'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
More here (which confirms the social media accounts involved are government ones)
'The Department for Transport has raised concerns that the number of people who may want to travel to London could cause major problems for the transport network, and lead to overcrowding in the capital.
In a striking assessment of the scenes that could unfold, one memo warns of a worst-case scenario in which London literally becomes “full” for the first time ever as potentially hundreds of thousands of people try to make their way there — with accommodation, roads, public transport, food, policing, healthcare and basic services stretched to breaking point. Concerns have also been raised about a shortage of stewards for crowd control purposes.'
It’ll be Death of Stalin redux, dozens of sobbing royalists crushed to death as they try to get a glimpse of the catafalque. Various horrible people manoeuvring for power and being summarily executed would be nice.
The policing disaster for the Euros final doesn’t bode well does it. And that was just with the yobbos. That funeral is going to be the most tempting target for Terry Terrorist on British soil ever.
When everyone knows someone who is on a waiting list that is measured in years not months, there will be trouble.
There won't be. Just tell them it's because of covid, climate change, or a bad minority with questionable commitment to British society who are "concentrated in certain areas". Tell them it's wicked to cause a fuss and that by making a fuss you make it harder on yourself and everybody else, and that none of your neighbours is making a fuss, so why do you think you're so special, and nurses and ambulance drivers do a bloody good job, and so on - oh look, there's a rainbow painted by small children, and what's wrong with you, you misery gutted Bolshevik, etc. etc. In advertising, oldies tend to be goodies. Same in politics. As for "new", they can have the "New NHS" if they need to. Or pre-emptively. I wouldn't put it past them.
In what country in the world has a deterioration of health services ever been a major political issue causing really big trouble? In Russia in the 1990s life expectancy was falling by one year per year and there were no electoral repercussions. This is one of those things like strikes against redundancies. They don't work. Big fights against poor or delayed or non-existent health treatment don't even happen.
Given all the sacrifices that have been made to the NHS deity (see what I did there?) since last March, Labour and the LibDems aren't going to say the government have bollocksed up the NHS. As far as I know, no British political party has ever even mentioned the reason for the existence of waiting lists. I mean in the period before covid. I wonder how many people reading this even know what the principal reason is, or if they have ever wondered why when you call a repair garage or a hairdresser you can always arrange a time for an appointment to get the required work done but when you contact the state health service you can't.
The average age of a adult social care worker (i.e. someone who does the caring) for Durham County Council is 56.
Social care is going to be an even bigger problem than I thought it would be.
It was younger before the EU staff went home. To be honest, when I went into such Homes regularly I would have thought the British average was younger.... 45 or so.
That was up to 2008 or so, though. So they might be the same staff, just older!
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
More here (which confirms the social media accounts involved are government ones)
'The Department for Transport has raised concerns that the number of people who may want to travel to London could cause major problems for the transport network, and lead to overcrowding in the capital.
In a striking assessment of the scenes that could unfold, one memo warns of a worst-case scenario in which London literally becomes “full” for the first time ever as potentially hundreds of thousands of people try to make their way there — with accommodation, roads, public transport, food, policing, healthcare and basic services stretched to breaking point. Concerns have also been raised about a shortage of stewards for crowd control purposes.'
It’ll be Death of Stalin redux, dozens of sobbing royalists crushed to death as they try to get a glimpse of the catafalque. Various horrible people manoeuvring for power and being summarily executed would be nice.
If we get a great movie out of it like that then it would be worth it.
The idea that given all the expenses of Covid, the NHS and social care, let alone anything else, we can avoid raising taxes on working people, as @MaxPB seems to want, is for the birds.
Taxes will have to rise and all will have to pay. That's all there is to it. All these demands for special exclusions is just self-interested nonsense.
Should we be raising taxes only on working age people?
"1% on NI" is a 2% tax rise on the employed, and a 0% tax rise on pensioners.
1%, 2% or whatever on income tax is a tax paid by all.
I did put forward the typically centre moderate view of 2% on income tax on here last night (I think). So workers and pensioners both contribute.
2% hike in income tax isn't moderate. It's almost Corbynite.
I'm absolutely disgusted with the Tory leadership. I campaigned hard in 2019 and believed the no tax rise manifesto promise. Fiscal drag is the order of the day.
In fairness it was not contemplated in 2019 that the government would spend more than £400bn on helping the economy cope with an 18 month pandemic which has devastated tax revenues as well. Politicians are all too keen to argue that circumstances have changed when breaking a promise but I struggle to think of a government that has a better base for such an argument than this one.
Tories should stand for sound money, careful management of the country's accounts and limitations on the role of the state. In some circumstances that requires more spending and thus, responsibly, more taxes, than others. This is such a time. I am more worried about having stable and sustainable public finances than current tax rates.
Now is not the time to put taxes up on working people. I don't care about my personal situation, an extra £1.6k per year in tax between myself and my wife is unfortunate but it doesn't really make a big difference to us. There will be millions of middle income people across the country that will find that kind of income cut very, very difficult to take.
Using my dad as an example again, his net income in retirement is about £60.5k. A working age person with an equivalent gross has a net income of £55k. In what world does it make sense that my dad, with no responsibilities, no kids, no mortgage and no real costs pays £5.5k less in tax than a working age person who will have a mortgage/rent, kids, possible nursery fees, school expenses, commuting costs etc...
The whole system is needs rethinking. Why is anyone in the higher rate tax bracket getting 100% of the state pension? In what world does that make sense?!
Very well said.
Plus of course dynamism and economics says we should not tax wages because working income is more elastic than non-working income.
A working aged person faced with a tax rise (or tax cut) can choose to respond by working less (or more) which harms (or boosts) the economy. A non-working person's income is relatively much more inelastic.
The reason we tax things like petrol and cigarettes is they're relatively inelastic so can be taxed more, and they're things we're trying to discourage anyway. We should not be seeking to discourage work by taxing it more.
The idea that given all the expenses of Covid, the NHS and social care, let alone anything else, we can avoid raising taxes on working people, as @MaxPB seems to want, is for the birds.
Taxes will have to rise and all will have to pay. That's all there is to it. All these demands for special exclusions is just self-interested nonsense.
Should we be raising taxes only on working age people?
"1% on NI" is a 2% tax rise on the employed, and a 0% tax rise on pensioners.
1%, 2% or whatever on income tax is a tax paid by all.
I did put forward the typically centre moderate view of 2% on income tax on here last night (I think). So workers and pensioners both contribute.
2% hike in income tax isn't moderate. It's almost Corbynite.
I'm absolutely disgusted with the Tory leadership. I campaigned hard in 2019 and believed the no tax rise manifesto promise. Fiscal drag is the order of the day.
In fairness it was not contemplated in 2019 that the government would spend more than £400bn on helping the economy cope with an 18 month pandemic which has devastated tax revenues as well. Politicians are all too keen to argue that circumstances have changed when breaking a promise but I struggle to think of a government that has a better base for such an argument than this one.
Well quite. It may be the right or wrong thing, but that it was a manifesto promise should barely merit consideration in that assessment. They've never been cast iron promises, for good reason, and frankly I'm amazed that even Boris has not used his big majority and the unprecedented circumstances to break more of them.
The average age of a adult social care worker (i.e. someone who does the caring) for Durham County Council is 56.
Social care is going to be an even bigger problem than I thought it would be.
No its going to be a bigger problem than the bigger problem you thought it would be.
The government has decreed care home staff must be double jabbed by law, and many don't want to be. The recruitment crisis is going to be enormous.
Oh I suspect that won't be an issue - the agencies / workers will play a variation of the avoiding being caught out on using workers without NI numbers by switching agency and care home every couple of months.
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
I thought we knew most of this years ago from that Guardian piece but I guess it's a bit more precise.
The idea that given all the expenses of Covid, the NHS and social care, let alone anything else, we can avoid raising taxes on working people, as @MaxPB seems to want, is for the birds.
Taxes will have to rise and all will have to pay. That's all there is to it. All these demands for special exclusions is just self-interested nonsense.
Should we be raising taxes only on working age people?
"1% on NI" is a 2% tax rise on the employed, and a 0% tax rise on pensioners.
1%, 2% or whatever on income tax is a tax paid by all.
I did put forward the typically centre moderate view of 2% on income tax on here last night (I think). So workers and pensioners both contribute.
2% hike in income tax isn't moderate. It's almost Corbynite.
I'm absolutely disgusted with the Tory leadership. I campaigned hard in 2019 and believed the no tax rise manifesto promise. Fiscal drag is the order of the day.
In fairness it was not contemplated in 2019 that the government would spend more than £400bn on helping the economy cope with an 18 month pandemic which has devastated tax revenues as well. Politicians are all too keen to argue that circumstances have changed when breaking a promise but I struggle to think of a government that has a better base for such an argument than this one.
Tories should stand for sound money, careful management of the country's accounts and limitations on the role of the state. In some circumstances that requires more spending and thus, responsibly, more taxes, than others. This is such a time. I am more worried about having stable and sustainable public finances than current tax rates.
Now is not the time to put taxes up on working people. I don't care about my personal situation, an extra £1.6k per year in tax between myself and my wife is unfortunate but it doesn't really make a big difference to us. There will be millions of middle income people across the country that will find that kind of income cut very, very difficult to take.
Using my dad as an example again, his net income in retirement is about £60.5k. A working age person with an equivalent gross has a net income of £55k. In what world does it make sense that my dad, with no responsibilities, no kids, no mortgage and no real costs pays £5.5k less in tax than a working age person who will have a mortgage/rent, kids, possible nursery fees, school expenses, commuting costs etc...
The whole system is needs rethinking. Why is anyone in the higher rate tax bracket getting 100% of the state pension? In what world does that make sense?!
You really think this is about social care?
The government is desperate for money to pay for the gargantuan errors of big state intervention of the last 18 months. Test and trace. Furlough fraud. The numbers are simply enormous.
This is simply the corollary. It was always going to be.
So we give vaccines to Oz rather than, say, sub-saharan Africa.
Pfizer.
Exactly: they chances of Pfizer being wasted in Africa (as a consequence of the storage requirements) are at least 10x that of AZ.
Better to give the more robust vaccines to Africa, rather than the more delicate ones.
40% of our initial vaccine donations go to Australia.
It's not a "donation" - its a swap - they get ours now, we get theirs later.
Even worse let's play swapsies with those nice other developed nations.
Which under developed nation would you prefer to play swapsies with? Or would you rather we give Pfizer doses to countries that couldn't practically distribute them?
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the UK deal doubles the number of Pfizer doses available in September. Throughout the month, Australia will receive more than 9 million doses of Pfizer alongside 1 million Moderna doses and continued AstraZeneca supply.
“From Downing Street to Down Under we are doubling down on the Pfizer doses available to us,” he said. “The plane’s on the tarmac now, it will be leaving tomorrow and those [Pfizer] doses will be coming over the course of the next few weeks.”
Britain’s high commissioner to Australia, Vicki Treadell, says it’s a privilege to be able to support Australians by helping to accelerate the vaccine rollout down under.
I fail to see why its "worse" that we do that in Topping's eyes. Its an entirely logical thing to do, which we considered doing with Israel earlier in the pandemic but the other way around.
We send them Pfizer doses we have now, but don't need now, before they expire.
They send us Pfizer doses later on, when we need them, for boosters.
Our current doses we're sending could potentially have expired before we get on with boosting.
Purely logical and sensible thing to do.
Wait:
I thought we were getting Kylie.
ABBA it seems will have to do.
Now we are getting on to a serious subject. I don't get ABBA. I think they are rubbish. I detest every song.
I respect your personal taste but...
I used to think ABBA were totally naff back in the day. But now when I hear their old songs I can't help singing along. They are very well crafted pop songs.
They may be well crafted, but I detest every single one of them.
And with regard to Mamma Mia the film, I was forced to watch it and almost had a fatal attack of cringe.
The idea of going to the musical just fills me with dread.
You have no soul , I rewatched it again the other night and it was just a happy film with lots of great music.
I'm with kjh here.
Abba's songs are quite remarkably crafted. And yet they grate. I can just about stomach the disco ones (voulez vouz, etc.), though they are not my cup of tea and make me very glad I wasn't young and Swedish in the 70s. There is a darkness to them (I don't know whether this is intentional - probably it is: they are, after all, very good songwriters). But the easy listening end of the spectrum - Fernando etc - music for people who don't like music.
And as for Mamma Mia - musical theatre is the lowest form of art. Lower than mime. (Musical theatre is the lowest form of art precisley because it is stuffed with this sort of music-for-people-who-don't-like-music: see also anything by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice).
Apologies, but this is, IMO, utter nonsense. ABBA's stuff is musically quite complex for popular music. Sure, the lyrics are fairly banal, but they also have a certain genius at times.
I'm not sure there's any such thing as people who don't like music, but I'm quite happy to switch between Bach's solo violin pieces and ABBA's greatest hits on occasion.
I love music but the God awful ear worms of ABBA combined with the stupidity of their lyrics can make me feel like I don't. Eurotrash rubbish.
So we give vaccines to Oz rather than, say, sub-saharan Africa.
Pfizer.
Exactly: they chances of Pfizer being wasted in Africa (as a consequence of the storage requirements) are at least 10x that of AZ.
Better to give the more robust vaccines to Africa, rather than the more delicate ones.
40% of our initial vaccine donations go to Australia.
It's not a "donation" - its a swap - they get ours now, we get theirs later.
Even worse let's play swapsies with those nice other developed nations.
Which under developed nation would you prefer to play swapsies with? Or would you rather we give Pfizer doses to countries that couldn't practically distribute them?
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the UK deal doubles the number of Pfizer doses available in September. Throughout the month, Australia will receive more than 9 million doses of Pfizer alongside 1 million Moderna doses and continued AstraZeneca supply.
“From Downing Street to Down Under we are doubling down on the Pfizer doses available to us,” he said. “The plane’s on the tarmac now, it will be leaving tomorrow and those [Pfizer] doses will be coming over the course of the next few weeks.”
Britain’s high commissioner to Australia, Vicki Treadell, says it’s a privilege to be able to support Australians by helping to accelerate the vaccine rollout down under.
I fail to see why its "worse" that we do that in Topping's eyes. Its an entirely logical thing to do, which we considered doing with Israel earlier in the pandemic but the other way around.
We send them Pfizer doses we have now, but don't need now, before they expire.
They send us Pfizer doses later on, when we need them, for boosters.
Our current doses we're sending could potentially have expired before we get on with boosting.
Purely logical and sensible thing to do.
Wait:
I thought we were getting Kylie.
ABBA it seems will have to do.
Now we are getting on to a serious subject. I don't get ABBA. I think they are rubbish. I detest every song.
I respect your personal taste but...
I used to think ABBA were totally naff back in the day. But now when I hear their old songs I can't help singing along. They are very well crafted pop songs.
They may be well crafted, but I detest every single one of them.
And with regard to Mamma Mia the film, I was forced to watch it and almost had a fatal attack of cringe.
The idea of going to the musical just fills me with dread.
You have no soul , I rewatched it again the other night and it was just a happy film with lots of great music.
I'm with kjh here.
Abba's songs are quite remarkably crafted. And yet they grate. I can just about stomach the disco ones (voulez vouz, etc.), though they are not my cup of tea and make me very glad I wasn't young and Swedish in the 70s. There is a darkness to them (I don't know whether this is intentional - probably it is: they are, after all, very good songwriters). But the easy listening end of the spectrum - Fernando etc - music for people who don't like music.
And as for Mamma Mia - musical theatre is the lowest form of art. Lower than mime. (Musical theatre is the lowest form of art precisley because it is stuffed with this sort of music-for-people-who-don't-like-music: see also anything by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice).
Apologies, but this is, IMO, utter nonsense. ABBA's stuff is musically quite complex for popular music. Sure, the lyrics are fairly banal, but they also have a certain genius at times.
I'm not sure there's any such thing as people who don't like music, but I'm quite happy to switch between Bach's solo violin pieces and ABBA's greatest hits on occasion.
It's pointless arguing about personal taste, really. FWIW I'm a diehard ABBA fan, partly because I followed them all as individual singers before they joined up - they were all successful on the Scandi scene. Unusually, perhaps, I think the core appeal is really the music and lyrics more than the performance - when the girls pursued their careers separately with other peoples' songs it didn't have the same bite. Casual listeners underrate the subtlety of some of the lyrics (The Day Before You Came has inpsired academic debate - some think it's about a stalker, others about a current love, or a lost love), but of course the main appeal is the music. Most people like it, some don't - either reaction shouldn't bother any of us.
On musicals, anything by Lerner and Loewe is worth seeing IMO - West Side Story is the best-known but they're all distinctive and have interesting plots, which many musicals really don't (and I agree that Mamma Mia is not exactly a profound narrative).
The idea that given all the expenses of Covid, the NHS and social care, let alone anything else, we can avoid raising taxes on working people, as @MaxPB seems to want, is for the birds.
Taxes will have to rise and all will have to pay. That's all there is to it. All these demands for special exclusions is just self-interested nonsense.
Should we be raising taxes only on working age people?
"1% on NI" is a 2% tax rise on the employed, and a 0% tax rise on pensioners.
1%, 2% or whatever on income tax is a tax paid by all.
I did put forward the typically centre moderate view of 2% on income tax on here last night (I think). So workers and pensioners both contribute.
2% hike in income tax isn't moderate. It's almost Corbynite.
I'm absolutely disgusted with the Tory leadership. I campaigned hard in 2019 and believed the no tax rise manifesto promise. Fiscal drag is the order of the day.
In fairness it was not contemplated in 2019 that the government would spend more than £400bn on helping the economy cope with an 18 month pandemic which has devastated tax revenues as well. Politicians are all too keen to argue that circumstances have changed when breaking a promise but I struggle to think of a government that has a better base for such an argument than this one.
Tories should stand for sound money, careful management of the country's accounts and limitations on the role of the state. In some circumstances that requires more spending and thus, responsibly, more taxes, than others. This is such a time. I am more worried about having stable and sustainable public finances than current tax rates.
Now is not the time to put taxes up on working people. I don't care about my personal situation, an extra £1.6k per year in tax between myself and my wife is unfortunate but it doesn't really make a big difference to us. There will be millions of middle income people across the country that will find that kind of income cut very, very difficult to take.
Using my dad as an example again, his net income in retirement is about £60.5k. A working age person with an equivalent gross has a net income of £55k. In what world does it make sense that my dad, with no responsibilities, no kids, no mortgage and no real costs pays £5.5k less in tax than a working age person who will have a mortgage/rent, kids, possible nursery fees, school expenses, commuting costs etc...
The whole system is needs rethinking. Why is anyone in the higher rate tax bracket getting 100% of the state pension? In what world does that make sense?!
Very well said.
Plus of course dynamism and economics says we should not tax wages because working income is more elastic than non-working income.
A working aged person faced with a tax rise (or tax cut) can choose to respond by working less (or more) which harms (or boosts) the economy. A non-working person's income is relatively much more inelastic.
The reason we tax things like petrol and cigarettes is they're relatively inelastic so can be taxed more, and they're things we're trying to discourage anyway. We should not be seeking to discourage work by taxing it more.
The entire reason for my approach of Royal Commission reporting in late 2024 is because it allows a whole heap of problems to be fixed in 1 trick.
You fix social care paid via the introduction of a wealth tax in a way that isn't political suicide.
The idea that given all the expenses of Covid, the NHS and social care, let alone anything else, we can avoid raising taxes on working people, as @MaxPB seems to want, is for the birds.
Taxes will have to rise and all will have to pay. That's all there is to it. All these demands for special exclusions is just self-interested nonsense.
Should we be raising taxes only on working age people?
"1% on NI" is a 2% tax rise on the employed, and a 0% tax rise on pensioners.
1%, 2% or whatever on income tax is a tax paid by all.
I did put forward the typically centre moderate view of 2% on income tax on here last night (I think). So workers and pensioners both contribute.
2% hike in income tax isn't moderate. It's almost Corbynite.
I'm absolutely disgusted with the Tory leadership. I campaigned hard in 2019 and believed the no tax rise manifesto promise. Fiscal drag is the order of the day.
In fairness it was not contemplated in 2019 that the government would spend more than £400bn on helping the economy cope with an 18 month pandemic which has devastated tax revenues as well. Politicians are all too keen to argue that circumstances have changed when breaking a promise but I struggle to think of a government that has a better base for such an argument than this one.
Tories should stand for sound money, careful management of the country's accounts and limitations on the role of the state. In some circumstances that requires more spending and thus, responsibly, more taxes, than others. This is such a time. I am more worried about having stable and sustainable public finances than current tax rates.
Now is not the time to put taxes up on working people. I don't care about my personal situation, an extra £1.6k per year in tax between myself and my wife is unfortunate but it doesn't really make a big difference to us. There will be millions of middle income people across the country that will find that kind of income cut very, very difficult to take.
Using my dad as an example again, his net income in retirement is about £60.5k. A working age person with an equivalent gross has a net income of £55k. In what world does it make sense that my dad, with no responsibilities, no kids, no mortgage and no real costs pays £5.5k less in tax than a working age person who will have a mortgage/rent, kids, possible nursery fees, school expenses, commuting costs etc...
The whole system is needs rethinking. Why is anyone in the higher rate tax bracket getting 100% of the state pension? In what world does that make sense?!
In the real world, the fair world where all people are equal or supposed to be equal.
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
More here (which confirms the social media accounts involved are government ones)
'The Department for Transport has raised concerns that the number of people who may want to travel to London could cause major problems for the transport network, and lead to overcrowding in the capital.
In a striking assessment of the scenes that could unfold, one memo warns of a worst-case scenario in which London literally becomes “full” for the first time ever as potentially hundreds of thousands of people try to make their way there — with accommodation, roads, public transport, food, policing, healthcare and basic services stretched to breaking point. Concerns have also been raised about a shortage of stewards for crowd control purposes.'
It’ll be Death of Stalin redux, dozens of sobbing royalists crushed to death as they try to get a glimpse of the catafalque. Various horrible people manoeuvring for power and being summarily executed would be nice.
I can't see it. I can just about understand (not empathize with) the Digasm in 1997, but a People's Princess is one thing, a very elderly billionairess with an interest in racing, quite another.
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
More here (which confirms the social media accounts involved are government ones)
'The Department for Transport has raised concerns that the number of people who may want to travel to London could cause major problems for the transport network, and lead to overcrowding in the capital.
In a striking assessment of the scenes that could unfold, one memo warns of a worst-case scenario in which London literally becomes “full” for the first time ever as potentially hundreds of thousands of people try to make their way there — with accommodation, roads, public transport, food, policing, healthcare and basic services stretched to breaking point. Concerns have also been raised about a shortage of stewards for crowd control purposes.'
It’ll be Death of Stalin redux, dozens of sobbing royalists crushed to death as they try to get a glimpse of the catafalque. Various horrible people manoeuvring for power and being summarily executed would be nice.
I can't see it. I can just about understand (not empathize with) the Digasm in 1997, but a People's Princess is one thing, a very elderly billionairess with an interest in racing, quite another.
Nah, the Queen is only worth a few hundred million, poor thing. The Grand Duke of Luxembourg is worth more. Charles is doing pretty well for himself though.
And I don't think there'll be much sobbing, but I think that Guardian piece had it right that it will be very momentous. People like the Queen, even if not as emotionally as the Diana stuff, and there'll be a lot of nonsense stuff about changing of eras and what the country is like now compared to when she became queen.
The idea that given all the expenses of Covid, the NHS and social care, let alone anything else, we can avoid raising taxes on working people, as @MaxPB seems to want, is for the birds.
Taxes will have to rise and all will have to pay. That's all there is to it. All these demands for special exclusions is just self-interested nonsense.
Should we be raising taxes only on working age people?
"1% on NI" is a 2% tax rise on the employed, and a 0% tax rise on pensioners.
1%, 2% or whatever on income tax is a tax paid by all.
I did put forward the typically centre moderate view of 2% on income tax on here last night (I think). So workers and pensioners both contribute.
2% hike in income tax isn't moderate. It's almost Corbynite.
I'm absolutely disgusted with the Tory leadership. I campaigned hard in 2019 and believed the no tax rise manifesto promise. Fiscal drag is the order of the day.
In fairness it was not contemplated in 2019 that the government would spend more than £400bn on helping the economy cope with an 18 month pandemic which has devastated tax revenues as well. Politicians are all too keen to argue that circumstances have changed when breaking a promise but I struggle to think of a government that has a better base for such an argument than this one.
Tories should stand for sound money, careful management of the country's accounts and limitations on the role of the state. In some circumstances that requires more spending and thus, responsibly, more taxes, than others. This is such a time. I am more worried about having stable and sustainable public finances than current tax rates.
Now is not the time to put taxes up on working people. I don't care about my personal situation, an extra £1.6k per year in tax between myself and my wife is unfortunate but it doesn't really make a big difference to us. There will be millions of middle income people across the country that will find that kind of income cut very, very difficult to take.
Using my dad as an example again, his net income in retirement is about £60.5k. A working age person with an equivalent gross has a net income of £55k. In what world does it make sense that my dad, with no responsibilities, no kids, no mortgage and no real costs pays £5.5k less in tax than a working age person who will have a mortgage/rent, kids, possible nursery fees, school expenses, commuting costs etc...
The whole system is needs rethinking. Why is anyone in the higher rate tax bracket getting 100% of the state pension? In what world does that make sense?!
With respect a net pensioner income of 60K plus is a million miles from most pensioners income
I get pissed off by how many people manage to dodge paying tax by getting their income paid to a ltd co (despite working for one employer) and who are now buggering off to Portugal and Cyprus to cash it all out tax free.
They couldn't claim anything for furlough or self employed grant though.
We tried reducing corporation tax for no discernable benefit.
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
More here (which confirms the social media accounts involved are government ones)
'The Department for Transport has raised concerns that the number of people who may want to travel to London could cause major problems for the transport network, and lead to overcrowding in the capital.
In a striking assessment of the scenes that could unfold, one memo warns of a worst-case scenario in which London literally becomes “full” for the first time ever as potentially hundreds of thousands of people try to make their way there — with accommodation, roads, public transport, food, policing, healthcare and basic services stretched to breaking point. Concerns have also been raised about a shortage of stewards for crowd control purposes.'
It’ll be Death of Stalin redux, dozens of sobbing royalists crushed to death as they try to get a glimpse of the catafalque. Various horrible people manoeuvring for power and being summarily executed would be nice.
I can't see it. I can just about understand (not empathize with) the Digasm in 1997, but a People's Princess is one thing, a very elderly billionairess with an interest in racing, quite another.
10 whole days of wall to wall coverage leading up to the funeral! Netflix will be sweeping the last households without a sub when that happens you’d have thought.
The idea that given all the expenses of Covid, the NHS and social care, let alone anything else, we can avoid raising taxes on working people, as @MaxPB seems to want, is for the birds.
Taxes will have to rise and all will have to pay. That's all there is to it. All these demands for special exclusions is just self-interested nonsense.
Should we be raising taxes only on working age people?
"1% on NI" is a 2% tax rise on the employed, and a 0% tax rise on pensioners.
1%, 2% or whatever on income tax is a tax paid by all.
I did put forward the typically centre moderate view of 2% on income tax on here last night (I think). So workers and pensioners both contribute.
2% hike in income tax isn't moderate. It's almost Corbynite.
I'm absolutely disgusted with the Tory leadership. I campaigned hard in 2019 and believed the no tax rise manifesto promise. Fiscal drag is the order of the day.
In fairness it was not contemplated in 2019 that the government would spend more than £400bn on helping the economy cope with an 18 month pandemic which has devastated tax revenues as well. Politicians are all too keen to argue that circumstances have changed when breaking a promise but I struggle to think of a government that has a better base for such an argument than this one.
Tories should stand for sound money, careful management of the country's accounts and limitations on the role of the state. In some circumstances that requires more spending and thus, responsibly, more taxes, than others. This is such a time. I am more worried about having stable and sustainable public finances than current tax rates.
Now is not the time to put taxes up on working people. I don't care about my personal situation, an extra £1.6k per year in tax between myself and my wife is unfortunate but it doesn't really make a big difference to us. There will be millions of middle income people across the country that will find that kind of income cut very, very difficult to take.
Using my dad as an example again, his net income in retirement is about £60.5k. A working age person with an equivalent gross has a net income of £55k. In what world does it make sense that my dad, with no responsibilities, no kids, no mortgage and no real costs pays £5.5k less in tax than a working age person who will have a mortgage/rent, kids, possible nursery fees, school expenses, commuting costs etc...
The whole system is needs rethinking. Why is anyone in the higher rate tax bracket getting 100% of the state pension? In what world does that make sense?!
With respect a net pensioner income of 60K plus is a million miles from most pensioners income
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
More here (which confirms the social media accounts involved are government ones)
'The Department for Transport has raised concerns that the number of people who may want to travel to London could cause major problems for the transport network, and lead to overcrowding in the capital.
In a striking assessment of the scenes that could unfold, one memo warns of a worst-case scenario in which London literally becomes “full” for the first time ever as potentially hundreds of thousands of people try to make their way there — with accommodation, roads, public transport, food, policing, healthcare and basic services stretched to breaking point. Concerns have also been raised about a shortage of stewards for crowd control purposes.'
It’ll be Death of Stalin redux, dozens of sobbing royalists crushed to death as they try to get a glimpse of the catafalque. Various horrible people manoeuvring for power and being summarily executed would be nice.
If we get a great movie out of it like that then it would be worth it.
So we give vaccines to Oz rather than, say, sub-saharan Africa.
Pfizer.
Exactly: they chances of Pfizer being wasted in Africa (as a consequence of the storage requirements) are at least 10x that of AZ.
Better to give the more robust vaccines to Africa, rather than the more delicate ones.
40% of our initial vaccine donations go to Australia.
It's not a "donation" - its a swap - they get ours now, we get theirs later.
Even worse let's play swapsies with those nice other developed nations.
Which under developed nation would you prefer to play swapsies with? Or would you rather we give Pfizer doses to countries that couldn't practically distribute them?
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the UK deal doubles the number of Pfizer doses available in September. Throughout the month, Australia will receive more than 9 million doses of Pfizer alongside 1 million Moderna doses and continued AstraZeneca supply.
“From Downing Street to Down Under we are doubling down on the Pfizer doses available to us,” he said. “The plane’s on the tarmac now, it will be leaving tomorrow and those [Pfizer] doses will be coming over the course of the next few weeks.”
Britain’s high commissioner to Australia, Vicki Treadell, says it’s a privilege to be able to support Australians by helping to accelerate the vaccine rollout down under.
I fail to see why its "worse" that we do that in Topping's eyes. Its an entirely logical thing to do, which we considered doing with Israel earlier in the pandemic but the other way around.
We send them Pfizer doses we have now, but don't need now, before they expire.
They send us Pfizer doses later on, when we need them, for boosters.
Our current doses we're sending could potentially have expired before we get on with boosting.
Purely logical and sensible thing to do.
Wait:
I thought we were getting Kylie.
ABBA it seems will have to do.
Now we are getting on to a serious subject. I don't get ABBA. I think they are rubbish. I detest every song.
I respect your personal taste but...
I used to think ABBA were totally naff back in the day. But now when I hear their old songs I can't help singing along. They are very well crafted pop songs.
They may be well crafted, but I detest every single one of them.
And with regard to Mamma Mia the film, I was forced to watch it and almost had a fatal attack of cringe.
The idea of going to the musical just fills me with dread.
You have no soul , I rewatched it again the other night and it was just a happy film with lots of great music.
I'm with kjh here.
Abba's songs are quite remarkably crafted. And yet they grate. I can just about stomach the disco ones (voulez vouz, etc.), though they are not my cup of tea and make me very glad I wasn't young and Swedish in the 70s. There is a darkness to them (I don't know whether this is intentional - probably it is: they are, after all, very good songwriters). But the easy listening end of the spectrum - Fernando etc - music for people who don't like music.
And as for Mamma Mia - musical theatre is the lowest form of art. Lower than mime. (Musical theatre is the lowest form of art precisley because it is stuffed with this sort of music-for-people-who-don't-like-music: see also anything by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice).
Apologies, but this is, IMO, utter nonsense. ABBA's stuff is musically quite complex for popular music. Sure, the lyrics are fairly banal, but they also have a certain genius at times.
I'm not sure there's any such thing as people who don't like music, but I'm quite happy to switch between Bach's solo violin pieces and ABBA's greatest hits on occasion.
I love music but the God awful ear worms of ABBA combined with the stupidity of their lyrics can make me feel like I don't. Eurotrash rubbish.
3 of us now. We will be taking over soon.
3 of us? No, it's One of Us:
One of us is crying, one of us is lying In a lonely bed Staring at the ceiling Wishing she was somewhere else instead One of us is lonely, one of us is only Waiting for a call Sorry for herself, feeling stupid, feeling small Wishing she had never left at all
The idea that given all the expenses of Covid, the NHS and social care, let alone anything else, we can avoid raising taxes on working people, as @MaxPB seems to want, is for the birds.
Taxes will have to rise and all will have to pay. That's all there is to it. All these demands for special exclusions is just self-interested nonsense.
Should we be raising taxes only on working age people?
"1% on NI" is a 2% tax rise on the employed, and a 0% tax rise on pensioners.
1%, 2% or whatever on income tax is a tax paid by all.
I did put forward the typically centre moderate view of 2% on income tax on here last night (I think). So workers and pensioners both contribute.
2% hike in income tax isn't moderate. It's almost Corbynite.
I'm absolutely disgusted with the Tory leadership. I campaigned hard in 2019 and believed the no tax rise manifesto promise. Fiscal drag is the order of the day.
In fairness it was not contemplated in 2019 that the government would spend more than £400bn on helping the economy cope with an 18 month pandemic which has devastated tax revenues as well. Politicians are all too keen to argue that circumstances have changed when breaking a promise but I struggle to think of a government that has a better base for such an argument than this one.
Tories should stand for sound money, careful management of the country's accounts and limitations on the role of the state. In some circumstances that requires more spending and thus, responsibly, more taxes, than others. This is such a time. I am more worried about having stable and sustainable public finances than current tax rates.
Now is not the time to put taxes up on working people. I don't care about my personal situation, an extra £1.6k per year in tax between myself and my wife is unfortunate but it doesn't really make a big difference to us. There will be millions of middle income people across the country that will find that kind of income cut very, very difficult to take.
Using my dad as an example again, his net income in retirement is about £60.5k. A working age person with an equivalent gross has a net income of £55k. In what world does it make sense that my dad, with no responsibilities, no kids, no mortgage and no real costs pays £5.5k less in tax than a working age person who will have a mortgage/rent, kids, possible nursery fees, school expenses, commuting costs etc...
The whole system is needs rethinking. Why is anyone in the higher rate tax bracket getting 100% of the state pension? In what world does that make sense?!
Very well said.
Plus of course dynamism and economics says we should not tax wages because working income is more elastic than non-working income.
A working aged person faced with a tax rise (or tax cut) can choose to respond by working less (or more) which harms (or boosts) the economy. A non-working person's income is relatively much more inelastic.
The reason we tax things like petrol and cigarettes is they're relatively inelastic so can be taxed more, and they're things we're trying to discourage anyway. We should not be seeking to discourage work by taxing it more.
The entire reason for my approach of Royal Commission reporting in late 2024 is because it allows a whole heap of problems to be fixed in 1 trick.
You fix social care paid via the introduction of a wealth tax in a way that isn't political suicide.
Why wouldnt the parties make similar commitments about no new taxes to win the 2023/4 election, that will be at odds with whatever the RC comes up with?
Imo, for your proposal to work it would need a firm commitment from both Tories and Labour to implement the RC in full, which seems very unlikely.
The idea that given all the expenses of Covid, the NHS and social care, let alone anything else, we can avoid raising taxes on working people, as @MaxPB seems to want, is for the birds.
Taxes will have to rise and all will have to pay. That's all there is to it. All these demands for special exclusions is just self-interested nonsense.
Should we be raising taxes only on working age people?
"1% on NI" is a 2% tax rise on the employed, and a 0% tax rise on pensioners.
1%, 2% or whatever on income tax is a tax paid by all.
I did put forward the typically centre moderate view of 2% on income tax on here last night (I think). So workers and pensioners both contribute.
2% hike in income tax isn't moderate. It's almost Corbynite.
I'm absolutely disgusted with the Tory leadership. I campaigned hard in 2019 and believed the no tax rise manifesto promise. Fiscal drag is the order of the day.
In fairness it was not contemplated in 2019 that the government would spend more than £400bn on helping the economy cope with an 18 month pandemic which has devastated tax revenues as well. Politicians are all too keen to argue that circumstances have changed when breaking a promise but I struggle to think of a government that has a better base for such an argument than this one.
Tories should stand for sound money, careful management of the country's accounts and limitations on the role of the state. In some circumstances that requires more spending and thus, responsibly, more taxes, than others. This is such a time. I am more worried about having stable and sustainable public finances than current tax rates.
Now is not the time to put taxes up on working people. I don't care about my personal situation, an extra £1.6k per year in tax between myself and my wife is unfortunate but it doesn't really make a big difference to us. There will be millions of middle income people across the country that will find that kind of income cut very, very difficult to take.
Using my dad as an example again, his net income in retirement is about £60.5k. A working age person with an equivalent gross has a net income of £55k. In what world does it make sense that my dad, with no responsibilities, no kids, no mortgage and no real costs pays £5.5k less in tax than a working age person who will have a mortgage/rent, kids, possible nursery fees, school expenses, commuting costs etc...
The whole system is needs rethinking. Why is anyone in the higher rate tax bracket getting 100% of the state pension? In what world does that make sense?!
With respect a net pensioner income of 60K plus is a million miles from most pensioners income
Isn't that your income BigG?
Nowhere near but I do have the love of a wonderful wife and family money could not buy
Now we are getting on to a serious subject. I don't get ABBA. I think they are rubbish. I detest every song.
ABBA write catchy tunes and when they sing, they put a smile on your face. Those are skills, which ABBA have in greater abundance than anyone else in popular music, ever. Other performers would give their eyes teeth to be able to do the same.
Increase basic rate income tax by 4p in the pound to 24%. Freeze the rate bands for 2-3 years Maybe offset with a 1p reduction in NI Have working pensioners pay NI Increase corporation tax steadily to 25% (disincentivise people salarying themselves through Ltd) Reform council tax - it hasn't been touched in 30 years! Look at a Land Value Tax
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
More here (which confirms the social media accounts involved are government ones)
'The Department for Transport has raised concerns that the number of people who may want to travel to London could cause major problems for the transport network, and lead to overcrowding in the capital.
In a striking assessment of the scenes that could unfold, one memo warns of a worst-case scenario in which London literally becomes “full” for the first time ever as potentially hundreds of thousands of people try to make their way there — with accommodation, roads, public transport, food, policing, healthcare and basic services stretched to breaking point. Concerns have also been raised about a shortage of stewards for crowd control purposes.'
It’ll be Death of Stalin redux, dozens of sobbing royalists crushed to death as they try to get a glimpse of the catafalque. Various horrible people manoeuvring for power and being summarily executed would be nice.
I can't see it. I can just about understand (not empathize with) the Digasm in 1997, but a People's Princess is one thing, a very elderly billionairess with an interest in racing, quite another.
Nah, the Queen is only worth a few hundred million, poor thing. The Grand Duke of Luxembourg is worth more. Charles is doing pretty well for himself though.
And I don't think there'll be much sobbing, but I think that Guardian piece had it right that it will be very momentous. People like the Queen, even if not as emotionally as the Diana stuff, and there'll be a lot of nonsense stuff about changing of eras and what the country is like now compared to when she became queen.
Worth noting that figure excludes the Crown Estate which has property worth over £14 billion.
Its funny monarchists like to claim the Crown Estate belongs to the monarch personally not the state when it suits them, so the state would lose it if we became a republic, while also excluding it when discussing the monarch's wealth.
Very late to this but what an excellent piece by @rottenborough - far better than anything else I can recall in the MSM recently.
It neatly lays out why I'm not betting on the outcome of the next election yet: we don't know when it will be or what it will be about, still less how the post Covid landscape will play out, so I'm not attracted by current odds that are extrapolating out present day trends.
The average age of a adult social care worker (i.e. someone who does the caring) for Durham County Council is 56.
Social care is going to be an even bigger problem than I thought it would be.
No its going to be a bigger problem than the bigger problem you thought it would be.
The government has decreed care home staff must be double jabbed by law, and many don't want to be. The recruitment crisis is going to be enormous.
Anyone who's an antivaxxer while working with the extremely vulnerable can't be a very good carer so good riddance to them.
As the parent of someone who is extremely vulnerable I can tell you that you are talking utter bullsh8t. Total and complete bullshit.
You have literally come on here to say you are willing to sacrifice your child in your drive for personal freedom by refusing to be vaxed. I am truly shocked by the revelation that you have a vulnerable child.
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
More here (which confirms the social media accounts involved are government ones)
'The Department for Transport has raised concerns that the number of people who may want to travel to London could cause major problems for the transport network, and lead to overcrowding in the capital.
In a striking assessment of the scenes that could unfold, one memo warns of a worst-case scenario in which London literally becomes “full” for the first time ever as potentially hundreds of thousands of people try to make their way there — with accommodation, roads, public transport, food, policing, healthcare and basic services stretched to breaking point. Concerns have also been raised about a shortage of stewards for crowd control purposes.'
It’ll be Death of Stalin redux, dozens of sobbing royalists crushed to death as they try to get a glimpse of the catafalque. Various horrible people manoeuvring for power and being summarily executed would be nice.
I can't see it. I can just about understand (not empathize with) the Digasm in 1997, but a People's Princess is one thing, a very elderly billionairess with an interest in racing, quite another.
It's possible. I actually expected the furore round the DoE's death, yeuch as it was, to be more extreme. The public mood is an odd thing though, even more so at the moment. A known unknown perhaps.
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
I thought we knew most of this years ago from that Guardian piece but I guess it's a bit more precise.
Indeed. But in the context of the discussion of Un/knowns it is particularly relevant.
It also raises the problem of political fallout if there is a screwup (think first night at the Millennium Dome, x 100 - and that only affected the New Labour invitees).
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
More here (which confirms the social media accounts involved are government ones)
'The Department for Transport has raised concerns that the number of people who may want to travel to London could cause major problems for the transport network, and lead to overcrowding in the capital.
In a striking assessment of the scenes that could unfold, one memo warns of a worst-case scenario in which London literally becomes “full” for the first time ever as potentially hundreds of thousands of people try to make their way there — with accommodation, roads, public transport, food, policing, healthcare and basic services stretched to breaking point. Concerns have also been raised about a shortage of stewards for crowd control purposes.'
It’ll be Death of Stalin redux, dozens of sobbing royalists crushed to death as they try to get a glimpse of the catafalque. Various horrible people manoeuvring for power and being summarily executed would be nice.
If we get a great movie out of it like that then it would be worth it.
Johnson - That freak out of Midsommar Carrie - Bernadette out of Eastenders King Charles - Richard E. Grant Queen Camilla - Maureen Lipman Nicholas Witchell - Himself
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
More here (which confirms the social media accounts involved are government ones)
'The Department for Transport has raised concerns that the number of people who may want to travel to London could cause major problems for the transport network, and lead to overcrowding in the capital.
In a striking assessment of the scenes that could unfold, one memo warns of a worst-case scenario in which London literally becomes “full” for the first time ever as potentially hundreds of thousands of people try to make their way there — with accommodation, roads, public transport, food, policing, healthcare and basic services stretched to breaking point. Concerns have also been raised about a shortage of stewards for crowd control purposes.'
It’ll be Death of Stalin redux, dozens of sobbing royalists crushed to death as they try to get a glimpse of the catafalque. Various horrible people manoeuvring for power and being summarily executed would be nice.
I can't see it. I can just about understand (not empathize with) the Digasm in 1997, but a People's Princess is one thing, a very elderly billionairess with an interest in racing, quite another.
Nah, the Queen is only worth a few hundred million, poor thing. The Grand Duke of Luxembourg is worth more. Charles is doing pretty well for himself though.
And I don't think there'll be much sobbing, but I think that Guardian piece had it right that it will be very momentous. People like the Queen, even if not as emotionally as the Diana stuff, and there'll be a lot of nonsense stuff about changing of eras and what the country is like now compared to when she became queen.
We did about what the 50's were like not long ago. Could dig all that up and recycle it. Might help to fund the site!
This is why I liked the Dilnot proposals, which steered a course between two extremes:
• Increase the current support qualification threshold from £23,250 to £100,000.
• Those with assets between £14,250 and £100,000 will pay a contribution towards their care, with the remainder paid by the state.
• People with assets over £100,000 will pay for their care entirely - until the payments made hit a maximum limit.
• Dilnot recommended this limit to be set at £35,000. Thereafter, state will pick up all ongoing care costs to death.
So, in summary, the most anyone is liable for is £35,000. With everyone with assets over £14,250 paying some sort of contribution (which would include the home).
It was by far the best solution but everyone decided to play politics with it instead, and then Cameron bravely ran away.
I have some sympathy with pensioners, many of whom have low, fixed incomes.
But they're an increasing proportion of the population and it isn't right for costs to be heaped on a relatively shrinking working age population. I'm not saying whack all pensioners with taxes or the like, but the proposed NI rise is dumb.
And if 8% goes through as the pension rise, that's indefensible in the current circumstances.
Pensioners with low, fixed incomes won't be affected.
I'd bring in higher income tax rates for the over 65s. Instead of 0/20/40/45 they would be 0/22.5/42.5/47.5 (for example).
It's a myth that income tax rates are 0/20/40/45 for most people.
Once you include NI the current tax rates are (roughly):
For employed earners under 65: 0/32/42/47 For self-employed under 65: 0/29/42/47 For unearned income, or for those over 65: 0/20/40/45
You've forgotten the bitch-slap in the face if you fall between 100k-120k where you face an effective rate of 62%.
The average age of a adult social care worker (i.e. someone who does the caring) for Durham County Council is 56.
Social care is going to be an even bigger problem than I thought it would be.
No its going to be a bigger problem than the bigger problem you thought it would be.
The government has decreed care home staff must be double jabbed by law, and many don't want to be. The recruitment crisis is going to be enormous.
My sister in law has just left a care home job for exactly this reason, and gone working for an insurance broker.
I don't particularly agree with her reasoning for not being vaccinated (although as she's had Covid in the last 9 months, I suspect the value of jabbing her is actually quite low), but if this is happening a lot, it's only going to be putting more pressure on the sector.
This is why I liked the Dilnot proposals, which steered a course between two extremes:
• Increase the current support qualification threshold from £23,250 to £100,000.
• Those with assets between £14,250 and £100,000 will pay a contribution towards their care, with the remainder paid by the state.
• People with assets over £100,000 will pay for their care entirely - until the payments made hit a maximum limit.
• Dilnot recommended this limit to be set at £35,000. Thereafter, state will pick up all ongoing care costs to death.
So, in summary, the most anyone is liable for is £35,000. With everyone with assets over £14,250 paying some sort of contribution (which would include the home).
It was by far the best solution but everyone decided to play politics with it instead, and then Cameron bravely ran away.
But that doesn't work because it only fixes the bit of the issue regarding what a person pays, it doesn't show how the Government pays the rest of those costs - and that money needs to come from somewhere.
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
More here (which confirms the social media accounts involved are government ones)
'The Department for Transport has raised concerns that the number of people who may want to travel to London could cause major problems for the transport network, and lead to overcrowding in the capital.
In a striking assessment of the scenes that could unfold, one memo warns of a worst-case scenario in which London literally becomes “full” for the first time ever as potentially hundreds of thousands of people try to make their way there — with accommodation, roads, public transport, food, policing, healthcare and basic services stretched to breaking point. Concerns have also been raised about a shortage of stewards for crowd control purposes.'
It’ll be Death of Stalin redux, dozens of sobbing royalists crushed to death as they try to get a glimpse of the catafalque. Various horrible people manoeuvring for power and being summarily executed would be nice.
I can't see it. I can just about understand (not empathize with) the Digasm in 1997, but a People's Princess is one thing, a very elderly billionairess with an interest in racing, quite another.
It's possible. I actually expected the furore round the DoE's death, yeuch as it was, to be more extreme. The public mood is an odd thing though, even more so at the moment. A known unknown perhaps.
I think you are right - the reaction could be very strong. Yet what we saw from the demise of the Duchess of Rothesay, and the Diamond Jubilee, is how different reactions were in different parts of the UK. Add the generation factor too.
I was also struck by the focus on making sure that the UJ on No 10 could be lowered within 600 seconds of the news - one hopes no poor sod is on permanent duty (more like the cops have been given the key to the sash window or something).
I have some sympathy with pensioners, many of whom have low, fixed incomes.
But they're an increasing proportion of the population and it isn't right for costs to be heaped on a relatively shrinking working age population. I'm not saying whack all pensioners with taxes or the like, but the proposed NI rise is dumb.
And if 8% goes through as the pension rise, that's indefensible in the current circumstances.
Pensioners with low, fixed incomes won't be affected.
I'd bring in higher income tax rates for the over 65s. Instead of 0/20/40/45 they would be 0/22.5/42.5/47.5 (for example).
It's a myth that income tax rates are 0/20/40/45 for most people.
Once you include NI the current tax rates are (roughly):
For employed earners under 65: 0/32/42/47 For self-employed under 65: 0/29/42/47 For unearned income, or for those over 65: 0/20/40/45
You've forgotten the bitch-slap in the face if you fall between 100k-120k where you face an effective rate of 62%.
Isn't there still one as well lower down where one comes off UC and family credit etc.? (Not keeping up with the topic so I may be out of date.)
Increase basic rate income tax by 4p in the pound to 24%. Freeze the rate bands for 2-3 years Maybe offset with a 1p reduction in NI Have working pensioners pay NI Increase corporation tax steadily to 25% (disincentivise people salarying themselves through Ltd) Reform council tax - it hasn't been touched in 30 years! Look at a Land Value Tax
Why? Already done the former has already been done and the latter hasn't Electoral suicide already the case isn't it. Political suicide A better solution to reforming council tax but still political suicide (although I whole heartedly believe we need it).
Now we are getting on to a serious subject. I don't get ABBA. I think they are rubbish. I detest every song.
ABBA write catchy tunes and when they sing, they put a smile on your face. Those are skills, which ABBA have in greater abundance than anyone else in popular music, ever. Other performers would give their eyes teeth to be able to do the same.
I didn't claim they weren't talented, just I hate them. Same goes for Andrew Lloyd Webber.
The idea that given all the expenses of Covid, the NHS and social care, let alone anything else, we can avoid raising taxes on working people, as @MaxPB seems to want, is for the birds.
Taxes will have to rise and all will have to pay. That's all there is to it. All these demands for special exclusions is just self-interested nonsense.
Should we be raising taxes only on working age people?
"1% on NI" is a 2% tax rise on the employed, and a 0% tax rise on pensioners.
1%, 2% or whatever on income tax is a tax paid by all.
I did put forward the typically centre moderate view of 2% on income tax on here last night (I think). So workers and pensioners both contribute.
2% hike in income tax isn't moderate. It's almost Corbynite.
I'm absolutely disgusted with the Tory leadership. I campaigned hard in 2019 and believed the no tax rise manifesto promise. Fiscal drag is the order of the day.
In fairness it was not contemplated in 2019 that the government would spend more than £400bn on helping the economy cope with an 18 month pandemic which has devastated tax revenues as well. Politicians are all too keen to argue that circumstances have changed when breaking a promise but I struggle to think of a government that has a better base for such an argument than this one.
Tories should stand for sound money, careful management of the country's accounts and limitations on the role of the state. In some circumstances that requires more spending and thus, responsibly, more taxes, than others. This is such a time. I am more worried about having stable and sustainable public finances than current tax rates.
Now is not the time to put taxes up on working people. I don't care about my personal situation, an extra £1.6k per year in tax between myself and my wife is unfortunate but it doesn't really make a big difference to us. There will be millions of middle income people across the country that will find that kind of income cut very, very difficult to take.
Using my dad as an example again, his net income in retirement is about £60.5k. A working age person with an equivalent gross has a net income of £55k. In what world does it make sense that my dad, with no responsibilities, no kids, no mortgage and no real costs pays £5.5k less in tax than a working age person who will have a mortgage/rent, kids, possible nursery fees, school expenses, commuting costs etc...
The whole system is needs rethinking. Why is anyone in the higher rate tax bracket getting 100% of the state pension? In what world does that make sense?!
With respect a net pensioner income of 60K plus is a million miles from most pensioners income
I have some sympathy with pensioners, many of whom have low, fixed incomes.
But they're an increasing proportion of the population and it isn't right for costs to be heaped on a relatively shrinking working age population. I'm not saying whack all pensioners with taxes or the like, but the proposed NI rise is dumb.
And if 8% goes through as the pension rise, that's indefensible in the current circumstances.
Pensioners with low, fixed incomes won't be affected.
I'd bring in higher income tax rates for the over 65s. Instead of 0/20/40/45 they would be 0/22.5/42.5/47.5 (for example).
It's a myth that income tax rates are 0/20/40/45 for most people.
Once you include NI the current tax rates are (roughly):
For employed earners under 65: 0/32/42/47 For self-employed under 65: 0/29/42/47 For unearned income, or for those over 65: 0/20/40/45
You've forgotten the bitch-slap in the face if you fall between 100k-120k where you face an effective rate of 62%.
Isn't there still one as well lower down where one comes off UC and family credit etc.? (Not keeping up with the topic so I may be out of date.)
That's 65% - someone mentioned it earlier.
There is another one for those with children between £50 and 60k
I have some sympathy with pensioners, many of whom have low, fixed incomes.
But they're an increasing proportion of the population and it isn't right for costs to be heaped on a relatively shrinking working age population. I'm not saying whack all pensioners with taxes or the like, but the proposed NI rise is dumb.
And if 8% goes through as the pension rise, that's indefensible in the current circumstances.
Pensioners with low, fixed incomes won't be affected.
I'd bring in higher income tax rates for the over 65s. Instead of 0/20/40/45 they would be 0/22.5/42.5/47.5 (for example).
It's a myth that income tax rates are 0/20/40/45 for most people.
Once you include NI the current tax rates are (roughly):
For employed earners under 65: 0/32/42/47 For self-employed under 65: 0/29/42/47 For unearned income, or for those over 65: 0/20/40/45
You've forgotten the bitch-slap in the face if you fall between 100k-120k where you face an effective rate of 62%.
Isn't there still one as well lower down where one comes off UC and family credit etc.? (Not keeping up with the topic so I may be out of date.)
Yes. You lose 63% of post-tax marginal income on top of paying NI and Income Tax.
People are missing the extent of disillusionment with Johnson of the traditional tory core vote. Leavers or remainers, doesn't matter. They like their foxhunting and they like the preservation of rural England and they see housing estates popping up like mushrooms and a tory government leaving the Hunting Act untouched and NutNut being NutNut, and at a bare minimum a lot more than anyone thinks are going to say: I'll just sit this one out, come 2024.
Perhaps but those are the worst elements of the Tory Party. 👎 Our equivalent of the Corbynista far left.
Yay, Philibet the Libertarian is up and about DISAPPROVING OF THINGS, because that's what libertarians do best.
I don't know why you are at daggers drawn with the tank commander, because you are peas in a pod*. You have this essentialist view of what is a good tory or a loyal tory, whereas the adults are talking about where crosses are going on ballot papers.
*Perhaps one of you is the other's sockpuppet, and the spats are scripted to keep us entertained?
I'm talking about where crosses are going on ballot papers too. Appealling to the worst elements of your own core vote, like Corbnistas or Ditchers, is a recipe for disaster. IDS or Corbyn style politics doesn't work, you need to win Middle England.
Foxhunting: It got forgotten afterwards because of the dementia tax and terrorism but its worth remembering in 2017 May coming out in favour of reopening the Foxhunting debate was the first major clanger of the campaign. The issue is as settled now as Cockfighting, it is animal cruelty that is never coming back.
Housing: The Tories win when as much as the nation as possible can own their own home. Pulling up the drawbridge saying "I have a lovely home but you peasants should be in tower blocks, don't despoil my view" is not only a scummy attitude it is bad politics.
"NutNut": If you think misogyny or attacking animal welfare/environmentalism wins votes nowadays then you have another thing coming.
I will add to that list further featherbedding pensioners by giving them new benefits they never saved or paid for, by adding further higher taxes on the working aged population. If that happens it is a disgrace that I completely oppose and will piss off working age voters.
I don't particularly like @IshmaelZ but I have no problem with foxhunting and don't think it's cruel - in fact, I'm going to the Hampshire country sports show next weekend - and would have preferred a licenced regulation of it.
However, I have accepted the issue is settled and not coming back (lesson for Remainers there) despite not agreeing with it.
You just have to accept some things don't go your way in politics from time to time.
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
More here (which confirms the social media accounts involved are government ones)
'The Department for Transport has raised concerns that the number of people who may want to travel to London could cause major problems for the transport network, and lead to overcrowding in the capital.
In a striking assessment of the scenes that could unfold, one memo warns of a worst-case scenario in which London literally becomes “full” for the first time ever as potentially hundreds of thousands of people try to make their way there — with accommodation, roads, public transport, food, policing, healthcare and basic services stretched to breaking point. Concerns have also been raised about a shortage of stewards for crowd control purposes.'
It’ll be Death of Stalin redux, dozens of sobbing royalists crushed to death as they try to get a glimpse of the catafalque. Various horrible people manoeuvring for power and being summarily executed would be nice.
I can't see it. I can just about understand (not empathize with) the Digasm in 1997, but a People's Princess is one thing, a very elderly billionairess with an interest in racing, quite another.
Nah, the Queen is only worth a few hundred million, poor thing. The Grand Duke of Luxembourg is worth more. Charles is doing pretty well for himself though.
And I don't think there'll be much sobbing, but I think that Guardian piece had it right that it will be very momentous. People like the Queen, even if not as emotionally as the Diana stuff, and there'll be a lot of nonsense stuff about changing of eras and what the country is like now compared to when she became queen.
Worth noting that figure excludes the Crown Estate which has property worth over £14 billion.
Its funny monarchists like to claim the Crown Estate belongs to the monarch personally not the state when it suits them, so the state would lose it if we became a republic, while also excluding it when discussing the monarch's wealth.
As a monarchist I don't think the crown estate would be lost if we became a republic. It's a legal fiction it's literally a crown estate, and the government would keep hold of it in the event we became a republic.
If the monarch cannot spend it or do with it as they like, it isn't really theirs, and they won't 'keep' it if we become a republic.
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
More here (which confirms the social media accounts involved are government ones)
'The Department for Transport has raised concerns that the number of people who may want to travel to London could cause major problems for the transport network, and lead to overcrowding in the capital.
In a striking assessment of the scenes that could unfold, one memo warns of a worst-case scenario in which London literally becomes “full” for the first time ever as potentially hundreds of thousands of people try to make their way there — with accommodation, roads, public transport, food, policing, healthcare and basic services stretched to breaking point. Concerns have also been raised about a shortage of stewards for crowd control purposes.'
It’ll be Death of Stalin redux, dozens of sobbing royalists crushed to death as they try to get a glimpse of the catafalque. Various horrible people manoeuvring for power and being summarily executed would be nice.
I can't see it. I can just about understand (not empathize with) the Digasm in 1997, but a People's Princess is one thing, a very elderly billionairess with an interest in racing, quite another.
It's possible. I actually expected the furore round the DoE's death, yeuch as it was, to be more extreme. The public mood is an odd thing though, even more so at the moment. A known unknown perhaps.
It's not as if it won't, in general terms, be expected. The woman is 95, but her mother lived until 101, so I suppose she might easily expect to live another 8-10 years.
I have some sympathy with pensioners, many of whom have low, fixed incomes.
But they're an increasing proportion of the population and it isn't right for costs to be heaped on a relatively shrinking working age population. I'm not saying whack all pensioners with taxes or the like, but the proposed NI rise is dumb.
And if 8% goes through as the pension rise, that's indefensible in the current circumstances.
Pensioners with low, fixed incomes won't be affected.
I'd bring in higher income tax rates for the over 65s. Instead of 0/20/40/45 they would be 0/22.5/42.5/47.5 (for example).
It's a myth that income tax rates are 0/20/40/45 for most people.
Once you include NI the current tax rates are (roughly):
For employed earners under 65: 0/32/42/47 For self-employed under 65: 0/29/42/47 For unearned income, or for those over 65: 0/20/40/45
You've forgotten the bitch-slap in the face if you fall between 100k-120k where you face an effective rate of 62%.
For those at that income level plenty of legal tax reduction schemes are available, such as paying into a private pension, SEIS, EIS, VCT etc.
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
I thought we knew most of this years ago from that Guardian piece but I guess it's a bit more precise.
Indeed. But in the context of the discussion of Un/knowns it is particularly relevant.
It also raises the problem of political fallout if there is a screwup (think first night at the Millennium Dome, x 100 - and that only affected the New Labour invitees).
Oh sure, I was more just taking issue with the article talking about it as if it is a brand new exclusive, when it just seems an updated piece.
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
More here (which confirms the social media accounts involved are government ones)
'The Department for Transport has raised concerns that the number of people who may want to travel to London could cause major problems for the transport network, and lead to overcrowding in the capital.
In a striking assessment of the scenes that could unfold, one memo warns of a worst-case scenario in which London literally becomes “full” for the first time ever as potentially hundreds of thousands of people try to make their way there — with accommodation, roads, public transport, food, policing, healthcare and basic services stretched to breaking point. Concerns have also been raised about a shortage of stewards for crowd control purposes.'
It’ll be Death of Stalin redux, dozens of sobbing royalists crushed to death as they try to get a glimpse of the catafalque. Various horrible people manoeuvring for power and being summarily executed would be nice.
I can't see it. I can just about understand (not empathize with) the Digasm in 1997, but a People's Princess is one thing, a very elderly billionairess with an interest in racing, quite another.
It's possible. I actually expected the furore round the DoE's death, yeuch as it was, to be more extreme. The public mood is an odd thing though, even more so at the moment. A known unknown perhaps.
I think you are right - the reaction could be very strong. Yet what we saw from the demise of the Duchess of Rothesay, and the Diamond Jubilee, is how different reactions were in different parts of the UK. Add the generation factor too.
I was also struck by the focus on making sure that the UJ on No 10 could be lowered within 600 seconds of the news - one hopes no poor sod is on permanent duty (more like the cops have been given the key to the sash window or something).
Can a government that left HMQ's portrait to be ****ed over by blood lusty Pashtuns be trusted to lower a flag in time? One thing you of which you can be abso-bloody-lutely certain is that various Yoons will be on a hair trigger looking out for signs of disrespect from the ghastly Nats in the flag lowering stakes.
So we give vaccines to Oz rather than, say, sub-saharan Africa.
Pfizer.
Exactly: they chances of Pfizer being wasted in Africa (as a consequence of the storage requirements) are at least 10x that of AZ.
Better to give the more robust vaccines to Africa, rather than the more delicate ones.
40% of our initial vaccine donations go to Australia.
It's not a "donation" - its a swap - they get ours now, we get theirs later.
Even worse let's play swapsies with those nice other developed nations.
Which under developed nation would you prefer to play swapsies with? Or would you rather we give Pfizer doses to countries that couldn't practically distribute them?
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the UK deal doubles the number of Pfizer doses available in September. Throughout the month, Australia will receive more than 9 million doses of Pfizer alongside 1 million Moderna doses and continued AstraZeneca supply.
“From Downing Street to Down Under we are doubling down on the Pfizer doses available to us,” he said. “The plane’s on the tarmac now, it will be leaving tomorrow and those [Pfizer] doses will be coming over the course of the next few weeks.”
Britain’s high commissioner to Australia, Vicki Treadell, says it’s a privilege to be able to support Australians by helping to accelerate the vaccine rollout down under.
I fail to see why its "worse" that we do that in Topping's eyes. Its an entirely logical thing to do, which we considered doing with Israel earlier in the pandemic but the other way around.
We send them Pfizer doses we have now, but don't need now, before they expire.
They send us Pfizer doses later on, when we need them, for boosters.
Our current doses we're sending could potentially have expired before we get on with boosting.
Purely logical and sensible thing to do.
Wait:
I thought we were getting Kylie.
ABBA it seems will have to do.
Now we are getting on to a serious subject. I don't get ABBA. I think they are rubbish. I detest every song.
I respect your personal taste but...
I used to think ABBA were totally naff back in the day. But now when I hear their old songs I can't help singing along. They are very well crafted pop songs.
They may be well crafted, but I detest every single one of them.
And with regard to Mamma Mia the film, I was forced to watch it and almost had a fatal attack of cringe.
The idea of going to the musical just fills me with dread.
You have no soul , I rewatched it again the other night and it was just a happy film with lots of great music.
I'm with kjh here.
Abba's songs are quite remarkably crafted. And yet they grate. I can just about stomach the disco ones (voulez vouz, etc.), though they are not my cup of tea and make me very glad I wasn't young and Swedish in the 70s. There is a darkness to them (I don't know whether this is intentional - probably it is: they are, after all, very good songwriters). But the easy listening end of the spectrum - Fernando etc - music for people who don't like music.
And as for Mamma Mia - musical theatre is the lowest form of art. Lower than mime. (Musical theatre is the lowest form of art precisley because it is stuffed with this sort of music-for-people-who-don't-like-music: see also anything by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice).
Apologies, but this is, IMO, utter nonsense. ABBA's stuff is musically quite complex for popular music. Sure, the lyrics are fairly banal, but they also have a certain genius at times.
I'm not sure there's any such thing as people who don't like music, but I'm quite happy to switch between Bach's solo violin pieces and ABBA's greatest hits on occasion.
It's pointless arguing about personal taste, really. FWIW I'm a diehard ABBA fan, partly because I followed them all as individual singers before they joined up - they were all successful on the Scandi scene. Unusually, perhaps, I think the core appeal is really the music and lyrics more than the performance - when the girls pursued their careers separately with other peoples' songs it didn't have the same bite. Casual listeners underrate the subtlety of some of the lyrics (The Day Before You Came has inpsired academic debate - some think it's about a stalker, others about a current love, or a lost love), but of course the main appeal is the music. Most people like it, some don't - either reaction shouldn't bother any of us.
On musicals, anything by Lerner and Loewe is worth seeing IMO - West Side Story is the best-known but they're all distinctive and have interesting plots, which many musicals really don't (and I agree that Mamma Mia is not exactly a profound narrative).
I'm sory but are you saying that West Side Story is by Lerner and Loewe? That seems to be what you are implying. It was by Leonard Bernstein (lyrics by Stephen Sondheim).
The average age of a adult social care worker (i.e. someone who does the caring) for Durham County Council is 56.
Social care is going to be an even bigger problem than I thought it would be.
No its going to be a bigger problem than the bigger problem you thought it would be.
The government has decreed care home staff must be double jabbed by law, and many don't want to be. The recruitment crisis is going to be enormous.
My sister in law has just left a care home job for exactly this reason, and gone working for an insurance broker.
I don't particularly agree with her reasoning for not being vaccinated (although as she's had Covid in the last 9 months, I suspect the value of jabbing her is actually quite low), but if this is happening a lot, it's only going to be putting more pressure on the sector.
The fact is that all vulnerable people have been double jabbed and will soon get a booster.
The criteria for care home workers should not be whether they have been doubled jabbed or not, but whether they CARE....
I would much rather my child was looked after by someone who cared (and they all do), rather than some agency worker doing it for the money.
The ascension of the next monarch is going to be a hugely difficult time for the UK, and I suspect political attempts will be made to exploit it - both in the UK and around the Commonwealth - that will unsettle many people as it will very destabilising.
[As an aside, I will certainly go to London. There is no-one alive I respect more than Queen Elizabeth II and I will personally struggle with it as well.]
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
More here (which confirms the social media accounts involved are government ones)
'The Department for Transport has raised concerns that the number of people who may want to travel to London could cause major problems for the transport network, and lead to overcrowding in the capital.
In a striking assessment of the scenes that could unfold, one memo warns of a worst-case scenario in which London literally becomes “full” for the first time ever as potentially hundreds of thousands of people try to make their way there — with accommodation, roads, public transport, food, policing, healthcare and basic services stretched to breaking point. Concerns have also been raised about a shortage of stewards for crowd control purposes.'
It’ll be Death of Stalin redux, dozens of sobbing royalists crushed to death as they try to get a glimpse of the catafalque. Various horrible people manoeuvring for power and being summarily executed would be nice.
I can't see it. I can just about understand (not empathize with) the Digasm in 1997, but a People's Princess is one thing, a very elderly billionairess with an interest in racing, quite another.
It's possible. I actually expected the furore round the DoE's death, yeuch as it was, to be more extreme. The public mood is an odd thing though, even more so at the moment. A known unknown perhaps.
It's not as if it won't, in general terms, be expected. The woman is 95, but her mother lived until 101, so I suppose she might easily expect to live another 8-10 years.
Typical Boris. Kicking the can down the road and leaving it to a future government.
The average age of a adult social care worker (i.e. someone who does the caring) for Durham County Council is 56.
Social care is going to be an even bigger problem than I thought it would be.
No its going to be a bigger problem than the bigger problem you thought it would be.
The government has decreed care home staff must be double jabbed by law, and many don't want to be. The recruitment crisis is going to be enormous.
My sister in law has just left a care home job for exactly this reason, and gone working for an insurance broker.
I don't particularly agree with her reasoning for not being vaccinated (although as she's had Covid in the last 9 months, I suspect the value of jabbing her is actually quite low), but if this is happening a lot, it's only going to be putting more pressure on the sector.
The fact is that all vulnerable people have been double jabbed and will soon get a booster.
The criteria for care home workers should not be whether they have been doubled jabbed or not, but whether they CARE....
I would much rather my child was looked after by someone who cared (and they all do), rather than some agency worker doing it for the money.
Why shouldn't it be one of the criteria? A requirement to be vaccinated for certain lines of work is not a new thing.
The average age of a adult social care worker (i.e. someone who does the caring) for Durham County Council is 56.
Social care is going to be an even bigger problem than I thought it would be.
No its going to be a bigger problem than the bigger problem you thought it would be.
The government has decreed care home staff must be double jabbed by law, and many don't want to be. The recruitment crisis is going to be enormous.
My sister in law has just left a care home job for exactly this reason, and gone working for an insurance broker.
I don't particularly agree with her reasoning for not being vaccinated (although as she's had Covid in the last 9 months, I suspect the value of jabbing her is actually quite low), but if this is happening a lot, it's only going to be putting more pressure on the sector.
The fact is that all vulnerable people have been double jabbed and will soon get a booster.
The criteria for care home workers should not be whether they have been doubled jabbed or not, but whether they CARE....
I would much rather my child was looked after by someone who cared (and they all do), rather than some agency worker doing it for the money.
Agency workers 'care' too. And a fresh pair of eyes in a situation is sometimes useful.
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
More here (which confirms the social media accounts involved are government ones)
'The Department for Transport has raised concerns that the number of people who may want to travel to London could cause major problems for the transport network, and lead to overcrowding in the capital.
In a striking assessment of the scenes that could unfold, one memo warns of a worst-case scenario in which London literally becomes “full” for the first time ever as potentially hundreds of thousands of people try to make their way there — with accommodation, roads, public transport, food, policing, healthcare and basic services stretched to breaking point. Concerns have also been raised about a shortage of stewards for crowd control purposes.'
It’ll be Death of Stalin redux, dozens of sobbing royalists crushed to death as they try to get a glimpse of the catafalque. Various horrible people manoeuvring for power and being summarily executed would be nice.
I can't see it. I can just about understand (not empathize with) the Digasm in 1997, but a People's Princess is one thing, a very elderly billionairess with an interest in racing, quite another.
Nah, the Queen is only worth a few hundred million, poor thing. The Grand Duke of Luxembourg is worth more. Charles is doing pretty well for himself though.
And I don't think there'll be much sobbing, but I think that Guardian piece had it right that it will be very momentous. People like the Queen, even if not as emotionally as the Diana stuff, and there'll be a lot of nonsense stuff about changing of eras and what the country is like now compared to when she became queen.
Worth noting that figure excludes the Crown Estate which has property worth over £14 billion.
Its funny monarchists like to claim the Crown Estate belongs to the monarch personally not the state when it suits them, so the state would lose it if we became a republic, while also excluding it when discussing the monarch's wealth.
Now we are getting on to a serious subject. I don't get ABBA. I think they are rubbish. I detest every song.
Do you like any music?
Yep, gave my favourites earlier. Blues mainly, but also like rock and 60s in particular. But also most other music. Not much of a fan of Opera or Country, but there are exceptions. Folk and classical are ok. Like jazz.
The idea that given all the expenses of Covid, the NHS and social care, let alone anything else, we can avoid raising taxes on working people, as @MaxPB seems to want, is for the birds.
Taxes will have to rise and all will have to pay. That's all there is to it. All these demands for special exclusions is just self-interested nonsense.
Should we be raising taxes only on working age people?
"1% on NI" is a 2% tax rise on the employed, and a 0% tax rise on pensioners.
1%, 2% or whatever on income tax is a tax paid by all.
I did put forward the typically centre moderate view of 2% on income tax on here last night (I think). So workers and pensioners both contribute.
2% hike in income tax isn't moderate. It's almost Corbynite.
I'm absolutely disgusted with the Tory leadership. I campaigned hard in 2019 and believed the no tax rise manifesto promise. Fiscal drag is the order of the day.
In fairness it was not contemplated in 2019 that the government would spend more than £400bn on helping the economy cope with an 18 month pandemic which has devastated tax revenues as well. Politicians are all too keen to argue that circumstances have changed when breaking a promise but I struggle to think of a government that has a better base for such an argument than this one.
Tories should stand for sound money, careful management of the country's accounts and limitations on the role of the state. In some circumstances that requires more spending and thus, responsibly, more taxes, than others. This is such a time. I am more worried about having stable and sustainable public finances than current tax rates.
Now is not the time to put taxes up on working people. I don't care about my personal situation, an extra £1.6k per year in tax between myself and my wife is unfortunate but it doesn't really make a big difference to us. There will be millions of middle income people across the country that will find that kind of income cut very, very difficult to take.
Using my dad as an example again, his net income in retirement is about £60.5k. A working age person with an equivalent gross has a net income of £55k. In what world does it make sense that my dad, with no responsibilities, no kids, no mortgage and no real costs pays £5.5k less in tax than a working age person who will have a mortgage/rent, kids, possible nursery fees, school expenses, commuting costs etc...
The whole system is needs rethinking. Why is anyone in the higher rate tax bracket getting 100% of the state pension? In what world does that make sense?!
With respect a net pensioner income of 60K plus is a million miles from most pensioners income
It is not the average, but it is not particularly unusual either, especially for those from the public sector final salary schemes.
Poor pensioners are still better off than poor workers. Rich pensioners are better off than rich workers. They are also richer than the workers are forecast to get to when they are retired.
Yet new taxes go on workers, most public (and private) sector workers get a pay freeze. The retired get no new taxes and 8% increase in state pension.
This will only make the generational conflict deeper and wider.
The average age of a adult social care worker (i.e. someone who does the caring) for Durham County Council is 56.
Social care is going to be an even bigger problem than I thought it would be.
No its going to be a bigger problem than the bigger problem you thought it would be.
The government has decreed care home staff must be double jabbed by law, and many don't want to be. The recruitment crisis is going to be enormous.
Anyone who's an antivaxxer while working with the extremely vulnerable can't be a very good carer so good riddance to them.
As the parent of someone who is extremely vulnerable I can tell you that you are talking utter bullsh8t. Total and complete bullshit.
You have literally come on here to say you are willing to sacrifice your child in your drive for personal freedom by refusing to be vaxed. I am truly shocked by the revelation that you have a vulnerable child.
How fucking dare you try to lecture me on how to bring up my childen you fucking bastard, you have no idea what my wife and I have been through...How fucking dare you. I hope you and I never meet, for your sake.
My child has been double vaxxed and will soon get a booster. That being the case, I would far rather they were looked after by someone who cared, rather than some agency worker, just because they have been vaxxed. You have no idea what you are talking about.
Every judgement you have made is wrong. Every thing you think you know, is wrong.
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
More here (which confirms the social media accounts involved are government ones)
'The Department for Transport has raised concerns that the number of people who may want to travel to London could cause major problems for the transport network, and lead to overcrowding in the capital.
In a striking assessment of the scenes that could unfold, one memo warns of a worst-case scenario in which London literally becomes “full” for the first time ever as potentially hundreds of thousands of people try to make their way there — with accommodation, roads, public transport, food, policing, healthcare and basic services stretched to breaking point. Concerns have also been raised about a shortage of stewards for crowd control purposes.'
It’ll be Death of Stalin redux, dozens of sobbing royalists crushed to death as they try to get a glimpse of the catafalque. Various horrible people manoeuvring for power and being summarily executed would be nice.
If we get a great movie out of it like that then it would be worth it.
Johnson - That freak out of Midsommar Carrie - Bernadette out of Eastenders King Charles - Richard E. Grant Queen Camilla - Maureen Lipman Nicholas Witchell - Himself
Andrew - Andy Serkis in a CGI suit Fergie - Stormy Daniels in a CGI suit
So we give vaccines to Oz rather than, say, sub-saharan Africa.
Pfizer.
Exactly: they chances of Pfizer being wasted in Africa (as a consequence of the storage requirements) are at least 10x that of AZ.
Better to give the more robust vaccines to Africa, rather than the more delicate ones.
40% of our initial vaccine donations go to Australia.
It's not a "donation" - its a swap - they get ours now, we get theirs later.
Even worse let's play swapsies with those nice other developed nations.
Which under developed nation would you prefer to play swapsies with? Or would you rather we give Pfizer doses to countries that couldn't practically distribute them?
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the UK deal doubles the number of Pfizer doses available in September. Throughout the month, Australia will receive more than 9 million doses of Pfizer alongside 1 million Moderna doses and continued AstraZeneca supply.
“From Downing Street to Down Under we are doubling down on the Pfizer doses available to us,” he said. “The plane’s on the tarmac now, it will be leaving tomorrow and those [Pfizer] doses will be coming over the course of the next few weeks.”
Britain’s high commissioner to Australia, Vicki Treadell, says it’s a privilege to be able to support Australians by helping to accelerate the vaccine rollout down under.
I fail to see why its "worse" that we do that in Topping's eyes. Its an entirely logical thing to do, which we considered doing with Israel earlier in the pandemic but the other way around.
We send them Pfizer doses we have now, but don't need now, before they expire.
They send us Pfizer doses later on, when we need them, for boosters.
Our current doses we're sending could potentially have expired before we get on with boosting.
Purely logical and sensible thing to do.
Wait:
I thought we were getting Kylie.
ABBA it seems will have to do.
Now we are getting on to a serious subject. I don't get ABBA. I think they are rubbish. I detest every song.
I respect your personal taste but...
I used to think ABBA were totally naff back in the day. But now when I hear their old songs I can't help singing along. They are very well crafted pop songs.
They may be well crafted, but I detest every single one of them.
And with regard to Mamma Mia the film, I was forced to watch it and almost had a fatal attack of cringe.
The idea of going to the musical just fills me with dread.
You have no soul , I rewatched it again the other night and it was just a happy film with lots of great music.
I'm with kjh here.
Abba's songs are quite remarkably crafted. And yet they grate. I can just about stomach the disco ones (voulez vouz, etc.), though they are not my cup of tea and make me very glad I wasn't young and Swedish in the 70s. There is a darkness to them (I don't know whether this is intentional - probably it is: they are, after all, very good songwriters). But the easy listening end of the spectrum - Fernando etc - music for people who don't like music.
And as for Mamma Mia - musical theatre is the lowest form of art. Lower than mime. (Musical theatre is the lowest form of art precisley because it is stuffed with this sort of music-for-people-who-don't-like-music: see also anything by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice).
Apologies, but this is, IMO, utter nonsense. ABBA's stuff is musically quite complex for popular music. Sure, the lyrics are fairly banal, but they also have a certain genius at times.
I'm not sure there's any such thing as people who don't like music, but I'm quite happy to switch between Bach's solo violin pieces and ABBA's greatest hits on occasion.
It's pointless arguing about personal taste, really. FWIW I'm a diehard ABBA fan, partly because I followed them all as individual singers before they joined up - they were all successful on the Scandi scene. Unusually, perhaps, I think the core appeal is really the music and lyrics more than the performance - when the girls pursued their careers separately with other peoples' songs it didn't have the same bite. Casual listeners underrate the subtlety of some of the lyrics (The Day Before You Came has inpsired academic debate - some think it's about a stalker, others about a current love, or a lost love), but of course the main appeal is the music. Most people like it, some don't - either reaction shouldn't bother any of us.
On musicals, anything by Lerner and Loewe is worth seeing IMO - West Side Story is the best-known but they're all distinctive and have interesting plots, which many musicals really don't (and I agree that Mamma Mia is not exactly a profound narrative).
Granted it's personal taste. It was the "music for people who don't like music" that I objected to. I don't think there's any such thing.
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
More here (which confirms the social media accounts involved are government ones)
'The Department for Transport has raised concerns that the number of people who may want to travel to London could cause major problems for the transport network, and lead to overcrowding in the capital.
In a striking assessment of the scenes that could unfold, one memo warns of a worst-case scenario in which London literally becomes “full” for the first time ever as potentially hundreds of thousands of people try to make their way there — with accommodation, roads, public transport, food, policing, healthcare and basic services stretched to breaking point. Concerns have also been raised about a shortage of stewards for crowd control purposes.'
It’ll be Death of Stalin redux, dozens of sobbing royalists crushed to death as they try to get a glimpse of the catafalque. Various horrible people manoeuvring for power and being summarily executed would be nice.
I can't see it. I can just about understand (not empathize with) the Digasm in 1997, but a People's Princess is one thing, a very elderly billionairess with an interest in racing, quite another.
It's possible. I actually expected the furore round the DoE's death, yeuch as it was, to be more extreme. The public mood is an odd thing though, even more so at the moment. A known unknown perhaps.
It's not as if it won't, in general terms, be expected. The woman is 95, but her mother lived until 101, so I suppose she might easily expect to live another 8-10 years.
This is why I liked the Dilnot proposals, which steered a course between two extremes:
• Increase the current support qualification threshold from £23,250 to £100,000.
• Those with assets between £14,250 and £100,000 will pay a contribution towards their care, with the remainder paid by the state.
• People with assets over £100,000 will pay for their care entirely - until the payments made hit a maximum limit.
• Dilnot recommended this limit to be set at £35,000. Thereafter, state will pick up all ongoing care costs to death.
So, in summary, the most anyone is liable for is £35,000. With everyone with assets over £14,250 paying some sort of contribution (which would include the home).
It was by far the best solution but everyone decided to play politics with it instead, and then Cameron bravely ran away.
But that doesn't work because it only fixes the bit of the issue regarding what a person pays, it doesn't show how the Government pays the rest of those costs - and that money needs to come from somewhere.
The funding need was modest for Dilnot, as it balanced out the risk and responsibility so well.
The Commission thought that in the context of the total spend on adult services a mere addition of 0.14 of gross domestic product (GDP) today, rising to an extra 0.22 by 2026. It suggested that government could raise revenue by taxation (either general or targeted) or by spending cuts, but does not express a preference. I think it was about £2.3bn a year.
I would take it from ending the triple-lock or amending the pension level or delaying the pension start date.
The average age of a adult social care worker (i.e. someone who does the caring) for Durham County Council is 56.
Social care is going to be an even bigger problem than I thought it would be.
No its going to be a bigger problem than the bigger problem you thought it would be.
The government has decreed care home staff must be double jabbed by law, and many don't want to be. The recruitment crisis is going to be enormous.
Anyone who's an antivaxxer while working with the extremely vulnerable can't be a very good carer so good riddance to them.
As the parent of someone who is extremely vulnerable I can tell you that you are talking utter bullsh8t. Total and complete bullshit.
Since you're an antivaxxer you would be familiar with bullshit.
"As the parent of someone who is extremely vulnerable" are you vaccinated yet?
Stop talking through your rectum, you nauseating little shit.
People who have vulnerable relatives want them cared for by people who care. Not by agency workers who couldn't give a fuck just because they have jumped through the bogus hoops you have set out for them.
Some people who really care about vulnerable people have not been jabbed themselves and don't want to be. They evade the labels you have given them because they are people, not the sub humans you and others on here are quite despicably trying to turn them into.
Now we are getting on to a serious subject. I don't get ABBA. I think they are rubbish. I detest every song.
ABBA write catchy tunes and when they sing, they put a smile on your face. Those are skills, which ABBA have in greater abundance than anyone else in popular music, ever. Other performers would give their eyes teeth to be able to do the same.
I didn't claim they weren't talented, just I hate them. Same goes for Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Nothing worse than feelgood music that doesn't make you feel good.
I disagree with the other commentator who thinks ABBA music to be quite sophisticated. But I do think they are superb performers, where performance is what it is all about.
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
More here (which confirms the social media accounts involved are government ones)
'The Department for Transport has raised concerns that the number of people who may want to travel to London could cause major problems for the transport network, and lead to overcrowding in the capital.
In a striking assessment of the scenes that could unfold, one memo warns of a worst-case scenario in which London literally becomes “full” for the first time ever as potentially hundreds of thousands of people try to make their way there — with accommodation, roads, public transport, food, policing, healthcare and basic services stretched to breaking point. Concerns have also been raised about a shortage of stewards for crowd control purposes.'
It’ll be Death of Stalin redux, dozens of sobbing royalists crushed to death as they try to get a glimpse of the catafalque. Various horrible people manoeuvring for power and being summarily executed would be nice.
I can't see it. I can just about understand (not empathize with) the Digasm in 1997, but a People's Princess is one thing, a very elderly billionairess with an interest in racing, quite another.
Nah, the Queen is only worth a few hundred million, poor thing. The Grand Duke of Luxembourg is worth more. Charles is doing pretty well for himself though.
And I don't think there'll be much sobbing, but I think that Guardian piece had it right that it will be very momentous. People like the Queen, even if not as emotionally as the Diana stuff, and there'll be a lot of nonsense stuff about changing of eras and what the country is like now compared to when she became queen.
Worth noting that figure excludes the Crown Estate which has property worth over £14 billion.
Its funny monarchists like to claim the Crown Estate belongs to the monarch personally not the state when it suits them, so the state would lose it if we became a republic, while also excluding it when discussing the monarch's wealth.
Politics of envy alive and well.
I think you just craft your posts to be as offensive to as many people as possible.
On inflation, it was not just unaffordable repayments that meant handing back the keys, it was those combined with negative equity that meant you could not (sell or) remortgage the house either. And the high interest rates were not just to fight inflation but more importantly to support the pound the the European monetary system, which was the policy of our most pro-European party – I forget the name – Consumptatives, Consumatives, something like that anyway.
Getting back to the serious issues, like schoolboy monickers, in this clip from Her Majesty's BBC, at around 6'40" Cockerill says "Cameron minor" but Boris saves a syllable with "Cameron mi". This could swing the whole 2024 election. I've not watched the rest so whether Boris ever adds the "nor" is a Rumsfeldian known unknown. https://youtu.be/EVq7ZGlvapM?t=400
The average age of a adult social care worker (i.e. someone who does the caring) for Durham County Council is 56.
Social care is going to be an even bigger problem than I thought it would be.
No its going to be a bigger problem than the bigger problem you thought it would be.
The government has decreed care home staff must be double jabbed by law, and many don't want to be. The recruitment crisis is going to be enormous.
My sister in law has just left a care home job for exactly this reason, and gone working for an insurance broker.
I don't particularly agree with her reasoning for not being vaccinated (although as she's had Covid in the last 9 months, I suspect the value of jabbing her is actually quite low), but if this is happening a lot, it's only going to be putting more pressure on the sector.
The fact is that all vulnerable people have been double jabbed and will soon get a booster.
The criteria for care home workers should not be whether they have been doubled jabbed or not, but whether they CARE....
I would much rather my child was looked after by someone who cared (and they all do), rather than some agency worker doing it for the money.
Why shouldn't it be one of the criteria? A requirement to be vaccinated for certain lines of work is not a new thing.
Ever wiped a nineteen year old's backside, fuckwit?
you do not know what you are talking about you unfeeling shite.
The ascension of the next monarch is going to be a hugely difficult time for the UK, and I suspect political attempts will be made to exploit it - both in the UK and around the Commonwealth - that will unsettle many people as it will very destabilising.
[As an aside, I will certainly go to London. There is no-one alive I respect more than Queen Elizabeth II and I will personally struggle with it as well.]
There are probably plenty of Republicans who think it would be wrong to push the issue towards the end of her reign. Are they not entitled to discuss the issue afterwards? When would be a good time?
(FWIW I am a kind of Republican, but it wouldn't be in my top 25 issues, and couldn't really care less if it doesn't happen in my lifetime).
Indeed, Mu (B.1.621) has a growth disadvantage of 11% per day [5-16% 95% CLs] relative to Delta based on a multinomial fit to the GISAID data from Colombia. I see absolutely no reason to be worried about that variant.
So we give vaccines to Oz rather than, say, sub-saharan Africa.
Pfizer.
Exactly: they chances of Pfizer being wasted in Africa (as a consequence of the storage requirements) are at least 10x that of AZ.
Better to give the more robust vaccines to Africa, rather than the more delicate ones.
40% of our initial vaccine donations go to Australia.
It's not a "donation" - its a swap - they get ours now, we get theirs later.
Even worse let's play swapsies with those nice other developed nations.
Which under developed nation would you prefer to play swapsies with? Or would you rather we give Pfizer doses to countries that couldn't practically distribute them?
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the UK deal doubles the number of Pfizer doses available in September. Throughout the month, Australia will receive more than 9 million doses of Pfizer alongside 1 million Moderna doses and continued AstraZeneca supply.
“From Downing Street to Down Under we are doubling down on the Pfizer doses available to us,” he said. “The plane’s on the tarmac now, it will be leaving tomorrow and those [Pfizer] doses will be coming over the course of the next few weeks.”
Britain’s high commissioner to Australia, Vicki Treadell, says it’s a privilege to be able to support Australians by helping to accelerate the vaccine rollout down under.
I fail to see why its "worse" that we do that in Topping's eyes. Its an entirely logical thing to do, which we considered doing with Israel earlier in the pandemic but the other way around.
We send them Pfizer doses we have now, but don't need now, before they expire.
They send us Pfizer doses later on, when we need them, for boosters.
Our current doses we're sending could potentially have expired before we get on with boosting.
Purely logical and sensible thing to do.
Wait:
I thought we were getting Kylie.
ABBA it seems will have to do.
Now we are getting on to a serious subject. I don't get ABBA. I think they are rubbish. I detest every song.
I respect your personal taste but...
I used to think ABBA were totally naff back in the day. But now when I hear their old songs I can't help singing along. They are very well crafted pop songs.
They may be well crafted, but I detest every single one of them.
And with regard to Mamma Mia the film, I was forced to watch it and almost had a fatal attack of cringe.
The idea of going to the musical just fills me with dread.
You have no soul , I rewatched it again the other night and it was just a happy film with lots of great music.
I'm with kjh here.
Abba's songs are quite remarkably crafted. And yet they grate. I can just about stomach the disco ones (voulez vouz, etc.), though they are not my cup of tea and make me very glad I wasn't young and Swedish in the 70s. There is a darkness to them (I don't know whether this is intentional - probably it is: they are, after all, very good songwriters). But the easy listening end of the spectrum - Fernando etc - music for people who don't like music.
And as for Mamma Mia - musical theatre is the lowest form of art. Lower than mime. (Musical theatre is the lowest form of art precisley because it is stuffed with this sort of music-for-people-who-don't-like-music: see also anything by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice).
Apologies, but this is, IMO, utter nonsense. ABBA's stuff is musically quite complex for popular music. Sure, the lyrics are fairly banal, but they also have a certain genius at times.
I'm not sure there's any such thing as people who don't like music, but I'm quite happy to switch between Bach's solo violin pieces and ABBA's greatest hits on occasion.
It's pointless arguing about personal taste, really. FWIW I'm a diehard ABBA fan, partly because I followed them all as individual singers before they joined up - they were all successful on the Scandi scene. Unusually, perhaps, I think the core appeal is really the music and lyrics more than the performance - when the girls pursued their careers separately with other peoples' songs it didn't have the same bite. Casual listeners underrate the subtlety of some of the lyrics (The Day Before You Came has inpsired academic debate - some think it's about a stalker, others about a current love, or a lost love), but of course the main appeal is the music. Most people like it, some don't - either reaction shouldn't bother any of us.
On musicals, anything by Lerner and Loewe is worth seeing IMO - West Side Story is the best-known but they're all distinctive and have interesting plots, which many musicals really don't (and I agree that Mamma Mia is not exactly a profound narrative).
Granted it's personal taste. It was the "music for people who don't like music" that I objected to. I don't think there's any such thing.
I have been overestimating Radiohead's market penetration.
The average age of a adult social care worker (i.e. someone who does the caring) for Durham County Council is 56.
Social care is going to be an even bigger problem than I thought it would be.
No its going to be a bigger problem than the bigger problem you thought it would be.
The government has decreed care home staff must be double jabbed by law, and many don't want to be. The recruitment crisis is going to be enormous.
My sister in law has just left a care home job for exactly this reason, and gone working for an insurance broker.
I don't particularly agree with her reasoning for not being vaccinated (although as she's had Covid in the last 9 months, I suspect the value of jabbing her is actually quite low), but if this is happening a lot, it's only going to be putting more pressure on the sector.
The fact is that all vulnerable people have been double jabbed and will soon get a booster.
The criteria for care home workers should not be whether they have been doubled jabbed or not, but whether they CARE....
I would much rather my child was looked after by someone who cared (and they all do), rather than some agency worker doing it for the money.
Why shouldn't it be one of the criteria? A requirement to be vaccinated for certain lines of work is not a new thing.
Ever wiped a nineteen year old's backside, fuckwit?
you do not know what you are talking about you unfeeling shite.
Wow, that's your response to a legitimate question?
Do you think vaccination should never be required for any line of work? I'm actually curious.
The average age of a adult social care worker (i.e. someone who does the caring) for Durham County Council is 56.
Social care is going to be an even bigger problem than I thought it would be.
No its going to be a bigger problem than the bigger problem you thought it would be.
The government has decreed care home staff must be double jabbed by law, and many don't want to be. The recruitment crisis is going to be enormous.
Anyone who's an antivaxxer while working with the extremely vulnerable can't be a very good carer so good riddance to them.
As the parent of someone who is extremely vulnerable I can tell you that you are talking utter bullsh8t. Total and complete bullshit.
You have literally come on here to say you are willing to sacrifice your child in your drive for personal freedom by refusing to be vaxed. I am truly shocked by the revelation that you have a vulnerable child.
Disagree with you there. Someone who argues for what he or she believes is best regardless of their own particular circumstances shouldn't be dissed in my view. What irks me more is people wanting to control other people's actions and lives because a member of their own family is ill or whatever.
Boosters are only being lined up (for the time being) for the immune compromised. This is literally the group that the initial vaccines won't have "worked" on particularly well. They're precisely the people that need others to get vaccinated to form a protective barrier around them. On a personal note I've had a shocking year. Getting vaccinated hasn't made it any better, but a loved one going down with a severe bout of Covid would certainly make it worse.
The ascension of the next monarch is going to be a hugely difficult time for the UK, and I suspect political attempts will be made to exploit it - both in the UK and around the Commonwealth - that will unsettle many people as it will very destabilising.
[As an aside, I will certainly go to London. There is no-one alive I respect more than Queen Elizabeth II and I will personally struggle with it as well.]
People will get touchy, but I think it inevitable and acceptable that there will be people, especially overseas, who will note it would be a moment to consider the future of the institution.
It will also definitely be annoying for those who find exhaustive coverage irritating, as it will be wall to wall for more than a week.
But it will be very significant for many and that will have to be bourne.
The idea that given all the expenses of Covid, the NHS and social care, let alone anything else, we can avoid raising taxes on working people, as @MaxPB seems to want, is for the birds.
Taxes will have to rise and all will have to pay. That's all there is to it. All these demands for special exclusions is just self-interested nonsense.
Should we be raising taxes only on working age people?
"1% on NI" is a 2% tax rise on the employed, and a 0% tax rise on pensioners.
1%, 2% or whatever on income tax is a tax paid by all.
I did put forward the typically centre moderate view of 2% on income tax on here last night (I think). So workers and pensioners both contribute.
2% hike in income tax isn't moderate. It's almost Corbynite.
I'm absolutely disgusted with the Tory leadership. I campaigned hard in 2019 and believed the no tax rise manifesto promise. Fiscal drag is the order of the day.
In fairness it was not contemplated in 2019 that the government would spend more than £400bn on helping the economy cope with an 18 month pandemic which has devastated tax revenues as well. Politicians are all too keen to argue that circumstances have changed when breaking a promise but I struggle to think of a government that has a better base for such an argument than this one.
Tories should stand for sound money, careful management of the country's accounts and limitations on the role of the state. In some circumstances that requires more spending and thus, responsibly, more taxes, than others. This is such a time. I am more worried about having stable and sustainable public finances than current tax rates.
Now is not the time to put taxes up on working people. I don't care about my personal situation, an extra £1.6k per year in tax between myself and my wife is unfortunate but it doesn't really make a big difference to us. There will be millions of middle income people across the country that will find that kind of income cut very, very difficult to take.
Using my dad as an example again, his net income in retirement is about £60.5k. A working age person with an equivalent gross has a net income of £55k. In what world does it make sense that my dad, with no responsibilities, no kids, no mortgage and no real costs pays £5.5k less in tax than a working age person who will have a mortgage/rent, kids, possible nursery fees, school expenses, commuting costs etc...
The whole system is needs rethinking. Why is anyone in the higher rate tax bracket getting 100% of the state pension? In what world does that make sense?!
With respect a net pensioner income of 60K plus is a million miles from most pensioners income
It is not the average, but it is not particularly unusual either, especially for those from the public sector final salary schemes.
Poor pensioners are still better off than poor workers. Rich pensioners are better off than rich workers. They are also richer than the workers are forecast to get to when they are retired.
Yet new taxes go on workers, most public (and private) sector workers get a pay freeze. The retired get no new taxes and 8% increase in state pension.
This will only make the generational conflict deeper and wider.
I'm not sure about your first paragraph; it is often mentioned on here, but I'm yet to see the evidence.
I'm on a 'gold-plated' public sector (Civil Service) final pension salary scheme. I was well-paid, retiring on a salary of c. £82K after 38 years service, a couple of years ago. But my pension, generous though it is, is nowhere near £60K - much nearer £20K. I'm not complaining at all, quite happy with it, but I do wonder whether non-public sector workers have an exaggerated view of the value of public sector pensions. You would have to be retiring on a salary well over £120k to get anywhere near £60k in pension; there's not many in that category.
The average age of a adult social care worker (i.e. someone who does the caring) for Durham County Council is 56.
Social care is going to be an even bigger problem than I thought it would be.
No its going to be a bigger problem than the bigger problem you thought it would be.
The government has decreed care home staff must be double jabbed by law, and many don't want to be. The recruitment crisis is going to be enormous.
My sister in law has just left a care home job for exactly this reason, and gone working for an insurance broker.
I don't particularly agree with her reasoning for not being vaccinated (although as she's had Covid in the last 9 months, I suspect the value of jabbing her is actually quite low), but if this is happening a lot, it's only going to be putting more pressure on the sector.
The fact is that all vulnerable people have been double jabbed and will soon get a booster.
The criteria for care home workers should not be whether they have been doubled jabbed or not, but whether they CARE....
I would much rather my child was looked after by someone who cared (and they all do), rather than some agency worker doing it for the money.
Why shouldn't it be one of the criteria? A requirement to be vaccinated for certain lines of work is not a new thing.
Ever wiped a nineteen year old's backside, fuckwit?
Now we are getting on to a serious subject. I don't get ABBA. I think they are rubbish. I detest every song.
ABBA write catchy tunes and when they sing, they put a smile on your face. Those are skills, which ABBA have in greater abundance than anyone else in popular music, ever. Other performers would give their eyes teeth to be able to do the same.
I didn't claim they weren't talented, just I hate them. Same goes for Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Nothing worse than feelgood music that doesn't make you feel good.
I disagree with the other commentator who thinks ABBA music to be quite sophisticated. But I do think they are superb performers, where performance is what it is all about.
Not sophisticated? Try "The day before you came". It's a comprehensive novella in 3 minutes, and in their second language.
I have some sympathy with pensioners, many of whom have low, fixed incomes.
But they're an increasing proportion of the population and it isn't right for costs to be heaped on a relatively shrinking working age population. I'm not saying whack all pensioners with taxes or the like, but the proposed NI rise is dumb.
And if 8% goes through as the pension rise, that's indefensible in the current circumstances.
Pensioners with low, fixed incomes won't be affected.
I'd bring in higher income tax rates for the over 65s. Instead of 0/20/40/45 they would be 0/22.5/42.5/47.5 (for example).
It's a myth that income tax rates are 0/20/40/45 for most people.
Once you include NI the current tax rates are (roughly):
For employed earners under 65: 0/32/42/47 For self-employed under 65: 0/29/42/47 For unearned income, or for those over 65: 0/20/40/45
You've forgotten the bitch-slap in the face if you fall between 100k-120k where you face an effective rate of 62%.
For those at that income level plenty of legal tax reduction schemes are available, such as paying into a private pension, SEIS, EIS, VCT etc.
The idea that given all the expenses of Covid, the NHS and social care, let alone anything else, we can avoid raising taxes on working people, as @MaxPB seems to want, is for the birds.
Taxes will have to rise and all will have to pay. That's all there is to it. All these demands for special exclusions is just self-interested nonsense.
Should we be raising taxes only on working age people?
"1% on NI" is a 2% tax rise on the employed, and a 0% tax rise on pensioners.
1%, 2% or whatever on income tax is a tax paid by all.
I did put forward the typically centre moderate view of 2% on income tax on here last night (I think). So workers and pensioners both contribute.
2% hike in income tax isn't moderate. It's almost Corbynite.
I'm absolutely disgusted with the Tory leadership. I campaigned hard in 2019 and believed the no tax rise manifesto promise. Fiscal drag is the order of the day.
In fairness it was not contemplated in 2019 that the government would spend more than £400bn on helping the economy cope with an 18 month pandemic which has devastated tax revenues as well. Politicians are all too keen to argue that circumstances have changed when breaking a promise but I struggle to think of a government that has a better base for such an argument than this one.
Tories should stand for sound money, careful management of the country's accounts and limitations on the role of the state. In some circumstances that requires more spending and thus, responsibly, more taxes, than others. This is such a time. I am more worried about having stable and sustainable public finances than current tax rates.
Now is not the time to put taxes up on working people. I don't care about my personal situation, an extra £1.6k per year in tax between myself and my wife is unfortunate but it doesn't really make a big difference to us. There will be millions of middle income people across the country that will find that kind of income cut very, very difficult to take.
Using my dad as an example again, his net income in retirement is about £60.5k. A working age person with an equivalent gross has a net income of £55k. In what world does it make sense that my dad, with no responsibilities, no kids, no mortgage and no real costs pays £5.5k less in tax than a working age person who will have a mortgage/rent, kids, possible nursery fees, school expenses, commuting costs etc...
The whole system is needs rethinking. Why is anyone in the higher rate tax bracket getting 100% of the state pension? In what world does that make sense?!
With respect a net pensioner income of 60K plus is a million miles from most pensioners income
It is not the average, but it is not particularly unusual either, especially for those from the public sector final salary schemes.
Poor pensioners are still better off than poor workers. Rich pensioners are better off than rich workers. They are also richer than the workers are forecast to get to when they are retired.
Yet new taxes go on workers, most public (and private) sector workers get a pay freeze. The retired get no new taxes and 8% increase in state pension.
This will only make the generational conflict deeper and wider.
Even in the public sector, earning enough to cop an £80k final salary pension is unusual. There are more ushers than high court judges; more porters than consultant surgeons.
OK, so to discuss some actual political betting, the German consensus is that the SPD are 2-3% ahead in the polls.
However it is pretty obvious to me that BF punters are struggling to price that, with a dip yesterday to 1.25 (i.e. 1/4) but a rebound after no new polling to 1.4 (2/5).
I feel like 1.4 is correct at the moment, three weeks from the election, but would welcome your collective thoughts.
'The UK government’s vast security operation to manage the immediate aftermath of the death of the Queen include official social media blackouts and a ban on retweets.
The secret documents, codenamed Operation London Bridge and seen by Politico, reveal the scale of the plans for the funeral and government anxieties about whether the UK has the resources to execute them.
The social media strategy plays a prominent role, including plans to change the royal family’s website to a black holding page with a short statement confirming the Queen’s death, while the gov.uk website and all governmental social media pages will display a black banner. Non-urgent content will not be published and retweets will be banned unless cleared by the government’s head of communications. [...]
The plans for Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide, which sets out how Charles will accede to the throne, contain granular detail such as the potential for public anger if Downing Street cannot lower its flags to half-mast within 10 minutes of the announcement since there is no “flag officer”.
The documents also showed concerns from the Foreign Office over how to arrange entry for significant numbers of tourists, from the Home Office on how to handle potential terror alerts, and from the Department for Transport on overcrowding in the capital.'
More here (which confirms the social media accounts involved are government ones)
'The Department for Transport has raised concerns that the number of people who may want to travel to London could cause major problems for the transport network, and lead to overcrowding in the capital.
In a striking assessment of the scenes that could unfold, one memo warns of a worst-case scenario in which London literally becomes “full” for the first time ever as potentially hundreds of thousands of people try to make their way there — with accommodation, roads, public transport, food, policing, healthcare and basic services stretched to breaking point. Concerns have also been raised about a shortage of stewards for crowd control purposes.'
It’ll be Death of Stalin redux, dozens of sobbing royalists crushed to death as they try to get a glimpse of the catafalque. Various horrible people manoeuvring for power and being summarily executed would be nice.
I can't see it. I can just about understand (not empathize with) the Digasm in 1997, but a People's Princess is one thing, a very elderly billionairess with an interest in racing, quite another.
It's possible. I actually expected the furore round the DoE's death, yeuch as it was, to be more extreme. The public mood is an odd thing though, even more so at the moment. A known unknown perhaps.
It's not as if it won't, in general terms, be expected. The woman is 95, but her mother lived until 101, so I suppose she might easily expect to live another 8-10 years.
She's staying on until she beats Louis XIV at least. Loves a record.
Comments
In what country in the world has a deterioration of health services ever been a major political issue causing really big trouble? In Russia in the 1990s life expectancy was falling by one year per year and there were no electoral repercussions. This is one of those things like strikes against redundancies. They don't work. Big fights against poor or delayed or non-existent health treatment don't even happen.
Given all the sacrifices that have been made to the NHS deity (see what I did there?) since last March, Labour and the LibDems aren't going to say the government have bollocksed up the NHS. As far as I know, no British political party has ever even mentioned the reason for the existence of waiting lists. I mean in the period before covid. I wonder how many people reading this even know what the principal reason is, or if they have ever wondered why when you call a repair garage or a hairdresser you can always arrange a time for an appointment to get the required work done but when you contact the state health service you can't.
That was up to 2008 or so, though. So they might be the same staff, just older!
The government has decreed care home staff must be double jabbed by law, and many don't want to be. The recruitment crisis is going to be enormous.
Plus of course dynamism and economics says we should not tax wages because working income is more elastic than non-working income.
A working aged person faced with a tax rise (or tax cut) can choose to respond by working less (or more) which harms (or boosts) the economy.
A non-working person's income is relatively much more inelastic.
The reason we tax things like petrol and cigarettes is they're relatively inelastic so can be taxed more, and they're things we're trying to discourage anyway. We should not be seeking to discourage work by taxing it more.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/16/what-happens-when-queen-elizabeth-dies-london-bridge
The government is desperate for money to pay for the gargantuan errors of big state intervention of the last 18 months. Test and trace. Furlough fraud. The numbers are simply enormous.
This is simply the corollary. It was always going to be.
On musicals, anything by Lerner and Loewe is worth seeing IMO - West Side Story is the best-known but they're all distinctive and have interesting plots, which many musicals really don't (and I agree that Mamma Mia is not exactly a profound narrative).
You fix social care paid via the introduction of a wealth tax in a way that isn't political suicide.
"As the parent of someone who is extremely vulnerable" are you vaccinated yet?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_royalty_by_net_worth
And I don't think there'll be much sobbing, but I think that Guardian piece had it right that it will be very momentous. People like the Queen, even if not as emotionally as the Diana stuff, and there'll be a lot of nonsense stuff about changing of eras and what the country is like now compared to when she became queen.
We tried reducing corporation tax for no discernable benefit.
One of us is crying, one of us is lying
In a lonely bed
Staring at the ceiling
Wishing she was somewhere else instead
One of us is lonely, one of us is only
Waiting for a call
Sorry for herself, feeling stupid, feeling small
Wishing she had never left at all
Imo, for your proposal to work it would need a firm commitment from both Tories and Labour to implement the RC in full, which seems very unlikely.
I must have missed that part of the settlement where AZ agreed to pay billions to the EU as the EU was claiming?
https://twitter.com/ONS/status/1433747574591197186?s=20
Freeze the rate bands for 2-3 years
Maybe offset with a 1p reduction in NI
Have working pensioners pay NI
Increase corporation tax steadily to 25% (disincentivise people salarying themselves through Ltd)
Reform council tax - it hasn't been touched in 30 years!
Look at a Land Value Tax
Its funny monarchists like to claim the Crown Estate belongs to the monarch personally not the state when it suits them, so the state would lose it if we became a republic, while also excluding it when discussing the monarch's wealth.
It neatly lays out why I'm not betting on the outcome of the next election yet: we don't know when it will be or what it will be about, still less how the post Covid landscape will play out, so I'm not attracted by current odds that are extrapolating out present day trends.
I actually expected the furore round the DoE's death, yeuch as it was, to be more extreme. The public mood is an odd thing though, even more so at the moment. A known unknown perhaps.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/3september2021
It also raises the problem of political fallout if there is a screwup (think first night at the Millennium Dome, x 100 - and that only affected the New Labour invitees).
Carrie - Bernadette out of Eastenders
King Charles - Richard E. Grant
Queen Camilla - Maureen Lipman
Nicholas Witchell - Himself
I don't particularly agree with her reasoning for not being vaccinated (although as she's had Covid in the last 9 months, I suspect the value of jabbing her is actually quite low), but if this is happening a lot, it's only going to be putting more pressure on the sector.
I was also struck by the focus on making sure that the UJ on No 10 could be lowered within 600 seconds of the news - one hopes no poor sod is on permanent duty (more like the cops have been given the key to the sash window or something).
Already done
the former has already been done and the latter hasn't
Electoral suicide
already the case isn't it.
Political suicide
A better solution to reforming council tax but still political suicide (although I whole heartedly believe we need it).
There is another one for those with children between £50 and 60k
So it works out at about 75% effective tax rate.
However, I have accepted the issue is settled and not coming back (lesson for Remainers there) despite not agreeing with it.
You just have to accept some things don't go your way in politics from time to time.
If the monarch cannot spend it or do with it as they like, it isn't really theirs, and they won't 'keep' it if we become a republic.
2 elderly men in club-style armchairs, one of whom is asleep while the other is reading the obituaries column in the paper.
One man turns to the other and says “Good Lord, Fenwick! I’d no idea you’d died.”
Ons infection survey which is deemed gold standard has prevalence flat on last week.
In fact it’s been flat ever since “freedom day”, which IMO vindicates the decision to lift restrictions when they did.
https://twitter.com/ThatRyanChap/status/1433748110245830659?s=20
The criteria for care home workers should not be whether they have been doubled jabbed or not, but whether they CARE....
I would much rather my child was looked after by someone who cared (and they all do), rather than some agency worker doing it for the money.
[As an aside, I will certainly go to London. There is no-one alive I respect more than Queen Elizabeth II and I will personally struggle with it as well.]
Poor pensioners are still better off than poor workers. Rich pensioners are better off than rich workers. They are also richer than the workers are forecast to get to when they are retired.
Yet new taxes go on workers, most public (and private) sector workers get a pay freeze. The retired get no new taxes and 8% increase in state pension.
This will only make the generational conflict deeper and wider.
My child has been double vaxxed and will soon get a booster. That being the case, I would far rather they were looked after by someone who cared, rather than some agency worker, just because they have been vaxxed. You have no idea what you are talking about.
Every judgement you have made is wrong. Every thing you think you know, is wrong.
Fergie - Stormy Daniels in a CGI suit
It was the "music for people who don't like music" that I objected to. I don't think there's any such thing.
The Commission thought that in the context of the total spend on adult services a mere addition of 0.14 of gross domestic product (GDP) today, rising to an extra 0.22 by 2026. It suggested that government could raise revenue by taxation (either general or targeted) or by spending cuts, but does not express a preference. I think it was about £2.3bn a year.
I would take it from ending the triple-lock or amending the pension level or delaying the pension start date.
I would not increase taxation.
People who have vulnerable relatives want them cared for by people who care. Not by agency workers who couldn't give a fuck just because they have jumped through the bogus hoops you have set out for them.
Some people who really care about vulnerable people have not been jabbed themselves and don't want to be. They evade the labels you have given them because they are people, not the sub humans you and others on here are quite despicably trying to turn them into.
Get used to it.
I disagree with the other commentator who thinks ABBA music to be quite sophisticated. But I do think they are superb performers, where performance is what it is all about.
https://youtu.be/EVq7ZGlvapM?t=400
you do not know what you are talking about you unfeeling shite.
https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/338canada-polls-shows-otoole-is-the-favourite-voters-dont-seem-convinced/
(FWIW I am a kind of Republican, but it wouldn't be in my top 25 issues, and couldn't really care less if it doesn't happen in my lifetime).
Indeed, Mu (B.1.621) has a growth disadvantage of 11% per day [5-16% 95% CLs] relative to Delta based on a multinomial fit to the GISAID data from Colombia. I see absolutely no reason to be worried about that variant.
https://twitter.com/TWenseleers/status/1433128096996134916?s=20
Do you think vaccination should never be required for any line of work? I'm actually curious.
On a personal note I've had a shocking year. Getting vaccinated hasn't made it any better, but a loved one going down with a severe bout of Covid would certainly make it worse.
It will also definitely be annoying for those who find exhaustive coverage irritating, as it will be wall to wall for more than a week.
But it will be very significant for many and that will have to be bourne.
I'm on a 'gold-plated' public sector (Civil Service) final pension salary scheme. I was well-paid, retiring on a salary of c. £82K after 38 years service, a couple of years ago. But my pension, generous though it is, is nowhere near £60K - much nearer £20K. I'm not complaining at all, quite happy with it, but I do wonder whether non-public sector workers have an exaggerated view of the value of public sector pensions. You would have to be retiring on a salary well over £120k to get anywhere near £60k in pension; there's not many in that category.
However it is pretty obvious to me that BF punters are struggling to price that, with a dip yesterday to 1.25 (i.e. 1/4) but a rebound after no new polling to 1.4 (2/5).
I feel like 1.4 is correct at the moment, three weeks from the election, but would welcome your collective thoughts.