Enough frivolity , I must away and do some productive stuff. Have to say I had a super haircut and shave at Turkish barber's today, some pleasant chit chat here , with wife playing ABBA in background. Time for a refreshment.
The new album?
There are two new songs (the ones that were recorded in time to go into the new show when it opens next year) but the album doesn't drop 'til November.
I presume H was banned for defending this vile Texas abortion law. Good call if so.
No. He got so enthusiastic trying to prove that atheists weren't charitable at all, or something, that he ended up putting OGH at risk of a potential defamation suit.
Yes, just seen that. I was kidding - but not about the Texas law being vile.
That the English language did not have the verb ESCALATE until the 1920s. Absolutely amazing. It was only after the escalator was invented that it appeared in the language.
I've doubled checked with the Oxford English Dictionary and indeed they have no usage of the word prior to the 1920s.
"If you are making labor costs estimates, it is customary to escalate them. You have some basis for determining what a reasonable, fair percentage escalation might be."
More instances of 19th century usage follow.
Is that the same word, so to speak, or an independent coinage? That usage is transitive, but 'escalate' today is usually intransitive (but not always).
Uses in that document seem all to be transitive, but Google Books were wrong about the date. They list it as 1832 but it is actually 1960. So you may be right, Alistair. Further apparently 19th century uses are listed at Google Books, but I haven't got time to check them 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?!
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.
I've just had a pension review, actually. I knew my public sector pension was better than my previous private sector pension, but I'm slightly shocked just how much better. Most private sector workers do not have final salary pensions. The IFA I talked to told me that the average private sector workers amassed a pension pot of around £50k by retirement. Whereas if you work as, say, a hospital admin worker - or some other not desperately well paid public sector job - for 40 years you can amass a pension with a trade in value in excess of three quarters of a million pounds.
Yep. I tried to calculate the benefit once and I reckoned add 40% on the salary and you're getting close. We see many public sector retirees who have lump sum and income entitlements (always index-linked and with death benefits) that you would need over £1m to purchase in the real world. But, hey, let's pay the public sector more.
PS pensions are good but generally the pay rates certainly used to be less than in the private sector. Also remember the monthly contributions were compulsory if you didn't opt out after the first couple of years or so. I'm very content with my arrangements but the idea that we have lived lives of idleness and luxury since the mid-70s is frankly rubbish. Like most generations we had our fair share of hardship. I well recall my first London flat - £15k - with strict borrowing rules and high interest rates. I lived hand to mouth for a good few years just to cope. I had bare floorboards for the first 3 years - not the varnished/sealed jobs of these days - I could not afford carpet. All of my furniture was begged, borrowed or second-hand. And I was by no means alone.
I'm reading Dominic Sandbrook's "Seasons in the Sun: the Battle for Britain 1974-1979" at the moment and my goodness does it sound shit.
I pity anyone who has to live through that.
The 70's were brilliant, pay rise every month , cheap beer , great music , will admit looking back the fashion was dodgy. We had the times of our lives and far superior to the shithole the country is just now..
I have just done a long tour of far north Scotland - Ullapool, Assynt, Cape Wrath, Caithness and the Orkneys. Much of it looked magnificent in generally fine weather,; tho I will confess John o Groats (where we mostly stayed) is a toilet (albeit with majestic views of the Orkneys)
Why do the Scots in that corner of Scotland INSIST on building houses in a dung-brown or birdshit-grey colour? Like they want them to be ugly. The far, flat north east of Scotland is never gonna be a beauty - unlike the Highlands and Islands - but it would be much improved if everyone just painted their houses white, like the crofts of old. Or even pink. Tartan?
Anything would be better than the colour of untreated sewage you get now. It is most perplexing
Ahhh... A tour of LibDem constituencies. Are St Albans, Richmond and Oxford next?
Is there something you need to share with us?
North East Fife might make a rather nice holiday. St Andrews (with the ruins, shops and restaurants of a mediaeval university town), fishertowns, breezy walks, the odd palace, and so on. Even golf, a nuclear rather than sand bunker, and, at Leuchars, planes; in the old days one could sit on the sea wall at St A with an ice cream and watch the last of the Lancaster family, the Shackleton, crawl up into the sky while the Phantoms zoomed around. Happy days. And the Tay Bridges to contemplate upon mortality and the ephemerality of glory, and Yes City Dundee just over the bridges with the Unicorn, Discovery and sthe new gallery on the seafront.
Well done for singing the praises of St Andrews, a town very close to my heart, without mentioning g**f.
You obviously hate it - you managed to miss the mention. (Sorry.) But at least it was a different kind of bunker.
Ha ha yes. I obviously learned to ignore it all too effectively. I actually have nothing against the game itself, just the people who came to St Andrews to play it, although live and let live and it paid a fair few people's wages in the town.
Though there is a certain Schadenfreude when certain visitors complain about the vicious cross-breeze from the sea, as if that wasn't an integral part of the game from the beginning!
Objection: the breeze in St Andrews isn't vicious. It's bracing.
JCVI has refused to give the go-ahead to give jabs to over-12s purely on health grounds in a move that is likely to go down very badly with ministers. Each of the 4 CMOs will now consider the advice to look at wider benefits of giving the jab
Time to sack them and give the role back to the regulator. We no longer have a vaccine shortage so why do we need the JCVI to have a say? It made sense when vaccines were a scarce resource and we needed to use them for widest coverage but now we have got enough to send 4m to Australia and still have 40m or so left over.
Why? They have a specific and rather narrow mandate, and ultimately they don't make the final decision.
Because they have the effective final say on who does and doesn't get the vaccine. It's completely ridiculous that the MHRA, FDA, EMA have all approved both Pfizer and Moderna for 12-15 year olds but another group of scientists say it shouldn't be administered and they've been given that final say on who does and doesn't get it.
We're going to be having this same discussion in a couple of weeks as Europe ramps up a booster programme and the JCVI weasels out of it by recommending it to just groups 1 and 2 rather than 1-10 as it should be. Why take the risk?
Spain has already ruled out booster jabs for all but the clinically vulnerable at this stage. Not a 'Europe' decision. There really is no great consensus that boosters are needed now or that they would be effective.
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.
I've just had a pension review, actually. I knew my public sector pension was better than my previous private sector pension, but I'm slightly shocked just how much better. Most private sector workers do not have final salary pensions. The IFA I talked to told me that the average private sector workers amassed a pension pot of around £50k by retirement. Whereas if you work as, say, a hospital admin worker - or some other not desperately well paid public sector job - for 40 years you can amass a pension with a trade in value in excess of three quarters of a million pounds.
Yep. I tried to calculate the benefit once and I reckoned add 40% on the salary and you're getting close. We see many public sector retirees who have lump sum and income entitlements (always index-linked and with death benefits) that you would need over £1m to purchase in the real world. But, hey, let's pay the public sector more.
PS pensions are good but generally the pay rates certainly used to be less than in the private sector. Also remember the monthly contributions were compulsory if you didn't opt out after the first couple of years or so. I'm very content with my arrangements but the idea that we have lived lives of idleness and luxury since the mid-70s is frankly rubbish. Like most generations we had our fair share of hardship. I well recall my first London flat - £15k - with strict borrowing rules and high interest rates. I lived hand to mouth for a good few years just to cope. I had bare floorboards for the first 3 years - not the varnished/sealed jobs of these days - I could not afford carpet. All of my furniture was begged, borrowed or second-hand. And I was by no means alone.
I'm reading Dominic Sandbrook's "Seasons in the Sun: the Battle for Britain 1974-1979" at the moment and my goodness does it sound shit.
I pity anyone who has to live through that.
The 70's were brilliant, pay rise every month , cheap beer , great music , will admit looking back the fashion was dodgy. We had the times of our lives and far superior to the shithole the country is just now..
I have just done a long tour of far north Scotland - Ullapool, Assynt, Cape Wrath, Caithness and the Orkneys. Much of it looked magnificent in generally fine weather,; tho I will confess John o Groats (where we mostly stayed) is a toilet (albeit with majestic views of the Orkneys)
Why do the Scots in that corner of Scotland INSIST on building houses in a dung-brown or birdshit-grey colour? Like they want them to be ugly. The far, flat north east of Scotland is never gonna be a beauty - unlike the Highlands and Islands - but it would be much improved if everyone just painted their houses white, like the crofts of old. Or even pink. Tartan?
Anything would be better than the colour of untreated sewage you get now. It is most perplexing
Ahhh... A tour of LibDem constituencies. Are St Albans, Richmond and Oxford next?
Is there something you need to share with us?
North East Fife might make a rather nice holiday. St Andrews (with the ruins, shops and restaurants of a mediaeval university town), fishertowns, breezy walks, the odd palace, and so on. Even golf, a nuclear rather than sand bunker, and, at Leuchars, planes; in the old days one could sit on the sea wall at St A with an ice cream and watch the last of the Lancaster family, the Shackleton, crawl up into the sky while the Phantoms zoomed around. Happy days. And the Tay Bridges to contemplate upon mortality and the ephemerality of glory, and Yes City Dundee just over the bridges with the Unicorn, Discovery and sthe new gallery on the seafront.
Well done for singing the praises of St Andrews, a town very close to my heart, without mentioning g**f.
You obviously hate it - you managed to miss the mention. (Sorry.) But at least it was a different kind of bunker.
Ha ha yes. I obviously learned to ignore it all too effectively. I actually have nothing against the game itself, just the people who came to St Andrews to play it, although live and let live and it paid a fair few people's wages in the town.
Though there is a certain Schadenfreude when certain visitors complain about the vicious cross-breeze from the sea, as if that wasn't an integral part of the game from the beginning!
Objection: the breeze in St Andrews isn't vicious. It's bracing.
I don't even notice it. But it is certainly vicious in the visiting golfers' perception.
It looks like they want to go ahead. The obvious concern is that the teaching unions want the kids jabbed, and if they aren't they'll have a massive strop over cases and it'll be back to Zoom lessons by October.
JCVI has refused to give the go-ahead to give jabs to over-12s purely on health grounds in a move that is likely to go down very badly with ministers. Each of the 4 CMOs will now consider the advice to look at wider benefits of giving the jab
Time to sack them and give the role back to the regulator. We no longer have a vaccine shortage so why do we need the JCVI to have a say? It made sense when vaccines were a scarce resource and we needed to use them for widest coverage but now we have got enough to send 4m to Australia and still have 40m or so left over.
Was speaking with a colleague the other day who is not on JCVI, but whom has been invited to discuss with them and advise on some aspects of data analysis. His viewpoint was that the UK data are just not there yet to make a firm conclusion and - although personally in favour of extending the jab - he has some sympathy with their position. Very few UK youngsters have been vaccinated and most of those are non-typical, so you can get estimates of the vaccine risk (myocarditis e.g.) that cover easily 2 orders of magnitude (topping out not too far off 0.1%, although it's probably much lower), depending on data and definitions. The risk from Covid is also, although not so much, uncertain. So the JCVI have been asked whether vaccinating the youngsters is a good thing for the youngsters and they don't yet have a compelling answer.
What doesn't seem to be coming into play yet - and the person I spoke to was a little perplexed as to why - was data from other countries that have done more youngster vaccination.
I think this might be a situation in which the government have asked the wrong question (should we vaccinate young people, is it in their interests?) when it should have been instead what's a best guess estimate for risks from vaccine and from Covid and then the government take responsibility for weighing those up. If you wait for certainty, you might wait too long (as we appear to have done).
The MHRA has deemed it safe, I don't understand why we have the JCVI saying otherwise. It's a really weird bit of UK exceptionalism. Vaccinating youngsters will mean and end to the disruption of school, that alone makes it worth doing.
You sounding off about UK exceptionalism doesn't make it true.
JCVI has refused to give the go-ahead to give jabs to over-12s purely on health grounds in a move that is likely to go down very badly with ministers. Each of the 4 CMOs will now consider the advice to look at wider benefits of giving the jab
Time to sack them and give the role back to the regulator. We no longer have a vaccine shortage so why do we need the JCVI to have a say? It made sense when vaccines were a scarce resource and we needed to use them for widest coverage but now we have got enough to send 4m to Australia and still have 40m or so left over.
Was speaking with a colleague the other day who is not on JCVI, but whom has been invited to discuss with them and advise on some aspects of data analysis. His viewpoint was that the UK data are just not there yet to make a firm conclusion and - although personally in favour of extending the jab - he has some sympathy with their position. Very few UK youngsters have been vaccinated and most of those are non-typical, so you can get estimates of the vaccine risk (myocarditis e.g.) that cover easily 2 orders of magnitude (topping out not too far off 0.1%, although it's probably much lower), depending on data and definitions. The risk from Covid is also, although not so much, uncertain. So the JCVI have been asked whether vaccinating the youngsters is a good thing for the youngsters and they don't yet have a compelling answer.
What doesn't seem to be coming into play yet - and the person I spoke to was a little perplexed as to why - was data from other countries that have done more youngster vaccination.
I think this might be a situation in which the government have asked the wrong question (should we vaccinate young people, is it in their interests?) when it should have been instead what's a best guess estimate for risks from vaccine and from Covid and then the government take responsibility for weighing those up. If you wait for certainty, you might wait too long (as we appear to have done).
Why are we relying on data from the UK? Across the US and Europe, there must have been at least ten million 12 to 15 year olds jabbed with Pfizer and Moderna.
Quite. Same issue as when fears over AZ should have looked at millions of doses already made elsewhere.
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.
(...)
(...)
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.
I've just had a pension review, actually. I knew my public sector pension was better than my previous private sector pension, but I'm slightly shocked just how much better. Most private sector workers do not have final salary pensions. The IFA I talked to told me that the average private sector workers amassed a pension pot of around £50k by retirement. Whereas if you work as, say, a hospital admin worker - or some other not desperately well paid public sector job - for 40 years you can amass a pension with a trade in value in excess of three quarters of a million pounds.
Yep. I tried to calculate the benefit once and I reckoned add 40% on the salary and you're getting close. We see many public sector retirees who have lump sum and income entitlements (always index-linked and with death benefits) that you would need over £1m to purchase in the real world. But, hey, let's pay the public sector more.
PS pensions are good but generally the pay rates certainly used to be less than in the private sector. Also remember the monthly contributions were compulsory if you didn't opt out after the first couple of years or so. I'm very content with my arrangements but the idea that we have lived lives of idleness and luxury since the mid-70s is frankly rubbish. Like most generations we had our fair share of hardship. I well recall my first London flat - £15k - with strict borrowing rules and high interest rates. I lived hand to mouth for a good few years just to cope. I had bare floorboards for the first 3 years - not the varnished/sealed jobs of these days - I could not afford carpet. All of my furniture was begged, borrowed or second-hand. And I was by no means alone.
I'm reading Dominic Sandbrook's "Seasons in the Sun: the Battle for Britain 1974-1979" at the moment and my goodness does it sound shit.
I pity anyone who has to live through that.
The 70's were brilliant, pay rise every month , cheap beer , great music , will admit looking back the fashion was dodgy. We had the times of our lives and far superior to the shithole the country is just now..
I have just done a long tour of far north Scotland - Ullapool, Assynt, Cape Wrath, Caithness and the Orkneys. Much of it looked magnificent in generally fine weather,; tho I will confess John o Groats (where we mostly stayed) is a toilet (albeit with majestic views of the Orkneys)
Why do the Scots in that corner of Scotland INSIST on building houses in a dung-brown or birdshit-grey colour? Like they want them to be ugly. The far, flat north east of Scotland is never gonna be a beauty - unlike the Highlands and Islands - but it would be much improved if everyone just painted their houses white, like the crofts of old. Or even pink. Tartan?
Anything would be better than the colour of untreated sewage you get now. It is most perplexing
I've often thought the same. And it's not just the North East. You can tell when you cross the border with the sudden arrival of houses covered in tiny stones (must be a word for this?). I'm sure they resist the weather, but good grief they're ugly. OTOH, the heavy stone fronted villas and tenements of the older parts of Scottish towns - I'm thinking in particular of Glasgow and Edinburgh, but you find them everywhere - are heartbreakingly lovely.
It is called "Harl" I believe and was mainly social housing from the 50's. It lasts for a long time and protects the fabric of the building from weather big time.
Indeed. Effectively a sacrificial coating which has to be replaced every few decades - but protecting the underlying masonry.
It's locally known as roughcasting and it can be painted but usually isn't.
Deepti Gurdasani @dgurdasani1 · 28m Replying to @dgurdasani1 8,000 cases/day in under 18s- that means >1,000 kids developing persistent symptoms for 3-4 months *every single day* with possible long term neurological effects for some. and the JCVI will be entirely responsible for every child that suffers because of their ideology.
JCVI has refused to give the go-ahead to give jabs to over-12s purely on health grounds in a move that is likely to go down very badly with ministers. Each of the 4 CMOs will now consider the advice to look at wider benefits of giving the jab
Time to sack them and give the role back to the regulator. We no longer have a vaccine shortage so why do we need the JCVI to have a say? It made sense when vaccines were a scarce resource and we needed to use them for widest coverage but now we have got enough to send 4m to Australia and still have 40m or so left over.
Was speaking with a colleague the other day who is not on JCVI, but whom has been invited to discuss with them and advise on some aspects of data analysis. His viewpoint was that the UK data are just not there yet to make a firm conclusion and - although personally in favour of extending the jab - he has some sympathy with their position. Very few UK youngsters have been vaccinated and most of those are non-typical, so you can get estimates of the vaccine risk (myocarditis e.g.) that cover easily 2 orders of magnitude (topping out not too far off 0.1%, although it's probably much lower), depending on data and definitions. The risk from Covid is also, although not so much, uncertain. So the JCVI have been asked whether vaccinating the youngsters is a good thing for the youngsters and they don't yet have a compelling answer.
What doesn't seem to be coming into play yet - and the person I spoke to was a little perplexed as to why - was data from other countries that have done more youngster vaccination.
I think this might be a situation in which the government have asked the wrong question (should we vaccinate young people, is it in their interests?) when it should have been instead what's a best guess estimate for risks from vaccine and from Covid and then the government take responsibility for weighing those up. If you wait for certainty, you might wait too long (as we appear to have done).
The MHRA has deemed it safe, I don't understand why we have the JCVI saying otherwise.
They're not:
Overall, the committee is of the opinion that the benefits from vaccination are marginally greater than the potential known harms....
That the English language did not have the verb ESCALATE until the 1920s. Absolutely amazing. It was only after the escalator was invented that it appeared in the language.
I've doubled checked with the Oxford English Dictionary and indeed they have no usage of the word prior to the 1920s.
"If you are making labor costs estimates, it is customary to escalate them. You have some basis for determining what a reasonable, fair percentage escalation might be."
More instances of 19th century usage follow.
Is that the same word, so to speak, or an independent coinage? That usage is transitive, but 'escalate' today is usually intransitive (but not always).
JCVI has refused to give the go-ahead to give jabs to over-12s purely on health grounds in a move that is likely to go down very badly with ministers. Each of the 4 CMOs will now consider the advice to look at wider benefits of giving the jab
Time to sack them and give the role back to the regulator. We no longer have a vaccine shortage so why do we need the JCVI to have a say? It made sense when vaccines were a scarce resource and we needed to use them for widest coverage but now we have got enough to send 4m to Australia and still have 40m or so left over.
Why? They have a specific and rather narrow mandate, and ultimately they don't make the final decision.
Because they have the effective final say on who does and doesn't get the vaccine. It's completely ridiculous that the MHRA, FDA, EMA have all approved both Pfizer and Moderna for 12-15 year olds but another group of scientists say it shouldn't be administered and they've been given that final say on who does and doesn't get it.
We're going to be having this same discussion in a couple of weeks as Europe ramps up a booster programme and the JCVI weasels out of it by recommending it to just groups 1 and 2 rather than 1-10 as it should be. Why take the risk?
Spain has already ruled out booster jabs for all but the clinically vulnerable at this stage. Not a 'Europe' decision. There really is no great consensus that boosters are needed now or that they would be effective.
Enough frivolity , I must away and do some productive stuff. Have to say I had a super haircut and shave at Turkish barber's today, some pleasant chit chat here , with wife playing ABBA in background. Time for a refreshment.
The new album?
There are two new songs (the ones that were recorded in time to go into the new show when it opens next year) but the album doesn't drop 'til November.
Ah ok. I caught a snatch of one of them on the radio earlier. It sounded very like Abba. No 'late life' different sound a la Johnny Cash; no sombre meditations on mortality from Bjorn and Benny, full of soul and gravitas, delivered by the girls in voices coarsened with age, just some more smooth ballady pop. Thank god for that.
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.
I've just had a pension review, actually. I knew my public sector pension was better than my previous private sector pension, but I'm slightly shocked just how much better. Most private sector workers do not have final salary pensions. The IFA I talked to told me that the average private sector workers amassed a pension pot of around £50k by retirement. Whereas if you work as, say, a hospital admin worker - or some other not desperately well paid public sector job - for 40 years you can amass a pension with a trade in value in excess of three quarters of a million pounds.
Yep. I tried to calculate the benefit once and I reckoned add 40% on the salary and you're getting close. We see many public sector retirees who have lump sum and income entitlements (always index-linked and with death benefits) that you would need over £1m to purchase in the real world. But, hey, let's pay the public sector more.
PS pensions are good but generally the pay rates certainly used to be less than in the private sector. Also remember the monthly contributions were compulsory if you didn't opt out after the first couple of years or so. I'm very content with my arrangements but the idea that we have lived lives of idleness and luxury since the mid-70s is frankly rubbish. Like most generations we had our fair share of hardship. I well recall my first London flat - £15k - with strict borrowing rules and high interest rates. I lived hand to mouth for a good few years just to cope. I had bare floorboards for the first 3 years - not the varnished/sealed jobs of these days - I could not afford carpet. All of my furniture was begged, borrowed or second-hand. And I was by no means alone.
I'm reading Dominic Sandbrook's "Seasons in the Sun: the Battle for Britain 1974-1979" at the moment and my goodness does it sound shit.
I pity anyone who has to live through that.
The 70's were brilliant, pay rise every month , cheap beer , great music , will admit looking back the fashion was dodgy. We had the times of our lives and far superior to the shithole the country is just now..
I have just done a long tour of far north Scotland - Ullapool, Assynt, Cape Wrath, Caithness and the Orkneys. Much of it looked magnificent in generally fine weather,; tho I will confess John o Groats (where we mostly stayed) is a toilet (albeit with majestic views of the Orkneys)
Why do the Scots in that corner of Scotland INSIST on building houses in a dung-brown or birdshit-grey colour? Like they want them to be ugly. The far, flat north east of Scotland is never gonna be a beauty - unlike the Highlands and Islands - but it would be much improved if everyone just painted their houses white, like the crofts of old. Or even pink. Tartan?
Anything would be better than the colour of untreated sewage you get now. It is most perplexing
Ahhh... A tour of LibDem constituencies. Are St Albans, Richmond and Oxford next?
Is there something you need to share with us?
North East Fife might make a rather nice holiday. St Andrews (with the ruins, shops and restaurants of a mediaeval university town), fishertowns, breezy walks, the odd palace, and so on. Even golf, a nuclear rather than sand bunker, and, at Leuchars, planes; in the old days one could sit on the sea wall at St A with an ice cream and watch the last of the Lancaster family, the Shackleton, crawl up into the sky while the Phantoms zoomed around. Happy days. And the Tay Bridges to contemplate upon mortality and the ephemerality of glory, and Yes City Dundee just over the bridges with the Unicorn, Discovery and sthe new gallery on the seafront.
Well done for singing the praises of St Andrews, a town very close to my heart, without mentioning g**f.
You obviously hate it - you managed to miss the mention. (Sorry.) But at least it was a different kind of bunker.
Ha ha yes. I obviously learned to ignore it all too effectively. I actually have nothing against the game itself, just the people who came to St Andrews to play it, although live and let live and it paid a fair few people's wages in the town.
Though there is a certain Schadenfreude when certain visitors complain about the vicious cross-breeze from the sea, as if that wasn't an integral part of the game from the beginning!
Ah yes, the wind off the North Sea. One thing I don't miss about not living in Fife anymore.
If I was a parent of a 12-15 year old I'd be spitting mad about this decision. The government has given away decision making on key decisions on vaccines to a bunch of lunatics driven by an agenda of giving UK vaccines away instead of using them in possible marginal cases here.
MHRA: "They're safe" JCVI: "Overall, the committee is of the opinion that the benefits from vaccination are marginally greater than the potential known harms ..."
That the English language did not have the verb ESCALATE until the 1920s. Absolutely amazing. It was only after the escalator was invented that it appeared in the language.
I've doubled checked with the Oxford English Dictionary and indeed they have no usage of the word prior to the 1920s.
"If you are making labor costs estimates, it is customary to escalate them. You have some basis for determining what a reasonable, fair percentage escalation might be."
More instances of 19th century usage follow.
Is that the same word, so to speak, or an independent coinage? That usage is transitive, but 'escalate' today is usually intransitive (but not always).
It depends on the meaning. If you are escalating something then it's transitive but the object is often omitted colloquially. E.g. "You should escalate [your complaint]."
If I was a parent of a 12-15 year old I'd be spitting mad about this decision. The government has given away decision making on key decisions on vaccines to a bunch of lunatics driven by an agenda of giving UK vaccines away instead of using them in possible marginal cases here.
i) It isn't a "decision" it's a recommendation and ii) The governments are seeking further advice, on which basis they'll take a decision.
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.
I've just had a pension review, actually. I knew my public sector pension was better than my previous private sector pension, but I'm slightly shocked just how much better. Most private sector workers do not have final salary pensions. The IFA I talked to told me that the average private sector workers amassed a pension pot of around £50k by retirement. Whereas if you work as, say, a hospital admin worker - or some other not desperately well paid public sector job - for 40 years you can amass a pension with a trade in value in excess of three quarters of a million pounds.
Yep. I tried to calculate the benefit once and I reckoned add 40% on the salary and you're getting close. We see many public sector retirees who have lump sum and income entitlements (always index-linked and with death benefits) that you would need over £1m to purchase in the real world. But, hey, let's pay the public sector more.
PS pensions are good but generally the pay rates certainly used to be less than in the private sector. Also remember the monthly contributions were compulsory if you didn't opt out after the first couple of years or so. I'm very content with my arrangements but the idea that we have lived lives of idleness and luxury since the mid-70s is frankly rubbish. Like most generations we had our fair share of hardship. I well recall my first London flat - £15k - with strict borrowing rules and high interest rates. I lived hand to mouth for a good few years just to cope. I had bare floorboards for the first 3 years - not the varnished/sealed jobs of these days - I could not afford carpet. All of my furniture was begged, borrowed or second-hand. And I was by no means alone.
I'm reading Dominic Sandbrook's "Seasons in the Sun: the Battle for Britain 1974-1979" at the moment and my goodness does it sound shit.
I pity anyone who has to live through that.
The 70's were brilliant, pay rise every month , cheap beer , great music , will admit looking back the fashion was dodgy. We had the times of our lives and far superior to the shithole the country is just now..
I have just done a long tour of far north Scotland - Ullapool, Assynt, Cape Wrath, Caithness and the Orkneys. Much of it looked magnificent in generally fine weather,; tho I will confess John o Groats (where we mostly stayed) is a toilet (albeit with majestic views of the Orkneys)
Why do the Scots in that corner of Scotland INSIST on building houses in a dung-brown or birdshit-grey colour? Like they want them to be ugly. The far, flat north east of Scotland is never gonna be a beauty - unlike the Highlands and Islands - but it would be much improved if everyone just painted their houses white, like the crofts of old. Or even pink. Tartan?
Anything would be better than the colour of untreated sewage you get now. It is most perplexing
Ahhh... A tour of LibDem constituencies. Are St Albans, Richmond and Oxford next?
Is there something you need to share with us?
North East Fife might make a rather nice holiday. St Andrews (with the ruins, shops and restaurants of a mediaeval university town), fishertowns, breezy walks, the odd palace, and so on. Even golf, a nuclear rather than sand bunker, and, at Leuchars, planes; in the old days one could sit on the sea wall at St A with an ice cream and watch the last of the Lancaster family, the Shackleton, crawl up into the sky while the Phantoms zoomed around. Happy days. And the Tay Bridges to contemplate upon mortality and the ephemerality of glory, and Yes City Dundee just over the bridges with the Unicorn, Discovery and sthe new gallery on the seafront.
Well done for singing the praises of St Andrews, a town very close to my heart, without mentioning g**f.
You obviously hate it - you managed to miss the mention. (Sorry.) But at least it was a different kind of bunker.
Ha ha yes. I obviously learned to ignore it all too effectively. I actually have nothing against the game itself, just the people who came to St Andrews to play it, although live and let live and it paid a fair few people's wages in the town.
Though there is a certain Schadenfreude when certain visitors complain about the vicious cross-breeze from the sea, as if that wasn't an integral part of the game from the beginning!
Objection: the breeze in St Andrews isn't vicious. It's bracing.
I don't even notice it. But it is certainly vicious in the visiting golfers' perception.
One can have a measure of sympathy, of course, for rich visitors from the US and southern England who haven't had the opportunity to acclimatize. OTOH, how one can, for example, take an amble along the West Sands on a particularly breezy day in January and not notice it at all is beyond me.
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.
I've just had a pension review, actually. I knew my public sector pension was better than my previous private sector pension, but I'm slightly shocked just how much better. Most private sector workers do not have final salary pensions. The IFA I talked to told me that the average private sector workers amassed a pension pot of around £50k by retirement. Whereas if you work as, say, a hospital admin worker - or some other not desperately well paid public sector job - for 40 years you can amass a pension with a trade in value in excess of three quarters of a million pounds.
Yep. I tried to calculate the benefit once and I reckoned add 40% on the salary and you're getting close. We see many public sector retirees who have lump sum and income entitlements (always index-linked and with death benefits) that you would need over £1m to purchase in the real world. But, hey, let's pay the public sector more.
PS pensions are good but generally the pay rates certainly used to be less than in the private sector. Also remember the monthly contributions were compulsory if you didn't opt out after the first couple of years or so. I'm very content with my arrangements but the idea that we have lived lives of idleness and luxury since the mid-70s is frankly rubbish. Like most generations we had our fair share of hardship. I well recall my first London flat - £15k - with strict borrowing rules and high interest rates. I lived hand to mouth for a good few years just to cope. I had bare floorboards for the first 3 years - not the varnished/sealed jobs of these days - I could not afford carpet. All of my furniture was begged, borrowed or second-hand. And I was by no means alone.
I'm reading Dominic Sandbrook's "Seasons in the Sun: the Battle for Britain 1974-1979" at the moment and my goodness does it sound shit.
I pity anyone who has to live through that.
The 70's were brilliant, pay rise every month , cheap beer , great music , will admit looking back the fashion was dodgy. We had the times of our lives and far superior to the shithole the country is just now..
I have just done a long tour of far north Scotland - Ullapool, Assynt, Cape Wrath, Caithness and the Orkneys. Much of it looked magnificent in generally fine weather,; tho I will confess John o Groats (where we mostly stayed) is a toilet (albeit with majestic views of the Orkneys)
Why do the Scots in that corner of Scotland INSIST on building houses in a dung-brown or birdshit-grey colour? Like they want them to be ugly. The far, flat north east of Scotland is never gonna be a beauty - unlike the Highlands and Islands - but it would be much improved if everyone just painted their houses white, like the crofts of old. Or even pink. Tartan?
Anything would be better than the colour of untreated sewage you get now. It is most perplexing
Ahhh... A tour of LibDem constituencies. Are St Albans, Richmond and Oxford next?
Is there something you need to share with us?
North East Fife might make a rather nice holiday. St Andrews (with the ruins, shops and restaurants of a mediaeval university town), fishertowns, breezy walks, the odd palace, and so on. Even golf, a nuclear rather than sand bunker, and, at Leuchars, planes; in the old days one could sit on the sea wall at St A with an ice cream and watch the last of the Lancaster family, the Shackleton, crawl up into the sky while the Phantoms zoomed around. Happy days. And the Tay Bridges to contemplate upon mortality and the ephemerality of glory, and Yes City Dundee just over the bridges with the Unicorn, Discovery and sthe new gallery on the seafront.
Well done for singing the praises of St Andrews, a town very close to my heart, without mentioning g**f.
You obviously hate it - you managed to miss the mention. (Sorry.) But at least it was a different kind of bunker.
Ha ha yes. I obviously learned to ignore it all too effectively. I actually have nothing against the game itself, just the people who came to St Andrews to play it, although live and let live and it paid a fair few people's wages in the town.
Though there is a certain Schadenfreude when certain visitors complain about the vicious cross-breeze from the sea, as if that wasn't an integral part of the game from the beginning!
Objection: the breeze in St Andrews isn't vicious. It's bracing.
I don't even notice it. But it is certainly vicious in the visiting golfers' perception.
One can have a measure of sympathy, of course, for rich visitors from the US and southern England who haven't had the opportunity to acclimatize. OTOH, how one can, for example, take an amble along the West Sands on a particularly breezy day in January and not notice it at all is beyond me.
My family's idea of a summer, springt and autumn holiday was a week or two in a wooden chalet right on a huge sandy beach. If you have been sandblasted on the thighs as a child in the final snowy weeks of winter, nothing compares since.
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.
I've just had a pension review, actually. I knew my public sector pension was better than my previous private sector pension, but I'm slightly shocked just how much better. Most private sector workers do not have final salary pensions. The IFA I talked to told me that the average private sector workers amassed a pension pot of around £50k by retirement. Whereas if you work as, say, a hospital admin worker - or some other not desperately well paid public sector job - for 40 years you can amass a pension with a trade in value in excess of three quarters of a million pounds.
Yep. I tried to calculate the benefit once and I reckoned add 40% on the salary and you're getting close. We see many public sector retirees who have lump sum and income entitlements (always index-linked and with death benefits) that you would need over £1m to purchase in the real world. But, hey, let's pay the public sector more.
PS pensions are good but generally the pay rates certainly used to be less than in the private sector. Also remember the monthly contributions were compulsory if you didn't opt out after the first couple of years or so. I'm very content with my arrangements but the idea that we have lived lives of idleness and luxury since the mid-70s is frankly rubbish. Like most generations we had our fair share of hardship. I well recall my first London flat - £15k - with strict borrowing rules and high interest rates. I lived hand to mouth for a good few years just to cope. I had bare floorboards for the first 3 years - not the varnished/sealed jobs of these days - I could not afford carpet. All of my furniture was begged, borrowed or second-hand. And I was by no means alone.
I'm reading Dominic Sandbrook's "Seasons in the Sun: the Battle for Britain 1974-1979" at the moment and my goodness does it sound shit.
I pity anyone who has to live through that.
The 70's were brilliant, pay rise every month , cheap beer , great music , will admit looking back the fashion was dodgy. We had the times of our lives and far superior to the shithole the country is just now..
Seem to recall this being the decade my family, and our neighbours, got a car, indoor toilets, central heating, colour telly, washing machine, gas fire, etc. They were unusual in 1969. Ubiquitous by 1979. Or maybe that's just us. The rest of the nation may have been living in collectivist penury.
and of course the 70s gave us Findus Crispy Pancakes.
They were great in the day , a culinary delight
Angel Delight....."E-numbers in a packet"!
Tasted great though PS: If being really exotic, Vesta curries
we have 2 of those in the cupboard right now! we already ate the paellas.
I did not realise they were still on the go. @paulyork64
Enough frivolity , I must away and do some productive stuff. Have to say I had a super haircut and shave at Turkish barber's today, some pleasant chit chat here , with wife playing ABBA in background. Time for a refreshment.
The new album?
No all the old ones on shuffle. Good to see her finally getting some energy back after 20 months, and dancing about. Has been a long hard slog for her and still has all the long covid symptoms.
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.
(...)
(...)
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.
I've just had a pension review, actually. I knew my public sector pension was better than my previous private sector pension, but I'm slightly shocked just how much better. Most private sector workers do not have final salary pensions. The IFA I talked to told me that the average private sector workers amassed a pension pot of around £50k by retirement. Whereas if you work as, say, a hospital admin worker - or some other not desperately well paid public sector job - for 40 years you can amass a pension with a trade in value in excess of three quarters of a million pounds.
Yep. I tried to calculate the benefit once and I reckoned add 40% on the salary and you're getting close. We see many public sector retirees who have lump sum and income entitlements (always index-linked and with death benefits) that you would need over £1m to purchase in the real world. But, hey, let's pay the public sector more.
PS pensions are good but generally the pay rates certainly used to be less than in the private sector. Also remember the monthly contributions were compulsory if you didn't opt out after the first couple of years or so. I'm very content with my arrangements but the idea that we have lived lives of idleness and luxury since the mid-70s is frankly rubbish. Like most generations we had our fair share of hardship. I well recall my first London flat - £15k - with strict borrowing rules and high interest rates. I lived hand to mouth for a good few years just to cope. I had bare floorboards for the first 3 years - not the varnished/sealed jobs of these days - I could not afford carpet. All of my furniture was begged, borrowed or second-hand. And I was by no means alone.
I'm reading Dominic Sandbrook's "Seasons in the Sun: the Battle for Britain 1974-1979" at the moment and my goodness does it sound shit.
I pity anyone who has to live through that.
The 70's were brilliant, pay rise every month , cheap beer , great music , will admit looking back the fashion was dodgy. We had the times of our lives and far superior to the shithole the country is just now..
I have just done a long tour of far north Scotland - Ullapool, Assynt, Cape Wrath, Caithness and the Orkneys. Much of it looked magnificent in generally fine weather,; tho I will confess John o Groats (where we mostly stayed) is a toilet (albeit with majestic views of the Orkneys)
Why do the Scots in that corner of Scotland INSIST on building houses in a dung-brown or birdshit-grey colour? Like they want them to be ugly. The far, flat north east of Scotland is never gonna be a beauty - unlike the Highlands and Islands - but it would be much improved if everyone just painted their houses white, like the crofts of old. Or even pink. Tartan?
Anything would be better than the colour of untreated sewage you get now. It is most perplexing
I've often thought the same. And it's not just the North East. You can tell when you cross the border with the sudden arrival of houses covered in tiny stones (must be a word for this?). I'm sure they resist the weather, but good grief they're ugly. OTOH, the heavy stone fronted villas and tenements of the older parts of Scottish towns - I'm thinking in particular of Glasgow and Edinburgh, but you find them everywhere - are heartbreakingly lovely.
It is called "Harl" I believe and was mainly social housing from the 50's. It lasts for a long time and protects the fabric of the building from weather big time.
Indeed. Effectively a sacrificial coating which has to be replaced every few decades - but protecting the underlying masonry.
It's locally known as roughcasting and it can be painted but usually isn't.
Probably don't want to have to paint it twice a year.
They should get less mean then.
Now I'm wondering whether the cost benefit of going commando - less expenditure on underwear - has any relevance to kilts.
Roughcast is different , it is cement coated and then has very fine crushed stone/shells thrown at it. It i snot as durable as Harling. Though people often call both roughcast.
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.
I've just had a pension review, actually. I knew my public sector pension was better than my previous private sector pension, but I'm slightly shocked just how much better. Most private sector workers do not have final salary pensions. The IFA I talked to told me that the average private sector workers amassed a pension pot of around £50k by retirement. Whereas if you work as, say, a hospital admin worker - or some other not desperately well paid public sector job - for 40 years you can amass a pension with a trade in value in excess of three quarters of a million pounds.
Yep. I tried to calculate the benefit once and I reckoned add 40% on the salary and you're getting close. We see many public sector retirees who have lump sum and income entitlements (always index-linked and with death benefits) that you would need over £1m to purchase in the real world. But, hey, let's pay the public sector more.
PS pensions are good but generally the pay rates certainly used to be less than in the private sector. Also remember the monthly contributions were compulsory if you didn't opt out after the first couple of years or so. I'm very content with my arrangements but the idea that we have lived lives of idleness and luxury since the mid-70s is frankly rubbish. Like most generations we had our fair share of hardship. I well recall my first London flat - £15k - with strict borrowing rules and high interest rates. I lived hand to mouth for a good few years just to cope. I had bare floorboards for the first 3 years - not the varnished/sealed jobs of these days - I could not afford carpet. All of my furniture was begged, borrowed or second-hand. And I was by no means alone.
I'm reading Dominic Sandbrook's "Seasons in the Sun: the Battle for Britain 1974-1979" at the moment and my goodness does it sound shit.
I pity anyone who has to live through that.
The 70's were brilliant, pay rise every month , cheap beer , great music , will admit looking back the fashion was dodgy. We had the times of our lives and far superior to the shithole the country is just now..
I have just done a long tour of far north Scotland - Ullapool, Assynt, Cape Wrath, Caithness and the Orkneys. Much of it looked magnificent in generally fine weather,; tho I will confess John o Groats (where we mostly stayed) is a toilet (albeit with majestic views of the Orkneys)
Why do the Scots in that corner of Scotland INSIST on building houses in a dung-brown or birdshit-grey colour? Like they want them to be ugly. The far, flat north east of Scotland is never gonna be a beauty - unlike the Highlands and Islands - but it would be much improved if everyone just painted their houses white, like the crofts of old. Or even pink. Tartan?
Anything would be better than the colour of untreated sewage you get now. It is most perplexing
Ahhh... A tour of LibDem constituencies. Are St Albans, Richmond and Oxford next?
Is there something you need to share with us?
North East Fife might make a rather nice holiday. St Andrews (with the ruins, shops and restaurants of a mediaeval university town), fishertowns, breezy walks, the odd palace, and so on. Even golf, a nuclear rather than sand bunker, and, at Leuchars, planes; in the old days one could sit on the sea wall at St A with an ice cream and watch the last of the Lancaster family, the Shackleton, crawl up into the sky while the Phantoms zoomed around. Happy days. And the Tay Bridges to contemplate upon mortality and the ephemerality of glory, and Yes City Dundee just over the bridges with the Unicorn, Discovery and sthe new gallery on the seafront.
Well done for singing the praises of St Andrews, a town very close to my heart, without mentioning g**f.
You obviously hate it - you managed to miss the mention. (Sorry.) But at least it was a different kind of bunker.
Ha ha yes. I obviously learned to ignore it all too effectively. I actually have nothing against the game itself, just the people who came to St Andrews to play it, although live and let live and it paid a fair few people's wages in the town.
Though there is a certain Schadenfreude when certain visitors complain about the vicious cross-breeze from the sea, as if that wasn't an integral part of the game from the beginning!
Objection: the breeze in St Andrews isn't vicious. It's bracing.
I don't even notice it. But it is certainly vicious in the visiting golfers' perception.
One can have a measure of sympathy, of course, for rich visitors from the US and southern England who haven't had the opportunity to acclimatize. OTOH, how one can, for example, take an amble along the West Sands on a particularly breezy day in January and not notice it at all is beyond me.
My family's idea of a summer, springt and autumn holiday was a week or two in a wooden chalet right on a huge sandy beach. If you have been sandblasted on the thighs as a child in the final snowy weeks of winter, nothing compares since.
We used to go to the Isle of Man, happy days on the beach at Douglas @Carnyx
Comments
“The JCVI’s advice goes on to suggest that the Government may wish to take further advice”
https://twitter.com/tomhfh/status/1433806391882420228?s=20
Gives me an excuse to post this:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/martynhilbert/27343275592
Deepti Gurdasani
@dgurdasani1
·
28m
Replying to
@dgurdasani1
8,000 cases/day in under 18s- that means >1,000 kids developing persistent symptoms for 3-4 months *every single day* with possible long term neurological effects for some. and the JCVI will be entirely responsible for every child that suffers because of their ideology.
Overall, the committee is of the opinion that the benefits from vaccination are marginally greater than the potential known harms....
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/jcvi-statement-september-2021-covid-19-vaccination-of-children-aged-12-to-15-years/jcvi-statement-on-covid-19-vaccination-of-children-aged-12-to-15-years-3-september-2021
Les Escaliers goes back to at least around 1700.
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-events/ecdc-and-ema-considerations-additional-and-booster-doses-covid-19-vaccines
Basically the same as the JCVI position - immunosuppressed, but no need (yet?) for booster jabs.
NEW THREAD
MHRA: "They're safe"
JCVI: "Overall, the committee is of the opinion that the benefits from vaccination are marginally greater than the potential known harms ..."
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/jcvi-statement-september-2021-covid-19-vaccination-of-children-aged-12-to-15-years/jcvi-statement-on-covid-19-vaccination-of-children-aged-12-to-15-years-3-september-2021
ii) The governments are seeking further advice, on which basis they'll take a decision.
"Get Boris Gone"
In the same type face as Get Brexit Done.