who study STEM subjects and subjects like law and medicine who see any real increase in their earnings potential compared to what they had after A Levels.
For most of the rest they would be better off doing an apprenticeship and for the bottom end the focus should be ensuring they left school with basis literacy and numeracy
Up to a point, Lord Copper. First, it would probably be better if companies recruited without reference to a student's alma mater. Tech companies in the US found this.
Second, medicine used to be taught by apprenticeship and law often still is. Law might be a graduate profession but not one that demands a degree in law.
Third, STEM subjects are popular but often not for their main subjects but for peripheral skills. Dominic Cummings popularised hiring astrophysicists, not because they can discourse on whether Pluto is a planet but because they are used to taking vast quantities of data from telescopes and shoving it through Python, Pandas and Jupyter notebooks, all of which can probably be taught in a week.
As it is, universities are often finishing schools. Want to get a BBC comedy series? Cambridge. Fancy running the country? Oxford. And so on.
But channeling my inner Michael Gove, perhaps there is more to life than money and education is a public good in and of itself. I'd like to think so.
In a democracy, poorly educated people can easily be fooled by lying politicians into making poor choices that directly reduce other people's quality of life. It is in everyone's interest to live in a society composed mostly of numerate, informed, sceptical and questioning citizens.
Well yes. But I'm not sure today's graduates are necessarily an advert for university's ability to impart these skills. Most of the media have been to university.
Already has 46k views which I believe is rather more than the channel gets.
What a shock, he’s banging on about ‘migrants’ in the channel. He means refugees fleeing persecution but that’s a different story.
The channel connects the UK to France/the EU.
What persecution are refugees facing in France/the EU?
Should we be bombing them to seek regime change in your eyes?
Lol. Do you also wear a beret and go ‘ooh betty, the cats done a whoopsie”
No.
But speaking of beret wearers, these poor desperate souls fleeing France across the Channel - why are they fleeing France?
Hostile climate for refugees in France. Non-contributory benefits in the UK. English language and existing social capital in the UK as second order issues.
It's not complicated.
Hostile climate for refugees in France is a terrible issue that pressure should be put on the French to address surely?
Benefits are not a refugee issue. If people want access to Britain's benefits that's economic migration and they're free to apply for a visa.
English language etc again is a reason to apply for a visa, not about being a refugee.
All of that is irrelevant. You asked why they were leaving France. I told you. You might as well go and stand on a beach at Grande-Synthe and advise the assorted tatterdemalions to apply for visas instead of getting in an Aldi RIB.
What is relevant is the government's completely ineffective and incompetent response. Particularly if it becomes a staple feature of This Time with Nigel Farage.
Well indeed.
The correct and humane solution is to immediately deport, without right to appeal, anyone who comes from France - while safely taking legitimate refugees from frontline countries.
Deport to where? The UK has left the Dublin II Regulation so they can't be deported to the EU or other signatories. Many of the arrivals will have no ID and/or come from countries to which the UK doesn't deport anyway.
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.
Tory governments spend less and tax less? Which Tory governments? Not this one. Nor the one before, whose Chancellor boasted Britain's tax take was at an all-time high. One of the remarkable achievements of the Thatcher government was to persuade people that only income tax mattered. Nor did Tory governments reduce immigration, since even non-EU immigration, not covered by EU FOM, rose.
But maybe that is the point. Despite what it does, voters remember what the Conservative Party says.
In 1979 at the end of the Wilson and Callaghan Labour government spending as a percentage of gdp was 38.5% (reaching a high of 44% in 1975 under Wilson) which fell to 32.5% by the end of the Thatcher and Major years.
By the end of the Blair Brown years in 2010 spending as a percentage of gdp had reached 43.1% which had fallen to 39% by 2019 after 9 years of Tory rule (albeit Boris has gone on a bit of a spending spree since than).
Thatcher also cut the top rate of income tax from almost 90% to 40% when she left office, Cameron cut it from 50% to 45% and raised the IHT threshold to £1 million.
EU net immigration to the UK has fallen 36% since Brexit
And non-EU immigration which, as mentioned, rose even though not affected by EU FOM. And what of VAT, more than doubled by Conservative governments? Like I said, Thatcher persuaded us that only income tax counts. And yes, Boris has "gone on a bit of a spending spree".
Dunno about the British electorate, but the Express obviously thinks their readers are moronic.
And why not? As apparently people aren't paying attention to Clown stupidity, why not feed that stupidity? The National up here and the Express down there are the dumbest newspapers possible.
Tight race with many others only a whisker behind.
Dunno about the British electorate, but the Express obviously thinks their readers are moronic.
And why not? As apparently people aren't paying attention to Clown stupidity, why not feed that stupidity? The National up here and the Express down there are the dumbest newspapers possible.
If you look at comments on the weather in the Express, they are in Fahrenheit. Every one else (outside the US) uses Centigrade
Fahrenheit is the only pre-metric unit of measurement I can’t do despite my American spouse. I think in miles, metres (with the below exception) ounces, and degrees Celsius. I measure people’s height in feet and inches. The confusion of being born in the seventies.
Ironically, Celsius is not the SI unit of temperature. I’m not sure any country actually uses Kelvin in its forecasts…
@Cyclefree's header will at least assuage those who think this site is consistently and persistently opposed to the Prime Minister, the Government and the Conservative Party (though it probably won't).
There are all sorts of reasons for the current political status quo - there is and always has been a willingness to "rally behind the Government" at a time of perceived or actual crisis. That is aided by Labour's conscious decision to provide "constructive Opposition" (in essence, being largely supportive of the Government's actions).
The temptation, were it to be more vociferous and critical, is to say "what would you have done differently?" and the answer is of course nothing. Had Starmer been Prime Minister in March 2020, he'd have done exactly what Johnson did - perhaps a little earlier, perhaps not.
The only credible opposition line would have been to argue against any form of restriction from the beginning or perhaps from last June. That's a credible position - not popular perhaps but credible.
Therein lies the problem for those looking to carve out a distinctive niche - a majority of the public (for now) believes we are in a crisis and broadly supports the measures taken by the Government to mitigate the crisis. A growing majority of the adult population has voluntarily agreed to be vaccinated based on the information supplied by Government and other bodies and has largely eschewed the opposing views.
There will be a reckoning for all this - fiscal, medical, political, cultural, social to name but five. Each one will be different, affect people differently and will be of longer or shorter duration.
There are socio-economic and cultural changes from the pandemic which may prove permanent both positive and negative (that's the nature of these things).
I don't sense either Government or Opposition has a coherent vision of post-Covid Britain - the Government (naturally) wants to emphasise the positive and try to "return to normal" but that normal for millions of people is not the life that was pre-Covid.
Oddly enough, Covid will have a much more fundamental impact on how we live than leaving the EU ever could.
Already has 46k views which I believe is rather more than the channel gets.
What a shock, he’s banging on about ‘migrants’ in the channel. He means refugees fleeing persecution but that’s a different story.
The channel connects the UK to France/the EU.
What persecution are refugees facing in France/the EU?
Should we be bombing them to seek regime change in your eyes?
Lol. Do you also wear a beret and go ‘ooh betty, the cats done a whoopsie”
No.
But speaking of beret wearers, these poor desperate souls fleeing France across the Channel - why are they fleeing France?
Hostile climate for refugees in France. Non-contributory benefits in the UK. English language and existing social capital in the UK as second order issues.
It's not complicated.
Hostile climate for refugees in France is a terrible issue that pressure should be put on the French to address surely?
Benefits are not a refugee issue. If people want access to Britain's benefits that's economic migration and they're free to apply for a visa.
English language etc again is a reason to apply for a visa, not about being a refugee.
UK finds itself in a superb position to put pressure on France obvs.
Hugo Gye - who has been paying attention - on the vaccine roll out:
There is no doubt that the rollout has been a resounding success since it launched seven months ago. Britain soared ahead of every comparable country in the weeks after the vaccines became available, with the one exception being Israel.
While other countries have thankfully managed to pick up the pace since, there is nowhere with a population of 10 million or more that has administered more doses per head than the UK.
The Vaccines Taskforce was faster to secure supplies than its equivalents elsewhere, and the centralised nature of the NHS meant the rollout went off smoothly, moving through the age groups in a way that was seen by most as eminently fair.
Every major target was met or exceeded: the original plan was to offer all adults a first dose by the end of September, a timeline which was beaten by fully three months.
But throughout the whole process, the Government has been inexplicably secretive about the supply available – ministers were constantly hinting at a coming boom which never arrived, apart from a couple of weeks at the end of March and again in late May when the daily figure reached 600,000.
Already has 46k views which I believe is rather more than the channel gets.
What a shock, he’s banging on about ‘migrants’ in the channel. He means refugees fleeing persecution but that’s a different story.
The channel connects the UK to France/the EU.
What persecution are refugees facing in France/the EU?
Should we be bombing them to seek regime change in your eyes?
Lol. Do you also wear a beret and go ‘ooh betty, the cats done a whoopsie”
No.
But speaking of beret wearers, these poor desperate souls fleeing France across the Channel - why are they fleeing France?
Hostile climate for refugees in France. Non-contributory benefits in the UK. English language and existing social capital in the UK as second order issues.
It's not complicated.
Hostile climate for refugees in France is a terrible issue that pressure should be put on the French to address surely?
Benefits are not a refugee issue. If people want access to Britain's benefits that's economic migration and they're free to apply for a visa.
English language etc again is a reason to apply for a visa, not about being a refugee.
All of that is irrelevant. You asked why they were leaving France. I told you. You might as well go and stand on a beach at Grande-Synthe and advise the assorted tatterdemalions to apply for visas instead of getting in an Aldi RIB.
What is relevant is the government's completely ineffective and incompetent response. Particularly if it becomes a staple feature of This Time with Nigel Farage.
Well indeed.
The correct and humane solution is to immediately deport, without right to appeal, anyone who comes from France - while safely taking legitimate refugees from frontline countries.
Deport to where? The UK has left the Dublin II Regulation so they can't be deported to the EU or other signatories. Many of the arrivals will have no ID and/or come from countries to which the UK doesn't deport anyway.
You voted for this situation. Own it.
Do similar to what the Australians did.
Essentially write a giant cheque to a safe but poor African nation that any asylum seekers will be sent and processed there. Anyone who comes to the UK gets immediately put on a plane there instead.
The application can then be processed properly and if its rejected (because eg they came from France and not from a country they're being persecuted from) then they don't need to be deported since they're already not in the country.
There'll be at least one safe but poor country willing to take our money for such an arrangement, especially since the moment that's put in place and followed through upon people will cease to pay people smugglers to take them to Britain since they know they won't end up in Britain anymore.
Instead of then having refugees via people smugglers, we can humanely then take our fair share of refugees direct in safe and organised flights from the frontline.
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".
Blair’s 50% to uni was one of his most idiotic policies.
Certainly it is only really those who go to Russell Group universities and particularly those who study STEM subjects and subjects like law and medicine who see any real increase in their earnings potential compared to what they had after A Levels.
For most of the rest they would be better off doing an apprenticeship and for the bottom end the focus should be ensuring they left school with basis literacy and numeracy
So you support a huge increase in directed cash to the poorest schools and direct support for the most deprived children?
You can't say you support literacy and numeracy whilst supporting policies which directly reduce attainment.
Sunak announced £2.2bn extra for schools in England last year, representing 2.2% increase per pupil.
However teaching basic arithmetic and reading is not something that can be solved by spending alone but effective teachers focused on the basis
I now think Labour will take poll leads in the next few months. This isn't wishful thinking on my part. The wheels are coming off the Johnson blunderbus.
After Black Wednesday there wasn't an instant Armageddon poll loss. It took months for it to seep through.
If they are serious about a 1% tax rise by way of national insurance then they will quickly get themselves into a mess. It heavily penalises the economically active, to essentially subsidise the economically inactive. Perhaps the labour party will start to honour its name.
Raising national insurance also breaks the manifesto pledge not to raise income tax or NI.
So what?
Social care needs to be funded.
It may come at a political cost because of a broken pledge but that doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do
I now think Labour will take poll leads in the next few months. This isn't wishful thinking on my part. The wheels are coming off the Johnson blunderbus.
After Black Wednesday there wasn't an instant Armageddon poll loss. It took months for it to seep through.
If they are serious about a 1% tax rise by way of national insurance then they will quickly get themselves into a mess. It heavily penalises the economically active, to essentially subsidise the economically inactive. Perhaps the labour party will start to honour its name.
Raising national insurance also breaks the manifesto pledge not to raise income tax or NI.
So what?
Social care needs to be funded.
It may come at a political cost because of a broken pledge but that doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do
They're not. They're "punishing" the lunatic Israeli settlers. Well, "punished" is a strong word...
I must admit I hold Ben and Jerry's in the same level of contempt as Starbucks and Apple. Overpriced tat, sold more on image than any genuine advantage to the consumer.
(Awaits incoming from TSE...)
Ben and Jerry's made children's food acceptable to adults. We should acknowledge that.
Starbucks' coffee is better than instant. Apple hardware and the Apple software ecosystem are better than the alternatives. They might still be overpriced, of course. It's the old story. Add a pound's worth of value and charge a tenner.
"Apple software ecosystem are better than the alternatives"
Proof, if it was ever needed, that 'better' is a terrible metric.
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".
Blair’s 50% to uni was one of his most idiotic policies.
Certainly it is only really those who go to Russell Group universities and particularly those who study STEM subjects and subjects like law and medicine who see any real increase in their earnings potential compared to what they had after A Levels.
For most of the rest they would be better off doing an apprenticeship and for the bottom end the focus should be ensuring they left school with basis literacy and numeracy
Up to a point, Lord Copper. First, it would probably be better if companies recruited without reference to a student's alma mater. Tech companies in the US found this.
Second, medicine used to be taught by apprenticeship and law often still is. Law might be a graduate profession but not one that demands a degree in law.
Third, STEM subjects are popular but often not for their main subjects but for peripheral skills. Dominic Cummings popularised hiring astrophysicists, not because they can discourse on whether Pluto is a planet but because they are used to taking vast quantities of data from telescopes and shoving it through Python, Pandas and Jupyter notebooks, all of which can probably be taught in a week.
As it is, universities are often finishing schools. Want to get a BBC comedy series? Cambridge. Fancy running the country? Oxford. And so on.
But channeling my inner Michael Gove, perhaps there is more to life than money and education is a public good in and of itself. I'd like to think so.
In a democracy, poorly educated people can easily be fooled by lying politicians into making poor choices that directly reduce other people's quality of life. It is in everyone's interest to live in a society composed mostly of numerate, informed, sceptical and questioning citizens.
Well yes. But I'm not sure today's graduates are necessarily an advert for university's ability to impart these skills. Most of the media have been to university.
At least half of the media are privately educated, too, makes you wonder why their parents spaffed that money up the wall. If you think graduates are credulous and innumerate, though, you should spend some time with a representative sample of non-graduates. These things are all relative.
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.
Kids are not especially expensive. You will find that half their clothes are hand me downs from friends and family. The government provides some help with childcare costs. They don't need expensive toys or accessories. The main investment you need to make is to give them your time. You will save a lot of money by not going out for the first few years, anyway.
The key is working out the fundamentals: Childcare is a killer in the early years. Housing is another one which is linked to working out the schooling, you need to work all that out very early on; because it is not desirable to change schools. These things will, by themselves, impose vast costs - for most people it means moving house or relocating.
The other spending is discretionary and basically optional - clothing, toys, holidays etc.
Many people stumble in to this accidentally, I know lots of people with young kids who are in leased houses with no capital built up; it doesn't provide much stability for the children.
Intrigued to see Tories talking of raising national insurance. All seems a bit Theresa May hubris (though in fairness at least Boris won an election before raising taxes).
Do the Tories really think they can put 7bn on national insurance?
Could genuinely be an opportunity for Labour to claim they will *lower* taxes on the working man/woman.
I now think Labour will take poll leads in the next few months. This isn't wishful thinking on my part. The wheels are coming off the Johnson blunderbus.
After Black Wednesday there wasn't an instant Armageddon poll loss. It took months for it to seep through.
If they are serious about a 1% tax rise by way of national insurance then they will quickly get themselves into a mess. It heavily penalises the economically active, to essentially subsidise the economically inactive. Perhaps the labour party will start to honour its name.
Raising national insurance also breaks the manifesto pledge not to raise income tax or NI.
So what?
Social care needs to be funded.
It may come at a political cost because of a broken pledge but that doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do
National Insurance is the worst possible tax to rise.
Why would you possible want to raise an income tax that many get to evade paying, eg because they're old or claiming income via dividends or other means etc?
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.
Tory governments spend less and tax less? Which Tory governments? Not this one. Nor the one before, whose Chancellor boasted Britain's tax take was at an all-time high. One of the remarkable achievements of the Thatcher government was to persuade people that only income tax mattered. Nor did Tory governments reduce immigration, since even non-EU immigration, not covered by EU FOM, rose.
But maybe that is the point. Despite what it does, voters remember what the Conservative Party says.
In 1979 at the end of the Wilson and Callaghan Labour government spending as a percentage of gdp was 38.5% (reaching a high of 44% in 1975 under Wilson) which fell to 32.5% by the end of the Thatcher and Major years.
By the end of the Blair Brown years in 2010 spending as a percentage of gdp had reached 43.1% which had fallen to 39% by 2019 after 9 years of Tory rule (albeit Boris has gone on a bit of a spending spree since than).
Thatcher also cut the top rate of income tax from almost 90% to 40% when she left office, Cameron cut it from 50% to 45% and raised the IHT threshold to £1 million.
EU net immigration to the UK has fallen 36% since Brexit
And non-EU immigration which, as mentioned, rose even though not affected by EU FOM. And what of VAT, more than doubled by Conservative governments? Like I said, Thatcher persuaded us that only income tax counts. And yes, Boris has "gone on a bit of a spending spree".
Overall net migration to the UK fell by its largest amount for 6 years in 2019, Patel's points system just ensures EU and non EU migrants are dealt with under the same criteria.
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".
Blair’s 50% to uni was one of his most idiotic policies.
Certainly it is only really those who go to Russell Group universities and particularly those who study STEM subjects and subjects like law and medicine who see any real increase in their earnings potential compared to what they had after A Levels.
For most of the rest they would be better off doing an apprenticeship and for the bottom end the focus should be ensuring they left school with basis literacy and numeracy
So you support a huge increase in directed cash to the poorest schools and direct support for the most deprived children?
You can't say you support literacy and numeracy whilst supporting policies which directly reduce attainment.
Sunak announced £2.2bn extra for schools in England last year, representing 2.2% increase per pupil.
However teaching basic arithmetic and reading is not something that can be solved by spending alone but effective teachers focused on the basis
Teachers cost money. TAs cost money. Books and computers cost money. School buildings well maintained cost money. £2.2bn is a drop in the ocean. And "effective teachers focused on the basics" is an attack on teachers who as results aren't there clearly aren't effective or focused.
Like I said, you're a screaming hypocrite on this. But as that seems to be most issues its not a surprise.
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".
Blair’s 50% to uni was one of his most idiotic policies.
Certainly it is only really those who go to Russell Group universities and particularly those who study STEM subjects and subjects like law and medicine who see any real increase in their earnings potential compared to what they had after A Levels.
For most of the rest they would be better off doing an apprenticeship and for the bottom end the focus should be ensuring they left school with basis literacy and numeracy
So you support a huge increase in directed cash to the poorest schools and direct support for the most deprived children?
You can't say you support literacy and numeracy whilst supporting policies which directly reduce attainment.
Sunak announced £2.2bn extra for schools in England last year, representing 2.2% increase per pupil.
However teaching basic arithmetic and reading is not something that can be solved by spending alone but effective teachers focused on the basis
Don't you mean the basics?
I suspect it would make sense to put additional focus on writing English as well as reading it.
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.
Smoking and Brexit are the same issue. A proposal which Labour activists are convinced will do serious harm to Labour voters who must be too stupid to not think the same.
FWIW the smoking ban had to happen - whether traditional WWC Labour voters liked a smoke and a fag down the working men's club it was killing them. But if people want the freedom to do and think as they see fit they aren't going to reward you for stopping them and patronising them at the same time.
The Brexit battle was lost when both sides refused to compromise to the EFTA/EEA route. Positioning Brexit as "all the benefits of membership but we get to make the decisions and keep our money" could have been a vote winner. Instead we had absolutism - and yes I was one of the absolutists. A mistake.
I think the smoking ban was also tied in with the wider issue of anti-smoking measures taken by Labour during its ruling years - the incessant tax rises, the warnings etc. As John Reid said at the time, Labour was punishing the poorest voters by trying to take away one of the few pleasures they had in life yet was quite content to facilitate middle class wine drinkers, even though the effects of downing a bottle of 14% red wine every night are probably worse overall than smoking 10 cigs.
Already has 46k views which I believe is rather more than the channel gets.
What a shock, he’s banging on about ‘migrants’ in the channel. He means refugees fleeing persecution but that’s a different story.
The channel connects the UK to France/the EU.
What persecution are refugees facing in France/the EU?
Should we be bombing them to seek regime change in your eyes?
Lol. Do you also wear a beret and go ‘ooh betty, the cats done a whoopsie”
No.
But speaking of beret wearers, these poor desperate souls fleeing France across the Channel - why are they fleeing France?
Hostile climate for refugees in France. Non-contributory benefits in the UK. English language and existing social capital in the UK as second order issues.
It's not complicated.
Hostile climate for refugees in France is a terrible issue that pressure should be put on the French to address surely?
Benefits are not a refugee issue. If people want access to Britain's benefits that's economic migration and they're free to apply for a visa.
English language etc again is a reason to apply for a visa, not about being a refugee.
All of that is irrelevant. You asked why they were leaving France. I told you. You might as well go and stand on a beach at Grande-Synthe and advise the assorted tatterdemalions to apply for visas instead of getting in an Aldi RIB.
What is relevant is the government's completely ineffective and incompetent response. Particularly if it becomes a staple feature of This Time with Nigel Farage.
Well indeed.
The correct and humane solution is to immediately deport, without right to appeal, anyone who comes from France - while safely taking legitimate refugees from frontline countries.
Deport to where? The UK has left the Dublin II Regulation so they can't be deported to the EU or other signatories. Many of the arrivals will have no ID and/or come from countries to which the UK doesn't deport anyway.
You voted for this situation. Own it.
Do similar to what the Australians did.
Essentially write a giant cheque to a safe but poor African nation that any asylum seekers will be sent and processed there. Anyone who comes to the UK gets immediately put on a plane there instead.
The application can then be processed properly and if its rejected (because eg they came from France and not from a country they're being persecuted from) then they don't need to be deported since they're already not in the country.
There'll be at least one safe but poor country willing to take our money for such an arrangement, especially since the moment that's put in place and followed through upon people will cease to pay people smugglers to take them to Britain since they know they won't end up in Britain anymore.
Instead of then having refugees via people smugglers, we can humanely then take our fair share of refugees direct in safe and organised flights from the frontline.
Problem solved.
I am not 100% sure we have any nearby client states that we could ask to do this. Where did you have in mind?
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.
Research topic for a politics or history student?
Locally many of the sort of people one would expect to vote Labour drink in the Conservative Club; why. Because the beer is cheaper. I don't know whether it makes a difference to anyone's vote, but it's a sort of drip, drip, drip. And not just the taps.
Yes - while the working mens' clubs and so forth have declined, the Conservative clubs appear to cling on.
In the 70s and 80s when I was growing up my parents drank in the Conservative club. Pubs weren't really seen as a viable option. Not sure why. Whereas the Con club gave them a) the same faces, b) snooker, and c) godawful 'entertainments' every Saturday to complain about. Judging by my local Con club, this is still the shtick.
(I don't know how the market for 'popular local singer' persists, but it does. If I want entertainment, I have a telly at home; I also have youtube; these can bring me all the wonders of the world. If I want a conversation, I will go out to a pub/club etc - but the presence of an entertainer inhibits this. I remember a pub I used to drink in 20 years or so ago had the idea one Saturday to get a singer in. As soon as she started - to the general disbelief of the clientele - half the pub got up and left. I felt quite sorry for her, but these people wanted to go for a drink somewhere where no-one was singing - or at least, where one person wasn't singing at them through amplification.)
And yet Con clubs persist. I occasionally go to one for a function someone has organised - a Christmas party, a Christening, etc. They're still the same as they were. There is a nostalgic smell to them.
A friend of mine's teenage daughter used to assume that Conservative club was simply the next step after brownies/guides or cubs/scouts - it was just what you joined when you were a grown up. They are astonishingly resilient.
I now think Labour will take poll leads in the next few months. This isn't wishful thinking on my part. The wheels are coming off the Johnson blunderbus.
After Black Wednesday there wasn't an instant Armageddon poll loss. It took months for it to seep through.
If they are serious about a 1% tax rise by way of national insurance then they will quickly get themselves into a mess. It heavily penalises the economically active, to essentially subsidise the economically inactive. Perhaps the labour party will start to honour its name.
Raising national insurance also breaks the manifesto pledge not to raise income tax or NI.
So what?
Social care needs to be funded.
It may come at a political cost because of a broken pledge but that doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do
Breaking a manifesto pledge because it is the "right" thing to do is the mother of all slippery slopes.
I now think Labour will take poll leads in the next few months. This isn't wishful thinking on my part. The wheels are coming off the Johnson blunderbus.
After Black Wednesday there wasn't an instant Armageddon poll loss. It took months for it to seep through.
If they are serious about a 1% tax rise by way of national insurance then they will quickly get themselves into a mess. It heavily penalises the economically active, to essentially subsidise the economically inactive. Perhaps the labour party will start to honour its name.
Raising national insurance also breaks the manifesto pledge not to raise income tax or NI.
So what?
Social care needs to be funded.
It may come at a political cost because of a broken pledge but that doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do
Yes there are no easy solutions to social care but raising NI causes less damage politically than dementia tax 2 (which would hit middle aged inheritance hard) or raising income tax (as the latter would also hit pensioners).
NI was of course partly set up to fund healthcare anyway
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.
They will have a different set of (lower cost) solutions.
Yes and they are not selfish greedy grasping people either which helps. I have seen some lack of self awareness but a rich clown blubbering about having to pay his own way as being the blame of pensioners, majority of whom live on a fraction of said whining git. You could not make it up, next it will be homeless and unemployed should be taxed so he can live in even more splendour, rotten to the core.
Already has 46k views which I believe is rather more than the channel gets.
What a shock, he’s banging on about ‘migrants’ in the channel. He means refugees fleeing persecution but that’s a different story.
The channel connects the UK to France/the EU.
What persecution are refugees facing in France/the EU?
Should we be bombing them to seek regime change in your eyes?
Lol. Do you also wear a beret and go ‘ooh betty, the cats done a whoopsie”
No.
But speaking of beret wearers, these poor desperate souls fleeing France across the Channel - why are they fleeing France?
Mainly because the French treat them like shit. They steal their belongings and their shelters. They dump them in the middle of nowhere. They break up families randomly and enjoy some physical violence too. Being a refugee in France is no joke.
The international refugee crisis is a massive problem for the west and can only be fixed via cooperation. The starter for 10 is spend money on international development to make their home countries less shitty and dangerous. Followed by close cooperation at regional level to distribute refugees more evenly to create less local problems.
The UK of course wants none of that. The forrin can do one. "Why can't they settle in France" or "They have to settle in the first safe country" is simply unsustainable - remember the refugee crisis on Lesbos, the first safe place many arrived at?
When people make those statements what they want is zero refugees. Only people arriving here direct from their unsafe country by air could claim - which is basically none at all.
"Global Britain" is either part of the international community, playing our role in this crisis, or we are not. Farage and his supporters want the Global Community to give all that we want whilst we give nothing that they want. For the refugees that means no boats coming from France and if the French won't take them back and they drown then thats the Frogs fault for not stopping them leaving.
David Cameron had the right solution years ago which is to take genuine refugees from organised camps direct from frontline areas like Turkey.
Not have a Darwinian "if you can get here without drowning then we'll take you" survival of the fittest race to get here.
Indeed. So why don't we do that then? Oh year, because refugees are all fake and will simultaneously take all the jobs and all the benefits...
I seem to recall that we are currently discussing with Denmark on create a joint offshore processing centre somewhere in Africa.
The key is working out the fundamentals: Childcare is a killer in the early years. Housing is another one which is linked to working out the schooling, you need to work all that out very early on; because it is not desirable to change schools. These things will, by themselves, impose vast costs - for most people it means moving house or relocating.
The other spending is discretionary and basically optional - clothing, toys, holidays etc.
Many people stumble in to this accidentally, I know lots of people with young kids who are in leased houses with no capital built up; it doesn't provide much stability for the children.
One of my red lines before having a kid was owning a house, given our experiences of being turfed out of a couple of rented places through no fault of our own. We were fortunate that we could afford to buy one.
I look at friends with young kids in rented places, and they can have lots of problems: from landlords not letting stair gates be put up (or saying it will cost some of the deposit) to having to move with a nine-month old baby. I've heard rumours of worse, though not involving people I know.
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?
I can only suggest that like roger, et al, you are just too clever to understand what has happened.
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".
Blair’s 50% to uni was one of his most idiotic policies.
Certainly it is only really those who go to Russell Group universities and particularly those who study STEM subjects and subjects like law and medicine who see any real increase in their earnings potential compared to what they had after A Levels.
For most of the rest they would be better off doing an apprenticeship and for the bottom end the focus should be ensuring they left school with basis literacy and numeracy
So you support a huge increase in directed cash to the poorest schools and direct support for the most deprived children?
You can't say you support literacy and numeracy whilst supporting policies which directly reduce attainment.
Sunak announced £2.2bn extra for schools in England last year, representing 2.2% increase per pupil.
However teaching basic arithmetic and reading is not something that can be solved by spending alone but effective teachers focused on the basis
Teachers cost money. TAs cost money. Books and computers cost money. School buildings well maintained cost money. £2.2bn is a drop in the ocean. And "effective teachers focused on the basics" is an attack on teachers who as results aren't there clearly aren't effective or focused.
Like I said, you're a screaming hypocrite on this. But as that seems to be most issues its not a surprise.
Ensuring primary school teachers are focused on basic literacy and numeracy rather than too much trendy educational theory would also be a help
Essentially write a giant cheque to a safe but poor African nation that any asylum seekers will be sent and processed there. Anyone who comes to the UK gets immediately put on a plane there instead.
The application can then be processed properly and if its rejected (because eg they came from France and not from a country they're being persecuted from) then they don't need to be deported since they're already not in the country.
There'll be at least one safe but poor country willing to take our money for such an arrangement, especially since the moment that's put in place and followed through upon people will cease to pay people smugglers to take them to Britain since they know they won't end up in Britain anymore.
Instead of then having refugees via people smugglers, we can humanely then take our fair share of refugees direct in safe and organised flights from the frontline.
Problem solved.
Problem not remotely solved. Once they have arrived they are entitled to the protection of the British legal system. Legal appeals will be lodged and heard before the minibus full of unfortunates gets to the idling jet on the ramp at Manston.
Australia deliberately excised Christmas Island (where the vast majority of their arrivals pitched up) from the Australian Migration Zone to circumvent this legal issue. The RAN also did tow backs, which probably has a much stronger deterrent value, to Indonesia.
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.
Tory governments spend less and tax less? Which Tory governments? Not this one. Nor the one before, whose Chancellor boasted Britain's tax take was at an all-time high. One of the remarkable achievements of the Thatcher government was to persuade people that only income tax mattered. Nor did Tory governments reduce immigration, since even non-EU immigration, not covered by EU FOM, rose.
But maybe that is the point. Despite what it does, voters remember what the Conservative Party says.
In 1979 at the end of the Wilson and Callaghan Labour government spending as a percentage of gdp was 38.5% (reaching a high of 44% in 1975 under Wilson) which fell to 32.5% by the end of the Thatcher and Major years.
By the end of the Blair Brown years in 2010 spending as a percentage of gdp had reached 43.1% which had fallen to 39% by 2019 after 9 years of Tory rule (albeit Boris has gone on a bit of a spending spree since than).
Thatcher also cut the top rate of income tax from almost 90% to 40% when she left office, Cameron cut it from 50% to 45% and raised the IHT threshold to £1 million.
EU net immigration to the UK has fallen 36% since Brexit
And non-EU immigration which, as mentioned, rose even though not affected by EU FOM. And what of VAT, more than doubled by Conservative governments? Like I said, Thatcher persuaded us that only income tax counts. And yes, Boris has "gone on a bit of a spending spree".
Overall net migration to the UK fell by its largest amount for 6 years in 2019, Patel's points system just ensures EU and non EU migrants are dealt with under the same criteria.
That's a completely fake and garbage percentage that should be ignored. Nobody sane uses that percentage. For one thing it excludes National Insurance, which is of course complete garbage since NI is a non-ringfenced tax like any other tax.
Personally I think when making comparisons by year tax as a percentage of GDP should include the budget deficit for that year too, since a budget deficit is a tax on the future.
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".
Blair’s 50% to uni was one of his most idiotic policies.
Certainly it is only really those who go to Russell Group universities and particularly those who study STEM subjects and subjects like law and medicine who see any real increase in their earnings potential compared to what they had after A Levels.
For most of the rest they would be better off doing an apprenticeship and for the bottom end the focus should be ensuring they left school with basis literacy and numeracy
So you support a huge increase in directed cash to the poorest schools and direct support for the most deprived children?
You can't say you support literacy and numeracy whilst supporting policies which directly reduce attainment.
Sunak announced £2.2bn extra for schools in England last year, representing 2.2% increase per pupil.
However teaching basic arithmetic and reading is not something that can be solved by spending alone but effective teachers focused on the basis
Don't you mean the basics?
I suspect it would make sense to put additional focus on writing English as well as reading it.
Primary schools already relentlessly focused on the basics or the three Rs as they are frequently referred to (the fact that only one actually starts with R perhaps gives an unintended insight into educational standards). To the extent that there's not enough time devoted to creativity and the arts, in my opinion. The issue, to the extent there is one (our kids all got/are getting a great KS1/2 education) is in class sizes and support for those that struggle. Our primary class sizes are a lot bigger than the OECD average. But changing that costs money. My personal solution to improving education is simple: ban all MPs, political donors and senior civil servants from using private education. You would be amazed how well resourced state schools would suddenly become.
...even though the effects of downing a bottle of 14% red wine every night are probably worse overall than smoking 10 cigs.
Citation needed. (And in any case the two are not remotely equivalent - drinking a whole bottle of 14% wine per day is on the extreme end of alcohol consumption amongst drinkers, whereas 10 cigs a day is on the moderate end of the range amongst smokers).
Isn't a better solution to just add a social care levy to the income tax of people over retirement age, whatever percentage is necessary to plug the gap? would hit the wealthy but not affect those on low incomes.
Get rid of the useless NI. Raise income tax. Apply it across the board. If you want fairness, that is the most "fair" system.
It also gets rid of the tax on jobs
I agree. NI is unfair - it is particularly bad for penalising people with high salaries. If you can find a way of paying yourself by dividend through self employment you avoid a vast amount of tax.
And you get to bitch and moan when you don’t get furlough payments as a result of your tax minimisation strategy
Already has 46k views which I believe is rather more than the channel gets.
What a shock, he’s banging on about ‘migrants’ in the channel. He means refugees fleeing persecution but that’s a different story.
The channel connects the UK to France/the EU.
What persecution are refugees facing in France/the EU?
Should we be bombing them to seek regime change in your eyes?
Lol. Do you also wear a beret and go ‘ooh betty, the cats done a whoopsie”
No.
But speaking of beret wearers, these poor desperate souls fleeing France across the Channel - why are they fleeing France?
Mainly because the French treat them like shit. They steal their belongings and their shelters. They dump them in the middle of nowhere. They break up families randomly and enjoy some physical violence too. Being a refugee in France is no joke.
The international refugee crisis is a massive problem for the west and can only be fixed via cooperation. The starter for 10 is spend money on international development to make their home countries less shitty and dangerous. Followed by close cooperation at regional level to distribute refugees more evenly to create less local problems.
The UK of course wants none of that. The forrin can do one. "Why can't they settle in France" or "They have to settle in the first safe country" is simply unsustainable - remember the refugee crisis on Lesbos, the first safe place many arrived at?
When people make those statements what they want is zero refugees. Only people arriving here direct from their unsafe country by air could claim - which is basically none at all.
"Global Britain" is either part of the international community, playing our role in this crisis, or we are not. Farage and his supporters want the Global Community to give all that we want whilst we give nothing that they want. For the refugees that means no boats coming from France and if the French won't take them back and they drown then thats the Frogs fault for not stopping them leaving.
The fact is they don't need to settle in the first country they come to which (because France and other countries know and understand that point ) makes it worth their time to make it uncomfortable for unregistered refugees so they decide to move on rather than trying to register in France / Italy....
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".
Blair’s 50% to uni was one of his most idiotic policies.
Certainly it is only really those who go to Russell Group universities and particularly those who study STEM subjects and subjects like law and medicine who see any real increase in their earnings potential compared to what they had after A Levels.
For most of the rest they would be better off doing an apprenticeship and for the bottom end the focus should be ensuring they left school with basis literacy and numeracy
So you support a huge increase in directed cash to the poorest schools and direct support for the most deprived children?
You can't say you support literacy and numeracy whilst supporting policies which directly reduce attainment.
Sunak announced £2.2bn extra for schools in England last year, representing 2.2% increase per pupil.
However teaching basic arithmetic and reading is not something that can be solved by spending alone but effective teachers focused on the basis
Teachers cost money. TAs cost money. Books and computers cost money. School buildings well maintained cost money. £2.2bn is a drop in the ocean. And "effective teachers focused on the basics" is an attack on teachers who as results aren't there clearly aren't effective or focused.
Like I said, you're a screaming hypocrite on this. But as that seems to be most issues its not a surprise.
Actually, it can be a question of where the money is focussed. 'We' tend to see a successful school as being one where pupils get top marks; I prefer metrics where as many kids as possible get the basics right. Intelligent kids can often teach themselves, especially nowadays.
Reading, writing and arithmetic are the fundamental building blocks of an education. The best teachers and most resources should be put into those areas, early on. If the kids cannot read and write by the time they leave primary school, they'll find things much harder and much more resources will have to be spent on them in school to catch up.
Oh, and helping parents at home as well. Dolly Parton should get a Nobel prize for her work in the US. (*)
(I am not in education, so I daresay Dr Y and others will laugh at this...)
Comments
FWIW the smoking ban had to happen - whether traditional WWC Labour voters liked a smoke and a fag down the working men's club it was killing them. But if people want the freedom to do and think as they see fit they aren't going to reward you for stopping them and patronising them at the same time.
The Brexit battle was lost when both sides refused to compromise to the EFTA/EEA route. Positioning Brexit as "all the benefits of membership but we get to make the decisions and keep our money" could have been a vote winner. Instead we had absolutism - and yes I was one of the absolutists. A mistake.
The government have been breathtakingly authoritarian in their use of restrictions intended to control coronavirus (although again, possibly not as authoritarian as the electorate would like). But when the main opposition parties have been urging them to be more authoritarian, again, it's difficult to make the case that this is a government of the right.
I read your post four times and found myself in flummoxed confused enraged confounded dismay that I couldn't understand a word of it.
Yours
Emotionally Challenged Sensitive flower of the Left
https://t.co/YF90ug2B3q?amp=1
Amongst that 15% there will be people who, if they were literate, could do greater things. Perhaps even great things. A few might start up businesses that employ people. Perhaps amongst them is the next Gates, Bezos, or Sarah Gilbert. They might start companies that employ thousands.
If they're illiterate or innumerate, they won't. From a more right-wing point of view, many will be burdens on the taxpayers.
Reducing functional illiteracy and innumeracy makes sense from a moral, societal and economic point of view. The main reasons that it's not being tackled are that it's hard, and the rewards are a decade or more in the future.
I don't think you can usefully compare the current period with the Thatcher period.
Kwarteng: https://twitter.com/cameronbrownuk?lang=en
But maybe that is the point. Despite what it does, voters remember what the Conservative Party says.
It was so refreshing, especially in this heat, to be walking around a fairly quiet air conditioned supermarket without a mask blocking nose and mouth and able to breathe properly while shopping for the first time in so long.
On the way in, there was a sign asking people to please wear the mask (rather than saying it was mandated) which I disregarded; I'd guess looking at people that about 60% of shoppers were still wearing masks, but only about 20% of staff were still wearing them. I'm curious to see how those ratios change in the coming weeks.
Having said that; the girl that I mentioned below (the daughter of a miner) probably got to go to university because of it. I therefore cannot say it was totally bad.
Had it not been for the Alliance, its possible that Labour would have been hammered even more rather than less.
Well, the figures for the week ending 9 July have just been published:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending9july2021#deaths-registered-by-week
And guess what, a big spike in deaths. Here are the number of deaths for Week 27 (week ending around 3 to 9 July):
2010: 8,627
2011: 8,705
2012: 8,909
2013: 8,790
2014: 8,763
2015: 9,205
2016: 9,138
2017: 9,263
2018: 9,258
2019: 9,062
2020: 9,140 (of which 532 were recorded as COVID)
2021: 9,752 (of which 183 were recorded as COVID)
COVID deaths went up (was averaging around 100 for the previous seven weeks), but that's not a huge factor. The previous two weeks in 2021 recorded 8,690 and 8,808 deaths, so that 9,752 deaths is an 11% increase.
Obviously there will be noise in a dataset like this, but this is the first time that non-COVID deaths have been well above average (excluding bank holidays) since last September. It will be interesting to see if this is a one off or the start of a trend (the current hot weather will probably show up in two weeks time).
EDIT: I'm assuming that we're not seeing a big under-count for COVID related deaths. The 183 (England and Wales) is pretty close to what worldometers has for the UK for the week ending 9 July.
But speaking of beret wearers, these poor desperate souls fleeing France across the Channel - why are they fleeing France?
In this context, the best thing the UK government can do is make its regulation compliant for the EU. That enables a market of 30 countries with one set of compliance rather than one. It also makes the UK a massively more attractive investment destination, given that companies will be compliant with EU regs anyway. Also largely deals with the Irish Sea border issue
But you are only compliant if the other party says you are. Which introduces issues of rule-taking, being at the whim of a larger more powerful party and not "taking control".
(Awaits incoming from TSE...)
For most of the rest they would be better off doing an apprenticeship and for the bottom end the focus should be ensuring they left school with basis literacy and numeracy
Locally many of the sort of people one would expect to vote Labour drink in the Conservative Club; why. Because the beer is cheaper. I don't know whether it makes a difference to anyone's vote, but it's a sort of drip, drip, drip.
And not just the taps.
Of all deaths registered in Week 27 in England, 1.9% mentioned COVID-19 on the death certificate.
By the end of the Blair Brown years in 2010 spending as a percentage of gdp had reached 43.1% which had fallen to 39% by 2019 after 9 years of Tory rule (albeit Boris has gone on a bit of a spending spree since than).
https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/past_spending
Thatcher also cut the top rate of income tax from almost 90% to 40% when she left office, Cameron cut it from 50% to 45% and raised the IHT threshold to £1 million.
EU net immigration to the UK has fallen 36% since Brexit
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jun/17/number-of-eu-citizens-seeking-work-in-uk-falls-36-since-brexit-study-shows
Non-contributory benefits in the UK.
English language and existing social capital in the UK as second order issues.
It's not complicated.
As for kids, good luck
If you want to do everything you used to do and pay for lots of childcare to enable that then it will cost a lot more. But you may find you have other, better things to do with children that cost a lot less.
Benefits are not a refugee issue. If people want access to Britain's benefits that's economic migration and they're free to apply for a visa.
English language etc again is a reason to apply for a visa, not about being a refugee.
The problem is more the poor quality of many undergraduate degrees rather than the need for a highly educated workforce.
Ministers were forced to write letters of apology to the managing directors of Pfizer and AstraZeneca after publishing commercially sensitive information around Covid-19 vaccine supply, The Scotsman can reveal......
.....Nicola Sturgeon said she was not “convinced” by the arguments put forward by the UK Government, later describing Boris Johnson’s government of having thrown a “hissy fit” over the publication as a briefing war around the number of vaccines being supplied to the Scottish Government erupted.
https://www.scotsman.com/health/coronavirus/scottish-government-forced-to-apologise-to-vaccine-manufacturers-over-deployment-plan-fiasco-3314296
Starbucks' coffee is better than instant. Apple hardware and the Apple software ecosystem are better than the alternatives. They might still be overpriced, of course. It's the old story. Add a pound's worth of value and charge a tenner.
The UK of course wants none of that. The forrin can do one. "Why can't they settle in France" or "They have to settle in the first safe country" is simply unsustainable - remember the refugee crisis on Lesbos, the first safe place many arrived at?
When people make those statements what they want is zero refugees. Only people arriving here direct from their unsafe country by air could claim - which is basically none at all.
"Global Britain" is either part of the international community, playing our role in this crisis, or we are not. Farage and his supporters want the Global Community to give all that we want whilst we give nothing that they want. For the refugees that means no boats coming from France and if the French won't take them back and they drown then thats the Frogs fault for not stopping them leaving.
Of course there are standards which actually matter, but a lot of the benefit is simply agreeing to work with the same ones.
You can't say you support literacy and numeracy whilst supporting policies which directly reduce attainment.
Not have a Darwinian "if you can get here without drowning then we'll take you" survival of the fittest race to get here.
They are here because we were there.
What is relevant is the government's completely ineffective and incompetent response. Particularly if it becomes a staple feature of This Time with Nigel Farage.
Second, medicine used to be taught by apprenticeship and law often still is. Law might be a graduate profession but not one that demands a degree in law.
Third, STEM subjects are popular but often not for their main subjects but for peripheral skills. Dominic Cummings popularised hiring astrophysicists, not because they can discourse on whether Pluto is a planet but because they are used to taking vast quantities of data from telescopes and shoving it through Python, Pandas and Jupyter notebooks, all of which can probably be taught in a week.
As it is, universities are often finishing schools. Want to get a BBC comedy series? Cambridge. Fancy running the country? Oxford. And so on.
But channeling my inner Michael Gove, perhaps there is more to life than money and education is a public good in and of itself. I'd like to think so.
The correct and humane solution is to immediately deport, without right to appeal, anyone who comes from France - while safely taking legitimate refugees from frontline countries.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I’d have to see a good reference to believe it (3 million would be much more plausible: is it a power of ten problem?)
2. People like Chinese Food so they're not instinctively against them unlike all these fake afghan children who are all 34 and get a free house and golf lessons
3. Lets see the response when HK British start arriving in large numbers
Then at one of the late (70's onwards) birthdays one or other of them stands up and makes a speech saying how wonderful you've been as a parent, and how much they owe to you.
Go ahead. Do it.
Hard to believe the rich people on here who would beggar pensioners so they could get their grubby paws on even more money, pathetic cretins.
You voted for this situation. Own it.
@Cyclefree's header will at least assuage those who think this site is consistently and persistently opposed to the Prime Minister, the Government and the Conservative Party (though it probably won't).
There are all sorts of reasons for the current political status quo - there is and always has been a willingness to "rally behind the Government" at a time of perceived or actual crisis. That is aided by Labour's conscious decision to provide "constructive Opposition" (in essence, being largely supportive of the Government's actions).
The temptation, were it to be more vociferous and critical, is to say "what would you have done differently?" and the answer is of course nothing. Had Starmer been Prime Minister in March 2020, he'd have done exactly what Johnson did - perhaps a little earlier, perhaps not.
The only credible opposition line would have been to argue against any form of restriction from the beginning or perhaps from last June. That's a credible position - not popular perhaps but credible.
Therein lies the problem for those looking to carve out a distinctive niche - a majority of the public (for now) believes we are in a crisis and broadly supports the measures taken by the Government to mitigate the crisis. A growing majority of the adult population has voluntarily agreed to be vaccinated based on the information supplied by Government and other bodies and has largely eschewed the opposing views.
There will be a reckoning for all this - fiscal, medical, political, cultural, social to name but five. Each one will be different, affect people differently and will be of longer or shorter duration.
There are socio-economic and cultural changes from the pandemic which may prove permanent both positive and negative (that's the nature of these things).
I don't sense either Government or Opposition has a coherent vision of post-Covid Britain - the Government (naturally) wants to emphasise the positive and try to "return to normal" but that normal for millions of people is not the life that was pre-Covid.
Oddly enough, Covid will have a much more fundamental impact on how we live than leaving the EU ever could.
There is no doubt that the rollout has been a resounding success since it launched seven months ago. Britain soared ahead of every comparable country in the weeks after the vaccines became available, with the one exception being Israel.
While other countries have thankfully managed to pick up the pace since, there is nowhere with a population of 10 million or more that has administered more doses per head than the UK.
The Vaccines Taskforce was faster to secure supplies than its equivalents elsewhere, and the centralised nature of the NHS meant the rollout went off smoothly, moving through the age groups in a way that was seen by most as eminently fair.
Every major target was met or exceeded: the original plan was to offer all adults a first dose by the end of September, a timeline which was beaten by fully three months.
But throughout the whole process, the Government has been inexplicably secretive about the supply available – ministers were constantly hinting at a coming boom which never arrived, apart from a couple of weeks at the end of March and again in late May when the daily figure reached 600,000.
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/uk-vaccine-rollout-amazing-success-country-unlocks-1111226
Essentially write a giant cheque to a safe but poor African nation that any asylum seekers will be sent and processed there. Anyone who comes to the UK gets immediately put on a plane there instead.
The application can then be processed properly and if its rejected (because eg they came from France and not from a country they're being persecuted from) then they don't need to be deported since they're already not in the country.
There'll be at least one safe but poor country willing to take our money for such an arrangement, especially since the moment that's put in place and followed through upon people will cease to pay people smugglers to take them to Britain since they know they won't end up in Britain anymore.
Instead of then having refugees via people smugglers, we can humanely then take our fair share of refugees direct in safe and organised flights from the frontline.
Problem solved.
However teaching basic arithmetic and reading is not something that can be solved by spending alone but effective teachers focused on the basis
Social care needs to be funded.
It may come at a political cost because of a broken pledge but that doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do
Social care needs to be funded.
It may come at a political cost because of a broken pledge but that doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do
Proof, if it was ever needed, that 'better' is a terrible metric.
If you think graduates are credulous and innumerate, though, you should spend some time with a representative sample of non-graduates. These things are all relative.
The other spending is discretionary and basically optional - clothing, toys, holidays etc.
Many people stumble in to this accidentally, I know lots of people with young kids who are in leased houses with no capital built up; it doesn't provide much stability for the children.
All seems a bit Theresa May hubris (though in fairness at least Boris won an election before raising taxes).
Do the Tories really think they can put 7bn on national insurance?
Could genuinely be an opportunity for Labour to claim they will *lower* taxes on the working man/woman.
Why would you possible want to raise an income tax that many get to evade paying, eg because they're old or claiming income via dividends or other means etc?
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-net-migration-falls/
The tax take as a percentage of gdp overall was 23% in 1997 which had risen to 26.5% by the end of the Brown years and is now about 25%
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/tax-revenue-percent-of-gdp-wb-data.html
Like I said, you're a screaming hypocrite on this. But as that seems to be most issues its not a surprise.
I suspect it would make sense to put additional focus on writing English as well as reading it.
In the 70s and 80s when I was growing up my parents drank in the Conservative club. Pubs weren't really seen as a viable option. Not sure why. Whereas the Con club gave them a) the same faces, b) snooker, and c) godawful 'entertainments' every Saturday to complain about. Judging by my local Con club, this is still the shtick.
(I don't know how the market for 'popular local singer' persists, but it does. If I want entertainment, I have a telly at home; I also have youtube; these can bring me all the wonders of the world. If I want a conversation, I will go out to a pub/club etc - but the presence of an entertainer inhibits this.
I remember a pub I used to drink in 20 years or so ago had the idea one Saturday to get a singer in. As soon as she started - to the general disbelief of the clientele - half the pub got up and left. I felt quite sorry for her, but these people wanted to go for a drink somewhere where no-one was singing - or at least, where one person wasn't singing at them through amplification.)
And yet Con clubs persist. I occasionally go to one for a function someone has organised - a Christmas party, a Christening, etc. They're still the same as they were. There is a nostalgic smell to them.
A friend of mine's teenage daughter used to assume that Conservative club was simply the next step after brownies/guides or cubs/scouts - it was just what you joined when you were a grown up. They are astonishingly resilient.
NI was of course partly set up to fund healthcare anyway
This https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/06/28/uk-wants-send-asylum-seekers-offshore-centers-after-denmark-passes-similar-law/ refers to a Times article (as the Times is paywalled I will use the Washington Post link).
I look at friends with young kids in rented places, and they can have lots of problems: from landlords not letting stair gates be put up (or saying it will cost some of the deposit) to having to move with a nine-month old baby. I've heard rumours of worse, though not involving people I know.
Australia deliberately excised Christmas Island (where the vast majority of their arrivals pitched up) from the Australian Migration Zone to circumvent this legal issue. The RAN also did tow backs, which probably has a much stronger deterrent value, to Indonesia.
"In 2019/20, UK government revenues – or public sector current receipts
– were £828 billion. This is equivalent to 37% of GDP. "
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8513/CBP-8513.pdf
Personally I think when making comparisons by year tax as a percentage of GDP should include the budget deficit for that year too, since a budget deficit is a tax on the future.
The issue, to the extent there is one (our kids all got/are getting a great KS1/2 education) is in class sizes and support for those that struggle. Our primary class sizes are a lot bigger than the OECD average. But changing that costs money.
My personal solution to improving education is simple: ban all MPs, political donors and senior civil servants from using private education. You would be amazed how well resourced state schools would suddenly become.
Reading, writing and arithmetic are the fundamental building blocks of an education. The best teachers and most resources should be put into those areas, early on. If the kids cannot read and write by the time they leave primary school, they'll find things much harder and much more resources will have to be spent on them in school to catch up.
Oh, and helping parents at home as well. Dolly Parton should get a Nobel prize for her work in the US. (*)
(I am not in education, so I daresay Dr Y and others will laugh at this...)
(*) I didn't realise that she does this in the UK as well: https://imaginationlibrary.com/uk/