I have upped my bet on Labour poll lead by the end of this year
Mug
John at least I've moved on from Corbyn, you still seem to think he's worthy of losing another election with
No I dont
I am anyone but Starmer who will certainly lose another election.
Andy Burnham needs a seat and to become leader.
Then your bet would not be a mug bet
Andy Burnham who polling says would be doing the same as Starmer? Andy Burnham who your team said was a red Tory in 2015? That one?
The Andy Burnham who is so much the pinnacle and apotheosis of mug betting that in a thousand years time, whatever humanity has evolved into will be sarcastically telling each other on the quantumnet that "If you believe that, I have an Andy Burnham to sell you"?
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
Here in the South West there is a massive shortage of staff in cafes, pubs and restaurants. Anyone who is unemployed could come down tomorrow and get a job. The problem is that they could not find anywhere to live.
Because half the villages are filled with 2nd home owners who will then moan they can't get the service when they want a coffee in their local cafe.
If you want to make a real a difference to the economic outlook for these places you should put a hefty tax on second home owners. We tax all manner of things that are bad for our health, second homes would seem an obvious addition to that list.
Tenby restaurants shutting because they can't get the staff.
"Tenby is now owned by second home owners, much like the rest of the desirable parts of the county. Years ago, the Tenby kids filled these jobs. Seasonal work such as this is of no real benefit to an adult paying rent or a mortgage because of its intermittent nature. Now the Tenby kids are all gone. They all live somewhere else, because their parents all got priced out of the market by investors from the cities and rich incomers. There is nowhere to park in Tenby. The public transport situation is dire. Mix all these ingredients up and there you have it, a work force pushed away, either into another area, or into a state of depression about their situation that makes them unwilling to work for just pride and no money."
Bring back Rebecca and her (grand)daughters
Second homes have certainly been causing angst for a long time - if the Meibion Glyndwr arson campaign in 1979-1991 was any guide.
I do like the deadpan comment: " One person was convicted of sending fire bombs through the post in 1993. But some doubted the extent of Sion Aubrey Roberts' involvement as he would have been seven when the campaign began."
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
What arrogance and condescension.
Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?
If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.
If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
Question - have you ever been to Wisbech...?
My "arrogance and condescension" is just reality. People aren't moving to east anglia - a place they don't want to live - to do jobs they don't want to do at a cost they can't afford. Media house price in Wizzy is £177k vs £130k in Widnes.
So your Wizzy food factory needs to cover the 36% higher house price and the higher cost of living before you even start trying to make the job and the prospects look attractive.
So your answer seems to be to import cheap foreign labour to live in squalid conditions in Wisbech so that Wizzy Food Co can maintain its profit margins?
I mean personally I am all in favour of migration and people being able to move where they want for whatever reason but your argument is actually utterly illogical. So long as the factory is in Wisbech (which funnily enough I drove past last night coming back from a wedding) then the food manufacturers must pay enough for the workers to be able to afford to live there whether those workers are from Widnes or Wroclaw. The days of expecting people to work for less than a living wage should be behind us.
I totally agree. The reason it does not happen, though, is because we demand unsustainably cheap food. The producers are squeezed by the supermarkets and the supermarkets do it because their customers expect it.
Again agreed. Of course it is easy for me to bemoan this when I can afford increased food prices from buying local and seasonal. I do understand that many cannot. But I am not sure how much the increased food price argument works when you see the vast profits being made by supermarkets.
They aren't making vast profits from selling food though. Big supermarkets are grossly inefficient to operate, some of them (Sainsbury's for example) almost laughably so. They can't charge enough from selling food to cover their costs because more efficient operators (like Aldi and Lidl) keep prices down and they have to compete.
We're seeing food price inflation again at the moment which is largely being driven from cost price inflation of basic staples not profiteering. Production prices rise, but retail prices cannot keep in check. So we get to the big margin squeeze, and as Brexit costs keep escalating (and haven't anywhere near fully kicked in yet) and we see structural issues like a shortage of drivers / workers it will get a lot worse.
Novel suggestion but maybe the inefficient businesses should become more efficient?
Or go out of business and be replaced by the more efficient ones?
Inefficient businesses have no divine right to survive.
Mr. Observer, I've toyed with writing an article (not sure it'd suit the site's subject, though) that the internet has the potential to uniquely reverse the trend of human civilization since its dawn: namely the increasing rise and power of cities (exceptional periods such as the collapse of the Roman Empire etc notwithstanding).
By working from home, and home delivery, and so much now possible electronically, the case for cities has been diminished significantly.
I have upped my bet on Labour poll lead by the end of this year
Mug
John at least I've moved on from Corbyn, you still seem to think he's worthy of losing another election with
No I dont
I am anyone but Starmer who will certainly lose another election.
Andy Burnham needs a seat and to become leader.
Then your bet would not be a mug bet
Andy Burnham who polling says would be doing the same as Starmer? Andy Burnham who your team said was a red Tory in 2015? That one?
The Andy Burnham who is so much the pinnacle and apotheosis of mug betting that in a thousand years time, whatever humanity has evolved into will be sarcastically telling each other on the quantumnet that "If you believe that, I have an Andy Burnham to sell you"?
I am quite willing to be proved wrong but it just seems bizarre that the people that are now so in favour of Burnham were so against him even a few months ago. They talk about Blair having no principles but they're happy for Burnham to go from Blairite to Corbynite?
I think Burnham would be a good leader - but I think he'd continue what Starmer has done.
Of course he would have to do better when actually going for the leadership, as last time it was dreadful
Mr. Observer, I've toyed with writing an article (not sure it'd suit the site's subject, though) that the internet has the potential to uniquely reverse the trend of human civilization since its dawn: namely the increasing rise and power of cities (exceptional periods such as the collapse of the Roman Empire etc notwithstanding).
By working from home, and home delivery, and so much now possible electronically, the case for cities has been diminished significantly.
Hmm, was not the decline of the Empire in Britannia marked by the retreat to the countryside villas? Edit: but, as you say, exceptional.
I disagree. The idea of a Transatlantic Bridge (Blair, Thatcher and earlier) was well established: root the Americans in Europe through the UK. That bridge now is comprehensively burnt at both ends.
David Milliband rejected the Atlantic Bridge, preferring instead "Global Hub", which seems to have meant being the only members of everything multilateral - NATO, EU, UN Security Council, G7 - and then trying to join it all up. The Global Hub concept was adopted by William Hague, but it was getting very woolly as he tried to reconcile the English nationalism that would inform Brexit with the globalisation that is inherent in the "Global Hub" name - saying multilateralism is really bilateralism etc.
The current lot don't even bother to reconcile the contradiction, which is why we are left with a slogan and a vacuum where a foreign policy should be
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
How long ago was it when Scott was pasting predictions of mass unemployment ?
Why is there unemployment and a huge labour shortage at the same time, what are the lazy barstewards lounging on the dole living it up not forced at gunpoint to get their arse's out the door and do a day's work.
I appreciate this is a wind-up but have you ever tried 'living it up' on UC?
Of course not , I have worked all my life. You rightly point out it is a wind up but it does have a serious point to it. In any proper functioning country it should be impossible to have so many unemployed people whilst at same time having a huge labour shortage. It shows how badly the country is run , how poor government agencies are and is a scandal. It does not impact the Tories and as long as they are all well paid and living it up , they do not give a hoot. Labour are only a hair's breadth different nowadays so it is a case of the devil or the deep blue sea.
The jobs are not where the unemployed are. We can either try to relocate the unemployed, or try to relocate the jobs.
Yes, but most subsidies are for large farmers etc, they ought to be subsiding real farm employment etc and not just the big boys. Failure to build decent low cost housing in lots of these rural areas is another thing that is needed, SNP have been as bad as Tories at that and so young people are forced to move to cities making things worse all the time. The government policies are a shambles, not enough votes in it for them.
AIUI, many small farmers say that the NFU, and it's Scottish equivalent are dominated by the 'big boys'.
Mr. Observer, I've toyed with writing an article (not sure it'd suit the site's subject, though) that the internet has the potential to uniquely reverse the trend of human civilization since its dawn: namely the increasing rise and power of cities (exceptional periods such as the collapse of the Roman Empire etc notwithstanding).
By working from home, and home delivery, and so much now possible electronically, the case for cities has been diminished significantly.
You could stand the same point on its head and say that the internet has turned everywhere into city.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
What arrogance and condescension.
Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?
If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.
If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
I agree with some of your points but the reason the food processing plants are in Wisbech rather than Widnes is because that is where the fields are. You grow crops where the soil and climate conditions are most favourable and then you process as close to there as possible.
But I agree that people should move for work. It has always been the way - people forget the mining communities that moved wholesale from places like Durham to south Wales in the early 20th century. Indeed my father moved from Essex to Liverpool to Nottingham and finally to Newark in the first 4 years of my life because those places were where the work was at the time.
That's a fair point on geography, I was going for alliteration: Wisbech, Warsaw, Widnes . . .
The point is though that people can and do move domestically, not just internationally. Like you my parents moved a lot when I was a child and so have I as an adult. Crocodile tears that jobs aren't where people are, so we need immigration as opposed to people moving a few miles across the country, is just silly.
Mr. Carnyx, I think so. Didn't take long for London etc to become ghost towns.
There was a rival settlement outside London (Lundenwic, maybe?) that was prosperous but when the Vikings showed up the value of city walls meant it got rapidly abandoned.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
We have far too many jobs that are done by very cheap labour because it is not worth investing in machinery that could significantly improve productivity. Your Anglian food factory is almost certainly a good example of this. The result is a low wage, low productivity economy where too many people rely upon the State to top up inadequate incomes with in work benefits making them net recipients from the system.
We need to change the balance on this. Not over night but certainly over time. An 8% increase in wages this year driven by the lower paid would certainly be a step in the right direction. The test will be whether the NMW continues to absorb more and more of our workforce or whether those with basic skills, such as being able to drive, can do better. If we can we will create a more cohesive, fairer society. I would have expected you to be in favour of this.
The way you say it, we have basically reverted to the mid-C19 Speenhamland System of using poor law to subsidise the farmers and big landowners in their payment of starvation wages to their workers, at the expense of the taxpayers more generally. Or am I missing something?
That's Tories for you , they look after their chums
What still puzzles me is that the Brexiter farmers didn't add 2 + 2 together when it came to their staffing policies. But who am I to Remainsplain them?
Morning, Malky! Had a foggy morning over here and still cloudy with small showers around. Hope it's brighter over your way - been enough rain of late.
Morning Carnyx, weather similar here, bit grey and murky though looks like it might brighten up a bit. Supposed to be in 20's today and rising through the week. We certainly needed a bit of rain.
Just catching up having been away. A couple of comments if I may:
1. Lovely to see so many Tories campaigning so vigorously for significant rises in working people's wages to counter the alleged labour shortage. Something at last that the lefties on here can agree with the Tories about. Strange old world, isn't it? 2. I'd have thought the more radical Tory solution would be to lock more people up. I read on here that prisoners are much sought after. If you imprison a lot more people, then release them early, wouldn't that be a more cost effective solution to labour shortages?
I don't see any tories apart from DavidL saying pay rises for minimum wage folk is a good thing. I am not a tory neither I believe is another richard
If not a Tory what would you describe yourself and 'another richard' as being?
Wouldn't a Tory be a member or otherwise strong supporter of the Conservative party ?
Something which Hyufd and a few other PBers - Casino, Mortimer, MM, Max - might be classed as.
But which neither I nor to my knowledge Pagan2 are.
Can we clear this up once and for all. Being 'A Tory' is not an ethnicity it is simply a voting intention. I can understand why you're in denial-particularly at the moment - but to suggest neither you nor 'Another Richard' would vote for anyone else (except perhaps UKIP) is plainly ridiculous.
So time to man up and say 'I'm a Tory and I'm proud"
Exactly so, Roger. All the dissembling that goes on around this. It's as if being a Tory is something shameful. Why would anyone feel that? Beats me.
"I'm not a member. I've voted for different parties over the years. It was about Brexit. You're forgetting the choice. It was that or Corbyn."
Bla bla bla. None of this is relevant. It's interesting but it's off the point. If you voted Tory in the last general election YOU ARE A TORY and this state persists until rectified by a sincereaf and firm intention to vote otherwise in the next one.
But to be a PB Tory is a sinuous and quicksilver thing, hard to pin down.
Afaics the people who voted for Cameron and now despise him are the same people who voted for May and now despise her, and also the the same people who voted for BJ but are still defending his every ineptitude and moral failing.
The one consistency seems to be that they bear no responsibility for any of the consequences of voting for these fine folk.
Not as far as I can see.
I despise May, and voted against her. Plenty of PB Tories voted against Boris.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
We have far too many jobs that are done by very cheap labour because it is not worth investing in machinery that could significantly improve productivity. Your Anglian food factory is almost certainly a good example of this. The result is a low wage, low productivity economy where too many people rely upon the State to top up inadequate incomes with in work benefits making them net recipients from the system.
We need to change the balance on this. Not over night but certainly over time. An 8% increase in wages this year driven by the lower paid would certainly be a step in the right direction. The test will be whether the NMW continues to absorb more and more of our workforce or whether those with basic skills, such as being able to drive, can do better. If we can we will create a more cohesive, fairer society. I would have expected you to be in favour of this.
The way you say it, we have basically reverted to the mid-C19 Speenhamland System of using poor law to subsidise the farmers and big landowners in their payment of starvation wages to their workers, at the expense of the taxpayers more generally. Or am I missing something?
That's Tories for you , they look after their chums
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
How long ago was it when Scott was pasting predictions of mass unemployment ?
Why is there unemployment and a huge labour shortage at the same time, what are the lazy barstewards lounging on the dole living it up not forced at gunpoint to get their arse's out the door and do a day's work.
I appreciate this is a wind-up but have you ever tried 'living it up' on UC?
Of course not , I have worked all my life. You rightly point out it is a wind up but it does have a serious point to it. In any proper functioning country it should be impossible to have so many unemployed people whilst at same time having a huge labour shortage. It shows how badly the country is run , how poor government agencies are and is a scandal. It does not impact the Tories and as long as they are all well paid and living it up , they do not give a hoot. Labour are only a hair's breadth different nowadays so it is a case of the devil or the deep blue sea.
Yeah, I spent 18 months 'living it up' on the dole back in the 80s after breaking my back. It all came to a sad end when I was trained in IT and left for forge a career all on my tod.
Of course I ended up paying back my dole 100s of times over in taxes but I'll be forever grateful for that safety net.
These days, now retired, I do a day a week for Citizens Advice; I've yet to come across anyone on the dole who wants to be there or is 'living it up'.
For sure it cannot something many people would do as a life choice , though it may suit some who can work on the side when they can. Just having to handle the bureaucracy would be enough to put many if not most off.
Get our green spaces back on track by using glyphosates is an interesting approach. Sorry, I meant ‘interesting’.
It's 'interesting'-ly tin-eared in the current climate, particularly when Mr Starmer et al have been up here LabourHQsplaining to us and evidently trying to attract voters back from the SNP and the Greens (and by implication the younger/greener* ones).
*No pun or sectarian affiliation implied. But this makes me suddenly wonder, do the, erm, overtones of 'Green' have anything to do with responses to environmental issues? Given, for instance, the infamous traffic light cycle in nearby Larkhill (red: yellow: nothing).
That is of course over the border in South Lanarkshire and I'm not familiar enough with North Lanarks politics to judge (it being, of course, on the other side of the Great Scottish Central Desert so beloved of PBTories opining on covid in Scotland).
The SNP's treatment of Charles Kennedy in 2015 was a disgrace, would like to see an apology for that
Unpopular view but Charles Kennedy was an unfit drunk putting himself up for elected office in 2015.
He deserved what he got. Opposition parties hold politicians to account and quite rightly too.
Charles Kennedy's friends, loved ones and party should have talked him into standing down in 2015 - or seen him removed as a PPC in 2015. If having retired he'd been subject to the same treatment then that would be a disgrace, but not while he was seeking elected office.
Just catching up having been away. A couple of comments if I may:
1. Lovely to see so many Tories campaigning so vigorously for significant rises in working people's wages to counter the alleged labour shortage. Something at last that the lefties on here can agree with the Tories about. Strange old world, isn't it? 2. I'd have thought the more radical Tory solution would be to lock more people up. I read on here that prisoners are much sought after. If you imprison a lot more people, then release them early, wouldn't that be a more cost effective solution to labour shortages?
I don't see any tories apart from DavidL saying pay rises for minimum wage folk is a good thing. I am not a tory neither I believe is another richard
If not a Tory what would you describe yourself and 'another richard' as being?
Wouldn't a Tory be a member or otherwise strong supporter of the Conservative party ?
Something which Hyufd and a few other PBers - Casino, Mortimer, MM, Max - might be classed as.
But which neither I nor to my knowledge Pagan2 are.
Can we clear this up once and for all. Being 'A Tory' is not an ethnicity it is simply a voting intention. I can understand why you're in denial-particularly at the moment - but to suggest neither you nor 'Another Richard' would vote for anyone else (except perhaps UKIP) is plainly ridiculous.
So time to man up and say 'I'm a Tory and I'm proud"
Exactly so, Roger. All the dissembling that goes on around this. It's as if being a Tory is something shameful. Why would anyone feel that? Beats me.
"I'm not a member. I've voted for different parties over the years. It was about Brexit. You're forgetting the choice. It was that or Corbyn."
Bla bla bla. None of this is relevant. It's interesting but it's off the point. If you voted Tory in the last general election YOU ARE A TORY and this state persists until rectified by a sincereaf and firm intention to vote otherwise in the next one.
But to be a PB Tory is a sinuous and quicksilver thing, hard to pin down.
Afaics the people who voted for Cameron and now despise him are the same people who voted for May and now despise her, and also the the same people who voted for BJ but are still defending his every ineptitude and moral failing.
The one consistency seems to be that they bear no responsibility for any of the consequences of voting for these fine folk.
Not as far as I can see.
I despise May, and voted against her. Plenty of PB Tories voted against Boris.
PB Tories are not a homogenous group.
Neither are Labour nor Lib dems. They all have their own views. Labour fight like ferrets in a sack. The Lib Dems argue about what type of sandals to wear..
Mr. Observer, I've toyed with writing an article (not sure it'd suit the site's subject, though) that the internet has the potential to uniquely reverse the trend of human civilization since its dawn: namely the increasing rise and power of cities (exceptional periods such as the collapse of the Roman Empire etc notwithstanding).
By working from home, and home delivery, and so much now possible electronically, the case for cities has been diminished significantly.
Hmm, was not the decline of the Empire in Britannia marked by the retreat to the countryside villas? Edit: but, as you say, exceptional.
I am not sure that is the case - perhaps the exact reverse. It appears that the Villa Landscape that dominated southern Britain from the 2nd to the 4th centuries suffered a massive and irreversible collapse as a result of the loss of demand from the cities and, more importantly, from the rest of the Empire. It was those cities which were able to survive and protect their immediate villa farms that were able to survive longest after the end of official Roman occupation. The Thames Valley and Cirencester are god examples of this and in the latter case it appears that an effective Romano-British lifestyle in slow decline was maintained for perhaps as much as 50 years after the traditionally claimed end of Roman Britain in 410AD. Likely what did for the cities were the series of plagues that swept across the Roman Empire in the later 4th century combined with a massive loss of trade, perhaps as a direct consequence.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
Here in the South West there is a massive shortage of staff in cafes, pubs and restaurants. Anyone who is unemployed could come down tomorrow and get a job. The problem is that they could not find anywhere to live.
Because half the villages are filled with 2nd home owners who will then moan they can't get the service when they want a coffee in their local cafe.
If you want to make a real a difference to the economic outlook for these places you should put a hefty tax on second home owners. We tax all manner of things that are bad for our health, second homes would seem an obvious addition to that list.
Tenby restaurants shutting because they can't get the staff.
"Tenby is now owned by second home owners, much like the rest of the desirable parts of the county. Years ago, the Tenby kids filled these jobs. Seasonal work such as this is of no real benefit to an adult paying rent or a mortgage because of its intermittent nature. Now the Tenby kids are all gone. They all live somewhere else, because their parents all got priced out of the market by investors from the cities and rich incomers. There is nowhere to park in Tenby. The public transport situation is dire. Mix all these ingredients up and there you have it, a work force pushed away, either into another area, or into a state of depression about their situation that makes them unwilling to work for just pride and no money."
Bring back Rebecca and her (grand)daughters
Second homes have certainly been causing angst for a long time - if the Meibion Glyndwr arson campaign in 1979-1991 was any guide.
I do like the deadpan comment: " One person was convicted of sending fire bombs through the post in 1993. But some doubted the extent of Sion Aubrey Roberts' involvement as he would have been seven when the campaign began."
One could buy boxes of the things in Dublin with the slogan 'Strike a light for Wales'!
Just catching up having been away. A couple of comments if I may:
1. Lovely to see so many Tories campaigning so vigorously for significant rises in working people's wages to counter the alleged labour shortage. Something at last that the lefties on here can agree with the Tories about. Strange old world, isn't it? 2. I'd have thought the more radical Tory solution would be to lock more people up. I read on here that prisoners are much sought after. If you imprison a lot more people, then release them early, wouldn't that be a more cost effective solution to labour shortages?
I don't see any tories apart from DavidL saying pay rises for minimum wage folk is a good thing. I am not a tory neither I believe is another richard
If not a Tory what would you describe yourself and 'another richard' as being?
Wouldn't a Tory be a member or otherwise strong supporter of the Conservative party ?
Something which Hyufd and a few other PBers - Casino, Mortimer, MM, Max - might be classed as.
But which neither I nor to my knowledge Pagan2 are.
Can we clear this up once and for all. Being 'A Tory' is not an ethnicity it is simply a voting intention. I can understand why you're in denial-particularly at the moment - but to suggest neither you nor 'Another Richard' would vote for anyone else (except perhaps UKIP) is plainly ridiculous.
So time to man up and say 'I'm a Tory and I'm proud"
Exactly so, Roger. All the dissembling that goes on around this. It's as if being a Tory is something shameful. Why would anyone feel that? Beats me.
"I'm not a member. I've voted for different parties over the years. It was about Brexit. You're forgetting the choice. It was that or Corbyn."
Bla bla bla. None of this is relevant. It's interesting but it's off the point. If you voted Tory in the last general election YOU ARE A TORY and this state persists until rectified by a sincere and firm intention to vote otherwise in the next one.
Why are you so desperate to put labels on people and file them under discrete but broad categories ?
A process which inevitably leads to division and hostility.
In the real world people are individuals with a wide range of experiences, interests and views, often surprising and sometimes seemingly contradictory.
Much less than people think. The referendum proved that. Why else would such a minority sport as capital punishment attract 73% of Leavers but hardly any Remainers? You don't need a very long conversation with someone before you know that they are likely to be a Tory/UKIP voter.
I'm as apiphilic as the next man, or more so (I grow apples) but that metastudy suggests glyphosate is only mildly irritating to bees (it's nicotinoids that are doing them in). It is otoh a known carcinogen in humans, which is why the eu is a bit against it.
The system of dispersing asylum seekers across the country is uneven, with some areas accommodating far more than others - and 32% of local authorities not taking any at all, according to a House of Commons library report.
Areas with lower than average household income have tended to accept more asylum seekers - the North East of England has the highest number per 1,000 resident population - 17 times greater than the South-East.
There's a link to details of asylum seekers per local authority.
Couldn't help noticing that Tom Tugendhat's Tonbridge has none and neither does Nick Palmer's Waverley.
Yep. Tory councils don't take any asylum seekers. Fancy that.
Former Afghan interpreters might have a better shot because of their fluency in English, but otherwise, why would an asylum seeker feel any affinity with a place in non-urban Britain where they have no connection whatsoever with their own community? Half a dozen sad and lonely Iraqis in Ilminster or Afghans in Ashby de la Zouch are going to put extra demands on those places in meeting their needs - whilst requiring interpreters to do so.
There is a good reason for the lack of geographic dispersal: they are neither wanted - nor want to be there.
So the solution is to dump them in all Gateshead, Middlesbrough and other such places ?
People in the Leafy shires want these people helped but don’t want to do any of the helping.
If there has been a community previously settled/"dumped" in Gateshead, Middlesbrough and other such places, then it makes sense for people coming here to want to join them, especially if they are asylum seekers. Loss of community by "dumping" them in say Truro or Bromsgrove would just compound the anguish they are going through by being exiled from their own country.
You could argue that economic migrants arriving by boat in Kent could be told they will have three years of assistance with housing and welfare - if they agree to live in a village in the Leafy shires. But that will end if they move to a town or city. I suspect most would have left in months.
I was choosing lampshades yesterday and arranging flowers in vases and plumping cushions and knitting and other housewifely tasks. The sorts of things that I'm sure you imagine me doing all the time. In the evening there was a visit from a steam train - all beautifully polished up - with the lucky travellers inside drinking their Prosecco while us yokels stared and waved. All very Railway Children-esque and there was certainly enough steam around to make the reappearance of long lost fathers seem almost possible.
I trust all was sweetness and light on here, yes?
Meanwhile Kabul airport has turned into a mixture of Hillsborough and Sophie's Choice. Horrible.
Still, the sun is out today - which makes a nice change as yesterday the rain was atrocious. The Tahiti lime tree still needs planting as did not fancy doing it while trying to avoid drowning.
There is a prison nearby, mostly full of sex offenders and paedophiles. They have a prison shop and sell plants which they grow. I did mention to Daughter the idea mooted by others of having prisoners work in her pub but the look she gave me .....
Anyway, if you want a good documentary about another British fuck-up as they leave a country they should never have invaded (ooh, a bit of controversy!) The Road to Partition - only 2 episodes - is on BBC iPlayer and is very good.
Sounds pretty good on the home front!
I've often been struck by the consistent pattern of the failure of partition as we dismantled the Empire. It led directly to permanent strife in all of India, Israel, Cyprus and Ireland. A similar process without much British involvement happened in Yugoslavia, and arguably Ukraine is another example. That's not to say that unitary solutions always work well, but trying to settle rival groups into adjoining nations seems to be a recipe for catastrophe, fuelling the rise of aggressive nationalism and open warfare.
What was interesting to me was that Lloyd George's attempts at resolution were all predicated on the assumptions that lay behind Home Rule and ignored the rise of Sinn Fein after WW1. He was answering questions posed in 1912 not in 1921. That and the nervousness which James Craig on the Unionist side had about Britain betraying the Unionists. No love lost there.
In the end the British did what they often do - got enough of a solution to make it look as if they'd solved the problem, walked away, caused lots of problems elsewhere and left the real issues for subsequent generations to grapple with.
In Ireland partition was probably inevitable given the plantation of Scots and others in Ulster from the 17th C onwards. The solution to one problem then leading to a yet bigger one two centuries later, the solution to that leading to another bloody one 40 years later and so on and on. Quite what the current temporary solution will lead to who knows. But kicking difficult issues into the long grass is not just the preserve of British governments.
Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone both had Catholic majorities at the 1911 Census (56% and 55%), and Nationalist majorities at the 1918 election (54% and 55%). Yet they were included in Northern Ireland!
I think the original original plan was to include the whole of Ulster in NI, but Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan managed to opt out (I think i read somewhere).
A quick look at the relevant Wikipedia pages suggest that at some point all sides said, in effect, 'sod it, that's the border' and left Fermanagh, Tyrone and Derry City on the Norn side. There's had been a Boundary Commission with some minor amendments, but that, too, was 'forgotten about'. To be fair, in the 1918 election Fermanagh was won by the Unionists.
Nope. Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone both had Catholic majorities at the 1911 Census (56% and 55%), and Nationalist majorities at the 1918 election (54% and 55%).
Cannabis use fuelling rise in psychosis among young adults, says top Priory expert A leading addictions expert based at the Priory’s Hospital in south London has issued a strong warning about the use of cannabis by young adults, and its link with paranoid psychosis.
His comments came as figures show cannabis has caused more than 125,000 NHS hospital admissions in the last five years.
And around 15,000 of those cases involved teenagers – some of whom were rushed to A&E departments suffering serious psychosis.
Modern cannabis is really scary stuff. Paranoid psychosis is not a desirable state of mind to be in.
My poor, mad brother’s 30 years of destroyed life started with a cannabis-induced psychotic episode while he shared a flat with a dope dealer with access to large amounts of the ‘strong stuff’ which was thought to be a great thing back then. Having experienced a couple of whiteys after smoking joints smeared in cannabis oil myself, I’d say that sort of thing wasn’t far of modern day skunk.
People who rail against legalisation & regulation of the cannabis trade seem to me like those who thought Prohibition was great because it kept people away from 160 proof spirit laced with antifreeze.
I have a relative with exactly same , started young and was extremely ill by early twenties, not nice to witness the impact on the family.
The SNP's treatment of Charles Kennedy in 2015 was a disgrace, would like to see an apology for that
Unpopular view but Charles Kennedy was an unfit drunk putting himself up for elected office in 2015.
He deserved what he got. Opposition parties hold politicians to account and quite rightly too.
Charles Kennedy's friends, loved ones and party should have talked him into standing down in 2015 - or seen him removed as a PPC in 2015. If having retired he'd been subject to the same treatment then that would be a disgrace, but not while he was seeking elected office.
It's funny how you take this view about a man with a drinking problem yet you have a completely different and sympathetic view for people with weight issues. Never let your principles get in the way of point scoring Philip
Mr. 43, if you consider that a policy rather than passivity it still wouldn't work now.
The EU is about continual integration, and the US has turned isolationist to the extent of not even briefing military allies (a shame, as we might have been able to point out some of the flaws in Biden's 'plan').
Mr. Tyndall, the dislocation of trade was enormous but another big problem was the Anglo-Saxon invasion and insufficient defences.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
What arrogance and condescension.
Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?
If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.
If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
Question - have you ever been to Wisbech...?
My "arrogance and condescension" is just reality. People aren't moving to east anglia - a place they don't want to live - to do jobs they don't want to do at a cost they can't afford. Media house price in Wizzy is £177k vs £130k in Widnes.
So your Wizzy food factory needs to cover the 36% higher house price and the higher cost of living before you even start trying to make the job and the prospects look attractive.
No, I've never been to Wisbech.
If people don't want to live "in Wizzy" then why is the median house price £177k? If nobody wanted to live their then houses would be literally worthless.
So you're clearly fallacious that that nobody wants to live their. Maybe you don't, but others do and they're willing to buy houses their at a median of £177k - and if the employers their increase pay rates higher then that'd attract even more people willing to live their than there already are.
Wisbech? Probably the overspill from the overspill from Cambridge.
The pure Adam Smith Institute answer would be to give up on agriculture in East Anglia, redeploy the people in an expanded Cambridge Tech Hub and import the food from Eastern Europe if it's so cheap there.
Whether that's a good answer, let alone one that's acceptable to the will of the people, I'm not sure.
I was choosing lampshades yesterday and arranging flowers in vases and plumping cushions and knitting and other housewifely tasks. The sorts of things that I'm sure you imagine me doing all the time. In the evening there was a visit from a steam train - all beautifully polished up - with the lucky travellers inside drinking their Prosecco while us yokels stared and waved. All very Railway Children-esque and there was certainly enough steam around to make the reappearance of long lost fathers seem almost possible.
I trust all was sweetness and light on here, yes?
Meanwhile Kabul airport has turned into a mixture of Hillsborough and Sophie's Choice. Horrible.
Still, the sun is out today - which makes a nice change as yesterday the rain was atrocious. The Tahiti lime tree still needs planting as did not fancy doing it while trying to avoid drowning.
There is a prison nearby, mostly full of sex offenders and paedophiles. They have a prison shop and sell plants which they grow. I did mention to Daughter the idea mooted by others of having prisoners work in her pub but the look she gave me .....
Anyway, if you want a good documentary about another British fuck-up as they leave a country they should never have invaded (ooh, a bit of controversy!) The Road to Partition - only 2 episodes - is on BBC iPlayer and is very good.
Sounds pretty good on the home front!
I've often been struck by the consistent pattern of the failure of partition as we dismantled the Empire. It led directly to permanent strife in all of India, Israel, Cyprus and Ireland. A similar process without much British involvement happened in Yugoslavia, and arguably Ukraine is another example. That's not to say that unitary solutions always work well, but trying to settle rival groups into adjoining nations seems to be a recipe for catastrophe, fuelling the rise of aggressive nationalism and open warfare.
Good to hear.
I'm now into the 3rd bush in the blueberry relay, which is great.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
We have far too many jobs that are done by very cheap labour because it is not worth investing in machinery that could significantly improve productivity. Your Anglian food factory is almost certainly a good example of this. The result is a low wage, low productivity economy where too many people rely upon the State to top up inadequate incomes with in work benefits making them net recipients from the system.
We need to change the balance on this. Not over night but certainly over time. An 8% increase in wages this year driven by the lower paid would certainly be a step in the right direction. The test will be whether the NMW continues to absorb more and more of our workforce or whether those with basic skills, such as being able to drive, can do better. If we can we will create a more cohesive, fairer society. I would have expected you to be in favour of this.
The way you say it, we have basically reverted to the mid-C19 Speenhamland System of using poor law to subsidise the farmers and big landowners in their payment of starvation wages to their workers, at the expense of the taxpayers more generally. Or am I missing something?
That's Tories for you , they look after their chums
What do you think the SnP do....
Are you stupid, I think they are cheeks of the same arse.
Just catching up having been away. A couple of comments if I may:
1. Lovely to see so many Tories campaigning so vigorously for significant rises in working people's wages to counter the alleged labour shortage. Something at last that the lefties on here can agree with the Tories about. Strange old world, isn't it? 2. I'd have thought the more radical Tory solution would be to lock more people up. I read on here that prisoners are much sought after. If you imprison a lot more people, then release them early, wouldn't that be a more cost effective solution to labour shortages?
I don't see any tories apart from DavidL saying pay rises for minimum wage folk is a good thing. I am not a tory neither I believe is another richard
If not a Tory what would you describe yourself and 'another richard' as being?
Wouldn't a Tory be a member or otherwise strong supporter of the Conservative party ?
Something which Hyufd and a few other PBers - Casino, Mortimer, MM, Max - might be classed as.
But which neither I nor to my knowledge Pagan2 are.
Can we clear this up once and for all. Being 'A Tory' is not an ethnicity it is simply a voting intention. I can understand why you're in denial-particularly at the moment - but to suggest neither you nor 'Another Richard' would vote for anyone else (except perhaps UKIP) is plainly ridiculous.
So time to man up and say 'I'm a Tory and I'm proud"
Proud to be a greedy , grasping , lying two bit chiseller who would sell out their granny , not for me.
The Ayrshire charm school is up early I see.
The union jack tanktop stalker is true to form
I’m wearing an old 49ers t shirt today but take requests, if you want me to dress up for you please let me know, but you’ll have to pay extra for this one as I don’t possess a tank top, let alone one with any sort of flag on it. I’ll DM my account details and my OnlyFans link.
The current lot don't even bother to reconcile the contradiction, which is why we are left with a slogan and a vacuum where a foreign policy should be
We are at juncture in global politics where the old certainties are shifting and the country could greatly benefit from an active and imaginative foreign policy. There are countries with whom the UK would have shared interests and complimentary needs. We should be looking at getting the Argentina relationship out of the deep freeze, pursuing a military alliance with South Africa and trying to love bomb Egypt (cultural and academic nexus of the ME) to see if they can be persuaded to overlook 100+ years of British perfidy.
Mr. Observer, I've toyed with writing an article (not sure it'd suit the site's subject, though) that the internet has the potential to uniquely reverse the trend of human civilization since its dawn: namely the increasing rise and power of cities (exceptional periods such as the collapse of the Roman Empire etc notwithstanding).
By working from home, and home delivery, and so much now possible electronically, the case for cities has been diminished significantly.
You could stand the same point on its head and say that the internet has turned everywhere into city.
the internet can pick fruit and vegetables , who would have thunk it
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
What arrogance and condescension.
Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?
If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.
If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
Question - have you ever been to Wisbech...?
My "arrogance and condescension" is just reality. People aren't moving to east anglia - a place they don't want to live - to do jobs they don't want to do at a cost they can't afford. Media house price in Wizzy is £177k vs £130k in Widnes.
So your Wizzy food factory needs to cover the 36% higher house price and the higher cost of living before you even start trying to make the job and the prospects look attractive.
So your answer seems to be to import cheap foreign labour to live in squalid conditions in Wisbech so that Wizzy Food Co can maintain its profit margins?
I mean personally I am all in favour of migration and people being able to move where they want for whatever reason but your argument is actually utterly illogical. So long as the factory is in Wisbech (which funnily enough I drove past last night coming back from a wedding) then the food manufacturers must pay enough for the workers to be able to afford to live there whether those workers are from Widnes or Wroclaw. The days of expecting people to work for less than a living wage should be behind us.
I agree with you - wages need to be higher. BTW a lot of the operators in anglia are not sat on mega operating margins. As we now have less workers from Wroclaw then workers must come from Widnes etc. The problem is that they cannot pay enough wages to do so.
Besides which, there is a bigger problem. Lets assume that there is affordable housing. Lets assume that there is a large scale increase in food prices (think 30%+) to create sufficient margins to allow wages to rise significantly. So the £ gap to promote internal migration isn't there.
But its still Wisbech. An awful lot of people don't want to live in the sticks. Especially when its as dull as the farming flatlands of eastern England.
Not a view I have much sympathy with. I didn't want to spend most of my working life in the sorts of dives I have had to operate - and I am not just talking about Aberdeen (that is a joke by the way, I really like Aberdeen). I would have loved to have been at home every Christmas rather than stuck in some arse end of the world. But you go where the work is. Something far too many people seem to have forgotten these days.
I was choosing lampshades yesterday and arranging flowers in vases and plumping cushions and knitting and other housewifely tasks. The sorts of things that I'm sure you imagine me doing all the time. In the evening there was a visit from a steam train - all beautifully polished up - with the lucky travellers inside drinking their Prosecco while us yokels stared and waved. All very Railway Children-esque and there was certainly enough steam around to make the reappearance of long lost fathers seem almost possible.
I trust all was sweetness and light on here, yes?
Meanwhile Kabul airport has turned into a mixture of Hillsborough and Sophie's Choice. Horrible.
Still, the sun is out today - which makes a nice change as yesterday the rain was atrocious. The Tahiti lime tree still needs planting as did not fancy doing it while trying to avoid drowning.
There is a prison nearby, mostly full of sex offenders and paedophiles. They have a prison shop and sell plants which they grow. I did mention to Daughter the idea mooted by others of having prisoners work in her pub but the look she gave me .....
Anyway, if you want a good documentary about another British fuck-up as they leave a country they should never have invaded (ooh, a bit of controversy!) The Road to Partition - only 2 episodes - is on BBC iPlayer and is very good.
Sounds pretty good on the home front!
I've often been struck by the consistent pattern of the failure of partition as we dismantled the Empire. It led directly to permanent strife in all of India, Israel, Cyprus and Ireland. A similar process without much British involvement happened in Yugoslavia, and arguably Ukraine is another example. That's not to say that unitary solutions always work well, but trying to settle rival groups into adjoining nations seems to be a recipe for catastrophe, fuelling the rise of aggressive nationalism and open warfare.
What was interesting to me was that Lloyd George's attempts at resolution were all predicated on the assumptions that lay behind Home Rule and ignored the rise of Sinn Fein after WW1. He was answering questions posed in 1912 not in 1921. That and the nervousness which James Craig on the Unionist side had about Britain betraying the Unionists. No love lost there.
In the end the British did what they often do - got enough of a solution to make it look as if they'd solved the problem, walked away, caused lots of problems elsewhere and left the real issues for subsequent generations to grapple with.
In Ireland partition was probably inevitable given the plantation of Scots and others in Ulster from the 17th C onwards. The solution to one problem then leading to a yet bigger one two centuries later, the solution to that leading to another bloody one 40 years later and so on and on. Quite what the current temporary solution will lead to who knows. But kicking difficult issues into the long grass is not just the preserve of British governments.
Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone both had Catholic majorities at the 1911 Census (56% and 55%), and Nationalist majorities at the 1918 election (54% and 55%). Yet they were included in Northern Ireland!
I think the original original plan was to include the whole of Ulster in NI, but Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan managed to opt out (I think i read somewhere).
A quick look at the relevant Wikipedia pages suggest that at some point all sides said, in effect, 'sod it, that's the border' and left Fermanagh, Tyrone and Derry City on the Norn side. There's had been a Boundary Commission with some minor amendments, but that, too, was 'forgotten about'. To be fair, in the 1918 election Fermanagh was won by the Unionists.
Nope. Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone both had Catholic majorities at the 1911 Census (56% and 55%), and Nationalist majorities at the 1918 election (54% and 55%).
On checking I find there were two Fermanagh constituencies; one was won by SinnFein, the other by a Unionist. So we're both right!
Mr. 43, if you consider that a policy rather than passivity it still wouldn't work now.
The EU is about continual integration, and the US has turned isolationist to the extent of not even briefing military allies (a shame, as we might have been able to point out some of the flaws in Biden's 'plan').
Mr. Tyndall, the dislocation of trade was enormous but another big problem was the Anglo-Saxon invasion and insufficient defences.
Edited extra bit: have to be off.
I think it is reasonable to think a foreign policy doesn't work, but it is incumbent on those who think that to devise a replacement, which has some kind of coherence. I don't even object to the current government's foreign policy, beyond there not being one. There isn't anything to object to.
Cannabis use fuelling rise in psychosis among young adults, says top Priory expert A leading addictions expert based at the Priory’s Hospital in south London has issued a strong warning about the use of cannabis by young adults, and its link with paranoid psychosis.
His comments came as figures show cannabis has caused more than 125,000 NHS hospital admissions in the last five years.
And around 15,000 of those cases involved teenagers – some of whom were rushed to A&E departments suffering serious psychosis.
Modern cannabis is really scary stuff. Paranoid psychosis is not a desirable state of mind to be in.
My poor, mad brother’s 30 years of destroyed life started with a cannabis-induced psychotic episode while he shared a flat with a dope dealer with access to large amounts of the ‘strong stuff’ which was thought to be a great thing back then. Having experienced a couple of whiteys after smoking joints smeared in cannabis oil myself, I’d say that sort of thing wasn’t far of modern day skunk.
People who rail against legalisation & regulation of the cannabis trade seem to me like those who thought Prohibition was great because it kept people away from 160 proof spirit laced with antifreeze.
I have a relative with exactly same , started young and was extremely ill by early twenties, not nice to witness the impact on the family.
There is a huge disconnect here; people are judging modern skunk by the standards of 60s pot which was nine-tenths camel dung in the first place.
There's a parallel thing going on in the world of psilocybin use atm. The mainstream press is full of articles about how research is showing it's the best and most exciting thing for depression since sliced SSRIs, the underground on reddit which actually takes the stuff is saying: hang on a moment, bad trips are not an establishment myth designed to steer people away from mushrooms. They happen, and just the one can be life-wrecking.
Cannabis use fuelling rise in psychosis among young adults, says top Priory expert A leading addictions expert based at the Priory’s Hospital in south London has issued a strong warning about the use of cannabis by young adults, and its link with paranoid psychosis.
His comments came as figures show cannabis has caused more than 125,000 NHS hospital admissions in the last five years.
And around 15,000 of those cases involved teenagers – some of whom were rushed to A&E departments suffering serious psychosis.
Modern cannabis is really scary stuff. Paranoid psychosis is not a desirable state of mind to be in.
My poor, mad brother’s 30 years of destroyed life started with a cannabis-induced psychotic episode while he shared a flat with a dope dealer with access to large amounts of the ‘strong stuff’ which was thought to be a great thing back then. Having experienced a couple of whiteys after smoking joints smeared in cannabis oil myself, I’d say that sort of thing wasn’t far of modern day skunk.
People who rail against legalisation & regulation of the cannabis trade seem to me like those who thought Prohibition was great because it kept people away from 160 proof spirit laced with antifreeze.
I have a relative with exactly same , started young and was extremely ill by early twenties, not nice to witness the impact on the family.
Agree with both of you on this - needs much thinking through.
And yet we are only a couple of weeks on from a conversation where several PBers were defending end-users buying hard drugs from illegal supply chains doing to men and women just what the Taliban are about to do in Afghanistan.
I was choosing lampshades yesterday and arranging flowers in vases and plumping cushions and knitting and other housewifely tasks. The sorts of things that I'm sure you imagine me doing all the time. In the evening there was a visit from a steam train - all beautifully polished up - with the lucky travellers inside drinking their Prosecco while us yokels stared and waved. All very Railway Children-esque and there was certainly enough steam around to make the reappearance of long lost fathers seem almost possible.
I trust all was sweetness and light on here, yes?
Meanwhile Kabul airport has turned into a mixture of Hillsborough and Sophie's Choice. Horrible.
Still, the sun is out today - which makes a nice change as yesterday the rain was atrocious. The Tahiti lime tree still needs planting as did not fancy doing it while trying to avoid drowning.
There is a prison nearby, mostly full of sex offenders and paedophiles. They have a prison shop and sell plants which they grow. I did mention to Daughter the idea mooted by others of having prisoners work in her pub but the look she gave me .....
Anyway, if you want a good documentary about another British fuck-up as they leave a country they should never have invaded (ooh, a bit of controversy!) The Road to Partition - only 2 episodes - is on BBC iPlayer and is very good.
Sounds pretty good on the home front!
I've often been struck by the consistent pattern of the failure of partition as we dismantled the Empire. It led directly to permanent strife in all of India, Israel, Cyprus and Ireland. A similar process without much British involvement happened in Yugoslavia, and arguably Ukraine is another example. That's not to say that unitary solutions always work well, but trying to settle rival groups into adjoining nations seems to be a recipe for catastrophe, fuelling the rise of aggressive nationalism and open warfare.
Good to hear.
I'm now into the 3rd bush in the blueberry relay, which is great.
Is that high bush blueberries, or did you carry out your plan to plant bilberries?
Mr. 43, if you consider that a policy rather than passivity it still wouldn't work now.
The EU is about continual integration, and the US has turned isolationist to the extent of not even briefing military allies (a shame, as we might have been able to point out some of the flaws in Biden's 'plan').
Mr. Tyndall, the dislocation of trade was enormous but another big problem was the Anglo-Saxon invasion and insufficient defences.
Edited extra bit: have to be off.
Hmm. We will definitely have to disagree on that one. Like many archaeologists today I do not subscribe to the 'Armed Invasion' model of Anglo-Saxon migration. The evidence points strongly to the Germanic migrants entering what was largely an empty landscape and settling alongside the remaining Romano-British population usually, if not always, in peace. There is an immediate mixing of native and immigrant traditions in ceramics, burial practices and habitation that would not be the case were this an armed conquest. Indeed archaeologically it looks very different from the Viking invasions or the Norman conquest.
Much of Southern Britain already had very large AS populations from the early 4th century onwards, partly from foederati brought in in large numbers to replace the regular legions but also due to migration and settlement which began long before the Romans decided to abandon the islands.
Mr. 43, if you consider that a policy rather than passivity it still wouldn't work now.
The EU is about continual integration, and the US has turned isolationist to the extent of not even briefing military allies (a shame, as we might have been able to point out some of the flaws in Biden's 'plan').
Mr. Tyndall, the dislocation of trade was enormous but another big problem was the Anglo-Saxon invasion and insufficient defences.
Edited extra bit: have to be off.
I think it is reasonable to think a foreign policy doesn't work, but it is incumbent on those who think that to devise a replacement, which has some kind of coherence. I don't even object to the current government's foreign policy, beyond there not being one. There isn't anything to object to.
For example, the UK could decide to happily sink into an obscure backwater, focus its defence capabilities strictly on the immediate seas around it and let America, China, Russia and the EU do what they will. We're an island, we're probably a bit protected.
Just catching up having been away. A couple of comments if I may:
1. Lovely to see so many Tories campaigning so vigorously for significant rises in working people's wages to counter the alleged labour shortage. Something at last that the lefties on here can agree with the Tories about. Strange old world, isn't it? 2. I'd have thought the more radical Tory solution would be to lock more people up. I read on here that prisoners are much sought after. If you imprison a lot more people, then release them early, wouldn't that be a more cost effective solution to labour shortages?
I don't see any tories apart from DavidL saying pay rises for minimum wage folk is a good thing. I am not a tory neither I believe is another richard
If not a Tory what would you describe yourself and 'another richard' as being?
Wouldn't a Tory be a member or otherwise strong supporter of the Conservative party ?
Something which Hyufd and a few other PBers - Casino, Mortimer, MM, Max - might be classed as.
But which neither I nor to my knowledge Pagan2 are.
Can we clear this up once and for all. Being 'A Tory' is not an ethnicity it is simply a voting intention. I can understand why you're in denial-particularly at the moment - but to suggest neither you nor 'Another Richard' would vote for anyone else (except perhaps UKIP) is plainly ridiculous.
So time to man up and say 'I'm a Tory and I'm proud"
Proud to be a greedy , grasping , lying two bit chiseller who would sell out their granny , not for me.
The Ayrshire charm school is up early I see.
The union jack tanktop stalker is true to form
I’m wearing an old 49ers t shirt today but take requests, if you want me to dress up for you please let me know, but you’ll have to pay extra for this one as I don’t possess a tank top, let alone one with any sort of flag on it. I’ll DM my account details and my OnlyFans link.
The thought of that brought my breakfast up, thanks.
The current lot don't even bother to reconcile the contradiction, which is why we are left with a slogan and a vacuum where a foreign policy should be
We are at juncture in global politics where the old certainties are shifting and the country could greatly benefit from an active and imaginative foreign policy. There are countries with whom the UK would have shared interests and complimentary needs. We should be looking at getting the Argentina relationship out of the deep freeze, pursuing a military alliance with South Africa and trying to love bomb Egypt (cultural and academic nexus of the ME) to see if they can be persuaded to overlook 100+ years of British perfidy.
Is that the 100+ years we have already had or the 100+ years yet to come
I was choosing lampshades yesterday and arranging flowers in vases and plumping cushions and knitting and other housewifely tasks. The sorts of things that I'm sure you imagine me doing all the time. In the evening there was a visit from a steam train - all beautifully polished up - with the lucky travellers inside drinking their Prosecco while us yokels stared and waved. All very Railway Children-esque and there was certainly enough steam around to make the reappearance of long lost fathers seem almost possible.
I trust all was sweetness and light on here, yes?
Meanwhile Kabul airport has turned into a mixture of Hillsborough and Sophie's Choice. Horrible.
Still, the sun is out today - which makes a nice change as yesterday the rain was atrocious. The Tahiti lime tree still needs planting as did not fancy doing it while trying to avoid drowning.
There is a prison nearby, mostly full of sex offenders and paedophiles. They have a prison shop and sell plants which they grow. I did mention to Daughter the idea mooted by others of having prisoners work in her pub but the look she gave me .....
Anyway, if you want a good documentary about another British fuck-up as they leave a country they should never have invaded (ooh, a bit of controversy!) The Road to Partition - only 2 episodes - is on BBC iPlayer and is very good.
Sounds pretty good on the home front!
I've often been struck by the consistent pattern of the failure of partition as we dismantled the Empire. It led directly to permanent strife in all of India, Israel, Cyprus and Ireland. A similar process without much British involvement happened in Yugoslavia, and arguably Ukraine is another example. That's not to say that unitary solutions always work well, but trying to settle rival groups into adjoining nations seems to be a recipe for catastrophe, fuelling the rise of aggressive nationalism and open warfare.
What was interesting to me was that Lloyd George's attempts at resolution were all predicated on the assumptions that lay behind Home Rule and ignored the rise of Sinn Fein after WW1. He was answering questions posed in 1912 not in 1921. That and the nervousness which James Craig on the Unionist side had about Britain betraying the Unionists. No love lost there.
In the end the British did what they often do - got enough of a solution to make it look as if they'd solved the problem, walked away, caused lots of problems elsewhere and left the real issues for subsequent generations to grapple with.
In Ireland partition was probably inevitable given the plantation of Scots and others in Ulster from the 17th C onwards. The solution to one problem then leading to a yet bigger one two centuries later, the solution to that leading to another bloody one 40 years later and so on and on. Quite what the current temporary solution will lead to who knows. But kicking difficult issues into the long grass is not just the preserve of British governments.
Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone both had Catholic majorities at the 1911 Census (56% and 55%), and Nationalist majorities at the 1918 election (54% and 55%). Yet they were included in Northern Ireland!
I think the original original plan was to include the whole of Ulster in NI, but Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan managed to opt out (I think i read somewhere).
A quick look at the relevant Wikipedia pages suggest that at some point all sides said, in effect, 'sod it, that's the border' and left Fermanagh, Tyrone and Derry City on the Norn side. There's had been a Boundary Commission with some minor amendments, but that, too, was 'forgotten about'. To be fair, in the 1918 election Fermanagh was won by the Unionists.
Nope. Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone both had Catholic majorities at the 1911 Census (56% and 55%), and Nationalist majorities at the 1918 election (54% and 55%).
On checking I find there were two Fermanagh constituencies; one was won by SinnFein, the other by a Unionist. So we're both right!
Yes, but overall, you will find that Nationalists got the most votes across the whole county of Fermanagh:
SF 12,909 IPP 132 Unionist 11,292
SF 53.1% IPP 0.5% Unionist 46.4%
Total Nationalist 53.6%
So you will find that it is ME that is completely correct!
Remember, Partition was by County, NOT Constituency boundaries!
Mr. 43, if you consider that a policy rather than passivity it still wouldn't work now.
The EU is about continual integration, and the US has turned isolationist to the extent of not even briefing military allies (a shame, as we might have been able to point out some of the flaws in Biden's 'plan').
Mr. Tyndall, the dislocation of trade was enormous but another big problem was the Anglo-Saxon invasion and insufficient defences.
Edited extra bit: have to be off.
Hmm. We will definitely have to disagree on that one. Like many archaeologists today I do not subscribe to the 'Armed Invasion' model of Anglo-Saxon migration. The evidence points strongly to the Germanic migrants entering what was largely an empty landscape and settling alongside the remaining Romano-British population usually, if not always, in peace. There is an immediate mixing of native and immigrant traditions in ceramics, burial practices and habitation that would not be the case were this an armed conquest. Indeed archaeologically it looks very different from the Viking invasions or the Norman conquest.
Much of Southern Britain already had very large AS populations from the early 4th century onwards, partly from foederati brought in in large numbers to replace the regular legions but also due to migration and settlement which began long before the Romans decided to abandon the islands.
See also DNA studies. As a disgracefully broad generalisation, they invariably show that huge displacements and replacements of populations which we thought happened, didn't.
Just catching up having been away. A couple of comments if I may:
1. Lovely to see so many Tories campaigning so vigorously for significant rises in working people's wages to counter the alleged labour shortage. Something at last that the lefties on here can agree with the Tories about. Strange old world, isn't it? 2. I'd have thought the more radical Tory solution would be to lock more people up. I read on here that prisoners are much sought after. If you imprison a lot more people, then release them early, wouldn't that be a more cost effective solution to labour shortages?
I don't see any tories apart from DavidL saying pay rises for minimum wage folk is a good thing. I am not a tory neither I believe is another richard
If not a Tory what would you describe yourself and 'another richard' as being?
Wouldn't a Tory be a member or otherwise strong supporter of the Conservative party ?
Something which Hyufd and a few other PBers - Casino, Mortimer, MM, Max - might be classed as.
But which neither I nor to my knowledge Pagan2 are.
Can we clear this up once and for all. Being 'A Tory' is not an ethnicity it is simply a voting intention. I can understand why you're in denial-particularly at the moment - but to suggest neither you nor 'Another Richard' would vote for anyone else (except perhaps UKIP) is plainly ridiculous.
So time to man up and say 'I'm a Tory and I'm proud"
Proud to be a greedy , grasping , lying two bit chiseller who would sell out their granny , not for me.
The Ayrshire charm school is up early I see.
The union jack tanktop stalker is true to form
I’m wearing an old 49ers t shirt today but take requests, if you want me to dress up for you please let me know, but you’ll have to pay extra for this one as I don’t possess a tank top, let alone one with any sort of flag on it. I’ll DM my account details and my OnlyFans link.
The thought of that brought my breakfast up, thanks.
Mr. 43, if you consider that a policy rather than passivity it still wouldn't work now.
The EU is about continual integration, and the US has turned isolationist to the extent of not even briefing military allies (a shame, as we might have been able to point out some of the flaws in Biden's 'plan').
Mr. Tyndall, the dislocation of trade was enormous but another big problem was the Anglo-Saxon invasion and insufficient defences.
Edited extra bit: have to be off.
Hmm. We will definitely have to disagree on that one. Like many archaeologists today I do not subscribe to the 'Armed Invasion' model of Anglo-Saxon migration. The evidence points strongly to the Germanic migrants entering what was largely an empty landscape and settling alongside the remaining Romano-British population usually, if not always, in peace. There is an immediate mixing of native and immigrant traditions in ceramics, burial practices and habitation that would not be the case were this an armed conquest. Indeed archaeologically it looks very different from the Viking invasions or the Norman conquest.
Much of Southern Britain already had very large AS populations from the early 4th century onwards, partly from foederati brought in in large numbers to replace the regular legions but also due to migration and settlement which began long before the Romans decided to abandon the islands.
See also DNA studies. As a disgracefully broad generalisation, they invariably show that huge displacements and replacements of populations which we thought happened, didn't.
Tacitus makes the point that the language spoken in SE Britain was quite similar to that in what we now know as the Low Countries. For many years that was pooh-poohed, but it's now thought somewhat more likely.
Just catching up having been away. A couple of comments if I may:
1. Lovely to see so many Tories campaigning so vigorously for significant rises in working people's wages to counter the alleged labour shortage. Something at last that the lefties on here can agree with the Tories about. Strange old world, isn't it? 2. I'd have thought the more radical Tory solution would be to lock more people up. I read on here that prisoners are much sought after. If you imprison a lot more people, then release them early, wouldn't that be a more cost effective solution to labour shortages?
I don't see any tories apart from DavidL saying pay rises for minimum wage folk is a good thing. I am not a tory neither I believe is another richard
If not a Tory what would you describe yourself and 'another richard' as being?
Wouldn't a Tory be a member or otherwise strong supporter of the Conservative party ?
Something which Hyufd and a few other PBers - Casino, Mortimer, MM, Max - might be classed as.
But which neither I nor to my knowledge Pagan2 are.
Can we clear this up once and for all. Being 'A Tory' is not an ethnicity it is simply a voting intention. I can understand why you're in denial-particularly at the moment - but to suggest neither you nor 'Another Richard' would vote for anyone else (except perhaps UKIP) is plainly ridiculous.
So time to man up and say 'I'm a Tory and I'm proud"
Exactly so, Roger. All the dissembling that goes on around this. It's as if being a Tory is something shameful. Why would anyone feel that? Beats me.
"I'm not a member. I've voted for different parties over the years. It was about Brexit. You're forgetting the choice. It was that or Corbyn."
Bla bla bla. None of this is relevant. It's interesting but it's off the point. If you voted Tory in the last general election YOU ARE A TORY and this state persists until rectified by a sincereaf and firm intention to vote otherwise in the next one.
But to be a PB Tory is a sinuous and quicksilver thing, hard to pin down.
Afaics the people who voted for Cameron and now despise him are the same people who voted for May and now despise her, and also the the same people who voted for BJ but are still defending his every ineptitude and moral failing.
The one consistency seems to be that they bear no responsibility for any of the consequences of voting for these fine folk.
Yes, "PB Tories", a grouping unto itself, and it's not so simple as if you're a Tory (per my official definition) and you're on PB then you are one. That is not the case. It's a necessary condition but it isn't sufficient. You can be a Tory on PB yet not a PB Tory. It took me a while to suss all this out but now I have. I know who is a PB Tory and who isn't. But it's pure instinct, I can't define or explain it. Won't give any examples either way so as not to personalize. Too much of that from fruity Le ... from one particular poster yesterday.
Mr. 43, if you consider that a policy rather than passivity it still wouldn't work now.
The EU is about continual integration, and the US has turned isolationist to the extent of not even briefing military allies (a shame, as we might have been able to point out some of the flaws in Biden's 'plan').
Mr. Tyndall, the dislocation of trade was enormous but another big problem was the Anglo-Saxon invasion and insufficient defences.
Edited extra bit: have to be off.
Hmm. We will definitely have to disagree on that one. Like many archaeologists today I do not subscribe to the 'Armed Invasion' model of Anglo-Saxon migration. The evidence points strongly to the Germanic migrants entering what was largely an empty landscape and settling alongside the remaining Romano-British population usually, if not always, in peace. There is an immediate mixing of native and immigrant traditions in ceramics, burial practices and habitation that would not be the case were this an armed conquest. Indeed archaeologically it looks very different from the Viking invasions or the Norman conquest.
Much of Southern Britain already had very large AS populations from the early 4th century onwards, partly from foederati brought in in large numbers to replace the regular legions but also due to migration and settlement which began long before the Romans decided to abandon the islands.
See also DNA studies. As a disgracefully broad generalisation, they invariably show that huge displacements and replacements of populations which we thought happened, didn't.
Tacitus makes the point that the language spoken in SE Britain was quite similar to that in what we now know as the Low Countries. For many years that was pooh-poohed, but it's now thought somewhat more likely.
Place name evidence for this epoch is fascinating
There is an area around the Sutton Hoo burial, in Suffolk, where the place names have a kind of ur-Englishness, a primordial Anglo-Saxonism.
Snape. Uffield. Falkenham. Sweffling. Yoxford
Say them aloud and it’s like you’re talking to a Saxon warlord. Suggesting this is indeed the cradle of England. Where England first unfurled her rippling pennant, in the astonished sun
The same nonsense happened when the BBC appointed Robbie Gibb, brother of a govt minister, to a high profile role. Overtly partisan people see bias where it just does not exist. I am sure Jess Brammar will be right for the role and do a great job.
Prof Francois Balloux @BallouxFrancois · 16h Some mentioned this tweet may have been unfair. I personally don't feel it was. Several 'media covid experts' claim credentials in public health and infectious disease epidemiology that they seem to have made up during the pandemic. I feel it's fair to call out those charlatans.
The same nonsense happened when the BBC appointed Robbie Gibb, brother of a govt minister, to a high profile role. Overtly partisan people see bias where it just does not exist. I am sure Jess Brammar will be right for the role and do a great job.
Why is the "Showbiz Editor" writing this piece on BBC News gathering?
Just catching up having been away. A couple of comments if I may:
1. Lovely to see so many Tories campaigning so vigorously for significant rises in working people's wages to counter the alleged labour shortage. Something at last that the lefties on here can agree with the Tories about. Strange old world, isn't it? 2. I'd have thought the more radical Tory solution would be to lock more people up. I read on here that prisoners are much sought after. If you imprison a lot more people, then release them early, wouldn't that be a more cost effective solution to labour shortages?
I don't see any tories apart from DavidL saying pay rises for minimum wage folk is a good thing. I am not a tory neither I believe is another richard
If not a Tory what would you describe yourself and 'another richard' as being?
Wouldn't a Tory be a member or otherwise strong supporter of the Conservative party ?
Something which Hyufd and a few other PBers - Casino, Mortimer, MM, Max - might be classed as.
But which neither I nor to my knowledge Pagan2 are.
Can we clear this up once and for all. Being 'A Tory' is not an ethnicity it is simply a voting intention. I can understand why you're in denial-particularly at the moment - but to suggest neither you nor 'Another Richard' would vote for anyone else (except perhaps UKIP) is plainly ridiculous.
So time to man up and say 'I'm a Tory and I'm proud"
Exactly so, Roger. All the dissembling that goes on around this. It's as if being a Tory is something shameful. Why would anyone feel that? Beats me.
"I'm not a member. I've voted for different parties over the years. It was about Brexit. You're forgetting the choice. It was that or Corbyn."
Bla bla bla. None of this is relevant. It's interesting but it's off the point. If you voted Tory in the last general election YOU ARE A TORY and this state persists until rectified by a sincere and firm intention to vote otherwise in the next one.
Why are you so desperate to put labels on people and file them under discrete but broad categories ?
A process which inevitably leads to division and hostility.
In the real world people are individuals with a wide range of experiences, interests and views, often surprising and sometimes seemingly contradictory.
It's not that. It's just I like clarity and accountability. You have to own your choices in life and this goes for your vote. There's no malice in it.
It's fabulous to see so many on here, of all political persuasions and none, arguing that higher wages are needed to attract workers to low-paid, often unattractive jobs, from fruit pickers to hospitality staff to care workers, where there are labour shortages.
Wage rises will, of course lead to: a) reduced profits, or b) increased prices, or c) both.
I suspect the history of capitalism, and current corporate greed, tells us that it won't be a) or c). So we're left with b).
The same nonsense happened when the BBC appointed Robbie Gibb, brother of a govt minister, to a high profile role. Overtly partisan people see bias where it just does not exist. I am sure Jess Brammar will be right for the role and do a great job.
Why is the "Showbiz Editor" writing this piece on BBC News gathering?
Presumably because the [edit] MoS thinks news is show business?
I see her twatter timeline is moving on from that tweet - now digging in even more.
Mr. 43, if you consider that a policy rather than passivity it still wouldn't work now.
The EU is about continual integration, and the US has turned isolationist to the extent of not even briefing military allies (a shame, as we might have been able to point out some of the flaws in Biden's 'plan').
Mr. Tyndall, the dislocation of trade was enormous but another big problem was the Anglo-Saxon invasion and insufficient defences.
Edited extra bit: have to be off.
Hmm. We will definitely have to disagree on that one. Like many archaeologists today I do not subscribe to the 'Armed Invasion' model of Anglo-Saxon migration. The evidence points strongly to the Germanic migrants entering what was largely an empty landscape and settling alongside the remaining Romano-British population usually, if not always, in peace. There is an immediate mixing of native and immigrant traditions in ceramics, burial practices and habitation that would not be the case were this an armed conquest. Indeed archaeologically it looks very different from the Viking invasions or the Norman conquest.
Much of Southern Britain already had very large AS populations from the early 4th century onwards, partly from foederati brought in in large numbers to replace the regular legions but also due to migration and settlement which began long before the Romans decided to abandon the islands.
See also DNA studies. As a disgracefully broad generalisation, they invariably show that huge displacements and replacements of populations which we thought happened, didn't.
Tacitus makes the point that the language spoken in SE Britain was quite similar to that in what we now know as the Low Countries. For many years that was pooh-poohed, but it's now thought somewhat more likely.
Place name evidence for this epoch is fascinating
There is an area around the Sutton Hoo burial, in Suffolk, where the place names have a kind of ur-Englishness, a primordial Anglo-Saxonism.
Snape. Uffield. Falkenham. Sweffling. Yoxford
Say them aloud and it’s like you’re talking to a Saxon warlord. Suggesting this is indeed the cradle of England. Where England first unfurled her rippling pennant, in the astonished sun
At least you’ll have your ur-Englishness to fall back on when there’s no longer a Britain.
Mr. 43, if you consider that a policy rather than passivity it still wouldn't work now.
The EU is about continual integration, and the US has turned isolationist to the extent of not even briefing military allies (a shame, as we might have been able to point out some of the flaws in Biden's 'plan').
Mr. Tyndall, the dislocation of trade was enormous but another big problem was the Anglo-Saxon invasion and insufficient defences.
Edited extra bit: have to be off.
Hmm. We will definitely have to disagree on that one. Like many archaeologists today I do not subscribe to the 'Armed Invasion' model of Anglo-Saxon migration. The evidence points strongly to the Germanic migrants entering what was largely an empty landscape and settling alongside the remaining Romano-British population usually, if not always, in peace. There is an immediate mixing of native and immigrant traditions in ceramics, burial practices and habitation that would not be the case were this an armed conquest. Indeed archaeologically it looks very different from the Viking invasions or the Norman conquest.
Much of Southern Britain already had very large AS populations from the early 4th century onwards, partly from foederati brought in in large numbers to replace the regular legions but also due to migration and settlement which began long before the Romans decided to abandon the islands.
See also DNA studies. As a disgracefully broad generalisation, they invariably show that huge displacements and replacements of populations which we thought happened, didn't.
Tacitus makes the point that the language spoken in SE Britain was quite similar to that in what we now know as the Low Countries. For many years that was pooh-poohed, but it's now thought somewhat more likely.
Place name evidence for this epoch is fascinating
There is an area around the Sutton Hoo burial, in Suffolk, where the place names have a kind of ur-Englishness, a primordial Anglo-Saxonism.
Snape. Uffield. Falkenham. Sweffling. Yoxford
Say them aloud and it’s like you’re talking to a Saxon warlord. Suggesting this is indeed the cradle of England. Where England first unfurled her rippling pennant, in the astonished sun
Likely to the burial ground of Raewald, a king in east anglia ≈ 625AD.
If you into this kind of stuff then I fully recommend Marc Morris's new book, "The Anglo Saxons". I am about 60 pages in and it is great stuff - really interesting but readable history with plenty of new thinking from scholars in last few years (seems a lot of what we were taught at school about Saxon kingdoms is seen as more myth than history these days).
The SNP's treatment of Charles Kennedy in 2015 was a disgrace, would like to see an apology for that
Unpopular view but Charles Kennedy was an unfit drunk putting himself up for elected office in 2015.
He deserved what he got. Opposition parties hold politicians to account and quite rightly too.
Charles Kennedy's friends, loved ones and party should have talked him into standing down in 2015 - or seen him removed as a PPC in 2015. If having retired he'd been subject to the same treatment then that would be a disgrace, but not while he was seeking elected office.
It's funny how you take this view about a man with a drinking problem yet you have a completely different and sympathetic view for people with weight issues. Never let your principles get in the way of point scoring Philip
What are you talking about?
If someone is so morbidly obese to the point that their weight is getting in the way of them being an effective politician then I see absolutely no problem with opponents criticising them for it. And I would want to see their friends and loved ones helping them get treatment instead of standing for election.
I can't think of a single politician from any party for whom that's the case though. Not in the same way as Charles Kennedy's alcoholism which was impeding his ability to do his job and sadly led to his early death.
Mr. 43, if you consider that a policy rather than passivity it still wouldn't work now.
The EU is about continual integration, and the US has turned isolationist to the extent of not even briefing military allies (a shame, as we might have been able to point out some of the flaws in Biden's 'plan').
Mr. Tyndall, the dislocation of trade was enormous but another big problem was the Anglo-Saxon invasion and insufficient defences.
Edited extra bit: have to be off.
Hmm. We will definitely have to disagree on that one. Like many archaeologists today I do not subscribe to the 'Armed Invasion' model of Anglo-Saxon migration. The evidence points strongly to the Germanic migrants entering what was largely an empty landscape and settling alongside the remaining Romano-British population usually, if not always, in peace. There is an immediate mixing of native and immigrant traditions in ceramics, burial practices and habitation that would not be the case were this an armed conquest. Indeed archaeologically it looks very different from the Viking invasions or the Norman conquest.
Much of Southern Britain already had very large AS populations from the early 4th century onwards, partly from foederati brought in in large numbers to replace the regular legions but also due to migration and settlement which began long before the Romans decided to abandon the islands.
See also DNA studies. As a disgracefully broad generalisation, they invariably show that huge displacements and replacements of populations which we thought happened, didn't.
Tacitus makes the point that the language spoken in SE Britain was quite similar to that in what we now know as the Low Countries. For many years that was pooh-poohed, but it's now thought somewhat more likely.
Place name evidence for this epoch is fascinating
There is an area around the Sutton Hoo burial, in Suffolk, where the place names have a kind of ur-Englishness, a primordial Anglo-Saxonism.
Snape. Uffield. Falkenham. Sweffling. Yoxford
Say them aloud and it’s like you’re talking to a Saxon warlord. Suggesting this is indeed the cradle of England. Where England first unfurled her rippling pennant, in the astonished sun
At least you’ll have your ur-Englishness to fall back on when there’s no longer a Britain.
I have a feeling Britain will endure. And I am certain that you, as a Scotsman, will be speaking the language of your English conquerors, until your final breath.
Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, has told the Telegraph that he is ruling out vaxports for pubs.
If you allow vaxx passports for anything, pretty soon they will be used for everything.
The decision to impose them on pubs will be rushed in via the government's emergency powers when cases are soaring in the winter and the 'science' says it would be useful, with wall to wall SAGE experts on the airwaves spreading gloom and doom.
It's fabulous to see so many on here, of all political persuasions and none, arguing that higher wages are needed to attract workers to low-paid, often unattractive jobs, from fruit pickers to hospitality staff to care workers, where there are labour shortages.
Wage rises will, of course lead to: a) reduced profits, or b) increased prices, or c) both.
I suspect the history of capitalism, and current corporate greed, tells us that it won't be a) or c). So we're left with b).
Mr. 43, if you consider that a policy rather than passivity it still wouldn't work now.
The EU is about continual integration, and the US has turned isolationist to the extent of not even briefing military allies (a shame, as we might have been able to point out some of the flaws in Biden's 'plan').
Mr. Tyndall, the dislocation of trade was enormous but another big problem was the Anglo-Saxon invasion and insufficient defences.
Edited extra bit: have to be off.
Hmm. We will definitely have to disagree on that one. Like many archaeologists today I do not subscribe to the 'Armed Invasion' model of Anglo-Saxon migration. The evidence points strongly to the Germanic migrants entering what was largely an empty landscape and settling alongside the remaining Romano-British population usually, if not always, in peace. There is an immediate mixing of native and immigrant traditions in ceramics, burial practices and habitation that would not be the case were this an armed conquest. Indeed archaeologically it looks very different from the Viking invasions or the Norman conquest.
Much of Southern Britain already had very large AS populations from the early 4th century onwards, partly from foederati brought in in large numbers to replace the regular legions but also due to migration and settlement which began long before the Romans decided to abandon the islands.
See also DNA studies. As a disgracefully broad generalisation, they invariably show that huge displacements and replacements of populations which we thought happened, didn't.
Tacitus makes the point that the language spoken in SE Britain was quite similar to that in what we now know as the Low Countries. For many years that was pooh-poohed, but it's now thought somewhat more likely.
Place name evidence for this epoch is fascinating
There is an area around the Sutton Hoo burial, in Suffolk, where the place names have a kind of ur-Englishness, a primordial Anglo-Saxonism.
Snape. Uffield. Falkenham. Sweffling. Yoxford
Say them aloud and it’s like you’re talking to a Saxon warlord. Suggesting this is indeed the cradle of England. Where England first unfurled her rippling pennant, in the astonished sun
At least you’ll have your ur-Englishness to fall back on when there’s no longer a Britain.
I have a feeling Britain will endure. And I am certain that you, as a Scotsman, will be speaking the language of your English conquerors, until your final breath.
Mr. 43, if you consider that a policy rather than passivity it still wouldn't work now.
The EU is about continual integration, and the US has turned isolationist to the extent of not even briefing military allies (a shame, as we might have been able to point out some of the flaws in Biden's 'plan').
Mr. Tyndall, the dislocation of trade was enormous but another big problem was the Anglo-Saxon invasion and insufficient defences.
Edited extra bit: have to be off.
Hmm. We will definitely have to disagree on that one. Like many archaeologists today I do not subscribe to the 'Armed Invasion' model of Anglo-Saxon migration. The evidence points strongly to the Germanic migrants entering what was largely an empty landscape and settling alongside the remaining Romano-British population usually, if not always, in peace. There is an immediate mixing of native and immigrant traditions in ceramics, burial practices and habitation that would not be the case were this an armed conquest. Indeed archaeologically it looks very different from the Viking invasions or the Norman conquest.
Much of Southern Britain already had very large AS populations from the early 4th century onwards, partly from foederati brought in in large numbers to replace the regular legions but also due to migration and settlement which began long before the Romans decided to abandon the islands.
See also DNA studies. As a disgracefully broad generalisation, they invariably show that huge displacements and replacements of populations which we thought happened, didn't.
Tacitus makes the point that the language spoken in SE Britain was quite similar to that in what we now know as the Low Countries. For many years that was pooh-poohed, but it's now thought somewhat more likely.
Place name evidence for this epoch is fascinating
There is an area around the Sutton Hoo burial, in Suffolk, where the place names have a kind of ur-Englishness, a primordial Anglo-Saxonism.
Snape. Uffield. Falkenham. Sweffling. Yoxford
Say them aloud and it’s like you’re talking to a Saxon warlord. Suggesting this is indeed the cradle of England. Where England first unfurled her rippling pennant, in the astonished sun
At least you’ll have your ur-Englishness to fall back on when there’s no longer a Britain.
Doubt it, we will all be long dead before the Scots vote for independece
It's fabulous to see so many on here, of all political persuasions and none, arguing that higher wages are needed to attract workers to low-paid, often unattractive jobs, from fruit pickers to hospitality staff to care workers, where there are labour shortages.
Wage rises will, of course lead to: a) reduced profits, or b) increased prices, or c) both.
I suspect the history of capitalism, and current corporate greed, tells us that it won't be a) or c). So we're left with b).
Why not increased prices and increased profits?
Besides what on earth is wrong with higher wages and higher profits?
So long as they're economically justified, they should be a good thing?
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
What arrogance and condescension.
Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?
If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.
If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
Question - have you ever been to Wisbech...?
My "arrogance and condescension" is just reality. People aren't moving to east anglia - a place they don't want to live - to do jobs they don't want to do at a cost they can't afford. Media house price in Wizzy is £177k vs £130k in Widnes.
So your Wizzy food factory needs to cover the 36% higher house price and the higher cost of living before you even start trying to make the job and the prospects look attractive.
So your answer seems to be to import cheap foreign labour to live in squalid conditions in Wisbech so that Wizzy Food Co can maintain its profit margins?
I mean personally I am all in favour of migration and people being able to move where they want for whatever reason but your argument is actually utterly illogical. So long as the factory is in Wisbech (which funnily enough I drove past last night coming back from a wedding) then the food manufacturers must pay enough for the workers to be able to afford to live there whether those workers are from Widnes or Wroclaw. The days of expecting people to work for less than a living wage should be behind us.
I agree with you - wages need to be higher. BTW a lot of the operators in anglia are not sat on mega operating margins. As we now have less workers from Wroclaw then workers must come from Widnes etc. The problem is that they cannot pay enough wages to do so.
Besides which, there is a bigger problem. Lets assume that there is affordable housing. Lets assume that there is a large scale increase in food prices (think 30%+) to create sufficient margins to allow wages to rise significantly. So the £ gap to promote internal migration isn't there.
But its still Wisbech. An awful lot of people don't want to live in the sticks. Especially when its as dull as the farming flatlands of eastern England.
Not a view I have much sympathy with. I didn't want to spend most of my working life in the sorts of dives I have had to operate - and I am not just talking about Aberdeen (that is a joke by the way, I really like Aberdeen). I would have loved to have been at home every Christmas rather than stuck in some arse end of the world. But you go where the work is. Something far too many people seem to have forgotten these days.
Alas the modern tory party has moved on from 'on your bike' to denigrating those of us who take part in economic migration.
It's fabulous to see so many on here, of all political persuasions and none, arguing that higher wages are needed to attract workers to low-paid, often unattractive jobs, from fruit pickers to hospitality staff to care workers, where there are labour shortages.
Wage rises will, of course lead to: a) reduced profits, or b) increased prices, or c) both.
I suspect the history of capitalism, and current corporate greed, tells us that it won't be a) or c). So we're left with b).
Lump of Labour remains a fallacy. Many of those jobs will disappear and wages will settle at the same level on average, although there will be winners and losers. ie fruit farming is quite likely to disappear from the UK, hospitality will reduce, as will demand for hospitality workers. More money will probably go into care, because you can't do without, although some might, if it gets unaffordable.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
What arrogance and condescension.
Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?
If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.
If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
Question - have you ever been to Wisbech...?
My "arrogance and condescension" is just reality. People aren't moving to east anglia - a place they don't want to live - to do jobs they don't want to do at a cost they can't afford. Media house price in Wizzy is £177k vs £130k in Widnes.
So your Wizzy food factory needs to cover the 36% higher house price and the higher cost of living before you even start trying to make the job and the prospects look attractive.
So your answer seems to be to import cheap foreign labour to live in squalid conditions in Wisbech so that Wizzy Food Co can maintain its profit margins?
I mean personally I am all in favour of migration and people being able to move where they want for whatever reason but your argument is actually utterly illogical. So long as the factory is in Wisbech (which funnily enough I drove past last night coming back from a wedding) then the food manufacturers must pay enough for the workers to be able to afford to live there whether those workers are from Widnes or Wroclaw. The days of expecting people to work for less than a living wage should be behind us.
I agree with you - wages need to be higher. BTW a lot of the operators in anglia are not sat on mega operating margins. As we now have less workers from Wroclaw then workers must come from Widnes etc. The problem is that they cannot pay enough wages to do so.
Besides which, there is a bigger problem. Lets assume that there is affordable housing. Lets assume that there is a large scale increase in food prices (think 30%+) to create sufficient margins to allow wages to rise significantly. So the £ gap to promote internal migration isn't there.
But its still Wisbech. An awful lot of people don't want to live in the sticks. Especially when its as dull as the farming flatlands of eastern England.
Not a view I have much sympathy with. I didn't want to spend most of my working life in the sorts of dives I have had to operate - and I am not just talking about Aberdeen (that is a joke by the way, I really like Aberdeen). I would have loved to have been at home every Christmas rather than stuck in some arse end of the world. But you go where the work is. Something far too many people seem to have forgotten these days.
Alas the modern tory party has moved on from 'on your bike' to denigrating those of us who take part in economic migration.
It's fabulous to see so many on here, of all political persuasions and none, arguing that higher wages are needed to attract workers to low-paid, often unattractive jobs, from fruit pickers to hospitality staff to care workers, where there are labour shortages.
Wage rises will, of course lead to: a) reduced profits, or b) increased prices, or c) both.
I suspect the history of capitalism, and current corporate greed, tells us that it won't be a) or c). So we're left with b).
It is simply market forces. There is no intrinsic 'worth' to many jobs out there, right? I don't see how anybody gets to designate who should or should not be well paid in the private sector.
The Pentagon has activated the Civil Reserve Air Fleet. Aircraft from each of the U.S. commercial airlines have been requested to assist airlift operations after Afghans & Americans are transported out of Kabul.
Mr. 43, if you consider that a policy rather than passivity it still wouldn't work now.
The EU is about continual integration, and the US has turned isolationist to the extent of not even briefing military allies (a shame, as we might have been able to point out some of the flaws in Biden's 'plan').
Mr. Tyndall, the dislocation of trade was enormous but another big problem was the Anglo-Saxon invasion and insufficient defences.
Edited extra bit: have to be off.
Hmm. We will definitely have to disagree on that one. Like many archaeologists today I do not subscribe to the 'Armed Invasion' model of Anglo-Saxon migration. The evidence points strongly to the Germanic migrants entering what was largely an empty landscape and settling alongside the remaining Romano-British population usually, if not always, in peace. There is an immediate mixing of native and immigrant traditions in ceramics, burial practices and habitation that would not be the case were this an armed conquest. Indeed archaeologically it looks very different from the Viking invasions or the Norman conquest.
Much of Southern Britain already had very large AS populations from the early 4th century onwards, partly from foederati brought in in large numbers to replace the regular legions but also due to migration and settlement which began long before the Romans decided to abandon the islands.
See also DNA studies. As a disgracefully broad generalisation, they invariably show that huge displacements and replacements of populations which we thought happened, didn't.
Tacitus makes the point that the language spoken in SE Britain was quite similar to that in what we now know as the Low Countries. For many years that was pooh-poohed, but it's now thought somewhat more likely.
Place name evidence for this epoch is fascinating
There is an area around the Sutton Hoo burial, in Suffolk, where the place names have a kind of ur-Englishness, a primordial Anglo-Saxonism.
Snape. Uffield. Falkenham. Sweffling. Yoxford
Say them aloud and it’s like you’re talking to a Saxon warlord. Suggesting this is indeed the cradle of England. Where England first unfurled her rippling pennant, in the astonished sun
Sweffling sounds like the process followed by fiction writers.
Prof Francois Balloux @BallouxFrancois · 16h Some mentioned this tweet may have been unfair. I personally don't feel it was. Several 'media covid experts' claim credentials in public health and infectious disease epidemiology that they seem to have made up during the pandemic. I feel it's fair to call out those charlatans.
I’d love to be a fly on the wall at the UCL Christmas Party when him and Christina Pagel run into each other.
It's fabulous to see so many on here, of all political persuasions and none, arguing that higher wages are needed to attract workers to low-paid, often unattractive jobs, from fruit pickers to hospitality staff to care workers, where there are labour shortages.
Wage rises will, of course lead to: a) reduced profits, or b) increased prices, or c) both.
I suspect the history of capitalism, and current corporate greed, tells us that it won't be a) or c). So we're left with b).
The #EU will NOT open any European migration corridors for Afghanistan. We will not allow the strategic mistake of 2015 to be repeated. We have to help only individuals who helped us during #NATO op. and those countries guarding the EU's external border to fully protect it.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
Here in the South West there is a massive shortage of staff in cafes, pubs and restaurants. Anyone who is unemployed could come down tomorrow and get a job. The problem is that they could not find anywhere to live.
Because half the villages are filled with 2nd home owners who will then moan they can't get the service when they want a coffee in their local cafe.
If you want to make a real a difference to the economic outlook for these places you should put a hefty tax on second home owners. We tax all manner of things that are bad for our health, second homes would seem an obvious addition to that list.
Yep - spot on. But it will not happen. At least, not under a Conservative government.
Therefore it will not happen
Can you imagine SKS support it couldnt even support a 3% pay rise for nurses or raising Corporation Tax
Labor under SKS are right of Tories under Johnson
You are laughable. You cannot write these posts with a straight face
Which policies do Labour under SKS have that makes them to the left of Johnson?
It's fabulous to see so many on here, of all political persuasions and none, arguing that higher wages are needed to attract workers to low-paid, often unattractive jobs, from fruit pickers to hospitality staff to care workers, where there are labour shortages.
Wage rises will, of course lead to: a) reduced profits, or b) increased prices, or c) both.
I suspect the history of capitalism, and current corporate greed, tells us that it won't be a) or c). So we're left with b).
It is simply market forces. There is no intrinsic 'worth' to many jobs out there, right? I don't see how anybody gets to designate who should or should not be well paid in the private sector.
Well the public school old boy clique do have that role and have decided that instead of the 10x average earnings the board members of big companies used to receive, 100x and ever increasing is more appropriate.
Just catching up having been away. A couple of comments if I may:
1. Lovely to see so many Tories campaigning so vigorously for significant rises in working people's wages to counter the alleged labour shortage. Something at last that the lefties on here can agree with the Tories about. Strange old world, isn't it? 2. I'd have thought the more radical Tory solution would be to lock more people up. I read on here that prisoners are much sought after. If you imprison a lot more people, then release them early, wouldn't that be a more cost effective solution to labour shortages?
I don't see any tories apart from DavidL saying pay rises for minimum wage folk is a good thing. I am not a tory neither I believe is another richard
If not a Tory what would you describe yourself and 'another richard' as being?
Wouldn't a Tory be a member or otherwise strong supporter of the Conservative party ?
Something which Hyufd and a few other PBers - Casino, Mortimer, MM, Max - might be classed as.
But which neither I nor to my knowledge Pagan2 are.
Can we clear this up once and for all. Being 'A Tory' is not an ethnicity it is simply a voting intention. I can understand why you're in denial-particularly at the moment - but to suggest neither you nor 'Another Richard' would vote for anyone else (except perhaps UKIP) is plainly ridiculous.
So time to man up and say 'I'm a Tory and I'm proud"
Exactly so, Roger. All the dissembling that goes on around this. It's as if being a Tory is something shameful. Why would anyone feel that? Beats me.
"I'm not a member. I've voted for different parties over the years. It was about Brexit. You're forgetting the choice. It was that or Corbyn."
Bla bla bla. None of this is relevant. It's interesting but it's off the point. If you voted Tory in the last general election YOU ARE A TORY and this state persists until rectified by a sincereaf and firm intention to vote otherwise in the next one.
But to be a PB Tory is a sinuous and quicksilver thing, hard to pin down.
Afaics the people who voted for Cameron and now despise him are the same people who voted for May and now despise her, and also the the same people who voted for BJ but are still defending his every ineptitude and moral failing.
The one consistency seems to be that they bear no responsibility for any of the consequences of voting for these fine folk.
Yes, "PB Tories", a grouping unto itself, and it's not so simple as if you're a Tory (per my official definition) and you're on PB then you are one. That is not the case. It's a necessary condition but it isn't sufficient. You can be a Tory on PB yet not a PB Tory. It took me a while to suss all this out but now I have. I know who is a PB Tory and who isn't. But it's pure instinct, I can't define or explain it. Won't give any examples either way so as not to personalize. Too much of that from fruity Le ... from one particular poster yesterday.
There’s a tendency on here to group those you don’t like into the grouping you don’t like. Such as Malc’s insistence that I’m a Unionist. Or Heathener’s suggestion that I’m a Tory. When I’m neither. I don’t think anyway.
Prof Francois Balloux @BallouxFrancois · 16h Some mentioned this tweet may have been unfair. I personally don't feel it was. Several 'media covid experts' claim credentials in public health and infectious disease epidemiology that they seem to have made up during the pandemic. I feel it's fair to call out those charlatans.
I’d love to be a fly on the wall at the UCL Christmas Party when him and Christina Pagel run into each other.
LOL....won't the party be on zoom though? or at least socially distanced?
Prof Francois Balloux @BallouxFrancois · 16h Some mentioned this tweet may have been unfair. I personally don't feel it was. Several 'media covid experts' claim credentials in public health and infectious disease epidemiology that they seem to have made up during the pandemic. I feel it's fair to call out those charlatans.
I’d love to be a fly on the wall at the UCL Christmas Party when him and Christina Pagel run into each other.
Comments
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/north_west/8408447.stm
I do like the deadpan comment: " One person was convicted of sending fire bombs through the post in 1993. But some doubted the extent of Sion Aubrey Roberts' involvement as he would have been seven when the campaign began."
Or go out of business and be replaced by the more efficient ones?
Inefficient businesses have no divine right to survive.
By working from home, and home delivery, and so much now possible electronically, the case for cities has been diminished significantly.
I think Burnham would be a good leader - but I think he'd continue what Starmer has done.
Of course he would have to do better when actually going for the leadership, as last time it was dreadful
David Milliband rejected the Atlantic Bridge, preferring instead "Global Hub", which seems to have meant being the only members of everything multilateral - NATO, EU, UN Security Council, G7 - and then trying to join it all up. The Global Hub concept was adopted by William Hague, but it was getting very woolly as he tried to reconcile the English nationalism that would inform Brexit with the globalisation that is inherent in the "Global Hub" name - saying multilateralism is really bilateralism etc.
The current lot don't even bother to reconcile the contradiction, which is why we are left with a slogan and a vacuum where a foreign policy should be
The point is though that people can and do move domestically, not just internationally. Like you my parents moved a lot when I was a child and so have I as an adult. Crocodile tears that jobs aren't where people are, so we need immigration as opposed to people moving a few miles across the country, is just silly.
There was a rival settlement outside London (Lundenwic, maybe?) that was prosperous but when the Vikings showed up the value of city walls meant it got rapidly abandoned.
I despise May, and voted against her.
Plenty of PB Tories voted against Boris.
PB Tories are not a homogenous group.
*No pun or sectarian affiliation implied. But this makes me suddenly wonder, do the, erm, overtones of 'Green' have anything to do with responses to environmental issues? Given, for instance, the infamous traffic light cycle in nearby Larkhill (red: yellow: nothing).
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/scottish-town-where-green-beyond-pale-981747.html
That is of course over the border in South Lanarkshire and I'm not familiar enough with North Lanarks politics to judge (it being, of course, on the other side of the Great Scottish Central Desert so beloved of PBTories opining on covid in Scotland).
He deserved what he got. Opposition parties hold politicians to account and quite rightly too.
Charles Kennedy's friends, loved ones and party should have talked him into standing down in 2015 - or seen him removed as a PPC in 2015. If having retired he'd been subject to the same treatment then that would be a disgrace, but not while he was seeking elected office.
You could argue that economic migrants arriving by boat in Kent could be told they will have three years of assistance with housing and welfare - if they agree to live in a village in the Leafy shires. But that will end if they move to a town or city. I suspect most would have left in months.
The EU is about continual integration, and the US has turned isolationist to the extent of not even briefing military allies (a shame, as we might have been able to point out some of the flaws in Biden's 'plan').
Mr. Tyndall, the dislocation of trade was enormous but another big problem was the Anglo-Saxon invasion and insufficient defences.
Edited extra bit: have to be off.
The pure Adam Smith Institute answer would be to give up on agriculture in East Anglia, redeploy the people in an expanded Cambridge Tech Hub and import the food from Eastern Europe if it's so cheap there.
Whether that's a good answer, let alone one that's acceptable to the will of the people, I'm not sure.
I'm now into the 3rd bush in the blueberry relay, which is great.
So we're both right!
Katie Hind is a laughably poor journalist
There's a parallel thing going on in the world of psilocybin use atm. The mainstream press is full of articles about how research is showing it's the best and most exciting thing for depression since sliced SSRIs, the underground on reddit which actually takes the stuff is saying: hang on a moment, bad trips are not an establishment myth designed to steer people away from mushrooms. They happen, and just the one can be life-wrecking.
And yet we are only a couple of weeks on from a conversation where several PBers were defending end-users buying hard drugs from illegal supply chains doing to men and women just what the Taliban are about to do in Afghanistan.
Much of Southern Britain already had very large AS populations from the early 4th century onwards, partly from foederati brought in in large numbers to replace the regular legions but also due to migration and settlement which began long before the Romans decided to abandon the islands.
That would be a coherent foreign policy.
SF 12,909
IPP 132
Unionist 11,292
SF 53.1%
IPP 0.5%
Unionist 46.4%
Total Nationalist 53.6%
So you will find that it is ME that is completely correct!
Remember, Partition was by County, NOT Constituency boundaries!
https://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/now-casting/nowcasting-and-forecasting-20th-august-2021/
For many years that was pooh-poohed, but it's now thought somewhat more likely.
There is an area around the Sutton Hoo burial, in Suffolk, where the place names have a kind of ur-Englishness, a primordial Anglo-Saxonism.
Snape. Uffield. Falkenham. Sweffling. Yoxford
Say them aloud and it’s like you’re talking to a Saxon warlord. Suggesting this is indeed the cradle of England. Where England first unfurled her rippling pennant, in the astonished sun
Prof Francois Balloux
@BallouxFrancois
·
16h
Some mentioned this tweet may have been unfair. I personally don't feel it was. Several 'media covid experts' claim credentials in public health and infectious disease epidemiology that they seem to have made up during the pandemic. I feel it's fair to call out those charlatans.
Wage rises will, of course lead to:
a) reduced profits, or
b) increased prices, or
c) both.
I suspect the history of capitalism, and current corporate greed, tells us that it won't be a) or c).
So we're left with b).
I see her twatter timeline is moving on from that tweet - now digging in even more.
If you into this kind of stuff then I fully recommend Marc Morris's new book, "The Anglo Saxons". I am about 60 pages in and it is great stuff - really interesting but readable history with plenty of new thinking from scholars in last few years (seems a lot of what we were taught at school about Saxon kingdoms is seen as more myth than history these days).
If someone is so morbidly obese to the point that their weight is getting in the way of them being an effective politician then I see absolutely no problem with opponents criticising them for it. And I would want to see their friends and loved ones helping them get treatment instead of standing for election.
I can't think of a single politician from any party for whom that's the case though. Not in the same way as Charles Kennedy's alcoholism which was impeding his ability to do his job and sadly led to his early death.
Johnson - no idea/can I go on holiday now?
Gove - all for.
So they happen, I guess.
If you allow vaxx passports for anything, pretty soon they will be used for everything.
The decision to impose them on pubs will be rushed in via the government's emergency powers when cases are soaring in the winter and the 'science' says it would be useful, with wall to wall SAGE experts on the airwaves spreading gloom and doom.
That is how Johnson's government operates.
The only protection is to rule them out entirely.
So long as they're economically justified, they should be a good thing?
The Pentagon has activated the Civil Reserve Air Fleet. Aircraft from each of the U.S. commercial airlines have been requested to assist airlift operations after Afghans & Americans are transported out of Kabul.
The #EU will NOT open any European migration corridors for Afghanistan. We will not allow the strategic mistake of 2015 to be repeated. We have to help only individuals who helped us during #NATO op. and those countries guarding the EU's external border to fully protect it.
Silky soundbites don't count.